I recently assigned a paper on the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement in a class on innovation. We had to spend two weeks more discussing it after I got not a single paper that understood the difference, despite having spent time going over the topic already.
What surfaced in the course of our discussions after the paper was that they were relying on sources (articles, press, other instructors) that simply conflated the two, and whose language on the justifications for both was almost always couched simply in individualist ethics (protecting an implied right on the parts of other authors in terms of identity and status) rather than in rational policy calculations. In short, most of the sources they found sloppily interchanged words like plagiarism and copyright infringement and implied both to be a matter of protecting egos and personas as an individual rights issue.
Plagiarism = Copyright Violation = Failure to be original
It was a very tough discussion because they were very suspicious to find one single instructor (i.e. me) telling them that pure originality is not the basis of science or creative life (indeed, isn't even possible), and that plagiarism is not a legal construct and should not be imagined in that way.
the silly brainwashing about fair use pounded into students' heads by other well-meaning but misguided instructors.
I have students afraid to read books before writing papers because if they "get an idea from a book" and use it, it's plagiarism. The entire notion of citations has gone right past them; all they know is that everything they do has to be "original."
I routinely hear that they didn't know they could use a quote because they thought it was "stealing" and are afraid of reading relevant works first so that they don't "copy an idea" without meaning to.
The other half of the students, steeped in remix and sampling culture and fancying themselves anti-IP warriors, routinely copy and paste without citing, then give me lectures about how IP is coming to dominate society. They intentionally refuse to cite out of a misguided sense of activism and as a result flunk assignments and even classes and are referred to disciplinary bodies where they presumably make the same arguments.
There is little sanity and a lot of craziness coming out of the discourse on IP, and we're going to see it affect us as the current generation of students enters the workforce.
CE PDA just two nights ago. It's an NEC MobilePro 900 that I used to use because the Palm's couldn't hack it for mobile editing. The thing has a USB port, but it won't see flash drives. It has a micro-USB port for syncing, but after installing ActiveSync in my Windows XP VM, it wouldn't connect. So I dug out an old Cisco PCMCIA 802.11b card and slid it into the slot. But it wouldn't connect with my 802.11g network.:-(
I beat on it for hours before finally remembering that I could take the CF card out of my camera, slide it into a PCMCIA CF reader on the MobilePro, copy the files to CF, then put the CF card in a card reader on my Linux PC via USB, to copy off the files. Yay.
Once on my Linux box, I just dropped the.doc files in my Dropbox folder and they were then immediately accessible and editable on my iPhone, and any changes I save on my iPhone are immediately accessible and available on my Linux desktop in my Dropbox folder.
My Palm Centro with an aftermarket (for $35) file manager shared many of the same difficulties in getting files on and off... For all the bitching and moaning about iPhone capabilities (or lack thereof), it's a damned sight easier to work with the iPhone, including doing things like "getting files on."
The fact is, they don't have to be on. With iPhone, I just edit them in the cloud, and they're automatically copied down to, backed up on, and automatically synchronized with the same files across all of my regular computers (a Mac at work, a Linux machine at home, several PCs in the departmental offices, and of course my iPhone).
Sorry, but the belittling of complaints that you see is often because the complaints appear to be based in total irrational ignorance of iPhone's capabilities, and not in reality.
be using Android. But anyone that suggests that there is no difference between the current generation of capacitive touchscreen "supersmartphones" and previous generations of mobile phones and tethered/sync smartphones... they have simply never spent any time using iPhone/Android, and come off as clueless and uninformed.
I imagined it was as well for two years after the release of the iPhone, based on my previous experience with smartphones. Then, when my unlocked retail Centro developed dead keys for the second time, I finally went to the local AT&T store and tried an iPhone. I took it home on a Saturday and figured I'd probably return it by Monday.
Instead, by Monday I'd bought $40 worth of apps (dozens of them for an amount that would have netted me a single app in Palm space), and was beyond hooked. The iPhone unexpectedly revolutionized my life. My personal file access system went from a complex mix of scripts, USB flash storage/readers, and tethered syncs to completely cloud-based. For the first time ever, electronic calendaring for my personal tasks and to-do lists actually justified the time required to maintain and synchronize these (i.e. no time at all). Everything changed.
I had been trying to use PDAs since the original Newton. I'd owned Palms, Clios, Stylistics, every manner of Windows CE and Windows Mobile devices, phones, and smartphones, subnotebooks, and any other portable device imaginable, always looking for The One that would finally bring the promise of mobile, cloud-based computing to fruition.
I unexpectedly found it in iPhone. And now you couldn't even pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Sorry, but it's not about hype. It's about functionality, pure and simple. The others promised it for two decades. The iPhone actually delivered it, and did so in fact with a minimum of hype, to my eyes. They could have spent a lot more time touting a lot of things it does. Instead, they let glowing reviews and wild word of mouth carry it to the top.
