Look, if you put AOL CDs in every supermarket, every magazine, every CompUSA, WalMart, Walgreens, CVS, and half the cereal boxes in Target, Stop&Shop and PigglyWiggly, a whole lotta people will pick them up. Many will use them. A bird in the hand...
Where's the surprise? Hell, people passing thru DFW airport pick up old cow turds AND PAY FOR IT! Hmmmm... maybe that was Steve's inspiration.
When 2001 came out, PanAm was flooded with calls - and one day someone had the inspiration to stop slamming the phone down and take names. From what I remember, there was some nominal (hundreds? thousand?) fee to get on the reservation list for PanAm's first flight to the moon - whenever it would be. I further recall that when PanAm dissolved, they had to do something with this list so that the dollars they were given in 1969 were accounted for... Anyone else got better details on this? I doubt I dreamed it but IO know this isn't the whole story...
Paper mags and news aren't paid for by their subscription - they're paid for by the ads placed in them. No difference here. I can deal with the ads here just like anywhere else. At least so far they're faily topical and appropriate. Start listing viagra and credit card offers and my tune may change...
isn't the point to use this technology to cut down the blanketing of chemicals and make for a more judicial and economic use of chems? That's what we've been telling people since this started (this story is hardly new). Only problem I have with the whole scheme is the privatization of the data - it comes from the Landsat satellites - and a private corp gets to charge for them - big bucks too.
very nice so far - beats the current mozilla for looks and function. this is for precision and speed where I thought mozilla woulw be by now - i still dl it and delete it regularly - no release has made me want to stick thus far. this one'a a keeper even in beta.
I bought plenty of albums when I could hear new stuff on Napster - haven't bought much since. Don't hear enough innovation and new discs to make me head to HMV or Amazon for that matter. And the dozen radio stations in CT come in four flavors - top 40 (say no more), urban ("aaaiiiiight?"), classic rock (own most of it), npr (zzzzz). Woo-hoo.
The 30-sec blips on CDNOW just don't do it - neither do the headsets at HMV etc - where you can hear all you want of the dozen discs THEY want you to hear.
My fav chain record shop was "Hear" music - they would put any disc you wanted on your listening station - but the logistics defeated them - can't have enough listening stations to move the numbers that the biggies can and pay premium mall rents.
I don't know what business school the RIAA went to - they need to work on more basic things - like reading a graph and being able to see where lines cross.
Until then, they deserve what they get.
Did they officially give up on getting royalties from used record shops? Forgot about that one.
Hades - February 25, 2002 (AP) - Dante Alighieri returned from the dead today to appear at a press conference announcing a new Circle of Hell component to accommodate Internet Spam providers. The new Circle, 8.5, will house spammers and marketers who have been deluging internet users with allegedly helpful emails, up to hundreds per day. "We thought long and hard about simply tossing them into Bolgia 9 or Bolgia 10," Alighieri said, "they are certainly Sowers of Discord and Inpersonators, but they also have elements of Alchemists - trying to turn base electrons into gold. For these reasons, it was simpler to give them their own new Circle - 8.5, than to try and winnow out the separate elements."
Alighieri's assistants at eDante Enterprises reiterated the choice - saying "We were going to implement a system of distribution into the existing Circles, based on the contents of the message headers, but we feel they deserve their own place - right near the edge of the pit. Plus, have you seen some of these headers?"
The existing denizens of adjoining Bolgias have 90 days to file protests, which eDante representatives say are already coming in fast and furious. "The most common complaint has been 'eeeeew - spammers?!' and that's mostly from the Evil Counselors in Circle 8 and Traitors in Circle 9."
Doubleclick, and Cantor and Siegel were unavailable for comment.
major
1. finder views not sticking - AMEN!
2. springloaded folders
3. windowshade (is a haxie, *should* be a feature) ***are these three so christlessly difficult?*** minor - could live with haxie but why?
