Interesting summary but it would take literally years for an ordinary person to get to the point where they could use a computer in the way you describe, although I find myself longing for simpler desktops and using the command line more and more too.
I read an article although I can't find it by a simple google search just now that basically said that even though the 4 digit unlock code that gives access to iPhone's should have 10^4 permutations and therefore any given phone should be very hard to unlock, actually people generally only use a few of the possible number combinations and so the unlock code is pretty guessable most of the time. In other words rather than having to guess the unlock from every possible permutation between 0000 and 9999 in fact there is a small table of unlock codes that almost everyone will select from.
There are of course prescriptivist and descriptivist approaches to grammar. What you did in your post is called "overcorrection": you take a perfectly comprehensible idiomatic phrase and claim that it is not grammatical for logical reasons and then add in the parts that would make it a proper phrase. In fact, from a descriptivist point of view, the grammar of English is: what native speakers actually say when they speak English... not what they SHOULD say if they spoke English correctly. In short, lots of people say "could care less" and because of that it is the idiom. It's not like the idiom should be "couldn't care less" because the addition of the "not" makes the idiom more logical. In other words, your standard of grammaticality starts with logic and you are claiming that the phrase should be made grammatical by the addition of the correct logical elements. This is only one way to approach grammar.
This story is ridiculous. It's not like the US Chamber of commerce does anything meaningful at all other than lobby for no taxes. Anyway, does anyone doubt that the NSA and CIA also hack into foreign servers and desktops to steal corporate data? I am sure that back when the Russians were developing MiG fighters the US "hacked" into their computers and stole all the blueprints or if they didn't, they would... and Boeing was/is the beneficiary of that. So honestly gimme a break. Why wouldn't the chinese develop their ability to attack american tech infrastructure? Since the US and China is probably going to go to war over Taiwan within 50 years, and the US will be attacking from the sea with Drones while a million chinese try to literally row their way over from the mainland, I think their best strategy is to learn to disable the American computer systems somehow.
And in other "Reinventing the Wheel" news... software that works perfectly well is out of date for no other reason than there have been no changes to it since the last Ubuntu or Fedora was released.
Because in the UK they have LAWS that are enforced by professional stewards of the public good... and that makes for a crappy business environment where people actually have rights and pay taxes and expect decent treatment etc etc. The truly wonderful thing about building facilities in far away places is that all those things that most people in the West take for granted are merely optional and every legal problem can be solved by means of bribes.
I started using computers seriously with my Powerbook in like 1993 and then a sony viao that I bought for close to $1500 in 1998. These were extremely simple devices to use. These computers taught me how to find a file, open a program, create a folder... etc etc... all the basics. Now its 2011 and everyone seems to want to change the desktop for no other reason than to create marketing buzz in an environment where everyone else is changing the desktop. Honestly, a computer has become a vehicle for marketers to turn every aspect of one's interaction with the device into a revenue opportunity or a brand identity. I don't really want to look for a file in a dramatically different way than I did back in 1993. I also don't want to need a graphics card made in the last two years to be able to get a desktop environment to make a word processing program available. Computers ought to be simpler and require fewer resources as technology improves but sadly they are being turned into complicated mazes that lock the user into a paradigm and punish defection to competitor's products.
Unfortunately Facebook and Google are businesses with a global reach and it would almost be a first in the history of humanity if they united for anything other than turning us all into a revenue stream. Once the government has defined the arena wherein legitimate business can be conducted, everyone will be driven into that cattle pen by the major business players.
