For what the OP wants to do, he wants a Surface. Or just an app for the Note series of tablets. Both have digitizers (which means a real pen interface for note taking), and both require only an app which allows annotation. Get someone to write a note-taking app similar to what ForScore for the iPad does with musical scores. You can even match an audio file to the score. The problem isn't hardware, it's software, unless you have an absolute need for an e-ink screen with this device. A dedicated device with all of these requirements and the limitations of e-ink starts making for a very narrow market - which means high cost.
And competition will do squat for prices. Kindles are "subsidized" devices, built to minimum cost and to fairly thin margins (at least initially) so that you buy them on a lark and then spend money in the Amazon ebook store. Amazon doesn't have to make money on them - it can lose money, for that matter - as long as you're a regular consumer of books. Google doesn't have an ebookstore I know if, nor does Microsoft. Apple has one, but is more focused on the shiny of music and video.
The light switch. My house was built in 1961. I can go down to any hardware store in town and get a replacement, and it wires right back in place. I can even do with with a three or four way circuit - basically a XOR wiring - with no modifications whatsoever. That's on the home end. On the consumer end, the same NEMA 1 plug found on nearly every single household appliance fits in sockets that were installed 60 years ago, and in the event that they don't it's a $1 replacement part to make it work...and that's for an 1800W connection. It can also transfer data at up to 500Mbps.
3 year old iPod Touch no longer supports games, doesn't support even the simplest things like time-aware do not disturb. Every single 3 year old connecter for every single iDevice is no longer compatible. Anything with a flush mount or exact fit will never work with the new format. Anything that uses more than 2 of the dozen ore more features are not only physically but electrically incompatible. Every single third party connector which is physically and electrically compatible with the interface now brings up an error/warning on connection. Every time.
So they either need to be competent in the entire range of their craft, or be willing to pay others to do parts for them, as it has existed for 1000s of years. If you only produce cloth, you should not deny the clothier his due when it must be made into a suit in order to bring a premium price. Just as, for that 30%, Amazon stores, reproduces, advertises, collects funds, and distributes the work - requiring you only be on the receiving end to get a check each month.
Art for public sale is always a speculative game. You produce it in hopes that enough people will buy it to keep you alive. The alternative is to provide it to private parties, as was the case for centuries before copyright laws existed. The down side to that is that there are relatively few of sufficient means to keep an author alive, much less an entire room of editors and such to support him or her.
Yeah, that's right. If you write a book when you're 20 years old, it will probably *still* be solely, wholly, and completely yours, including all interpretations and derivative works, for ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS.
Even at Amazon's low wages, we (the people) have granted you 150 years to earn that living. Perhaps you would like to re-negotiate the terms on both sides of this agreement?
"most probable cause of why we have not seen more 9/11's in the last 10 years."
Doubtful at best, and the chance of an actual 9/11 style attack (with planes) will never again occur. Heck, it didn't even work by the four plane that same morning.
However, I do agree that the monitoring they are doing is exactly what we set them up to do in the first place. Nobody ever wants to be spied on, but everybody wants to spy. When the magical pixie horse utopia arrives and there are no wars or conflicts and everybody loves everybody else (or hates but avoids everyone else in a back cabin miles from the nearest other living thing, for libertarians) we won't need to spy. Until then, I still feel the NSA is operating in the best interest of the US as a whole.
Really, 'cause I border the south, and I read "rednecks" not "blacks." Inner city results is the euphemism for failing African-Americans. Border or southwest results is code for Latin-American immigrants. Get your dog-whistle racism correct.;-)
Welcome to standardized testing for everyone. They drill the kids on facts because the learning standards testing is primarily fact based. They've forgotten that half the students won't be working a cash register or a driving a hammer or pipe wrench, and have completely eliminated critical thinking as a skill - mainly because it's not an easy-to-test condition. 70% of humans will never understand abstract critical thinking, so its unfair to test everyone on it when the purse strings are attached to 90% pass rates. So they don't test for it, but the panic to hit that 90% threshold means everything becomes secondary to drilling for those tests.
As you say, there are exceptions. Great teachers, great students, great schools do exist. But the vast majority - the administrations and teachers who just want to keep their jobs to feed their families, and the students (who, let's face it, at 15 or 16) just want to get a good grade and go do something fun the 6 hours they're not locked in school - are streamlining the path of least resistance and maximum results for the path that is laid before them by legislators who have never held a piece of chalk.
Whatever you do, don't look at the relative cost of college tuition. Public education has outstripped consumer inflation (which is what you quote - the cost of milk and TVs and popcorn) for 4x, but private college tuition has outstripped it by 7x. So, if you use colleges as the benchmark, the relative expense of getting a person ready for college has dropped by nearly half. And you wonder why they're not prepared?
