Most of the things you learn in school and college are mostly useless. Except reading, writing and a bit or arithmetic, nothing is really too useful for the majority of people. Most of the things you need for most of the jobs out there you have to learn at the job, anyway. Most of the concepts we'll meet in daily life are never even touched in school. You don't learn about insurance, or what's a bill, or a receipt, or a mortgage, or car mechanics or home repairs. But we learn about biology (why? what has biology to be so widely taught? agreed we are living things, but still), lots of history (interesting, sure, but useful? only if you are Indiana Jones, I suppose), physics (you'll learn all you need about gravitation by age five, anyway), literature (that's more useful than math?).
The syllabuses we trod in our life seem at best random and at worst residual accumulation of pet topics from a long genealogy of teachers. Most of it comes from forgotten times, where you could really grasp ALL the human knowledge of the time, so no selection was needed. Since that's no longer the case, some selection is overdue, for math and for all the rest of topics. But it seems like once installed in the syllabus, there is no way of getting something thrown out. And it should be a continuous work in progress, year in and year out, selecting what must come in and what must go out.
The best that can be said of today's education is not about what we learn, because we forget that soon, but how that learning teaches us to better ways of thinking. In this regard, Mathematics should be considered fundamental. Perhaps an instinctive suspicion of that is what keeps Math in our schools, who knows?
The problem is just in your expectations. If you start with 1600x1200, then you'll be disappointed. If you start with a 1024x768, you'll notice how your perception of the new monitors improve. If you want more improvement, just start with a worse monitor. Don't mention it.
I'm always surprised of how this things are implemented. They usually _start_ with a bang and public announcements and trumpets and all. That is, before they have done anything. When you see something like that, you know they are going to have lots of problems, simply because the people that thinks that way (first let's make a big decision and a big press conference) usually cannot think in the way needed to solve the very difficult problems that arise in big migration.
IT systems have become very complex things that pervade our work and private life. They have evolved for decades to adapt themselves to peoples' needs, and people has changed too to adapt to the IT systems. Windows has been part of that mutual evolution for many years now, and Linux hasn't. That's the elephant in the room that nobody speaks about. Linux won't be able to compete with Windows till it has many many years, not of existing, but of being widely used (even in special locations like call centers and so), after it.
For doing migrations I'd recommend the following guidelines:
- Gradually is the thing. Start with localized users, preferably new people that haven't got used to the old system. - These new users have to get a good experience. If you cannot make it happen for a couple of desktops, sure you won't be able to make everybody switch. - Provide comparative advantages to the new users. Things like putting big screens in the Linux systems will make other people wish they had been migrated. - Everything you use should work in both systems. If something cannot (Outlook/Exchange, custom apps, Access databases) then you have to search for an alternative or replacement. If no alternative exists that is good enough, you better forget about the whole idea. - Even if everything works in both systems, when you set up something new (database or anything) make sure it works a bit better in the Linux than the Windows systems. - Set no end date for the migration. You are going to keep Windows for a long time, so don't fight it. Gradually is the thing, remember.
I'd say that suing them would be enough to prove your good faith. I mean, if you had registered both domains, you'd probably refrain from suing anybody, as you could get into trouble when the truth came out. It's the same principle as insurance companies asking you for a police report before paying for damages to an stolen car. The police won't even see your car usually, but most people won't risk a problem with the police for the repair money.
It never pays to really block all pornography. Then people has too much time in their hands (no puns, please, it's too easy), and might start thinking. You want to have them with all the porno they want, but scared of having it. That way you can use porno as a way of pressuring people to do whatever the state machinery wants (drug possession is used in other countries with the same end).
Chinese and Japanese symbols are a brutal inefficiency. The cost of learning them is so many times higher than the possible benefits, that it put the users of these languages at a disadvantage. In time, ruthlessly competition with users of other languages will mean the end of such inefficiencies. Natives of these languages naturally tend to cut corners when they can. Soon a mobile phone camera will be able to automatically subtext the symbols with their pronunciation, in real time. Then you won't really have any longer any reason to learn them. In a couple of generations more, knowing the symbols will be seen as terribly uncool by the youngster, in a couple more, they will be dead, nostalgia notwithstanding. Well, make it ten generations in Japan, perhaps:o), but I don't think it'll be more.
