They are making better than $14 an hour with benefits which is a very good wage for someone that does not need any education. This is a very fair deal and you have people lined up. It is not a career it is a retail job. They off to help pay for schooling as well. They are getting a very fair deal and dignity. But there is also a lot of other people that would love to have that job tomorrow. If he doesn't feel he is getting paid what he is worth then he should go and find a new job. So move on if you are under valued.
Maybe but you have the Monster Google also talking to congress and if they did it to Apple as well it would be all hell breaking loose. Steve Jobs would be on Capital Hill talking giving testimony that would have the galleries applauding. Plus there more seats in California than Washington state so. Yea there rear-ends would be dragged into court and anti-trust would flying around. Just imagine Balmer vs Jobs infront of a Congressional hearing.
It is an armored car. MLRS is not a good plan at all. Kiowa Warrior would be more in line. Just even some of the new small PGMs like the DAGR or the Giffin will would do just fine for those if you needed to go that far. Just some bust strips to take out the tires would probably do them in. Must sit back and wait when they are stuck long enough and they are hot enough they will walk out. Even M2 would probably really mess up one of these trucks days.
And President Obama got us into another war in Libya. No fly zone? Keep living in the fantasy that you are so much smarter than those that voted the other way and you still part of the problem.
IT doesn't support the OS that the student wrote last week. The problems today for IT support a university are much different than back in the day. Today the still have to support all the high end users but now every student and teacher also has one or more devices and they are all on an Internet full of malware and script kiddies. They would love to go back to the day that they supported a few hundred users on a Vax Cluster.
Security or the lack of it on a mobile device really trumps Office. So I would disagree that it is better than iPhone or Android. In fact a Verizon GSA rep I talked to told me this since I work at a small company and we do not use Exchange at all. Plus you can get Office views for both Android and iPhone. And who is really going to be editing a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet on their phone anyway? Maybe a few die hards but that has got to be the absolute pits. Zune pass seems like the real no brainer. From what I hear the Zune HD was a better audio device than the iPod line. Zunepass seemed to me to be the killer feature that almost no one seemed to know about. Really WinMo7 seven phones could be marked as the phone for music lovers and gamers but they really do not push that at all.
Humm and Microsoft using their market share on the desk top in an anti-competitive way would go over so well. Yea I see corporate customers throwing a fit if their blackberries and Android phones stopped working, the EU slapping a few billion dollar fine on Microsoft, companies migrating away from Exchange to Gmail, and a general destruction of Microsoft's market share in the enterprise.
Wow. That would be cool and it would only get better. You see WP7 isn't enterprise ready at all. The law suits would be fantastic to watch as even the US gov would get into a fit because they use Exchange with Blackberries. Oh and if they gave it to Blackberry as well. That would targeting Google which is anti-completive and Google would launch an massive law suit that be epic in scope.
It would probably cause less legal problems if Microsoft just put a hit out on Steve Jobs and the Larry Page.
Not really. Microsoft has advertised them all over the place. I have seen them at AT&T and Verizon stores. kiosks almost never even have phones they have those stupid cheap fake phones with pictures for screens. Windows Phone 7 is feature incomplete. Mango when it get here will bring WP7 up the the same standard as teh current iPhone and Android handsets but that is still not till fall. Also Windows Phones is the past where enterprise devices while WP7 is less enterprise ready than Android and iPhone. They have no buzz and no real interest. If Mango was out today they would be pretty interesting devices. They have some really good games and Zune Pass sounds like a killer deal. Oh and microsoft doesn't push ZunePass as a feature. The Xbox integration is at best okay IMHO but some people will love the little rewards. So there you have it. WP7 is flopping because the old market for Microsoft phones was the enterprise users and WP7 abandoned them. The the target market remembers Microsoft as a business phone. The tech writers and phone fans are all saying "It is cool but is missing a ton of features." So they are all excited about Mango and Nokia but that is in the future so the local tech experts are all saying get an Android or an iPhone today and look at WP7 when it comes out. And the WP7 phones are no carriers hero device. AT&T made the iPhone their hero device for a long time. Verizon pushed the Droid line to compete with the iPhone and now they have an iPhone. TMobile was the launch carrier for Android and is still an Android fan. Sprint first tried to make the Palm Pre their iPhone killer and when that didn't work out because of the bad, half baked sdk and being feature incomplete "like WP7 is now" they went to Android and made the Evo 4g their hero device. So no carrier is going to risk their hero device budget on a WP7 device today.