4. detent in the icon zoom
5. where the *&^%@! is my os9 desktop in a std file dialog?
Whitehead worked in Fairfield / Bridgeport Connecticut, but he had no pictures or movies like the Wrights had.
There is plenty of evidence - in the form of printed reports and eyewitness accounts - that Whitehead achieved powered flight before the Wrights. There is however, a good reason why this claim isn't pursued on any official level - in the agreement that was drawn up to finally bring the battered Wright Flyer to the Smithsonian in 1948 you'll find this clause:
"Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered for the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or its successors shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the Wright Airplane of 1903, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."
In other words, say we weren't first, and we take our bat and ball and go home.
If you were SI, you wouldn't touch Whitehead with a ten foot spar - why gamble on a re-creation when you have an original?
OK - a battered original - darn thing BLEW OVER like a kite and wrecked while they were all busy whooping it up after the first three flights, went thru a mud flood, and generally sat around gathering dust for thirty plus years...
Appropos today, a few more things everyone 'knows' and aren't really true - the cherry tree, silver dollar and wooden teeth yarns...
i'd have to see the numbers on that.
they can make more selling a handful of apps that mostly only run on the boxes they already sold for way more money?
1. Supporting MacOS on god-knows-what hardware configs is a nightmare that would cripple it's reputation. When WIN doesn't work, users don't call the box maker, they curse the OS maker. Something about WIN made all of you stop using it - some of that was lack of HW toleration - did you go buy a new box? Nope - you switched OSs.
2. Overpriced hardware is a myth bordering now on The Big Lie - go to Dell, Gateway, Compaq, HP and match any level of the new G4 iMac - then count yer change.
3. Bob, it WOULD cannibalize hardware sales - Apple's largest edge is the OS/box integration, the Mac faithful would still buy the mac boxes, but your average new user would - and does - buy the rattiest box they can find - blind to the reality of the $599 specials. And good luck getting it to run reliably on some box that, as is typical, doesn't even know the names of the cards slapped in it.
Sticking to HW/SW is not so bad - Apple knows that typical system turnover is about three years - would they rather rachet up to making box money or start tomorrow with a herculean effort at supporting all the hardware in the world to make license money? Think you can open a storefront and sell licenses? Or would you rather have a store that can sell someone a solution and make box money?
Anyone know what portion of their business MS makes on licensing the OS alone? Remember, MS makes a lot of software - odds are Apple would not - this number needs to be known before convincing anyone that ramping up the software biz would be their saviour.
I have an iBook2 with OSX because since day one, I open it up, it does everything I ask of it as a plain old person, teacher, writer, webmaster, admin, tourist, scientist, etc. I have yet to crash OSX after 11 months, anything I plug into it fits and works. It is an order of magnitude above any previous HW/SW I've seen or owned. I could run windows on it tomorrow.
But I won't, and not because of religion. because of integration.
An engineer who shall remain nameless (cuz I just know what'll happen here if I bring up where I know him from - the Coleco Adam - and yes, there were some very cool things about that machine for its day)
Anyway, he was charged with a program that would make sure the floppy drive was operating before doing other things, so to put it thru its paces, he had it access tracks in the correct order (and therefore musical pitches based on spin) to play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" - hear the tune - everything's OK!
OK - granted that kids will spend hours in front of a computer - but that's where the teacher comes in - by being a facilitator to learning, no matter the form - and the judicious use of appropriate software.
Because remember - we all spent hours passing notes, doodling in the margins of our books and binders - students always have and always will find a way to keep occupied in the face of dull instruction.
The creativity is not involved in firing up anything - it is what you do when you get there. How many kids remember reading the book The Oregon Trail - masterful writing, and take a peek at who did the illustrations - You can count them on one hand. I've taught college tech classes where upon firing up Oregon Trail to do a software review, 20-year olds light up like kids again and sponteneously rattle out strategies and details theyt haven't seen since middle school. Not bad. Of course ther's a line to draw, they can prolly remember details of Galaxian too - which does them no further good. So again, it depends on the teacher and the school and the district's choices.