If there is a problem with online banking, why not put all the banks in a different net, accessible only to identified persons? Putting all the websites in an ID-net, for the problem of just one small segment of the whole net, seems a bit of an overkill.
Microsoft seemingly doesn't recognize that as long as they don't make the hardware along with the software they cannot control the user experience. And they cannot alienate their customer base (not the users, of course, the computer makers) by competing with them. So they cannot do much. Except complaining of course, that is what Ballmer is doing.
A difficult law to implement. How are they going to know how much pirated content travels by one ISP's lines? Even the ISP itself has no idea. Are they going to suppose that all bittorrent traffic is pirated content? What is the percentage of pornographic content? I assume that they don't represent the pornographic content providers, specially foreign ones. What about encrypted content? If they implement such a law I assume that the level of encrypted content will rise. There is no reason why all pirated content is not encrypted, except that it's at the moment not needed.
In the end they probably just want to get a fixed levy an all ISPs. And all blank CDs, DVDs, hard disks, memory cards, diskettes, memo pads, pens, photo cameras, and people with good memory.
Well, if the free publicity stunts work for Apple, why cannot Nokia try them too? They will probably need to "lose" four prototypes, for Apple two, but in the end they will probably move a bit the interest of the people.
Is a wasted feature in most of the world, for most of the people most of the time. A grandma can want to video talk with her grandchildren, and in business settings can be also very useful, but for most of the people, most of the time, video just get in the way. My wife is now talking with her brother, that lives in other country, and they could video talk, but who wants to. She is playing MahJong while talking, and the brother is packing a suitcase (he has a headphone), so video would just be a damned nuisance.
My point is, if from the beginning of phoning, all calls had been video calls, we'd welcome the option of just-voice calls as a big liberation.
I somehow thought that a "Lego printer" was a device to create an image of what you print using Lego cubes. So, as amazing as the thing is, I felt a bit disappointed.
People who prefer print books over e-books may still want extra digital material to go with them
I really prefer e-books, and now I'm terrified that they could start adding ads to the e-books. I'm not so much worried by pop-ups, nasty as they can be, but by product placement. Imagine "One ring to rule them all (and you'll certainly rule if you buy a diamond ring to your girlfriend), one ring to find them...". Or Nero Wolfe drinking a particular brand of beer... The simple idea makes me shiver.
I'd find this thing very useful if it could easily grab a good-quality photo of a document. 2MP doesn't seem enough, although if it's prepared for that it could be. I have a 3.2 MP camera in my mobile phone, and it doesn't do a very good job of grabbing a document's photo. Now, if this thing did a better job of it, (by for example taking a fast sequence of photos and software-joining them to get better quality), and if the document's classification system doesn't suck, well, I'd like one. Provided, of course, that the pencil annotations' format is an open one, because, you know Asus, I like you, but I'm not the type to marry.
Any word on the openness of the annotations' format?
1. Someone will steal an iPad or eBook reader from your bag at the airport, not a dog-eared paperback. On the other side, you have to carry the dead weight of some paperbacks in your luggage, instead of just one light eBook reader. 2. For all the tree-huggers out there, you can only use paper from sustainable sources. How exactly do you do that? I mean, if you don't happen to be the publisher of the book. 3. If it takes you 12 hours to read a book from start to finish, it will take you the same time to read the eBook. On most devices that means carrying around a spare set of batteries or finding somewhere to recharge. eBook readers (based on e-ink) can stay about a week, of continuous use without recharging. I charge mine only when putting new books inside, and it's enough. 4. Electronic media is all about "me me me" whereas physical media can be loaned to family and friends, thus encouraging more social interaction. eBooks can be given to everybody, encouraging worldwide goodwill 5. A used book can be given away to a charity or be sold to go towards the price of the next book. You have a point there, even if the price of the books should go down thanks to ebooks, reducing the second advantage.