The question that I have is what was meant by support. WiFi is usually platform independent so it should work for most devices. Do mean can you call them up and ask for help connecting? Probably not. Heck that is a support headache now for Windows. You have to deal with XP, Vista, and Windows7 plus manufactures often seem to want to add their own Wifi utility that you may have never seen before. On OS/X it just seems to work. Frankly on Linux if you have a good distro with on a system with a supported wifi chipset it also just seems to work. But if you say you support every platform at a University you will get some pain in the rear that will be running Contiki on an old 386 notebook trying to log on to the network asking for help.
That is correct but that is also the point. Modern aircraft are really good. Airline pilots are well trained. Airline pilots don't stall a plane at cruise out of the blue. Modern airliners rarely just fall apart. Maybe the vast majority of cells and stuff will probably do no harm. One bad kirf or maybe one that has a flaw happens to cause an ILS to glitch at the worst possible time and people die. They can't inspect every device so the safe route is to have them turned off at takeoff and landing. Cell phones are a different issue. The FCC wants them turned off in flight because they will see too many towers and switch too fast. Most crashes happen when more than one thing fails and the pilot makes an error dealing with the failure. And what the hell is wrong you these fools. They can't turn off their toys for 10 minutes at the start and end of a flight!
Do you know what a risk to benefit ratio is? Having to turn of your electronics == tiny benefit, deaths in a fire ball == big risk. It is kind of like smoking while pumping gas. I am sure millions of people have done it but that doesn't mean that it isn't both stupid and dangerous.
Let me make a guess. You are not connected in any professorial manor with the aviation industry? If a pilot notices interference during landing but still can land safety it is still a problem. Maybe for it to be your kind of problem problem it will take them interfering while landing, at night, during a storm, with the GPS landing system out, when the plane is low on fuel. When it is you on the plane or your spouse of maybe your child you will scream bloody murder. Think back to that Air France crash that happened because an air speed indicator iced up. That can also happen all the time and never contribute to a crash. In aviation you ideally try and deal with the problems before it involves a few hundred people dieing in a ball of fire.
Funny but when.Net came out I refused to spend time learning it because I don't like Microsoft lock in. Seems like I made a good choice..Net = Microsoft making a windows only competitor to Java. Silverlight = Microsoft taking on Flash. HTML5 as a development platform == A copy of Palm WebOS and Google ChromeOS. As to Silverlight everywhere? Not a freaking chance and never had one. You should have gone with Java for that or maybe Flash. As to Microsoft's record with developers this is typical. They did it to VB6 devs, Java devs, and are doing it to FoxPro devs. And the crap they pulled on web devs over the years with IE speaks for it's self. Windows 8 on Tablets right now looks like a disaster of the level of Wince/Windows Mobile. It is a half backed tacked on solution.
Don't forget FoxPro developers . Thing is that.NET was always just a copy of Java. For those that like to complain about the the performance of Java I can tell you that you fury is for the most part misplaced. Current Java is pretty fast and the only real lag is still start up and that has also improved. Had Microsoft embraced Java the way Apple did "But is no longer:(" the start up and the native look and feel issues would be gone. If you want to see a some good Java programs try out the Eclipse.org, Vuze, and Jedit. What has really given Java a bad name is that it allows really badly written programs to work. This is a good thing because it allows you to throw stuff together quick that works when you need it. It comes back to haunt you when all of a sudden you code is running really slow and you look at it 3 years later and go "I did what?" The other problem was applet abuse. You had idiots using applets for freaking buttons much like you see idiots doing with flash. Had Microsoft not tried to twist Java into a Windows only flavor we would have had multi Platform a long time ago.