Computers are a tool - a saw can be used to build a house, amaze people in a magic act, or to kill.
this comes up every so often, and is sheer speculation with no basis in fact.
it is someone's - in one case cliff stoll's OPINION - and the only reason people listen to him is due to a random opportunity to be the first at tracking down a pretty nasty hacker. the shower scenes and fatality made it titillating, but he's no more a pundit than the rest of us.
please - whenever people bring this up - play the old name game ("frank frank bo-bank, banana fana fo fan, fee fie fo fank... frank) and replace COMPUTERS with ANY OTHER ENABLING TECHNOLOGY USED IN CLASSROOMS - THAT'S RIGHT - JUST ASSERT THAT
-- PENCILS STIFLE CREATIVITY,
-- BLACKBOARDS STIFLE CREATIVITY,
-- PHOTOCOPIERS STIFLE CREATIVITY,
-- LAMINATORS STIFLE CREATIVITY,
-- PROTRACTORS STIFLE CREATIVITY,
-- CUISINAIRE BLOCKS STIFLE CREATIVITY
-- MICROSCOPES STIFLE CREATIVITY
A case can be manufactured for the truth of each of these assertions. Trouble is, folks who assemble these straw men forget one very important tenet of education:
There is no best way to teach.
There are many ways which are successful, with varying situations, students, and classes, but there is no best way.
Being a teacher is in large part being a problem solver - you have a bunch of resources, a bunch of kids, and a bunch of desired outcomes. And being a good problem solver means knowing which strategies to emply for any given moment / situation / personality.
Consequently, it is folly to simply toss out any method(s) of instruction or expression on principle.
Unfortunately, this whole debate is usually framed as a guns-or-butter argument - which it isn't.
And while we're at it - a growing number of districts no longer have kids learning keyboarding as a regularly scheduled activity.
And for two cases that can be used to refute the generalization, here's how I have put it to parents and clients I've dealt with:
First - the importance of form in determining specific instructional strategirs - the specific example of music classes - remember your music lessons? What did you do in them? Mostly you attempted to recreate a piece of music, just as the author did it, no mistakes, very little expresion or improvisation. Yet music is one of the subjects lauded as "creative" - and most of what you do is mere skill building. You didn't go to music / band / suzuki to compose your own music -you simply mimicked the form - played heart and soul etc. - until you got it right.
Transfer such an approach to language arts - and you'd have the equivalent of having a room full of kids copy the first page of Moby Dick over and over again until they could do it flawlessly. That teacher would be out the door in short time. So form DOES matter - not all subjects can be optimized through the same instructional strategy.
Graduate now, to a music classroom full of keyboards and midi-enabled computers / sequencers / samplers. Now you can create music of your own. Notice the work CREATE - Now you can play with notes, patterns, entire symhponies, burn your own CDs, in record time, and with greater flexibility and ease than if you had to scribe each note on paper (or hire a copyist).
Yes, people will now put forth the argument that Beethoven didn't have a computer and look what he did - eventual deafness and all. Problem is this argument implies that if Ludwig HAD access to a computer he'd have been a lesser composer. Irrelevant and unsported conclusion.
As for trhe broader idea - when I was in grammar school, we expressed ourselves academically in two ways:
Book reports / essays
Shoebox dioramas full of clay things.
You had such a narrow window of expression, your work had to fit a very small number of forms.
Now we can hand a student HyperStudio or PowerPoint or Flash, and they can express themselves through printed workds, sopoken words, sound, music, the world's best graphics, original graphics, movies, 3-D animations, the list goes on.
Which is more creative? While the structure of the older two methods might be held up as a sort of academic haiku, with the accomplishment detemined by maximizing expression within the narrow form, it doesn't address the more recent benchmarks of creativity - for instance Paul Torrance's measures such as fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration - the amount, range, newness and depth of creative work.