I'm sure that when books where invented there was somebody that complained that they would ruin the amazing oral narrative tradition. That people wouldn't be able to remember any longer the tens of thousands of verses that anybody could at the time, and that inventive would disappear in a world of fossilized stories. And they were probably even right. So what? Things change, get used to it.
There is nothing particularly special in books, that will make people grow up really sound-minded. It's not like if today we are are looking at a generation of fine, upright, mentally flexible people with sound moral foundations. But wait, I'm assuming they ever read books at all!
Quite independently of whether that weapon is vaporware or not, the fact remains that advances in military hardware will end up percolating to the general public, if said public has enough money. What some years away were classified chips nowadays are available off-the-shelf. Guidance software, once leaked, is easy to copy. A disgruntled scientist is all that is needed to transfer loads of tech. Everybody keeps getting better at making things that fly. Look at the advance of the Chinese weaponry in the last years. They simply throw enough money at it, and they got mostly all the tech they needed. In some years, everybody and its dog will have enough firepower to down an aircraft carrier. I've seen posts saying that they should be able to block most missiles. Well, that's all right, except when you are faced with a hundred of them at the same time.
In a similar note, I'm not altogether sure that the recent move to the "non-nuclear ICBM" is a smart one. People are scared of using nuclear weapons, which is a sound attitude. That leads to treaties of non proliferation and generic agreement on not allowing the aforesaid proliferation. But that doesn't apply to other explosives, even if you are equally dead by a bullet than by a H-bomb. So what is now a cutting-edge technology (nnICBMs), will in ten years perhaps be available to mostly anybody in the world, and there is no non-proliferation treaty to pursue anybody for it.
Slashdot Mirror
it impossible to use a mobile phone while in a car can save lives,
Just not the lives of anybody trapped in a car and slowly dying because he cannot call anybody, that is.
Most of the things you learn in school and college are mostly useless. Except reading, writing and a bit or arithmetic, nothing is really too useful for the majority of people. Most of the things you need for most of the jobs out there you have to learn at the job, anyway. Most of the concepts we'll meet in daily life are never even touched in school. You don't learn about insurance, or what's a bill, or a receipt, or a mortgage, or car mechanics or home repairs. But we learn about biology (why? what has biology to be so widely taught? agreed we are living things, but still), lots of history (interesting, sure, but useful? only if you are Indiana Jones, I suppose), physics (you'll learn all you need about gravitation by age five, anyway), literature (that's more useful than math?).
The syllabuses we trod in our life seem at best random and at worst residual accumulation of pet topics from a long genealogy of teachers. Most of it comes from forgotten times, where you could really grasp ALL the human knowledge of the time, so no selection was needed. Since that's no longer the case, some selection is overdue, for math and for all the rest of topics. But it seems like once installed in the syllabus, there is no way of getting something thrown out. And it should be a continuous work in progress, year in and year out, selecting what must come in and what must go out.
The best that can be said of today's education is not about what we learn, because we forget that soon, but how that learning teaches us to better ways of thinking. In this regard, Mathematics should be considered fundamental. Perhaps an instinctive suspicion of that is what keeps Math in our schools, who knows?
The problem is just in your expectations. If you start with 1600x1200, then you'll be disappointed. If you start with a 1024x768, you'll notice how your perception of the new monitors improve. If you want more improvement, just start with a worse monitor. Don't mention it.
I'm always surprised of how this things are implemented. They usually _start_ with a bang and public announcements and trumpets and all. That is, before they have done anything. When you see something like that, you know they are going to have lots of problems, simply because the people that thinks that way (first let's make a big decision and a big press conference) usually cannot think in the way needed to solve the very difficult problems that arise in big migration.
IT systems have become very complex things that pervade our work and private life. They have evolved for decades to adapt themselves to peoples' needs, and people has changed too to adapt to the IT systems. Windows has been part of that mutual evolution for many years now, and Linux hasn't. That's the elephant in the room that nobody speaks about. Linux won't be able to compete with Windows till it has many many years, not of existing, but of being widely used (even in special locations like call centers and so), after it.