And I recommend the iPhone to anyone that asks, because it's just THAT GOOD.
is smoking crack. I am a multi-published developer and tech guy who's been in the industry since the days he was using a Sun 3/50 all-in-one 68k machine with SunOS loaded from DC600 tapes. I'm not tech-incompatible.
I spent days and hours frothing at the mouth because "in theory" the Palm "should" be able to do X, Y, and Z or because the Palm was "so close" do doing what I needed... and yet with all the hours and evenings spent trying to "just make it do this one little thing" that would make my life easier, the Palms always fell short. I always fell back into "well, what are you going to do, those are the trade-offs of mobile devices" thinking.
That has never happened to me with iPhone. I have spent damned near zero time configuring, syncing, hacking, installing, manipulating, and maintaining. It has just worked from day one and I have never found anything that I wanted it to do that it didn't do with a minimum of fuss and an almost stunning lack of impediment.
And anyone who says that Palm or Windows Mobile is more extensible than iPhone is smoking crack. Maybe you can put a bigger MicroSD card in a Palm, but there's damn near no point in filling it up with anything but music. And beyond that, there's no real extensibility there. You have half a dozen "usable" shareware apps to choose from (most of them $50-150 to register) and a whole world of utter, utter app crap in the Palm and Windows Mobile spaces.
iPhone on the other hand has excellent apps that universally cost less than $10, most less than $4, and that don't require registration, configuration, or tethered installation... not to mention that not one of them has yet caused me to go into spontaneous reboots, data loss, and other things requiring a factory reset and restore from backup, a regular occurrence with Palm that was a strong disincentive to actually install apps and try to make use of that "extensibility."
Basically anyone still arguing that there is nothing new with supersmartphones like iPhone or Android and that all of this could have been done before, and that people are just responding to "hype" or "shine" or whatever... Well, such people have far too much time on their hands to dick around with gadgets, and far too few real needs for those gadgets to actually work, or they'd know that previous gadgets in fact didn't, by and large.
that had a Treo 600, Treo 650, Treo 680, then Centro, let me say: No.
They did not do "everything modern smart phones" do, and for you to suggest that is just disingenuous. My iPhone required initial configuration to enter account information for calendaring, email, facebook, twitter, bank accounts, and a few other things, and after that, it stays immediately and permanently synced, without intervention. No need to plug it into a PC and synchronize. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone gives me access to my Dropbox account and lets me open most kinds of files and even edit MS Office files sitting in my Dropbox account. That means that I have continuous, on-the-go editing access to current project files from wherever I am, and whatever work I do on my iPhone is automatically available on any Mac or PC I happen to sit down at anywhere in the world. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone lets me download and install tens of thousands of applications immediately, without browsing the web, without having to connect to a PC, and with tons of rating information and screenshots about each of them to help me make up my mind. Further, when I select one, I just tap it and it's mine, no need to enter payment information, registration serial numbers, whatever. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone lets me browse the total web without needing "mobile versions" of even very complex pages. As a university instructor I can log into campus systems and do grading, rosters, posting to e-courses, etc. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone lets me use just about every social networking site on the go, from wherever I am. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone lets me use WiFi hotspots wherever I am without any fuss. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone gives me street-by-street positioning and navigation anywhere I go. It furthermore maps out where stores, businesses, gasoline, ATMs, and any number of other things are in relation to me, providing me "augmented reality" compass-based views to locate them. Palms sure as hell did not do that.
Now Android can do most if not all of these things (even if it does these more awkwardly and imperfectly and often requiring more user intervention to set them up), but Palms sure as hell couldn't, at least not before the Pre.
the Asus WL-520GU and GL models are available for less than $30 and run DD-WRT flawlessly. I picked up multiples for WDS and they have been up 24/7. Performance is awesome, stability is perfect, and cost is less than dinner.
since sliced bread. Easy and damned rapid to deploy, reasonably scalable, easy to modify and customize, flexible enough to build everything from a blog to an e-commerce system to a social networking platform to a cloud-based RDBMS front-end to a personal document and photos filing system.
A million things I used to do with my own C code, shell scripts, and hard drives are now done on a hosted domain using Drupal. More and more of the work I do for others just slides into Drupal by default because it's the easiest, most powerful, fastest, and most growth-capable way to accomplish it.
I just love Drupal.
JWZ is an important figure in the history of
on
Cross With the Platform
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· Score: 4, Informative
web (specifically, web browser) development, with Major (capital M) contributions to the mozilla/netscape/firefox ecosystem since before mozilla/firefox existed as projects in their own right (going all the way back to Netscape 1.0), as well as fingers in things like Emacs and popular X applications.
if you adjust for GDP per capita nationally (i.e. equalize the prices of goods, services, and labor to a reductive but nominal extent), these Chinese workers are making the equivalent of about $9.00 per hour. This is not slave labor wages for a Chinese citizen. It's not investment banker territory, but there are a lot of U.S. workers that would like to make $9.00 per hour and that probably wouldn't object to working 15 hours at that rate in a clean, relatively risk-free environment.
nonsense. The working hours are long, but it's hardly a "sweatshop." It's a decent living wage in China under (judging by the photos) very reasonable conditions in comparison to alternatives.