The problem with touch is that it's not really thought out by the software makers. There are exceptions. Bluebeam makes a PDF program for professionals that lets you edit and annotate. On a digitizer Win8 tablet, like this or my Sony Flip, fingers are used to zoom and pan, while the digitizer is used for writing on the screen. There's never a mixup between the two like occurs with an iPad, where even the best BT-linked styli are hit and miss (and still only work properly in special "aware" apps).
The biggest downside to W8 is the lack of ability to go all-fingers when you want to, but that would require touch-optimized apps for nearly everything, and the vendors just aren't feeling the need to go there.
I want an n/200,000 share of all patents, publications, and corporate assets produced in the next 10 years in return for my n contribution. And you can keep the ferro-fluid and the shout-out.
Well, that's just 2 years of subscription fees at $100/head, and there are lots of plans more expensive than that. In fact, it's just over 1.5x annual revenue, which isn't necessarily a bad deal for a mature industry with a large subscriber base and a rapidly increasing revenue. I mean, hey, you're competing with cable so it's more of a race to see who can raise rates the fastest, rather than find the bottom dollar service cost.
You complain about the failing of schools, yet you give them less than 1/2 the dollars per pupil compared to private schools (which still aren't perfect) to accomplish the same task. The reason for all the tracking and testing is to try and optimize the educational system. You want personalized lesson plans so each student can learn at his or her own pace and in a manner which is best suited to him or her, while putting in $1/hour/pupil in human oversight and guidance? Good fucking luck! Put in $20/hr and you're on the right track, but I don't think property taxes of 20% are feasible.
There is no way to optimize learning except by observing how and why a child learns in real time, and adjusting the curriculum to match. Computers can do this now, but they need some sort of basis for their algorithm. That comes from data.
If you want it fixed, you should require anonymization of data (i.e. tokens), forbid the use of data for any fiscal gain outside of the task at hand, and hold every person in the corporate chain personally and criminally liable for breaches. Or do the same and keep the data and programs in-house, but that would mean either every district with it's own custom software (=$$$$) or a nationwide project to create the software - and we know how well the Feds are at that kind of thing.
It would be nice to see AMD offer a 4-8 processor chipset that would allow you to highly parallelize their chips. Intel can do it, but the premium for Xeon silicon is outrageous. Not sure if AMD has enough business in that market that they're willing to chuck it in hopes of getting a leg up, but I sure as hell wish I could drop a second CPU into my desktop so I don't have to chuck the entire thing and buy a whole new board/CPU from Intel just to get a 50% boost in performance every 3-4 years.
Kind of depends on whether you think this year or this decade for your horizon. I see more brands/models of electric and hybrid cars, not fewer, in the coming years.
That's not to say that you should abandon a promising car business, though. Making a product which challenges others to compete with you, and then mastering the underlying components which give you the edge makes your cars more competitive AND a second revenue stream which is funded by your competitors.
Awww, don't be so harsh on Autodesk. They will just want $1200 per person per year to keep your $6000 printer current and running - is that really so much to ask? A pittance, really, a trifle. Imagine all the wonderful things we^h^hyou can do^h^hsupport with that trivial licensing fee, like that great Autodesk HQ building with doggy day care and free meals. All for just a small nearly-voluntary donation once a year.
(If Adobe and SCO had a bastard child, it would only be half as evil as AutoDesk.)
You forget the entire installed userbase of all flavors of autocad, including most of the architecture industry - not just inventor. I'm sure that's how they calculate their "3d modeling" numbers.
Anything by Autodesk makes me cringe. Autodesk's licensing makes Adobe look like open source. No first sale, upgrades outside of 3 years are at full price, and annual maintenance is 30% of a well-negotiated single seat license price. As a bonus, the dwg format changes every three years (hmmm, that number is familiar...) so that compatibility with anyone not on the maintenance plan is compromised.
True, if you're willing to pay the fee and willing to stay with m4a. Since the files you download are lossy, the next time you transcode them (either to 128kb to save space on your device, or simply to move to a player which requires MP3) they can result in transcoding artifacts. And you still have to tag them to match your style, unless you just don't care about finding what you're looking for in which case you can use Apple's tags.
Slashdot Mirror
For what the OP wants to do, he wants a Surface. Or just an app for the Note series of tablets. Both have digitizers (which means a real pen interface for note taking), and both require only an app which allows annotation. Get someone to write a note-taking app similar to what ForScore for the iPad does with musical scores. You can even match an audio file to the score. The problem isn't hardware, it's software, unless you have an absolute need for an e-ink screen with this device. A dedicated device with all of these requirements and the limitations of e-ink starts making for a very narrow market - which means high cost.