Yea I love the tone of the sumary because the first question is can Germany phase out nuclear power at all. They have not done it and the rest of the it is just so much fantasy. Of course what the Green party doesn't know is they are going to replace Nuclear with carbon neutral whale oil fired plants.
Most authors of books end up making less than minimum wage. My stepfather has written 4 books and I think has made like $300 out of the deal. He like to write so that is all that matters. A few make a lot of money but only a very tiny few become extremely rich. Even the big authors like Piers Anthony and William Gibson are probably in the "well to do" category BMW 5 class well to do and not Mercedes Benz S class much less Bentley rich. Writing a book, making a movie, and or producing an Album is a pretty high risk venture with little chance of pay off. The cost of production of the work is then distributed over the all the people that purchase the book. Voluntary payments? Really are you willing to work that way? Tax money for authors? Yea that will be great so then the electorate can vote one what can and can not get subsidized by the government. That is why we have copyright and patent law. It allows people to put in the capital to create works that take a lot of resources to create but next to nothing to duplicate. Frankly those are the types of works we want. Things like transistors and ICs where devices that cost a lot of money to develop but almost nothing to copy. The inventors got their investment back from selling lots of them and licenses for them. Digital media is that in spades. Things like DRM are I hope nothing but growing pains. The music industry has learned that it is useless and now people buy DRM music because it is cheap and easier than pirating. Now if the the video and book publishers come to understand it then we are all set. No eBook should cost more than $5.00. The only reason I can figure they are so expensive is that many publishers are still having to live in both worlds. They have to keep producing the expensive to produce, store, ship, and destroy paper books and the inexpensive Ebooks. Each Ebook sale for them isn't just an ebook sale but a hard book that will not sell. Already on Amazon you are seeing Ebook only authors embracing 99 cent and $1.99 books because they would rather make $600,000 from a million sales. Other authors are putting their old out of print books back into circulation as ebooks for a low price much to the joy of their fans. EBooks are not the problem that RMS sees. DRM is as is the old publishing and distribution models. The other thing is that you will see a continuation of a trend that a lot of people don't like which is centralization. The local record/book/video store is pretty much becoming a thing of the past. Everything is now available as a digital download. The plus is that it is cheaper for the consumer and offers them greater choice. You are not limited to just what they want to carry or think will sell. The downside is that the people that worked at those small stores and that delivered the media and made the physical media are now going to have to find new jobs. The Internet is doing everything that people complained about WalMart doing. Hey nothing is all good or bad. eBooks like digital music can provide lower costs, greater selection, and zero travel purchases. RMS is a great coder that has lived his entire life in the AI Lab at MIT. His political ideas are those of someone that has not really had to deal with the real world and are unworkably radical. But dude Love that GCC, GPL, and Emacs.
They didn't think they had too. They worked from the Harmony project which was supposed to be clean. Sun didn't seem to mind. Plus these are software patents which frankly should even exist. It will be interesting to see how many hold up in court. It isn't as if Google doesn't have a huge crap load of money to spend on the lawsuit.
A coder is not a computer scientist or even really a programer. They have the same relationship to a programer as draftsperson has to an engineer or architect. Some coders can become programmers but they are the ones that read Knuth and take classes and so on. It is going down hill fast folks, I deal with support techs that don't understand what an ascii file is. They have no idea what Unicode is. And they really don't even know what binary is. Most don't even know that it takes 1024 bytes to make a kilobyte and 1024 kilobytes to make a megabyte much less why. Sure they can tell me which GPU is the fastest but they will also things like AMD video cards suck because their drivers are crap. Or better yet that Macs suck! They have never used one or a Linux box but they know that it sucks.... Sigh... I gave them a link to some free computer science texts I have found including one my Wirth. Not one of them bothered to read them. I fear that as more people adopt the label "geeks" the more the rift raft creeps in. Hell they are showing wrestling on the Science Fiction channel! That is how bad we have fallen!