You do a currency conversion when you travel, too. Ever been to South America? Eastern Europe? The average American can live like a king. In some places on the globe you can get a hotel room and three meals a day for less than $5. Seriously, what are you smoking? Even within the U.S. prices vary wildly. I rent in New York for $1,250. My sister pays $400 for a place of similar size in Utah. Are you suggesting that if I just do the appropriate "currency conversion," i can save $850 a month?
you, there is NO WAY it got 12-16 hours. More like 4 if you're lucky. What's more, the web browser (IE4 for CE) was obsolete and couldn't load 90 percent of web sites on the day it launched. Pocket Outlook couldn't actually talk to anything because it had zero authentication or encryption capabilities. And as for all those apps you could install... There were maybe a dozen or two that were compatible. The CE machines were spread out across SH3, SH4, MIPS, XScale, and a bunch of other CPUs, and many shareware authors only compiled for the platform they had. Plus screen sizes varied and apps often weren't easily compatible across them. Finally, you had ZERO connectivity because there were just about ZERO PCMCIA network or wireless manufacturers that actually released CE drivers. Cisco was one, so all you had to do was pony up $300 for the Cisco PCMCIA card instead of the $20 Chinese one on eBay that was supported by "real" Windows.
Don't be fooled. The iPad will do what the CE touchpads never did because (like the iPhone) the implementation and execution of the iPad isn't about the bullet list of features (which you just recited not realizing that they all sucked on these old devices) but about making sure that the features it DOES have DON'T SUCK.
a 20-room mansion kitted out by an interior designer and a landscape architect with all of the latest forms of lighting and digitial controls, and happens to be in a gated community. The other comes as a pile of lumber theoretically big enough to build a 22-room mansion and a matching truckload of tools, some assembly required, and eschews the gated community for the diversity of an inner city neighborhood.
I'm with you. I'm really wary of Apple's control over things, but have been flabbergasted at the usefulness of the iPhone. For so many years, we've had device makers simply executing poorly. They take five central features and water them down and/or give them short schrift, redirecting the time and resources toward five additional and less important features, just so they can claim 10 features on the side of the box.
A million billion years ago I had a Fujitsu Stylistic 1000 with a 486 CPU. I was telling people all they had to do was cut the thickness in half and multiply the battery life. But five years later, what was being made? Thick, heavy tablets with shitty battery life. What had they worked on in the meantime? Boosting processor speed and hard drive capacity. So you had a much faster heavy brick that died in two hours.
A similar thing went on in smartphone space. For a long time what we got was more speed, more memory, and more features. What we never got was web access that worked or any reasonable cloud storage or interaction, despite the fact that this was the most obvious use of the devices in question, if only the manufacturers would do something about it.
In both cases, only Apple has delivered. They actually made these things work. They have made them usable in a way that they never were before. And all many geeks can do is virulently foam at the mouth over the the fact that the features that no mobile user cares about aren't up to the same level as your average desktop, or (even more mind-boggling to me) the fact that there's no way to sit down and spend all day tweaking-configuring them to your heart's content (a.k.a. "openness," a.k.a. spending the next six days scouring the web for links to.EXE files to be installed during synchronization if you can find the version that's compatible with your particular configuration and actually get it to install, after which you must buy a $69.95 license for a tiny mobile app by visiting a slow shareware site and typing in your credit card information, followed by a long wait for a long email with an even longer serial number inside to be entered along with a pile of other relevant details into a difficult-to-find registration screen and follow this with a "WTF!? It crashed!? I register the application and the new unlocked features just CRASH IT!?").
is a brainwashed zombie. I get that all the time in geek circles as an iPhone owner. Apple has clearly satiated me with their special sauce. I am a serial sedatee, my mind has been softened by Steve, etc.
Once you get into "If you like it, that's just because you've been body-snatched!" territory, that's when you know that people harbor irrational prejudices.
I am a gadget true believer that was always disappointed before the iPhone. From the Palm Pilot through the Fujitsu Stylistics through the CE touchscreen machines through the Treo and Blackberry phones, since the early '90s I've spent money every year at least hoping that finally one mobile device would actually deliver on the obvious promise of the "personal digital assistant." Until iPhone, none of them ever did. The technology was always there, but the execution was frustratingly missing and the user interfaces were frustratingly adept at frustrating your attempts to use them. They were clumsy, fiddly, endlessly configurable to do everything but work the way you wanted them to, slow, awkward, and ultimately always embarrassing when you tried to use them ("Oh, that's not in there yet, I haven't synchronized" or "Hang on, getting there, getting there, just gotta navigate to the right screen..." or "It usually works" or "That page is too complicated for this device" or "Sorry, my battery ran flat" or, or, or...)