I have an Acer Aspire One D250 that I got from the refurbished bin at Microcenter like a year and half ago or so and I love that little beast. It's running 10.04.3 Lucid. I put a 500GB hard drive in it and I basically use it as a portable storage device for movies and music but the thing that really sets it apart is that it will rip a DVD. So, its a lot more functional than a tablet. Of course, Dell is a mass market kind of company, so a boutique item like netbooks aren't really in their purview but if you can pick one up for a couple of hundred bucks like I did then you get a device that is a zillion times more useful than a freakin Kindle Fire. I can read books with Kindle Cloud reader in Firefox AND I can edit sound files with Audacity.,,, just to give an example. I just recently got a Samsung with an E-450 processor (running Mint 12) not because I needed a better computer than the Acer but because I wanted a bigger screen... the two computers together give me just about everything I could want in portable computing for a total weight of about 7 pounds. I think weight is probably one of the most important factors now. I am not going to spend 1000 dollars on a Mac Book Air when I can buy four or five of these little computers.
I wish DARPA would focus more on non-violent forms of persuasion. Like for example, an entire army of non-violent protesters that we can fly to any city in the world to perform sit-ins, street demonstrations and suchlike. I can imagine a group of 100,000 americans fully equipped for urban camping occupying Beijing with placards that read "We don't like your labor laws" and other such slogans. Even if the opposing army killed all of the non-violent protesters, we would win the propaganda war, which is the only war worth fighting anymore. By taking the futuristic approach to warfare, with robots and lasers, America turns out to look too much like The Death Star and the American forces are basically just Storm Troopers. We make our enemies into Jedi Knights and really in the end who doesn't want to see the Jedi Knights blow up the Death Star? In other words, our Sith Overlords in Washington DC are already on the losing side of the ideological battle so long as they keep pursuing the technological approach to war.
I would guess they have a stake in some FPGA manufacturing process and this is just a way of bringing attention to it to trick investors into handing over their money... and anyway, since the easiest way to make money on wall street is to take it from other people who already have it, I would imagine that their calculations really just show them where other people are exposed to risk so that they can bet the other way or something. Whatever they are doing, it isn't fair, it probably isn't even legal and eventually the government is going to have to give them 1 trillion dollars to save us all from some apocalyptic starvation scheme based on the devaluation of the Euro or some ludicrous arcana in the mathematics of finance.
As hard as it would be to imagine in the United States, there are still places on earth where people actually know each other and interact with each other in person. If some farming village in the middle of nowhere doesn't have internet access, then I wouldn't wish it upon them. For the most part the internet is a scourge. I would be more interested to know how people without the internet in their lives survive. In america you can't even get a job without going online, which is ridiculous. Poor people are not helped by technology. Rich people force poor people to use technology as a way of generating revenue from otherwise lost causes.
I was looking around online for how much electricity it took to produce this result. It seems that the annual consumption for this device is something around 1000 Gigawatt hours. If this were expressed in terms of Microwave ovens, how many frozen chicken carcasses could be dethawed? How many millions of miles could a Chevy Volt drive on a similar amount of electricity.? It just seems weird to me that humanity is willing to use up this much energy on a result that can't possibly matter to billions of people and yet we can't all agree that every child on earth should have access to clean drinking water. That being said, this is one of the most important machines that has ever been built regardless of whether or not it takes one years of study at the PhD level and beyond to have any understanding of what is happening inside of it.
From a customer service point of view it would be bad to just kill user data along with the app. Enterprise level clients really aren't going to put up with that.
A better use would be tactical communications in battle. Watson would very likely do better at communicating orders in combat situations than a real person could do.
Convenience is worth something too. Sure, the actual production and distribution costs are lower for a download than they are for a paper book (probably) but making the book available online so that readers don't have to go all the way to a brick and mortar store adds value and ought to increase the price of book. Also, I hardly ever go to bookstores anymore unless I just feel like browsing magazines because I have hardly ever seen a bookstore that has anything more than the most popular titles in every category so if I did want to buy a book they would just order it online themselves and make me wait a week for it to be delivered...
Look up Bentham's Panopticon on wikipedia or google it. Basically it is a well known principle in security (anti-shoplifting devices for example) that so long as the prisoner believes himself to be constantly under the surveillance of the authorities then he will conform to the rules. So, you simple post a stern notice that says something like "All keystrokes are logged by a security application and any student that attempts to search online for answers to any of the test questions will be immediately dismissed from the examination and their test will be marked with a failing grade." Essentially, all you have to do is create a believable regime of Security Theater that will deter deviation from your desires and 99.99 per cent of the students will conform. Its a proven sociological fact.