I do agree that they do need to drop their prices but why should they have to add anything that isn't easily copied. They created the content which is expensive and hard to replicate. It is easy to copy but why don't you write and produce a movie yourself sometime. Or even write a book. To create is hard work to copy is easy. It has been that way for a long time for many things. Now DRM is just a terrible idea. It doesn't work and only punishes those that are honest paying customers. Draconian laws are also less than useful. That combined with no real rule on what is fair use and what is not makes everything a mess. The media industry needs to adjust to the new world. A lot of media companies only existed as a means of distribution. That market is now on the way out because the ease and cost of distribution is now dropping like a rock. Other companies made money on providing a local shopping experience. Those companies now have to deal with websites and digital distribution. Why buy a CD at Bestbuy when I can buy the song I want from home? Why should I drive to Blockbuster when I can stream it on NetFlix? But the elimination of IP rights is not the solution. People that invest the time and effort in content creation need and frankly diserve protection from people just coping their work. Their work is not easy to replicate it is easy to copy. The difference is this if a scientist publishes a paper and another follows his steps and conducts the same experiment that is replication. If he copies the other guys paper and publishes it as his own that is copying.
People also don't get it. IOS and OS/X are very very close. They share a lot of APIs as it is. Could Apple kill OS/X in favor of IOS? Yes. Will Apple kill OS/X in favor of IOS I doubt it.
Right now you can get a keyboard for the ipad2 but even Jobs has said that touch does work well for vertical screens. Eventually I think you will see IOS and OS/X get very very close. If at anytime Intel makes a great mobilephone like CPU then maybe you will see the merge. If Arm starts to push X86 out of the consumer market then you might seem them merge that way. But I don't see IOS killing OS/X since they are really close to being the same thing.
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They are making better than $14 an hour with benefits which is a very good wage for someone that does not need any education. This is a very fair deal and you have people lined up. It is not a career it is a retail job. They off to help pay for schooling as well. They are getting a very fair deal and dignity. But there is also a lot of other people that would love to have that job tomorrow. If he doesn't feel he is getting paid what he is worth then he should go and find a new job. So move on if you are under valued.
Really what a great and admirable hobby. This is a gentleman that must sleep well every night.
Maybe but you have the Monster Google also talking to congress and if they did it to Apple as well it would be all hell breaking loose. Steve Jobs would be on Capital Hill talking giving testimony that would have the galleries applauding. Plus there more seats in California than Washington state so. Yea there rear-ends would be dragged into court and anti-trust would flying around. Just imagine Balmer vs Jobs infront of a Congressional hearing.
It is an armored car. MLRS is not a good plan at all. Kiowa Warrior would be more in line. Just even some of the new small PGMs like the DAGR or the Giffin will would do just fine for those if you needed to go that far. Just some bust strips to take out the tires would probably do them in. Must sit back and wait when they are stuck long enough and they are hot enough they will walk out. Even M2 would probably really mess up one of these trucks days.
And President Obama got us into another war in Libya. No fly zone? Keep living in the fantasy that you are so much smarter than those that voted the other way and you still part of the problem.
IT doesn't support the OS that the student wrote last week. The problems today for IT support a university are much different than back in the day. Today the still have to support all the high end users but now every student and teacher also has one or more devices and they are all on an Internet full of malware and script kiddies. They would love to go back to the day that they supported a few hundred users on a Vax Cluster.
Security or the lack of it on a mobile device really trumps Office. So I would disagree that it is better than iPhone or Android. In fact a Verizon GSA rep I talked to told me this since I work at a small company and we do not use Exchange at all. Plus you can get Office views for both Android and iPhone. And who is really going to be editing a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet on their phone anyway? Maybe a few die hards but that has got to be the absolute pits.
Zune pass seems like the real no brainer. From what I hear the Zune HD was a better audio device than the iPod line. Zunepass seemed to me to be the killer feature that almost no one seemed to know about. Really WinMo7 seven phones could be marked as the phone for music lovers and gamers but they really do not push that at all.