I held off three years in getting and iPhone and when I did get one it was more or less by accident. Within 24 hours I was shocked and hooked. I had, for the first time, experienced what it's like to have a "personal digital assistant" that works for you, rather than a personal digital taskmaster that makes you work for it, in pale hopes of some return in efficiency that never materializes.
One of my best friends has a Droid. Looks like the same thing in some ways, and superficially feels like the same thing. But watch him fiddle with it, hunt and hunt for apps, tweak and manage, and watch me just use. Not at all the same thing after all.
And yet people who don't own iPhones continue to talk about brainwashing.
I suppose absolutely falling in love with what something contributes to your life is the most effective form of brainwashing out there.
that kind of truth won't make you any friends here. We don't care how usable a device's features actually are, we only care that there are 2394872672304 features listed on the website, and that it can theoretically be used to run a webserver and tunnel a remote desktop through ssh (even if in practice this takes hours of fiddling to accomplish and is forgotten afterward in a day).
GNOME is working. Therefore I use GNOME. I have better things to do than conduct the Desktop Inquisition to make a determination about whether or not KDE should be exonerated.
You prove the parent's point nicely. You're so attached to multitasking that you're willing to sacrifice battery life. Of course battery life has something to do with the topic, IT'S A PHONE. And you can say "Welcome to fast smartphones" all you want, but for most people these features:
- Has a reasonable battery life - Doesn't require me to swap batteries - Lets me listen to music in the background
Are more important than this feature:
- Lets me run sendmail in the background
iPhone has the first three and has since the beginning. You running around saying "Yay! Multitasking!" isn't saving Palm, and I say this as a Palm customer of over a decade that has gone iPhone.
in app-determined ways, you'd see me selling my iPhone right now. One of the things I value most about it is that it remains useful through months and months of continuous use, without major slowdowns, needing reboots, or needing me to spend time weeding out whatever might be "running."
Apple is only doing this because douchebags like you get normatively attached to an idea like "multitasking" without once bothering to wonder whether it's appropriate on a small-screen embedded device. It isn't. But marketers have once again won out thanks to idiots like you.
I used KDE from KDE 1.0, when I switched away from TWM. I was fully integrated into the KDE "way of life," and reliant on lots of KDE apps.
I tried to use KDE4.0 but after about two weeks it got the boot. Though it has theoretically improved and I keep a KDE 4 installation on my Fedora 12 personal machine, logging into KDE thus far provides no incentive to switch back, despite updates.
Dolphin is still intolerably slow. Important apps still don't share a consistent appearance; Firefox, Chrome, and OpenOffice in particular look good in GNOME but are full of distracting artifacting and other appearance problems in KDE. GNOME apps in general don't mix well with KDE themes right now. The graphics still don't work right. A notification balloon is likely to take out half the taskbar, etc. They blame this on the radeon driver and I believe them, but that's the hardware I have, and GNOME shows none of the same problems. Desktop management for multiple monitors doesn't behave as I expect it to, and it's difficult to create a configuration that jostles well amongst varying configurations of external, internal, or both, monitors without taskbars disappearing or desktops shifting from display to display unexpectedly. The default icon theme is far too colorful and luminous for focused desktop work of the kind that I do (lots of writing, editing, and calculating) but there are few replacement icon sets to be found. The wireless connectivity manager seems incapable of working with my simple home WiFi installation without needing constant reconfiguration and tinkering, while in GNOME it "just works."
Yes, some of these things could be fixed, but to trudge through each one of them would require rather a lot of time and effort that I just don't have to spare. So despite the fact that I'm still not wild about GNOME either, KDE4 is simply not on the cards in the near future for me. What's missing everywhere is polish. Not the kind that makes widget corners have a "glass" appearance, but the kind that keeps widgets from disappearing or artifacting unexpectedly, or the kind that doesn't leave you wondering why the hell the widget doesn't work, or there isn't a widget for that at all, in the first place. Details work. Not big thoughts. KDE needs to cut out the innovation for a while and patch roof leaks.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many other KDE users right up through KDE 3.x switched to GNOME with the KDE4 release.
and check out all of the relevant math textbooks. Make sure there are exercises for each chapter for which answers are provided somewhere in the book.
Then, read the chapters, and do the problems. Keep doing the problems until you get every . single . one . of . them . right and you understand what you've previously done wrong in each case.
Pour over it until you really understand the relationships between the quantities.
It is very hard work, but there is no shortcut to understanding math and science, and if you don't understand them, you'll never be good at them, even if you manage to solve a few problems using memorized patterns.