Plus - a piece of Intel thinks computers stifle creativity? Do they watch their own ads? Enhanced creativity is most of what they push.
Seems like there are some deeper issues here that aren't seeing the light of day...
MS didn't think anyone would notice ANYTHING
on
Read the Fine Print
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
My original point stands - you can't just walk all over what people need and think that can simply go on endlessly... MS spent years engineering a system that took away options - and they got their head handed to them, and the recent revelations show that plain old people DO care. MS is possibly getting off only for political reasons - but they seem to be going back to their old arrogant ways. MS is the irish potato of the computer world - monoculture on which not only does their well being depend, but so does the wellbeing of 90% of computer users. The crop goes bad and lots of users / businesses go dark. They may just creep up on enough small indecencies so that someone calls them on it. MS has an achilles heel somewhere - and the people who depend upon them better hope no-one finds it. This is not original - Nick Negroponte has laid this out in detail with several real possibilities. Someone needs to dope slap the folks who Ok these little things.
Heh heh... cute. Likely false, but cute.
on
Read the Fine Print
·
· Score: 2
It's a basic principle of tort law, but I'd love to see the original reference if this is true.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, if you put AOL CDs in every supermarket, every magazine, every CompUSA, WalMart, Walgreens, CVS, and half the cereal boxes in Target, Stop&Shop and PigglyWiggly, a whole lotta people will pick them up. Many will use them. A bird in the hand...
Where's the surprise? Hell, people passing thru DFW airport pick up old cow turds AND PAY FOR IT! Hmmmm... maybe that was Steve's inspiration.
Now this is news!
When 2001 came out, PanAm was flooded with calls - and one day someone had the inspiration to stop slamming the phone down and take names. From what I remember, there was some nominal (hundreds? thousand?) fee to get on the reservation list for PanAm's first flight to the moon - whenever it would be. I further recall that when PanAm dissolved, they had to do something with this list so that the dollars they were given in 1969 were accounted for... Anyone else got better details on this? I doubt I dreamed it but IO know this isn't the whole story...
ya mean the text-only browser? or is there another lynx? n browse with omni. browse with iCab. sssssheeeesh.
Paper mags and news aren't paid for by their subscription - they're paid for by the ads placed in them. No difference here. I can deal with the ads here just like anywhere else. At least so far they're faily topical and appropriate. Start listing viagra and credit card offers and my tune may change...
isn't the point to use this technology to cut down the blanketing of chemicals and make for a more judicial and economic use of chems? That's what we've been telling people since this started (this story is hardly new). Only problem I have with the whole scheme is the privatization of the data - it comes from the Landsat satellites - and a private corp gets to charge for them - big bucks too.
very nice so far - beats the current mozilla for looks and function. this is for precision and speed where I thought mozilla woulw be by now - i still dl it and delete it regularly - no release has made me want to stick thus far. this one'a a keeper even in beta.
here here!
I bought plenty of albums when I could hear new stuff on Napster - haven't bought much since. Don't hear enough innovation and new discs to make me head to HMV or Amazon for that matter. And the dozen radio stations in CT come in four flavors - top 40 (say no more), urban ("aaaiiiiight?"), classic rock (own most of it), npr (zzzzz). Woo-hoo.
The 30-sec blips on CDNOW just don't do it - neither do the headsets at HMV etc - where you can hear all you want of the dozen discs THEY want you to hear.
My fav chain record shop was "Hear" music - they would put any disc you wanted on your listening station - but the logistics defeated them - can't have enough listening stations to move the numbers that the biggies can and pay premium mall rents.
I don't know what business school the RIAA went to - they need to work on more basic things - like reading a graph and being able to see where lines cross.
Until then, they deserve what they get.
Did they officially give up on getting royalties from used record shops? Forgot about that one.