Humm and Microsoft using their market share on the desk top in an anti-competitive way would go over so well.
Yea I see corporate customers throwing a fit if their blackberries and Android phones stopped working, the EU slapping a few billion dollar fine on Microsoft, companies migrating away from Exchange to Gmail, and a general destruction of Microsoft's market share in the enterprise.
Wow. That would be cool and it would only get better. You see WP7 isn't enterprise ready at all. The law suits would be fantastic to watch as even the US gov would get into a fit because they use Exchange with Blackberries. Oh and if they gave it to Blackberry as well. That would targeting Google which is anti-completive and Google would launch an massive law suit that be epic in scope.
It would probably cause less legal problems if Microsoft just put a hit out on Steve Jobs and the Larry Page.
Not really. Microsoft has advertised them all over the place. I have seen them at AT&T and Verizon stores. kiosks almost never even have phones they have those stupid cheap fake phones with pictures for screens.
Windows Phone 7 is feature incomplete. Mango when it get here will bring WP7 up the the same standard as teh current iPhone and Android handsets but that is still not till fall.
Also Windows Phones is the past where enterprise devices while WP7 is less enterprise ready than Android and iPhone. They have no buzz and no real interest.
If Mango was out today they would be pretty interesting devices. They have some really good games and Zune Pass sounds like a killer deal. Oh and microsoft doesn't push ZunePass as a feature. The Xbox integration is at best okay IMHO but some people will love the little rewards.
So there you have it.
WP7 is flopping because the old market for Microsoft phones was the enterprise users and WP7 abandoned them.
The the target market remembers Microsoft as a business phone.
The tech writers and phone fans are all saying "It is cool but is missing a ton of features." So they are all excited about Mango and Nokia but that is in the future so the local tech experts are all saying get an Android or an iPhone today and look at WP7 when it comes out.
And the WP7 phones are no carriers hero device. AT&T made the iPhone their hero device for a long time. Verizon pushed the Droid line to compete with the iPhone and now they have an iPhone. TMobile was the launch carrier for Android and is still an Android fan. Sprint first tried to make the Palm Pre their iPhone killer and when that didn't work out because of the bad, half baked sdk and being feature incomplete "like WP7 is now" they went to Android and made the Evo 4g their hero device.
So no carrier is going to risk their hero device budget on a WP7 device today.
The question that I have is what was meant by support. WiFi is usually platform independent so it should work for most devices. Do mean can you call them up and ask for help connecting? Probably not. Heck that is a support headache now for Windows. You have to deal with XP, Vista, and Windows7 plus manufactures often seem to want to add their own Wifi utility that you may have never seen before. On OS/X it just seems to work. Frankly on Linux if you have a good distro with on a system with a supported wifi chipset it also just seems to work.
But if you say you support every platform at a University you will get some pain in the rear that will be running Contiki on an old 386 notebook trying to log on to the network asking for help.
That is correct but that is also the point. Modern aircraft are really good. Airline pilots are well trained. Airline pilots don't stall a plane at cruise out of the blue. Modern airliners rarely just fall apart. Maybe the vast majority of cells and stuff will probably do no harm. One bad kirf or maybe one that has a flaw happens to cause an ILS to glitch at the worst possible time and people die.
They can't inspect every device so the safe route is to have them turned off at takeoff and landing. Cell phones are a different issue. The FCC wants them turned off in flight because they will see too many towers and switch too fast. Most crashes happen when more than one thing fails and the pilot makes an error dealing with the failure. And what the hell is wrong you these fools. They can't turn off their toys for 10 minutes at the start and end of a flight!
No not 100% of the time. Sometimes they do know out sensor and electronics. It is rare but does happen.
Do you know what a risk to benefit ratio is? Having to turn of your electronics == tiny benefit, deaths in a fire ball == big risk. It is kind of like smoking while pumping gas. I am sure millions of people have done it but that doesn't mean that it isn't both stupid and dangerous.
Let me make a guess. You are not connected in any professorial manor with the aviation industry?