Well obviously the buttons will be designed to start falling off in about 2 years, which means the astronomical sum you paid for the 10 year keyboard will translate into a 2 year keyboard that was five times more expensive than any other keyboard you might have bought... and anyway isn't 10 years a little too long a lifespan in today's technology timeline. I expect that in a couple of years I will have a pair of gloves (instead of a keyboard) and 3-d glasses (instead of a monitor) and the whole computer will work on a device no bigger than a cellphone is today... so carrying around a clunky battery powered keyboard will look goofy.
Like how Red Hat started using indecipherable blobs to obscure their contributions to the kernel, I feel like they are just trying to do more and more to differentiate their operating system from linux distros in general while still staying within the framework of freely distributable software. It's not like this move changes much but it does add another layer of uniqueness/expertise that they can sell to their Enterprise clients. An Ubuntu admin is not necessarily going to be able to even read the logs in RHEL and that provides the opportunity for a sale or service charge at some point.
you can get an email address through google with any domain name you want... so, the company I work for runs its email from google but we all still have email addresses that say mrbigshot@seriousbusiness.com so I don't think the point about the.edu ending of the address is really valid.
When I started college in 1991 I was amazed by the telnet access I had to the email account given to me by the University. I hadn't had an email address prior to that. Now I have an email addresses through hotmail, gmail and yahoo that I use for different things and facebook also gives me an email address. So, I doubt students really need email addresses provided by the university anymore. As for the NYC Dept of Ed example, I think it just shows that trying to build IT competence into a government agency basically a waste of money because the institutional culture of government. In short, all of these kinds of organizations could just offer email through gmail/google business or any number of other providers that will scale up almost infinitely.
Slashdot Mirror
yum install skynet
Interesting summary but it would take literally years for an ordinary person to get to the point where they could use a computer in the way you describe, although I find myself longing for simpler desktops and using the command line more and more too.
I read an article although I can't find it by a simple google search just now that basically said that even though the 4 digit unlock code that gives access to iPhone's should have 10^4 permutations and therefore any given phone should be very hard to unlock, actually people generally only use a few of the possible number combinations and so the unlock code is pretty guessable most of the time. In other words rather than having to guess the unlock from every possible permutation between 0000 and 9999 in fact there is a small table of unlock codes that almost everyone will select from.
Works fine for the pin numbers on debit cards.
There are of course prescriptivist and descriptivist approaches to grammar. What you did in your post is called "overcorrection": you take a perfectly comprehensible idiomatic phrase and claim that it is not grammatical for logical reasons and then add in the parts that would make it a proper phrase. In fact, from a descriptivist point of view, the grammar of English is: what native speakers actually say when they speak English... not what they SHOULD say if they spoke English correctly. In short, lots of people say "could care less" and because of that it is the idiom. It's not like the idiom should be "couldn't care less" because the addition of the "not" makes the idiom more logical. In other words, your standard of grammaticality starts with logic and you are claiming that the phrase should be made grammatical by the addition of the correct logical elements. This is only one way to approach grammar.
This story is ridiculous. It's not like the US Chamber of commerce does anything meaningful at all other than lobby for no taxes. Anyway, does anyone doubt that the NSA and CIA also hack into foreign servers and desktops to steal corporate data? I am sure that back when the Russians were developing MiG fighters the US "hacked" into their computers and stole all the blueprints or if they didn't, they would... and Boeing was/is the beneficiary of that. So honestly gimme a break. Why wouldn't the chinese develop their ability to attack american tech infrastructure? Since the US and China is probably going to go to war over Taiwan within 50 years, and the US will be attacking from the sea with Drones while a million chinese try to literally row their way over from the mainland, I think their best strategy is to learn to disable the American computer systems somehow.