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I recently assigned a paper on the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement in a class on innovation. We had to spend two weeks more discussing it after I got not a single paper that understood the difference, despite having spent time going over the topic already.
What surfaced in the course of our discussions after the paper was that they were relying on sources (articles, press, other instructors) that simply conflated the two, and whose language on the justifications for both was almost always couched simply in individualist ethics (protecting an implied right on the parts of other authors in terms of identity and status) rather than in rational policy calculations. In short, most of the sources they found sloppily interchanged words like plagiarism and copyright infringement and implied both to be a matter of protecting egos and personas as an individual rights issue.
Plagiarism = Copyright Violation = Failure to be original
It was a very tough discussion because they were very suspicious to find one single instructor (i.e. me) telling them that pure originality is not the basis of science or creative life (indeed, isn't even possible), and that plagiarism is not a legal construct and should not be imagined in that way.
the silly brainwashing about fair use pounded into students' heads by other well-meaning but misguided instructors.
I have students afraid to read books before writing papers because if they "get an idea from a book" and use it, it's plagiarism. The entire notion of citations has gone right past them; all they know is that everything they do has to be "original."
I routinely hear that they didn't know they could use a quote because they thought it was "stealing" and are afraid of reading relevant works first so that they don't "copy an idea" without meaning to.
The other half of the students, steeped in remix and sampling culture and fancying themselves anti-IP warriors, routinely copy and paste without citing, then give me lectures about how IP is coming to dominate society. They intentionally refuse to cite out of a misguided sense of activism and as a result flunk assignments and even classes and are referred to disciplinary bodies where they presumably make the same arguments.
There is little sanity and a lot of craziness coming out of the discourse on IP, and we're going to see it affect us as the current generation of students enters the workforce.
CE PDA just two nights ago. It's an NEC MobilePro 900 that I used to use because the Palm's couldn't hack it for mobile editing. The thing has a USB port, but it won't see flash drives. It has a micro-USB port for syncing, but after installing ActiveSync in my Windows XP VM, it wouldn't connect. So I dug out an old Cisco PCMCIA 802.11b card and slid it into the slot. But it wouldn't connect with my 802.11g network. :-(
I beat on it for hours before finally remembering that I could take the CF card out of my camera, slide it into a PCMCIA CF reader on the MobilePro, copy the files to CF, then put the CF card in a card reader on my Linux PC via USB, to copy off the files. Yay.
Once on my Linux box, I just dropped the .doc files in my Dropbox folder and they were then immediately accessible and editable on my iPhone, and any changes I save on my iPhone are immediately accessible and available on my Linux desktop in my Dropbox folder.
My Palm Centro with an aftermarket (for $35) file manager shared many of the same difficulties in getting files on and off... For all the bitching and moaning about iPhone capabilities (or lack thereof), it's a damned sight easier to work with the iPhone, including doing things like "getting files on."
The fact is, they don't have to be on. With iPhone, I just edit them in the cloud, and they're automatically copied down to, backed up on, and automatically synchronized with the same files across all of my regular computers (a Mac at work, a Linux machine at home, several PCs in the departmental offices, and of course my iPhone).
Sorry, but the belittling of complaints that you see is often because the complaints appear to be based in total irrational ignorance of iPhone's capabilities, and not in reality.
be using Android. But anyone that suggests that there is no difference between the current generation of capacitive touchscreen "supersmartphones" and previous generations of mobile phones and tethered/sync smartphones... they have simply never spent any time using iPhone/Android, and come off as clueless and uninformed.
I imagined it was as well for two years after the release of the iPhone, based on my previous experience with smartphones. Then, when my unlocked retail Centro developed dead keys for the second time, I finally went to the local AT&T store and tried an iPhone. I took it home on a Saturday and figured I'd probably return it by Monday.
Instead, by Monday I'd bought $40 worth of apps (dozens of them for an amount that would have netted me a single app in Palm space), and was beyond hooked. The iPhone unexpectedly revolutionized my life. My personal file access system went from a complex mix of scripts, USB flash storage/readers, and tethered syncs to completely cloud-based. For the first time ever, electronic calendaring for my personal tasks and to-do lists actually justified the time required to maintain and synchronize these (i.e. no time at all). Everything changed.
I had been trying to use PDAs since the original Newton. I'd owned Palms, Clios, Stylistics, every manner of Windows CE and Windows Mobile devices, phones, and smartphones, subnotebooks, and any other portable device imaginable, always looking for The One that would finally bring the promise of mobile, cloud-based computing to fruition.
I unexpectedly found it in iPhone. And now you couldn't even pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Sorry, but it's not about hype. It's about functionality, pure and simple. The others promised it for two decades. The iPhone actually delivered it, and did so in fact with a minimum of hype, to my eyes. They could have spent a lot more time touting a lot of things it does. Instead, they let glowing reviews and wild word of mouth carry it to the top.