If a pilot notices interference during landing but still can land safety it is still a problem. Maybe for it to be your kind of problem problem it will take them interfering while landing, at night, during a storm, with the GPS landing system out, when the plane is low on fuel. When it is you on the plane or your spouse of maybe your child you will scream bloody murder. Think back to that Air France crash that happened because an air speed indicator iced up. That can also happen all the time and never contribute to a crash. In aviation you ideally try and deal with the problems before it involves a few hundred people dieing in a ball of fire.
Funny but when .Net came out I refused to spend time learning it because I don't like Microsoft lock in. Seems like I made a good choice. .Net = Microsoft making a windows only competitor to Java.
Silverlight = Microsoft taking on Flash.
HTML5 as a development platform == A copy of Palm WebOS and Google ChromeOS.
As to Silverlight everywhere? Not a freaking chance and never had one. You should have gone with Java for that or maybe Flash. As to Microsoft's record with developers this is typical. They did it to VB6 devs, Java devs, and are doing it to FoxPro devs.
And the crap they pulled on web devs over the years with IE speaks for it's self.
Windows 8 on Tablets right now looks like a disaster of the level of Wince/Windows Mobile. It is a half backed tacked on solution.
Don't forget FoxPro developers . .NET was always just a copy of Java. For those that like to complain about the the performance of Java I can tell you that you fury is for the most part misplaced. Current Java is pretty fast and the only real lag is still start up and that has also improved. Had Microsoft embraced Java the way Apple did "But is no longer :(" the start up and the native look and feel issues would be gone. If you want to see a some good Java programs try out the Eclipse.org, Vuze, and Jedit.
Thing is that
What has really given Java a bad name is that it allows really badly written programs to work. This is a good thing because it allows you to throw stuff together quick that works when you need it. It comes back to haunt you when all of a sudden you code is running really slow and you look at it 3 years later and go "I did what?"
The other problem was applet abuse. You had idiots using applets for freaking buttons much like you see idiots doing with flash.
Had Microsoft not tried to twist Java into a Windows only flavor we would have had multi Platform a long time ago.
Yea I love the tone of the sumary because the first question is can Germany phase out nuclear power at all. They have not done it and the rest of the it is just so much fantasy. Of course what the Green party doesn't know is they are going to replace Nuclear with carbon neutral whale oil fired plants.
Most authors of books end up making less than minimum wage. My stepfather has written 4 books and I think has made like $300 out of the deal. He like to write so that is all that matters.
A few make a lot of money but only a very tiny few become extremely rich. Even the big authors like Piers Anthony and William Gibson are probably in the "well to do" category BMW 5 class well to do and not Mercedes Benz S class much less Bentley rich. Writing a book, making a movie, and or producing an Album is a pretty high risk venture with little chance of pay off. The cost of production of the work is then distributed over the all the people that purchase the book. Voluntary payments? Really are you willing to work that way? Tax money for authors? Yea that will be great so then the electorate can vote one what can and can not get subsidized by the government. That is why we have copyright and patent law. It allows people to put in the capital to create works that take a lot of resources to create but next to nothing to duplicate. Frankly those are the types of works we want. Things like transistors and ICs where devices that cost a lot of money to develop but almost nothing to copy. The inventors got their investment back from selling lots of them and licenses for them. Digital media is that in spades.
Things like DRM are I hope nothing but growing pains. The music industry has learned that it is useless and now people buy DRM music because it is cheap and easier than pirating. Now if the the video and book publishers come to understand it then we are all set. No eBook should cost more than $5.00. The only reason I can figure they are so expensive is that many publishers are still having to live in both worlds. They have to keep producing the expensive to produce, store, ship, and destroy paper books and the inexpensive Ebooks. Each Ebook sale for them isn't just an ebook sale but a hard book that will not sell.
Already on Amazon you are seeing Ebook only authors embracing 99 cent and $1.99 books because they would rather make $600,000 from a million sales. Other authors are putting their old out of print books back into circulation as ebooks for a low price much to the joy of their fans.