Hades - February 25, 2002 (AP) - Dante Alighieri returned from the dead today to appear at a press conference announcing a new Circle of Hell component to accommodate Internet Spam providers. The new Circle, 8.5, will house spammers and marketers who have been deluging internet users with allegedly helpful emails, up to hundreds per day. "We thought long and hard about simply tossing them into Bolgia 9 or Bolgia 10," Alighieri said, "they are certainly Sowers of Discord and Inpersonators, but they also have elements of Alchemists - trying to turn base electrons into gold. For these reasons, it was simpler to give them their own new Circle - 8.5, than to try and winnow out the separate elements." Alighieri's assistants at eDante Enterprises reiterated the choice - saying "We were going to implement a system of distribution into the existing Circles, based on the contents of the message headers, but we feel they deserve their own place - right near the edge of the pit. Plus, have you seen some of these headers?" The existing denizens of adjoining Bolgias have 90 days to file protests, which eDante representatives say are already coming in fast and furious. "The most common complaint has been 'eeeeew - spammers?!' and that's mostly from the Evil Counselors in Circle 8 and Traitors in Circle 9." Doubleclick, and Cantor and Siegel were unavailable for comment.
major
1. finder views not sticking - AMEN!
2. springloaded folders
3. windowshade (is a haxie, *should* be a feature)
***are these three so christlessly difficult?***
minor - could live with haxie but why?
4. detent in the icon zoom
5. where the *&^%@! is my os9 desktop in a std file dialog?
by customizing yoru choices at Dell, Compaq and Gateway.
You're either under by less that $50 or over by up to a few hundred.
I blame BattleBots and the USPTO and First Post!
Every design, new or old, has to be a stealth thing that emerges fully formed from the shop;
Everything has to be protected, numbered, and stamped "mine", new or not;
Anyone check to see if the teams are made up of denied FP'ers?
;-)
As a Connecticut native, I can't let this one lie.
r ch .html
Gustave Whitehead (Weiskopf) likely preceeded the Wrights, his planes have been rebuilt, and successfully flown as proof of concept.
http://www.deepsky.com/~firstflight/Pages/resea
Whitehead worked in Fairfield / Bridgeport Connecticut, but he had no pictures or movies like the Wrights had.
There is plenty of evidence - in the form of printed reports and eyewitness accounts - that Whitehead achieved powered flight before the Wrights. There is however, a good reason why this claim isn't pursued on any official level - in the agreement that was drawn up to finally bring the battered Wright Flyer to the Smithsonian in 1948 you'll find this clause:
"Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered for the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or its successors shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the Wright Airplane of 1903, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."
In other words, say we weren't first, and we take our bat and ball and go home.
If you were SI, you wouldn't touch Whitehead with a ten foot spar - why gamble on a re-creation when you have an original?
OK - a battered original - darn thing BLEW OVER like a kite and wrecked while they were all busy whooping it up after the first three flights, went thru a mud flood, and generally sat around gathering dust for thirty plus years...
Appropos today, a few more things everyone 'knows' and aren't really true - the cherry tree, silver dollar and wooden teeth yarns...
http://www.mountvernon.org/books/myths.asp
Enjoy
1. software production costs are hardly limited to the manual and cd. how'd it get there, how does it stay updated? how does it get sold?
2. that hw liquidation scenario has only happened on a handful of isolated occasions to apple.
they charge for their boxes, most of their sw is free - if more money could be made the other way around, wouldn't they have done it by now?
remember, MS is 79 on the fortune 500 - there are three intel box makers ahead of them.
i'd have to see the numbers on that.
they can make more selling a handful of apps that mostly only run on the boxes they already sold for way more money?
i should know better.
1. Supporting MacOS on god-knows-what hardware configs is a nightmare that would cripple it's reputation. When WIN doesn't work, users don't call the box maker, they curse the OS maker. Something about WIN made all of you stop using it - some of that was lack of HW toleration - did you go buy a new box? Nope - you switched OSs.