For doing migrations I'd recommend the following guidelines:
- Gradually is the thing. Start with localized users, preferably new people that haven't got used to the old system.
- These new users have to get a good experience. If you cannot make it happen for a couple of desktops, sure you won't be able to make everybody switch.
- Provide comparative advantages to the new users. Things like putting big screens in the Linux systems will make other people wish they had been migrated.
- Everything you use should work in both systems. If something cannot (Outlook/Exchange, custom apps, Access databases) then you have to search for an alternative or replacement. If no alternative exists that is good enough, you better forget about the whole idea.
- Even if everything works in both systems, when you set up something new (database or anything) make sure it works a bit better in the Linux than the Windows systems.
- Set no end date for the migration. You are going to keep Windows for a long time, so don't fight it. Gradually is the thing, remember.
I'd say that suing them would be enough to prove your good faith. I mean, if you had registered both domains, you'd probably refrain from suing anybody, as you could get into trouble when the truth came out. It's the same principle as insurance companies asking you for a police report before paying for damages to an stolen car. The police won't even see your car usually, but most people won't risk a problem with the police for the repair money.
It never pays to really block all pornography. Then people has too much time in their hands (no puns, please, it's too easy), and might start thinking. You want to have them with all the porno they want, but scared of having it. That way you can use porno as a way of pressuring people to do whatever the state machinery wants (drug possession is used in other countries with the same end).
Chinese and Japanese symbols are a brutal inefficiency. The cost of learning them is so many times higher than the possible benefits, that it put the users of these languages at a disadvantage. In time, ruthlessly competition with users of other languages will mean the end of such inefficiencies. Natives of these languages naturally tend to cut corners when they can. Soon a mobile phone camera will be able to automatically subtext the symbols with their pronunciation, in real time. Then you won't really have any longer any reason to learn them. In a couple of generations more, knowing the symbols will be seen as terribly uncool by the youngster, in a couple more, they will be dead, nostalgia notwithstanding. Well, make it ten generations in Japan, perhaps :o), but I don't think it'll be more.
Dura lex SED lex
After all, they don't worry about what happens to geeks' muscles.
If there is a problem with online banking, why not put all the banks in a different net, accessible only to identified persons? Putting all the websites in an ID-net, for the problem of just one small segment of the whole net, seems a bit of an overkill.
Microsoft seemingly doesn't recognize that as long as they don't make the hardware along with the software they cannot control the user experience. And they cannot alienate their customer base (not the users, of course, the computer makers) by competing with them. So they cannot do much. Except complaining of course, that is what Ballmer is doing.
A difficult law to implement. How are they going to know how much pirated content travels by one ISP's lines? Even the ISP itself has no idea. Are they going to suppose that all bittorrent traffic is pirated content? What is the percentage of pornographic content? I assume that they don't represent the pornographic content providers, specially foreign ones. What about encrypted content? If they implement such a law I assume that the level of encrypted content will rise. There is no reason why all pirated content is not encrypted, except that it's at the moment not needed.
In the end they probably just want to get a fixed levy an all ISPs. And all blank CDs, DVDs, hard disks, memory cards, diskettes, memo pads, pens, photo cameras, and people with good memory.
Well, if the free publicity stunts work for Apple, why cannot Nokia try them too? They will probably need to "lose" four prototypes, for Apple two, but in the end they will probably move a bit the interest of the people.
Have you ever heard of poetic licenses? Or, more to the point in this case, of size limitations on sigs?
Well, after so many years seeing software makers get away with it, I can understand them trying it out.
Why Video Calling Is a Wasted Feature In the UK
Is a wasted feature in most of the world, for most of the people most of the time. A grandma can want to video talk with her grandchildren, and in business settings can be also very useful, but for most of the people, most of the time, video just get in the way. My wife is now talking with her brother, that lives in other country, and they could video talk, but who wants to. She is playing MahJong while talking, and the brother is packing a suitcase (he has a headphone), so video would just be a damned nuisance.
My point is, if from the beginning of phoning, all calls had been video calls, we'd welcome the option of just-voice calls as a big liberation.