And I recommend the iPhone to anyone that asks, because it's just THAT GOOD.
is smoking crack. I am a multi-published developer and tech guy who's been in the industry since the days he was using a Sun 3/50 all-in-one 68k machine with SunOS loaded from DC600 tapes. I'm not tech-incompatible.
I spent days and hours frothing at the mouth because "in theory" the Palm "should" be able to do X, Y, and Z or because the Palm was "so close" do doing what I needed... and yet with all the hours and evenings spent trying to "just make it do this one little thing" that would make my life easier, the Palms always fell short. I always fell back into "well, what are you going to do, those are the trade-offs of mobile devices" thinking.
That has never happened to me with iPhone. I have spent damned near zero time configuring, syncing, hacking, installing, manipulating, and maintaining. It has just worked from day one and I have never found anything that I wanted it to do that it didn't do with a minimum of fuss and an almost stunning lack of impediment.
And anyone who says that Palm or Windows Mobile is more extensible than iPhone is smoking crack. Maybe you can put a bigger MicroSD card in a Palm, but there's damn near no point in filling it up with anything but music. And beyond that, there's no real extensibility there. You have half a dozen "usable" shareware apps to choose from (most of them $50-150 to register) and a whole world of utter, utter app crap in the Palm and Windows Mobile spaces.
iPhone on the other hand has excellent apps that universally cost less than $10, most less than $4, and that don't require registration, configuration, or tethered installation... not to mention that not one of them has yet caused me to go into spontaneous reboots, data loss, and other things requiring a factory reset and restore from backup, a regular occurrence with Palm that was a strong disincentive to actually install apps and try to make use of that "extensibility."
Basically anyone still arguing that there is nothing new with supersmartphones like iPhone or Android and that all of this could have been done before, and that people are just responding to "hype" or "shine" or whatever... Well, such people have far too much time on their hands to dick around with gadgets, and far too few real needs for those gadgets to actually work, or they'd know that previous gadgets in fact didn't, by and large.
that had a Treo 600, Treo 650, Treo 680, then Centro, let me say: No.
They did not do "everything modern smart phones" do, and for you to suggest that is just disingenuous. My iPhone required initial configuration to enter account information for calendaring, email, facebook, twitter, bank accounts, and a few other things, and after that, it stays immediately and permanently synced, without intervention. No need to plug it into a PC and synchronize. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone gives me access to my Dropbox account and lets me open most kinds of files and even edit MS Office files sitting in my Dropbox account. That means that I have continuous, on-the-go editing access to current project files from wherever I am, and whatever work I do on my iPhone is automatically available on any Mac or PC I happen to sit down at anywhere in the world. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone lets me download and install tens of thousands of applications immediately, without browsing the web, without having to connect to a PC, and with tons of rating information and screenshots about each of them to help me make up my mind. Further, when I select one, I just tap it and it's mine, no need to enter payment information, registration serial numbers, whatever. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone lets me browse the total web without needing "mobile versions" of even very complex pages. As a university instructor I can log into campus systems and do grading, rosters, posting to e-courses, etc. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone lets me use just about every social networking site on the go, from wherever I am. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone lets me use WiFi hotspots wherever I am without any fuss. Palms did not do that.
My iPhone gives me street-by-street positioning and navigation anywhere I go. It furthermore maps out where stores, businesses, gasoline, ATMs, and any number of other things are in relation to me, providing me "augmented reality" compass-based views to locate them. Palms sure as hell did not do that.
Now Android can do most if not all of these things (even if it does these more awkwardly and imperfectly and often requiring more user intervention to set them up), but Palms sure as hell couldn't, at least not before the Pre.
But by then I was already gone go iPhone.
the Asus WL-520GU and GL models are available for less than $30 and run DD-WRT flawlessly. I picked up multiples for WDS and they have been up 24/7. Performance is awesome, stability is perfect, and cost is less than dinner.
since sliced bread. Easy and damned rapid to deploy, reasonably scalable, easy to modify and customize, flexible enough to build everything from a blog to an e-commerce system to a social networking platform to a cloud-based RDBMS front-end to a personal document and photos filing system.
A million things I used to do with my own C code, shell scripts, and hard drives are now done on a hosted domain using Drupal. More and more of the work I do for others just slides into Drupal by default because it's the easiest, most powerful, fastest, and most growth-capable way to accomplish it.
I just love Drupal.
web (specifically, web browser) development, with Major (capital M) contributions to the mozilla/netscape/firefox ecosystem since before mozilla/firefox existed as projects in their own right (going all the way back to Netscape 1.0), as well as fingers in things like Emacs and popular X applications.
if you adjust for GDP per capita nationally (i.e. equalize the prices of goods, services, and labor to a reductive but nominal extent), these Chinese workers are making the equivalent of about $9.00 per hour. This is not slave labor wages for a Chinese citizen. It's not investment banker territory, but there are a lot of U.S. workers that would like to make $9.00 per hour and that probably wouldn't object to working 15 hours at that rate in a clean, relatively risk-free environment.
nonsense. The working hours are long, but it's hardly a "sweatshop." It's a decent living wage in China under (judging by the photos) very reasonable conditions in comparison to alternatives.