2. Overpriced hardware is a myth bordering now on The Big Lie - go to Dell, Gateway, Compaq, HP and match any level of the new G4 iMac - then count yer change.
3. Bob, it WOULD cannibalize hardware sales - Apple's largest edge is the OS/box integration, the Mac faithful would still buy the mac boxes, but your average new user would - and does - buy the rattiest box they can find - blind to the reality of the $599 specials. And good luck getting it to run reliably on some box that, as is typical, doesn't even know the names of the cards slapped in it.
Sticking to HW/SW is not so bad - Apple knows that typical system turnover is about three years - would they rather rachet up to making box money or start tomorrow with a herculean effort at supporting all the hardware in the world to make license money? Think you can open a storefront and sell licenses? Or would you rather have a store that can sell someone a solution and make box money?
Anyone know what portion of their business MS makes on licensing the OS alone? Remember, MS makes a lot of software - odds are Apple would not - this number needs to be known before convincing anyone that ramping up the software biz would be their saviour.
I have an iBook2 with OSX because since day one, I open it up, it does everything I ask of it as a plain old person, teacher, writer, webmaster, admin, tourist, scientist, etc. I have yet to crash OSX after 11 months, anything I plug into it fits and works. It is an order of magnitude above any previous HW/SW I've seen or owned. I could run windows on it tomorrow.
But I won't, and not because of religion. because of integration.
An engineer who shall remain nameless (cuz I just know what'll happen here if I bring up where I know him from - the Coleco Adam - and yes, there were some very cool things about that machine for its day)
Anyway, he was charged with a program that would make sure the floppy drive was operating before doing other things, so to put it thru its paces, he had it access tracks in the correct order (and therefore musical pitches based on spin) to play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" - hear the tune - everything's OK!
That - um *feature* didn't make it to 1.0 though.
At least these guys are open to correcting the problem, unlike the goons who sat on Felten et. al.
sell a box per OS, and you avoid this nonsense. when was th last time you saw anyone selling pirated macos?
of course you make much less money...
CONGRATS!
OK - granted that kids will spend hours in front of a computer - but that's where the teacher comes in - by being a facilitator to learning, no matter the form - and the judicious use of appropriate software.
Because remember - we all spent hours passing notes, doodling in the margins of our books and binders - students always have and always will find a way to keep occupied in the face of dull instruction.
The creativity is not involved in firing up anything - it is what you do when you get there. How many kids remember reading the book The Oregon Trail - masterful writing, and take a peek at who did the illustrations - You can count them on one hand. I've taught college tech classes where upon firing up Oregon Trail to do a software review, 20-year olds light up like kids again and sponteneously rattle out strategies and details theyt haven't seen since middle school. Not bad. Of course ther's a line to draw, they can prolly remember details of Galaxian too - which does them no further good. So again, it depends on the teacher and the school and the district's choices.
Computers are a tool - a saw can be used to build a house, amaze people in a magic act, or to kill.
It's all in the choices.
this comes up every so often, and is sheer speculation with no basis in fact.
it is someone's - in one case cliff stoll's OPINION - and the only reason people listen to him is due to a random opportunity to be the first at tracking down a pretty nasty hacker. the shower scenes and fatality made it titillating, but he's no more a pundit than the rest of us.
please - whenever people bring this up - play the old name game ("frank frank bo-bank, banana fana fo fan, fee fie fo fank... frank) and replace COMPUTERS with ANY OTHER ENABLING TECHNOLOGY USED IN CLASSROOMS - THAT'S RIGHT - JUST ASSERT THAT
-- PENCILS STIFLE CREATIVITY,
-- BLACKBOARDS STIFLE CREATIVITY,
-- PHOTOCOPIERS STIFLE CREATIVITY,
-- LAMINATORS STIFLE CREATIVITY,
-- PROTRACTORS STIFLE CREATIVITY,
-- CUISINAIRE BLOCKS STIFLE CREATIVITY
-- MICROSCOPES STIFLE CREATIVITY
A case can be manufactured for the truth of each of these assertions. Trouble is, folks who assemble these straw men forget one very important tenet of education:
There is no best way to teach.
