Is there any other country that actually takes private education seriously?
Private education is, and always will be reserved for the wealthy and elite. Start admitting everybody (or privatizing everything), and the private schools will sink right back to the level that the publics currently are at.
Vouchers and privatization are simply admissions of defeat. I'd hope that as a society, we're better than that. The fact that government is inherently inefficient is a myth that's quickly becoming self-fulfilling.
That's a very simplistic way of looking at things.
Whether or not to provide DRM was not Apple's call to make. It was demanded by the record companies.
A growing percentage of iTunes tracks are now sold without DRM, and are labeled as such. If you'd prefer MP3 to unprotected AAC (which most players are fine with these days), Amazon also now has a music store.
Honestly, it sounds like it's the only DRM system you've used.
Apple didn't want to buy into Microsoft's DRM standard. What would you have proposed that they did instead?
Also, what "software that you didn't want" does it install? Complaining about iTunes installing Quicktime is like complaining about the VLC Player installing the VLC Libraries. (No, iTunes and Quicktime for Windows aren't as good as they could be. Still, things could be a lot worse)
We need some sort of standardized, cross-platform system for DRM. Sadly, it's going to be a reality that we have to deal with. We might as well make the best of it. For now, Apple's system isn't terribly bad.
This is interesting. Although I've seen quite a few worn-down touchpads (especially on Dells), the one on my 12" Powerbook's looks pretty much just like new after 3 years of heavy use.
I wonder if Apple use different materials for touchpads on their "Pro" line than they do on their cheaper consumer-grade stuff.
I dunno. NanoSolar have promised insanely cheap solar cells printed using thin-film deposition methods, and as their production process is coming on-line, they seem to be making good on their promise.
These methods have been used for many other applications, including semiconductor fabrication. The "time in the lab" was spent adapting this technology to produce PV cells using that technology.
Please quit the FUD. "Yankee ingenuity" isn't going to help us push the envelope at all. On the other hand, thin-film solar cells may very well be the definitive mainstream technological breakthrough of this decade. As long as the costs are kept down, it's poised to become a nearly ubiquitous technology.
The underlying technologies of the iPhone have been around for ages. Even the MultiTouch interface isn't terribly new (the iPhone screen was derived from a technology developed in the 90s). However, nobody ever bothered to properly integrate these technologies, and develop a usable UI for them. Blackberry came close, but still missed the mark...
A blackberry can theoretically do anything that an iPhone can. However, if you poll the users of each respective platform for which features they use most, you'll get two very different answers.
Re:Innovation vs Confidence
on
Apple After Jobs
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This is an interesting point, and seems to indicate one of Microsoft's serious shortcomings.
Tons and tons of cool stuff has come out of Microsoft's research division, who seem to be given a blank check to research whatever they feel is the next path forward in computing.
Unfortunately, Microsoft lacks the direction or confidence to tie these things together into a cool package, and their OS doesn't encourage this sort of thing.
Apple, on the other hand, has had about a 75% track record for seamlessly integrating their new products and technologies into their customers daily lives. That's seriously impressive, and they've designed MacOS to be easily extensible, thanks to its UNIX underpinnings and fantastic set of core libraries.
As one example, Time Machine is a seriously cool technology that even novice users can easily connect with. It's useful, intuitive, and the mechanism by which it works on the backend is embarrassingly simple.
Re:But more importantly
on
Apple After Jobs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
One could also argue that Be had a better operating system.
Like NeXt, they got bailed out by a corporate overlord. Unfortunately for Be, that corporate overlord happened to be Palm.
They seem pretty much OK with Mono and the Mono team's Silverlight port.
Honestly.... I don't get why Microsoft get treated like crap the instant that they start doing almost exactly what we wanted them to.
I honestly couldn't give a damn if Windows is F/OSS or not. Being able to see the source with a licensed copy would be nice, but not a terribly huge priority for me.
What is a priority, as a Linux user, is that Linux and Windows play nicely with each other. This means that Microsoft has to commit to keeping their protocols open to the open-source community, while the OSS community needs to make sure that things like the Win32 EXT3 driver are well-supported and kept up to date.