EBooks are not the problem that RMS sees. DRM is as is the old publishing and distribution models. The other thing is that you will see a continuation of a trend that a lot of people don't like which is centralization.
The local record/book/video store is pretty much becoming a thing of the past. Everything is now available as a digital download. The plus is that it is cheaper for the consumer and offers them greater choice. You are not limited to just what they want to carry or think will sell.
The downside is that the people that worked at those small stores and that delivered the media and made the physical media are now going to have to find new jobs. The Internet is doing everything that people complained about WalMart doing.
Hey nothing is all good or bad. eBooks like digital music can provide lower costs, greater selection, and zero travel purchases.
RMS is a great coder that has lived his entire life in the AI Lab at MIT. His political ideas are those of someone that has not really had to deal with the real world and are unworkably radical. But dude Love that GCC, GPL, and Emacs.
Oh and the another sign that geeks aren't anymore. Grammar and spelling trolls on Slashdot.
Good heaven is any programer didn't know that I would scream. These are the support techs I am talking about.
They didn't think they had too. They worked from the Harmony project which was supposed to be clean. Sun didn't seem to mind. Plus these are software patents which frankly should even exist. It will be interesting to see how many hold up in court. It isn't as if Google doesn't have a huge crap load of money to spend on the lawsuit.
A coder is not a computer scientist or even really a programer. They have the same relationship to a programer as draftsperson has to an engineer or architect. Some coders can become programmers but they are the ones that read Knuth and take classes and so on. It is going down hill fast folks, I deal with support techs that don't understand what an ascii file is. They have no idea what Unicode is. And they really don't even know what binary is. Most don't even know that it takes 1024 bytes to make a kilobyte and 1024 kilobytes to make a megabyte much less why.
Sure they can tell me which GPU is the fastest but they will also things like AMD video cards suck because their drivers are crap. Or better yet that Macs suck! They have never used one or a Linux box but they know that it sucks....
Sigh...
I gave them a link to some free computer science texts I have found including one my Wirth. Not one of them bothered to read them.
I fear that as more people adopt the label "geeks" the more the rift raft creeps in. Hell they are showing wrestling on the Science Fiction channel!
That is how bad we have fallen!
How about OWL? http://owl.anytimecomm.com/
Yes you need to install a webserver on your system but it really does work very well.
I do agree that they do need to drop their prices but why should they have to add anything that isn't easily copied. They created the content which is expensive and hard to replicate. It is easy to copy but why don't you write and produce a movie yourself sometime. Or even write a book.
To create is hard work to copy is easy. It has been that way for a long time for many things. Now DRM is just a terrible idea. It doesn't work and only punishes those that are honest paying customers. Draconian laws are also less than useful. That combined with no real rule on what is fair use and what is not makes everything a mess. The media industry needs to adjust to the new world. A lot of media companies only existed as a means of distribution. That market is now on the way out because the ease and cost of distribution is now dropping like a rock. Other companies made money on providing a local shopping experience. Those companies now have to deal with websites and digital distribution. Why buy a CD at Bestbuy when I can buy the song I want from home? Why should I drive to Blockbuster when I can stream it on NetFlix?
But the elimination of IP rights is not the solution. People that invest the time and effort in content creation need and frankly diserve protection from people just coping their work. Their work is not easy to replicate it is easy to copy. The difference is this if a scientist publishes a paper and another follows his steps and conducts the same experiment that is replication. If he copies the other guys paper and publishes it as his own that is copying.
People also don't get it. IOS and OS/X are very very close. They share a lot of APIs as it is.
Could Apple kill OS/X in favor of IOS? Yes.
Will Apple kill OS/X in favor of IOS I doubt it.
Right now you can get a keyboard for the ipad2 but even Jobs has said that touch does work well for vertical screens. Eventually I think you will see IOS and OS/X get very very close. If at anytime Intel makes a great mobilephone like CPU then maybe you will see the merge. If Arm starts to push X86 out of the consumer market then you might seem them merge that way.
But I don't see IOS killing OS/X since they are really close to being the same thing.