And in other "Reinventing the Wheel" news... software that works perfectly well is out of date for no other reason than there have been no changes to it since the last Ubuntu or Fedora was released.
Because in the UK they have LAWS that are enforced by professional stewards of the public good... and that makes for a crappy business environment where people actually have rights and pay taxes and expect decent treatment etc etc. The truly wonderful thing about building facilities in far away places is that all those things that most people in the West take for granted are merely optional and every legal problem can be solved by means of bribes.
I started using computers seriously with my Powerbook in like 1993 and then a sony viao that I bought for close to $1500 in 1998. These were extremely simple devices to use. These computers taught me how to find a file, open a program, create a folder... etc etc... all the basics. Now its 2011 and everyone seems to want to change the desktop for no other reason than to create marketing buzz in an environment where everyone else is changing the desktop. Honestly, a computer has become a vehicle for marketers to turn every aspect of one's interaction with the device into a revenue opportunity or a brand identity. I don't really want to look for a file in a dramatically different way than I did back in 1993. I also don't want to need a graphics card made in the last two years to be able to get a desktop environment to make a word processing program available. Computers ought to be simpler and require fewer resources as technology improves but sadly they are being turned into complicated mazes that lock the user into a paradigm and punish defection to competitor's products.
Unfortunately Facebook and Google are businesses with a global reach and it would almost be a first in the history of humanity if they united for anything other than turning us all into a revenue stream. Once the government has defined the arena wherein legitimate business can be conducted, everyone will be driven into that cattle pen by the major business players.
I have an Acer Aspire One D250 that I got from the refurbished bin at Microcenter like a year and half ago or so and I love that little beast. It's running 10.04.3 Lucid. I put a 500GB hard drive in it and I basically use it as a portable storage device for movies and music but the thing that really sets it apart is that it will rip a DVD. So, its a lot more functional than a tablet. Of course, Dell is a mass market kind of company, so a boutique item like netbooks aren't really in their purview but if you can pick one up for a couple of hundred bucks like I did then you get a device that is a zillion times more useful than a freakin Kindle Fire. I can read books with Kindle Cloud reader in Firefox AND I can edit sound files with Audacity.,,, just to give an example. I just recently got a Samsung with an E-450 processor (running Mint 12) not because I needed a better computer than the Acer but because I wanted a bigger screen... the two computers together give me just about everything I could want in portable computing for a total weight of about 7 pounds. I think weight is probably one of the most important factors now. I am not going to spend 1000 dollars on a Mac Book Air when I can buy four or five of these little computers.
I wish DARPA would focus more on non-violent forms of persuasion. Like for example, an entire army of non-violent protesters that we can fly to any city in the world to perform sit-ins, street demonstrations and suchlike. I can imagine a group of 100,000 americans fully equipped for urban camping occupying Beijing with placards that read "We don't like your labor laws" and other such slogans. Even if the opposing army killed all of the non-violent protesters, we would win the propaganda war, which is the only war worth fighting anymore. By taking the futuristic approach to warfare, with robots and lasers, America turns out to look too much like The Death Star and the American forces are basically just Storm Troopers. We make our enemies into Jedi Knights and really in the end who doesn't want to see the Jedi Knights blow up the Death Star? In other words, our Sith Overlords in Washington DC are already on the losing side of the ideological battle so long as they keep pursuing the technological approach to war.
I would guess they have a stake in some FPGA manufacturing process and this is just a way of bringing attention to it to trick investors into handing over their money... and anyway, since the easiest way to make money on wall street is to take it from other people who already have it, I would imagine that their calculations really just show them where other people are exposed to risk so that they can bet the other way or something. Whatever they are doing, it isn't fair, it probably isn't even legal and eventually the government is going to have to give them 1 trillion dollars to save us all from some apocalyptic starvation scheme based on the devaluation of the Euro or some ludicrous arcana in the mathematics of finance.