And competition will do squat for prices. Kindles are "subsidized" devices, built to minimum cost and to fairly thin margins (at least initially) so that you buy them on a lark and then spend money in the Amazon ebook store. Amazon doesn't have to make money on them - it can lose money, for that matter - as long as you're a regular consumer of books. Google doesn't have an ebookstore I know if, nor does Microsoft. Apple has one, but is more focused on the shiny of music and video.
You mean like how the iDevices are tied to the iTunes Music Store and a very limited, non-expandable audio and video format?
Only by adding one of the following phrases:
"on the internet"
"on a mobile device"
"in the cloud"
"with rounded corners"
Well, that last one is an Apple exclusive, but you get the idea.
The light switch. My house was built in 1961. I can go down to any hardware store in town and get a replacement, and it wires right back in place. I can even do with with a three or four way circuit - basically a XOR wiring - with no modifications whatsoever. That's on the home end. On the consumer end, the same NEMA 1 plug found on nearly every single household appliance fits in sockets that were installed 60 years ago, and in the event that they don't it's a $1 replacement part to make it work...and that's for an 1800W connection. It can also transfer data at up to 500Mbps.
3 year old iPod Touch no longer supports games, doesn't support even the simplest things like time-aware do not disturb. Every single 3 year old connecter for every single iDevice is no longer compatible. Anything with a flush mount or exact fit will never work with the new format. Anything that uses more than 2 of the dozen ore more features are not only physically but electrically incompatible. Every single third party connector which is physically and electrically compatible with the interface now brings up an error/warning on connection. Every time.
Example enough?
So they either need to be competent in the entire range of their craft, or be willing to pay others to do parts for them, as it has existed for 1000s of years. If you only produce cloth, you should not deny the clothier his due when it must be made into a suit in order to bring a premium price. Just as, for that 30%, Amazon stores, reproduces, advertises, collects funds, and distributes the work - requiring you only be on the receiving end to get a check each month.
Art for public sale is always a speculative game. You produce it in hopes that enough people will buy it to keep you alive. The alternative is to provide it to private parties, as was the case for centuries before copyright laws existed. The down side to that is that there are relatively few of sufficient means to keep an author alive, much less an entire room of editors and such to support him or her.
Yeah, that's right. If you write a book when you're 20 years old, it will probably *still* be solely, wholly, and completely yours, including all interpretations and derivative works, for ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS.
Even at Amazon's low wages, we (the people) have granted you 150 years to earn that living. Perhaps you would like to re-negotiate the terms on both sides of this agreement?
"most probable cause of why we have not seen more 9/11's in the last 10 years."
Doubtful at best, and the chance of an actual 9/11 style attack (with planes) will never again occur. Heck, it didn't even work by the four plane that same morning.
However, I do agree that the monitoring they are doing is exactly what we set them up to do in the first place. Nobody ever wants to be spied on, but everybody wants to spy. When the magical pixie horse utopia arrives and there are no wars or conflicts and everybody loves everybody else (or hates but avoids everyone else in a back cabin miles from the nearest other living thing, for libertarians) we won't need to spy. Until then, I still feel the NSA is operating in the best interest of the US as a whole.
Really, 'cause I border the south, and I read "rednecks" not "blacks." Inner city results is the euphemism for failing African-Americans. Border or southwest results is code for Latin-American immigrants. Get your dog-whistle racism correct. ;-)
No, they'll end up as project managers.
Welcome to standardized testing for everyone. They drill the kids on facts because the learning standards testing is primarily fact based. They've forgotten that half the students won't be working a cash register or a driving a hammer or pipe wrench, and have completely eliminated critical thinking as a skill - mainly because it's not an easy-to-test condition. 70% of humans will never understand abstract critical thinking, so its unfair to test everyone on it when the purse strings are attached to 90% pass rates. So they don't test for it, but the panic to hit that 90% threshold means everything becomes secondary to drilling for those tests.
As you say, there are exceptions. Great teachers, great students, great schools do exist. But the vast majority - the administrations and teachers who just want to keep their jobs to feed their families, and the students (who, let's face it, at 15 or 16) just want to get a good grade and go do something fun the 6 hours they're not locked in school - are streamlining the path of least resistance and maximum results for the path that is laid before them by legislators who have never held a piece of chalk.
Whatever you do, don't look at the relative cost of college tuition. Public education has outstripped consumer inflation (which is what you quote - the cost of milk and TVs and popcorn) for 4x, but private college tuition has outstripped it by 7x. So, if you use colleges as the benchmark, the relative expense of getting a person ready for college has dropped by nearly half. And you wonder why they're not prepared?