This seems like a good start. Let's not discourage them.
I seriously doubt that a loss of refrigeration would kill 1/6 of the world's population.
Maybe a couple million. At most. It won't be pretty, but humanity will soldier on.
Even then, the situation is completely hypothetical. There's nothing that could take out all of humanity's electrical systems simultaneously. If something like this happened, we'd divert all of our resources toward sustaining the bare minimum to keep everybody alive.
Although those costs seem somewhat realistic for small quantities, the cost of Liquid Nitrogen can go down to pennies per liter if you're producing it in large enough quantities. (If you've got your own Cryo plant on-site, this can be as low as dollars-per-ton, ignoring capital costs associated with building said plant)
Transportation and storage are the two key expenses, and though still not particularly expensive, are nevertheless an order of magnitude more than the what it takes produce the stuff. Really, as far as commodity liquids go, LN2 is amazingly among the cheapest you'll ever find, apart from tap water.
Given that all of the "usual suspects" of encoding apps support SMP on almost every platform, and have done so for quite some time, what was this guy using that didn't support it?
ffmpeg and x264 are just about the only players in town these days.
Given the selection of American shows that BBC, Channel 4, and iTV choose to syndicate, that really comes at no surprise.
However, because of that, I'm going to choose to judge your culture based upon the British shows that don't get syndicated. Hollyoaks, Skins, Eastenders.....
For some reason, American TV networks seem to syndicate the best BBC series* while you lads manage to only pick up the dregs of American television.
*There's one exception to this. I saw part of the American adaptation of Planet Earth last week. David Attenborough's voice had been dubbed over. Shameful.
That seems to be the defeatist attitude the Government has been taking ever since Regan.
Sure, there are agencies which would operate better under the private sector. Deregulation of the airlines seemed to (at least initially) have some positive effects thanks to the new competition.
However, when it comes to "essential" services, the private sector falls flat on its face, simply because it's not efficient (on paper) to provide these services to some segments of the population. In the end, virtually everyone gets screwed.
Britain tried privatizing its mail delivery and post office system. Last year, the newly-privatized post office determined that there was no way it could ever run most of its rural branches profitably, and closed most of the offices, sold their assets, pocketed the money, and called it a day.
Virtually every other industrialized nation has Nationalized healthcare, and although there are occasionally shortages of doctors to perform "lower-priority" procedures, the emergency room works the exact same way. A nationalized healthcare system also works well by reducing the economic barriers present in getting trained as a doctor (easily $500,000 in the US). Statistics also seem to indicate that these countries are generally much "healthier" than the US.
And also, most state DMVs have really cleaned up their acts. I went in for a new license a few weeks ago. The entire process took about 10 minutes, and on a busy holiday weekend at that. The staff were astonishingly friendly and professional throughout the entire process.
Even Martha Stewart approves of the job the DMV is doing.
Australia has a typical 37.5-38 hour work week (excluding lunch, so 40 hours including a 30ish minute lunch) and record low unemployment.
And public health care.
And a pension system for those who cannot work.
And an economy kicking the US's...
And a huge cache of natural resources.
And an array of nearby countries scrambling to extract/buy them as fast as is physically possible.
I hate to play devils advocate. The US needs all those things you mention, but the Australian economy might be booming for reasons other than those you mention.
Canada might be a better comparison point, though I don't quite understand the US's aversion to "becoming Canada." Apart from the weather (brr!), they seem to have it pretty good over there.
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Is there any other country that actually takes private education seriously?
Private education is, and always will be reserved for the wealthy and elite. Start admitting everybody (or privatizing everything), and the private schools will sink right back to the level that the publics currently are at.
Vouchers and privatization are simply admissions of defeat. I'd hope that as a society, we're better than that. The fact that government is inherently inefficient is a myth that's quickly becoming self-fulfilling.
That's a very simplistic way of looking at things.
Whether or not to provide DRM was not Apple's call to make. It was demanded by the record companies.