You do a currency conversion when you travel, too. Ever been to South America? Eastern Europe? The average American can live like a king. In some places on the globe you can get a hotel room and three meals a day for less than $5. Seriously, what are you smoking? Even within the U.S. prices vary wildly. I rent in New York for $1,250. My sister pays $400 for a place of similar size in Utah. Are you suggesting that if I just do the appropriate "currency conversion," i can save $850 a month?
you, there is NO WAY it got 12-16 hours. More like 4 if you're lucky. What's more, the web browser (IE4 for CE) was obsolete and couldn't load 90 percent of web sites on the day it launched. Pocket Outlook couldn't actually talk to anything because it had zero authentication or encryption capabilities. And as for all those apps you could install... There were maybe a dozen or two that were compatible. The CE machines were spread out across SH3, SH4, MIPS, XScale, and a bunch of other CPUs, and many shareware authors only compiled for the platform they had. Plus screen sizes varied and apps often weren't easily compatible across them. Finally, you had ZERO connectivity because there were just about ZERO PCMCIA network or wireless manufacturers that actually released CE drivers. Cisco was one, so all you had to do was pony up $300 for the Cisco PCMCIA card instead of the $20 Chinese one on eBay that was supported by "real" Windows.
Don't be fooled. The iPad will do what the CE touchpads never did because (like the iPhone) the implementation and execution of the iPad isn't about the bullet list of features (which you just recited not realizing that they all sucked on these old devices) but about making sure that the features it DOES have DON'T SUCK.
a 20-room mansion kitted out by an interior designer and a landscape architect with all of the latest forms of lighting and digitial controls, and happens to be in a gated community. The other comes as a pile of lumber theoretically big enough to build a 22-room mansion and a matching truckload of tools, some assembly required, and eschews the gated community for the diversity of an inner city neighborhood.
of the post-Geek era.
I'm with you. I'm really wary of Apple's control over things, but have been flabbergasted at the usefulness of the iPhone. For so many years, we've had device makers simply executing poorly. They take five central features and water them down and/or give them short schrift, redirecting the time and resources toward five additional and less important features, just so they can claim 10 features on the side of the box.
A million billion years ago I had a Fujitsu Stylistic 1000 with a 486 CPU. I was telling people all they had to do was cut the thickness in half and multiply the battery life. But five years later, what was being made? Thick, heavy tablets with shitty battery life. What had they worked on in the meantime? Boosting processor speed and hard drive capacity. So you had a much faster heavy brick that died in two hours.
A similar thing went on in smartphone space. For a long time what we got was more speed, more memory, and more features. What we never got was web access that worked or any reasonable cloud storage or interaction, despite the fact that this was the most obvious use of the devices in question, if only the manufacturers would do something about it.
In both cases, only Apple has delivered. They actually made these things work. They have made them usable in a way that they never were before. And all many geeks can do is virulently foam at the mouth over the the fact that the features that no mobile user cares about aren't up to the same level as your average desktop, or (even more mind-boggling to me) the fact that there's no way to sit down and spend all day tweaking-configuring them to your heart's content (a.k.a. "openness," a.k.a. spending the next six days scouring the web for links to .EXE files to be installed during synchronization if you can find the version that's compatible with your particular configuration and actually get it to install, after which you must buy a $69.95 license for a tiny mobile app by visiting a slow shareware site and typing in your credit card information, followed by a long wait for a long email with an even longer serial number inside to be entered along with a pile of other relevant details into a difficult-to-find registration screen and follow this with a "WTF!? It crashed!? I register the application and the new unlocked features just CRASH IT!?").
is a brainwashed zombie. I get that all the time in geek circles as an iPhone owner. Apple has clearly satiated me with their special sauce. I am a serial sedatee, my mind has been softened by Steve, etc.
Once you get into "If you like it, that's just because you've been body-snatched!" territory, that's when you know that people harbor irrational prejudices.
I am a gadget true believer that was always disappointed before the iPhone. From the Palm Pilot through the Fujitsu Stylistics through the CE touchscreen machines through the Treo and Blackberry phones, since the early '90s I've spent money every year at least hoping that finally one mobile device would actually deliver on the obvious promise of the "personal digital assistant." Until iPhone, none of them ever did. The technology was always there, but the execution was frustratingly missing and the user interfaces were frustratingly adept at frustrating your attempts to use them. They were clumsy, fiddly, endlessly configurable to do everything but work the way you wanted them to, slow, awkward, and ultimately always embarrassing when you tried to use them ("Oh, that's not in there yet, I haven't synchronized" or "Hang on, getting there, getting there, just gotta navigate to the right screen..." or "It usually works" or "That page is too complicated for this device" or "Sorry, my battery ran flat" or, or, or...)