As hard as it would be to imagine in the United States, there are still places on earth where people actually know each other and interact with each other in person. If some farming village in the middle of nowhere doesn't have internet access, then I wouldn't wish it upon them. For the most part the internet is a scourge. I would be more interested to know how people without the internet in their lives survive. In america you can't even get a job without going online, which is ridiculous. Poor people are not helped by technology. Rich people force poor people to use technology as a way of generating revenue from otherwise lost causes.
I was looking around online for how much electricity it took to produce this result. It seems that the annual consumption for this device is something around 1000 Gigawatt hours. If this were expressed in terms of Microwave ovens, how many frozen chicken carcasses could be dethawed? How many millions of miles could a Chevy Volt drive on a similar amount of electricity.? It just seems weird to me that humanity is willing to use up this much energy on a result that can't possibly matter to billions of people and yet we can't all agree that every child on earth should have access to clean drinking water. That being said, this is one of the most important machines that has ever been built regardless of whether or not it takes one years of study at the PhD level and beyond to have any understanding of what is happening inside of it.
Yes, we pay google. I doubt it would be cheaper to run an exchange server.
From a customer service point of view it would be bad to just kill user data along with the app. Enterprise level clients really aren't going to put up with that.
A better use would be tactical communications in battle. Watson would very likely do better at communicating orders in combat situations than a real person could do.
Convenience is worth something too. Sure, the actual production and distribution costs are lower for a download than they are for a paper book (probably) but making the book available online so that readers don't have to go all the way to a brick and mortar store adds value and ought to increase the price of book. Also, I hardly ever go to bookstores anymore unless I just feel like browsing magazines because I have hardly ever seen a bookstore that has anything more than the most popular titles in every category so if I did want to buy a book they would just order it online themselves and make me wait a week for it to be delivered...
Look up Bentham's Panopticon on wikipedia or google it. Basically it is a well known principle in security (anti-shoplifting devices for example) that so long as the prisoner believes himself to be constantly under the surveillance of the authorities then he will conform to the rules. So, you simple post a stern notice that says something like "All keystrokes are logged by a security application and any student that attempts to search online for answers to any of the test questions will be immediately dismissed from the examination and their test will be marked with a failing grade." Essentially, all you have to do is create a believable regime of Security Theater that will deter deviation from your desires and 99.99 per cent of the students will conform. Its a proven sociological fact.
Well obviously the buttons will be designed to start falling off in about 2 years, which means the astronomical sum you paid for the 10 year keyboard will translate into a 2 year keyboard that was five times more expensive than any other keyboard you might have bought... and anyway isn't 10 years a little too long a lifespan in today's technology timeline. I expect that in a couple of years I will have a pair of gloves (instead of a keyboard) and 3-d glasses (instead of a monitor) and the whole computer will work on a device no bigger than a cellphone is today... so carrying around a clunky battery powered keyboard will look goofy.
Like how Red Hat started using indecipherable blobs to obscure their contributions to the kernel, I feel like they are just trying to do more and more to differentiate their operating system from linux distros in general while still staying within the framework of freely distributable software. It's not like this move changes much but it does add another layer of uniqueness/expertise that they can sell to their Enterprise clients. An Ubuntu admin is not necessarily going to be able to even read the logs in RHEL and that provides the opportunity for a sale or service charge at some point.
I live in Chicago and honestly I wouldn't even bother trying to mail a letter. It's basically a jobs program.
you can get an email address through google with any domain name you want... so, the company I work for runs its email from google but we all still have email addresses that say mrbigshot@seriousbusiness.com so I don't think the point about the .edu ending of the address is really valid.
When I started college in 1991 I was amazed by the telnet access I had to the email account given to me by the University. I hadn't had an email address prior to that. Now I have an email addresses through hotmail, gmail and yahoo that I use for different things and facebook also gives me an email address. So, I doubt students really need email addresses provided by the university anymore. As for the NYC Dept of Ed example, I think it just shows that trying to build IT competence into a government agency basically a waste of money because the institutional culture of government. In short, all of these kinds of organizations could just offer email through gmail/google business or any number of other providers that will scale up almost infinitely.