A growing percentage of iTunes tracks are now sold without DRM, and are labeled as such. If you'd prefer MP3 to unprotected AAC (which most players are fine with these days), Amazon also now has a music store.
iTunes uses QuickTime as a backend to read media files.
VLC uses the VLC Libraries to process its files.
What exactly is the big deal here? They're complementary products. Deal with it. It's not like Quicktime is actively causing you any harm.
Ok. Name a *less* intrusive DRM system.
Honestly, it sounds like it's the only DRM system you've used.
Apple didn't want to buy into Microsoft's DRM standard. What would you have proposed that they did instead?
Also, what "software that you didn't want" does it install? Complaining about iTunes installing Quicktime is like complaining about the VLC Player installing the VLC Libraries. (No, iTunes and Quicktime for Windows aren't as good as they could be. Still, things could be a lot worse)
We need some sort of standardized, cross-platform system for DRM. Sadly, it's going to be a reality that we have to deal with. We might as well make the best of it. For now, Apple's system isn't terribly bad.
This is interesting. Although I've seen quite a few worn-down touchpads (especially on Dells), the one on my 12" Powerbook's looks pretty much just like new after 3 years of heavy use.
I wonder if Apple use different materials for touchpads on their "Pro" line than they do on their cheaper consumer-grade stuff.
You forgot the joint endorsement from Al Gore and Barack Obama.
Ook?
I dunno. NanoSolar have promised insanely cheap solar cells printed using thin-film deposition methods, and as their production process is coming on-line, they seem to be making good on their promise.
These methods have been used for many other applications, including semiconductor fabrication. The "time in the lab" was spent adapting this technology to produce PV cells using that technology.
Please quit the FUD. "Yankee ingenuity" isn't going to help us push the envelope at all. On the other hand, thin-film solar cells may very well be the definitive mainstream technological breakthrough of this decade. As long as the costs are kept down, it's poised to become a nearly ubiquitous technology.
The underlying technologies of the iPhone have been around for ages. Even the MultiTouch interface isn't terribly new (the iPhone screen was derived from a technology developed in the 90s). However, nobody ever bothered to properly integrate these technologies, and develop a usable UI for them. Blackberry came close, but still missed the mark...
A blackberry can theoretically do anything that an iPhone can. However, if you poll the users of each respective platform for which features they use most, you'll get two very different answers.
This is an interesting point, and seems to indicate one of Microsoft's serious shortcomings.
Tons and tons of cool stuff has come out of Microsoft's research division, who seem to be given a blank check to research whatever they feel is the next path forward in computing.
Unfortunately, Microsoft lacks the direction or confidence to tie these things together into a cool package, and their OS doesn't encourage this sort of thing.
Apple, on the other hand, has had about a 75% track record for seamlessly integrating their new products and technologies into their customers daily lives. That's seriously impressive, and they've designed MacOS to be easily extensible, thanks to its UNIX underpinnings and fantastic set of core libraries.
As one example, Time Machine is a seriously cool technology that even novice users can easily connect with. It's useful, intuitive, and the mechanism by which it works on the backend is embarrassingly simple.
One could also argue that Be had a better operating system.
Like NeXt, they got bailed out by a corporate overlord. Unfortunately for Be, that corporate overlord happened to be Palm.
Some would call that optimism.
Anyway... What do you want.... for them not to cooperate?
They seem pretty much OK with Mono and the Mono team's Silverlight port.
Honestly.... I don't get why Microsoft get treated like crap the instant that they start doing almost exactly what we wanted them to.
I honestly couldn't give a damn if Windows is F/OSS or not. Being able to see the source with a licensed copy would be nice, but not a terribly huge priority for me.
What is a priority, as a Linux user, is that Linux and Windows play nicely with each other. This means that Microsoft has to commit to keeping their protocols open to the open-source community, while the OSS community needs to make sure that things like the Win32 EXT3 driver are well-supported and kept up to date.
This seems like a good start. Let's not discourage them.