There are many ways which are successful, with varying situations, students, and classes, but there is no best way.
Being a teacher is in large part being a problem solver - you have a bunch of resources, a bunch of kids, and a bunch of desired outcomes. And being a good problem solver means knowing which strategies to emply for any given moment / situation / personality.
Consequently, it is folly to simply toss out any method(s) of instruction or expression on principle.
Unfortunately, this whole debate is usually framed as a guns-or-butter argument - which it isn't.
And while we're at it - a growing number of districts no longer have kids learning keyboarding as a regularly scheduled activity.
And for two cases that can be used to refute the generalization, here's how I have put it to parents and clients I've dealt with:
First - the importance of form in determining specific instructional strategirs - the specific example of music classes - remember your music lessons? What did you do in them? Mostly you attempted to recreate a piece of music, just as the author did it, no mistakes, very little expresion or improvisation. Yet music is one of the subjects lauded as "creative" - and most of what you do is mere skill building. You didn't go to music / band / suzuki to compose your own music -you simply mimicked the form - played heart and soul etc. - until you got it right.
Transfer such an approach to language arts - and you'd have the equivalent of having a room full of kids copy the first page of Moby Dick over and over again until they could do it flawlessly. That teacher would be out the door in short time. So form DOES matter - not all subjects can be optimized through the same instructional strategy.
Graduate now, to a music classroom full of keyboards and midi-enabled computers / sequencers / samplers. Now you can create music of your own. Notice the work CREATE - Now you can play with notes, patterns, entire symhponies, burn your own CDs, in record time, and with greater flexibility and ease than if you had to scribe each note on paper (or hire a copyist).
Yes, people will now put forth the argument that Beethoven didn't have a computer and look what he did - eventual deafness and all. Problem is this argument implies that if Ludwig HAD access to a computer he'd have been a lesser composer. Irrelevant and unsported conclusion.
As for trhe broader idea - when I was in grammar school, we expressed ourselves academically in two ways:
Book reports / essays
Shoebox dioramas full of clay things.
You had such a narrow window of expression, your work had to fit a very small number of forms.
Now we can hand a student HyperStudio or PowerPoint or Flash, and they can express themselves through printed workds, sopoken words, sound, music, the world's best graphics, original graphics, movies, 3-D animations, the list goes on.
Which is more creative? While the structure of the older two methods might be held up as a sort of academic haiku, with the accomplishment detemined by maximizing expression within the narrow form, it doesn't address the more recent benchmarks of creativity - for instance Paul Torrance's measures such as fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration - the amount, range, newness and depth of creative work.
Plus - a piece of Intel thinks computers stifle creativity? Do they watch their own ads? Enhanced creativity is most of what they push.
Seems like there are some deeper issues here that aren't seeing the light of day...
My original point stands - you can't just walk all over what people need and think that can simply go on endlessly... MS spent years engineering a system that took away options - and they got their head handed to them, and the recent revelations show that plain old people DO care. MS is possibly getting off only for political reasons - but they seem to be going back to their old arrogant ways. MS is the irish potato of the computer world - monoculture on which not only does their well being depend, but so does the wellbeing of 90% of computer users. The crop goes bad and lots of users / businesses go dark. They may just creep up on enough small indecencies so that someone calls them on it. MS has an achilles heel somewhere - and the people who depend upon them better hope no-one finds it. This is not original - Nick Negroponte has laid this out in detail with several real possibilities. Someone needs to dope slap the folks who Ok these little things.
It's a basic principle of tort law, but I'd love to see the original reference if this is true.