"It even sends audio recording if you use the mic to their servers."
How did you expect the voice recognition to work? That's not exactly a local-capable function on a lower power machine like a TV.
We passed that point decades ago.
That would be 3 more programs that the typical American is willing to use to accomplish any task. Well, four actually, but I was being generous.
The problem with touch is that it's not really thought out by the software makers. There are exceptions. Bluebeam makes a PDF program for professionals that lets you edit and annotate. On a digitizer Win8 tablet, like this or my Sony Flip, fingers are used to zoom and pan, while the digitizer is used for writing on the screen. There's never a mixup between the two like occurs with an iPad, where even the best BT-linked styli are hit and miss (and still only work properly in special "aware" apps).
The biggest downside to W8 is the lack of ability to go all-fingers when you want to, but that would require touch-optimized apps for nearly everything, and the vendors just aren't feeling the need to go there.
I want an n/200,000 share of all patents, publications, and corporate assets produced in the next 10 years in return for my n contribution. And you can keep the ferro-fluid and the shout-out.
Well, that's just 2 years of subscription fees at $100/head, and there are lots of plans more expensive than that. In fact, it's just over 1.5x annual revenue, which isn't necessarily a bad deal for a mature industry with a large subscriber base and a rapidly increasing revenue. I mean, hey, you're competing with cable so it's more of a race to see who can raise rates the fastest, rather than find the bottom dollar service cost.
They do say that Jacob was the father of the 12 tribes of Israel - one bone for a whole new species, so to speak.
You complain about the failing of schools, yet you give them less than 1/2 the dollars per pupil compared to private schools (which still aren't perfect) to accomplish the same task. The reason for all the tracking and testing is to try and optimize the educational system. You want personalized lesson plans so each student can learn at his or her own pace and in a manner which is best suited to him or her, while putting in $1/hour/pupil in human oversight and guidance? Good fucking luck! Put in $20/hr and you're on the right track, but I don't think property taxes of 20% are feasible.
There is no way to optimize learning except by observing how and why a child learns in real time, and adjusting the curriculum to match. Computers can do this now, but they need some sort of basis for their algorithm. That comes from data.
If you want it fixed, you should require anonymization of data (i.e. tokens), forbid the use of data for any fiscal gain outside of the task at hand, and hold every person in the corporate chain personally and criminally liable for breaches. Or do the same and keep the data and programs in-house, but that would mean either every district with it's own custom software (=$$$$) or a nationwide project to create the software - and we know how well the Feds are at that kind of thing.
It would be nice to see AMD offer a 4-8 processor chipset that would allow you to highly parallelize their chips. Intel can do it, but the premium for Xeon silicon is outrageous. Not sure if AMD has enough business in that market that they're willing to chuck it in hopes of getting a leg up, but I sure as hell wish I could drop a second CPU into my desktop so I don't have to chuck the entire thing and buy a whole new board/CPU from Intel just to get a 50% boost in performance every 3-4 years.
Kind of depends on whether you think this year or this decade for your horizon. I see more brands/models of electric and hybrid cars, not fewer, in the coming years.
That's not to say that you should abandon a promising car business, though. Making a product which challenges others to compete with you, and then mastering the underlying components which give you the edge makes your cars more competitive AND a second revenue stream which is funded by your competitors.
Awww, don't be so harsh on Autodesk. They will just want $1200 per person per year to keep your $6000 printer current and running - is that really so much to ask? A pittance, really, a trifle. Imagine all the wonderful things we^h^hyou can do^h^hsupport with that trivial licensing fee, like that great Autodesk HQ building with doggy day care and free meals. All for just a small nearly-voluntary donation once a year.
(If Adobe and SCO had a bastard child, it would only be half as evil as AutoDesk.)
You forget the entire installed userbase of all flavors of autocad, including most of the architecture industry - not just inventor. I'm sure that's how they calculate their "3d modeling" numbers.
Anything by Autodesk makes me cringe. Autodesk's licensing makes Adobe look like open source. No first sale, upgrades outside of 3 years are at full price, and annual maintenance is 30% of a well-negotiated single seat license price. As a bonus, the dwg format changes every three years (hmmm, that number is familiar...) so that compatibility with anyone not on the maintenance plan is compromised.
True, if you're willing to pay the fee and willing to stay with m4a. Since the files you download are lossy, the next time you transcode them (either to 128kb to save space on your device, or simply to move to a player which requires MP3) they can result in transcoding artifacts. And you still have to tag them to match your style, unless you just don't care about finding what you're looking for in which case you can use Apple's tags.