And billions would die
I seriously doubt that a loss of refrigeration would kill 1/6 of the world's population.
Maybe a couple million. At most. It won't be pretty, but humanity will soldier on.
Even then, the situation is completely hypothetical. There's nothing that could take out all of humanity's electrical systems simultaneously. If something like this happened, we'd divert all of our resources toward sustaining the bare minimum to keep everybody alive.
I can't believe a father would really kill his innocent little child.
This wasn't a normal father. He was a criminal.
You, sir, have been watching too much Batman.
Do you really believe that humans are divided evenly between "criminals" and "good guys"?
CERN would like to have a word with you.
You're making the assumption that AOL gives a damn about its customers.
I'm not sure that's a terribly great assumption.
Although those costs seem somewhat realistic for small quantities, the cost of Liquid Nitrogen can go down to pennies per liter if you're producing it in large enough quantities. (If you've got your own Cryo plant on-site, this can be as low as dollars-per-ton, ignoring capital costs associated with building said plant)
Transportation and storage are the two key expenses, and though still not particularly expensive, are nevertheless an order of magnitude more than the what it takes produce the stuff. Really, as far as commodity liquids go, LN2 is amazingly among the cheapest you'll ever find, apart from tap water.
Now I'm a bit curious.
Given that all of the "usual suspects" of encoding apps support SMP on almost every platform, and have done so for quite some time, what was this guy using that didn't support it?
ffmpeg and x264 are just about the only players in town these days.
Given the selection of American shows that BBC, Channel 4, and iTV choose to syndicate, that really comes at no surprise.
However, because of that, I'm going to choose to judge your culture based upon the British shows that don't get syndicated. Hollyoaks, Skins, Eastenders.....
For some reason, American TV networks seem to syndicate the best BBC series* while you lads manage to only pick up the dregs of American television.
*There's one exception to this. I saw part of the American adaptation of Planet Earth last week. David Attenborough's voice had been dubbed over. Shameful.
Actually, I think it bears an uncanny resemblance to E.V.E.
150-200mi range would be considerably more useful.
100mi is probably adequate, but certainly strikes me as "risky."
Government efficiency is an oxymoron, remember?
That seems to be the defeatist attitude the Government has been taking ever since Regan.
Sure, there are agencies which would operate better under the private sector. Deregulation of the airlines seemed to (at least initially) have some positive effects thanks to the new competition.
However, when it comes to "essential" services, the private sector falls flat on its face, simply because it's not efficient (on paper) to provide these services to some segments of the population. In the end, virtually everyone gets screwed.
Britain tried privatizing its mail delivery and post office system. Last year, the newly-privatized post office determined that there was no way it could ever run most of its rural branches profitably, and closed most of the offices, sold their assets, pocketed the money, and called it a day.
Virtually every other industrialized nation has Nationalized healthcare, and although there are occasionally shortages of doctors to perform "lower-priority" procedures, the emergency room works the exact same way. A nationalized healthcare system also works well by reducing the economic barriers present in getting trained as a doctor (easily $500,000 in the US). Statistics also seem to indicate that these countries are generally much "healthier" than the US.
And also, most state DMVs have really cleaned up their acts. I went in for a new license a few weeks ago. The entire process took about 10 minutes, and on a busy holiday weekend at that. The staff were astonishingly friendly and professional throughout the entire process.
Even Martha Stewart approves of the job the DMV is doing.
You might want to consider posting these things as AC.
It's pretty much the exact reason why the option is there.
Australia has a typical 37.5-38 hour work week (excluding lunch, so 40 hours including a 30ish minute lunch) and record low unemployment.
And public health care.
And a pension system for those who cannot work.
And an economy kicking the US's...
And a huge cache of natural resources.
And an array of nearby countries scrambling to extract/buy them as fast as is physically possible.
I hate to play devils advocate. The US needs all those things you mention, but the Australian economy might be booming for reasons other than those you mention.
Canada might be a better comparison point, though I don't quite understand the US's aversion to "becoming Canada." Apart from the weather (brr!), they seem to have it pretty good over there.