The designers also hope that one day the underwear can release drugs
We hope too!
Slashdot is the culprit now, for pointing out where the data was to be found.
I somehow thought that a "Lego printer" was a device to create an image of what you print using Lego cubes. So, as amazing as the thing is, I felt a bit disappointed.
People who prefer print books over e-books may still want extra digital material to go with them
I really prefer e-books, and now I'm terrified that they could start adding ads to the e-books. I'm not so much worried by pop-ups, nasty as they can be, but by product placement. Imagine "One ring to rule them all (and you'll certainly rule if you buy a diamond ring to your girlfriend), one ring to find them...". Or Nero Wolfe drinking a particular brand of beer... The simple idea makes me shiver.
I'd find this thing very useful if it could easily grab a good-quality photo of a document. 2MP doesn't seem enough, although if it's prepared for that it could be. I have a 3.2 MP camera in my mobile phone, and it doesn't do a very good job of grabbing a document's photo. Now, if this thing did a better job of it, (by for example taking a fast sequence of photos and software-joining them to get better quality), and if the document's classification system doesn't suck, well, I'd like one. Provided, of course, that the pencil annotations' format is an open one, because, you know Asus, I like you, but I'm not the type to marry.
Any word on the openness of the annotations' format?
1. Someone will steal an iPad or eBook reader from your bag at the airport, not a dog-eared paperback.
On the other side, you have to carry the dead weight of some paperbacks in your luggage, instead of just one light eBook reader.
2. For all the tree-huggers out there, you can only use paper from sustainable sources.
How exactly do you do that? I mean, if you don't happen to be the publisher of the book.
3. If it takes you 12 hours to read a book from start to finish, it will take you the same time to read the eBook. On most devices that means carrying around a spare set of batteries or finding somewhere to recharge.
eBook readers (based on e-ink) can stay about a week, of continuous use without recharging. I charge mine only when putting new books inside, and it's enough.
4. Electronic media is all about "me me me" whereas physical media can be loaned to family and friends, thus encouraging more social interaction.
eBooks can be given to everybody, encouraging worldwide goodwill
5. A used book can be given away to a charity or be sold to go towards the price of the next book.
You have a point there, even if the price of the books should go down thanks to ebooks, reducing the second advantage.
"What's not so gratifying is we have no clue why any of these effects are happening."
Well, it's not like they had any clue before as to why there was an eleven years' cycle, so the situation hasn't changed that much.
I'm sure that when books where invented there was somebody that complained that they would ruin the amazing oral narrative tradition. That people wouldn't be able to remember any longer the tens of thousands of verses that anybody could at the time, and that inventive would disappear in a world of fossilized stories. And they were probably even right. So what? Things change, get used to it.
There is nothing particularly special in books, that will make people grow up really sound-minded. It's not like if today we are are looking at a generation of fine, upright, mentally flexible people with sound moral foundations. But wait, I'm assuming they ever read books at all!
Quite independently of whether that weapon is vaporware or not, the fact remains that advances in military hardware will end up percolating to the general public, if said public has enough money. What some years away were classified chips nowadays are available off-the-shelf. Guidance software, once leaked, is easy to copy. A disgruntled scientist is all that is needed to transfer loads of tech. Everybody keeps getting better at making things that fly. Look at the advance of the Chinese weaponry in the last years. They simply throw enough money at it, and they got mostly all the tech they needed. In some years, everybody and its dog will have enough firepower to down an aircraft carrier. I've seen posts saying that they should be able to block most missiles. Well, that's all right, except when you are faced with a hundred of them at the same time.
In a similar note, I'm not altogether sure that the recent move to the "non-nuclear ICBM" is a smart one. People are scared of using nuclear weapons, which is a sound attitude. That leads to treaties of non proliferation and generic agreement on not allowing the aforesaid proliferation. But that doesn't apply to other explosives, even if you are equally dead by a bullet than by a H-bomb. So what is now a cutting-edge technology (nnICBMs), will in ten years perhaps be available to mostly anybody in the world, and there is no non-proliferation treaty to pursue anybody for it.