I held off three years in getting and iPhone and when I did get one it was more or less by accident. Within 24 hours I was shocked and hooked. I had, for the first time, experienced what it's like to have a "personal digital assistant" that works for you, rather than a personal digital taskmaster that makes you work for it, in pale hopes of some return in efficiency that never materializes.
One of my best friends has a Droid. Looks like the same thing in some ways, and superficially feels like the same thing. But watch him fiddle with it, hunt and hunt for apps, tweak and manage, and watch me just use. Not at all the same thing after all.
And yet people who don't own iPhones continue to talk about brainwashing.
I suppose absolutely falling in love with what something contributes to your life is the most effective form of brainwashing out there.
that kind of truth won't make you any friends here. We don't care how usable a device's features actually are, we only care that there are 2394872672304 features listed on the website, and that it can theoretically be used to run a webserver and tunnel a remote desktop through ssh (even if in practice this takes hours of fiddling to accomplish and is forgotten afterward in a day).
Seriously?
GNOME is working. Therefore I use GNOME. I have better things to do than conduct the Desktop Inquisition to make a determination about whether or not KDE should be exonerated.
and I should not. Since none of those things work for me. I guess they just like you better.
You prove the parent's point nicely. You're so attached to multitasking that you're willing to sacrifice battery life. Of course battery life has something to do with the topic, IT'S A PHONE. And you can say "Welcome to fast smartphones" all you want, but for most people these features:
- Has a reasonable battery life
- Doesn't require me to swap batteries
- Lets me listen to music in the background
Are more important than this feature:
- Lets me run sendmail in the background
iPhone has the first three and has since the beginning. You running around saying "Yay! Multitasking!" isn't saving Palm, and I say this as a Palm customer of over a decade that has gone iPhone.
in app-determined ways, you'd see me selling my iPhone right now. One of the things I value most about it is that it remains useful through months and months of continuous use, without major slowdowns, needing reboots, or needing me to spend time weeding out whatever might be "running."
Apple is only doing this because douchebags like you get normatively attached to an idea like "multitasking" without once bothering to wonder whether it's appropriate on a small-screen embedded device. It isn't. But marketers have once again won out thanks to idiots like you.
I used KDE from KDE 1.0, when I switched away from TWM. I was fully integrated into the KDE "way of life," and reliant on lots of KDE apps.
I tried to use KDE4.0 but after about two weeks it got the boot. Though it has theoretically improved and I keep a KDE 4 installation on my Fedora 12 personal machine, logging into KDE thus far provides no incentive to switch back, despite updates.
Dolphin is still intolerably slow. Important apps still don't share a consistent appearance; Firefox, Chrome, and OpenOffice in particular look good in GNOME but are full of distracting artifacting and other appearance problems in KDE. GNOME apps in general don't mix well with KDE themes right now. The graphics still don't work right. A notification balloon is likely to take out half the taskbar, etc. They blame this on the radeon driver and I believe them, but that's the hardware I have, and GNOME shows none of the same problems. Desktop management for multiple monitors doesn't behave as I expect it to, and it's difficult to create a configuration that jostles well amongst varying configurations of external, internal, or both, monitors without taskbars disappearing or desktops shifting from display to display unexpectedly. The default icon theme is far too colorful and luminous for focused desktop work of the kind that I do (lots of writing, editing, and calculating) but there are few replacement icon sets to be found. The wireless connectivity manager seems incapable of working with my simple home WiFi installation without needing constant reconfiguration and tinkering, while in GNOME it "just works."
Yes, some of these things could be fixed, but to trudge through each one of them would require rather a lot of time and effort that I just don't have to spare. So despite the fact that I'm still not wild about GNOME either, KDE4 is simply not on the cards in the near future for me. What's missing everywhere is polish. Not the kind that makes widget corners have a "glass" appearance, but the kind that keeps widgets from disappearing or artifacting unexpectedly, or the kind that doesn't leave you wondering why the hell the widget doesn't work, or there isn't a widget for that at all, in the first place. Details work. Not big thoughts. KDE needs to cut out the innovation for a while and patch roof leaks.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many other KDE users right up through KDE 3.x switched to GNOME with the KDE4 release.
and check out all of the relevant math textbooks. Make sure there are exercises for each chapter for which answers are provided somewhere in the book.
Then, read the chapters, and do the problems. Keep doing the problems until you get every . single . one . of . them . right and you understand what you've previously done wrong in each case.
Pour over it until you really understand the relationships between the quantities.
It is very hard work, but there is no shortcut to understanding math and science, and if you don't understand them, you'll never be good at them, even if you manage to solve a few problems using memorized patterns.