After thinking about it for years, one of the most useful things in I did school was geometry. Specifically, making geometric proofs was unbelievably useful. They required you to do two things:
* think step by step * think about the person reading the proof, and what they needed to know
When you're using computers you need to be able to, at a minimum, sequence your tasks. If you want to write good software, you need to be able to at some level understand what the person using your software is trying to do and the workflow that they have. So it works for the front and back end.
So in summary, let your students perform step by step breakdowns of a workflow/process. It could even be something simple, like "how do you make a piece of paper." Just listing the inputs into that process would take a day or two, and it'd be fun for everyone involved. You could do that with everything, because everyone likes something. How would you make makeup, clothes, etc.
Amtrak, our much-maligned medium-speed rail, has been heavily subsidized for years and it hardly can be considered successful by most accepted meanings of the word successful. Why would anyone thing a high-speed version of it would be any more successful?
Note that the unit is profitable, but will never (at the current rate) make up the amount of cumulative losses it has sustained. Just because it's profitable for a quarter or two doesn't mean it'll ever make money.
The printing industry has dealt with this sort of thing for a while. Read up on Stochastic Screening. Not quite the same, but it gives you a sort of idea of the problem of mapping continuous tone data in a non-continous space.
The only way a tablet will make it in the consumer market now is if it lets you watch flash-based porn on it. Soon even that will be gone, as the porn industry moves to HTML5/H264.
Basically, the rest of the market is fucked. Nobody can put out a device with the screen and build quality at the price points that Apple has, because nobody else has the volume to do it cost-effectively.
IPS screens are expensive...unless you buy them in bulk. The same goes with anything Apple is buying for their devices. Flash memory? Apple probably sells 2/5ths of the world production of flash. Crap, they must buy millions upon millions of molex connectors. How aboout glass? Yeah, it's not like anyone is opening new glass factories to make capacitive screens for these tablets. They're using what Apple doesn't want...or excess capacity run at off hours by the B team.
That's not to say tablet manufacturers won't make money. Apple makes tons of money in the PC market with a puny marketshare, relatively speaking. However, they won't make as much margin as Apple does in its PC niche because, when you come down to it, everyone else (non-Apple customers) is too cheap to buy gadgets at a price point that's sustainable.
That leaves two markets: government and verticals...the two areas where tablets actually exist in countable numbers. Verticals are soon going to be crushed by the iPad as well, unless they have odd physical requirements.
So there you go...a Q&D analysis of the 'tablet' market. Summary: go vertical now, before the iPad gets there. Or sell to governments.
I have hundreds of gigs of music, and a much smaller amount of movies. I'm not trapped in the Apple world...I like it here. In fact, I prefer the Apple world for the most part. Why would I move? Nothing else passes the order-of-magnitude threshold for change. In fact, most other things are a few steps backwards.
If anything, this is a failure of the tech industry, and especially of the Apple-bashers everywhere including/. If you think interface is so easy, you should go ahead and beat Apple with your super-duper whiz-bang UI. Instead, you have...gnome and KDE.
Could I use gnome/KDE? Sure! I could also cut off my leg and learn to hop. But why bother?
"Andy's point was simple. Older Android devices that can't be upgraded to newer versions of the OS or run newer apps are no different than an iPhone from 2007 not being updated to OS 4."
Rubin obfuscates the problem by trying to simplify things, which is working. The issues:
* my android device can't be upgraded * my android app don't work on x version of android * my android app doesn't work on y version of hardware
iPhone 4.0 is irrelevant, since it doesn't exist yet. And it is not like iPhone 3Gs not moving to iPhone 4. It's more like an app on an iPhone 3G with iPhone OS 2.0 can't run iPhone OS 3.0 because (a) the device itself can't be upgraded to iPhone OS 3.0, and/or (2) because iPhone OS 3.0 isn't backwards-compatible with iPhone OS 2.0.
I have plenty of iPhone apps that were first-generation that still work. That sounds like an unlikely situation in the android world. I also have apps that work on all versions of OS and hardware. I have a few that require specific features (GPS) that don't exist on 1.0 hardware...so obviously don't work on newer devices. I had a few apps (WiFi scanners) that died under OS 3.0 that used to work.
It sounds, however, that compatibility across android and handset versions is not only not guaranteed with android, but that the incompatibility is to be expected...according to their chief architect.
It's not moore's law is tapering off. It's just that machines are so fast that 99% of the population doesn't need it.
Why i7 when a core duo would be just as good? Or an atom? You don't need a lot of processing power to log onto facebook, watch a Youtube video, or create and edit a word doc.
The world is changing, and many people in the field find it hard to believe. Just the other day I heard some tech make some crack about an underpowered core 2 duo box...for general office use. A P4 would be perfectly fine for that; a c2d is overkill.
You are an EE, so you don't understand how markets work. Maybe you should go for a marketing degree instead.
Before Apple, there weren't a lot of mainstream PC makers that included USB. PS/2 and parallel were 'good enough'. Without a market, no peripheral manufacturer would make a USB peripheral; it would be a pointless waste of resources.
Once Apple introduced USB only Macs, it gave to segments of the industry (printers and scanners) a market...one that they've historically been a part of anyway. At that point the investment was required, not optional. As more printers and scanners got USB, more PCs got USB, etc. That's how a market is born. It to
The floppy, well, not so much. Apple was the first mainstream manufacturer to ship a CD-ROM drive standard, but the floppy's been around (and still will be around) for years.
Slashdot Mirror
The apps aren't leaking information. Leaking implies the information is being sent accidentally.
The apps are taking the information and sending it to whomever intentionally.
So you'd rather be given the choice to eat shit than to have the shit removed from your plate by someone else?
Bon Appetit!
After thinking about it for years, one of the most useful things in I did school was geometry. Specifically, making geometric proofs was unbelievably useful. They required you to do two things:
* think step by step
* think about the person reading the proof, and what they needed to know
When you're using computers you need to be able to, at a minimum, sequence your tasks. If you want to write good software, you need to be able to at some level understand what the person using your software is trying to do and the workflow that they have. So it works for the front and back end.
So in summary, let your students perform step by step breakdowns of a workflow/process. It could even be something simple, like "how do you make a piece of paper." Just listing the inputs into that process would take a day or two, and it'd be fun for everyone involved. You could do that with everything, because everyone likes something. How would you make makeup, clothes, etc.
Why not stick ads in it? I've heard that's the hot thing right now.
The first line from the CEO should have been "what can I do to make you guys go away."
The second line should have been "I'll put this lube on right now so it'll be easier."
Technology marches ahead. I can't check those 5.25 floppies anymore. How about those Corvus 5MB hard drives or cassette tapes of Lemonade?
That's how it is. If he doesn't like it, he can jailbreak his iPad, port Bochs, and install XP.
Amtrak, our much-maligned medium-speed rail, has been heavily subsidized for years and it hardly can be considered successful by most accepted meanings of the word successful. Why would anyone thing a high-speed version of it would be any more successful?
/repurposed
Note that the unit is profitable, but will never (at the current rate) make up the amount of cumulative losses it has sustained. Just because it's profitable for a quarter or two doesn't mean it'll ever make money.
The printing industry has dealt with this sort of thing for a while. Read up on Stochastic Screening. Not quite the same, but it gives you a sort of idea of the problem of mapping continuous tone data in a non-continous space.
The only way a tablet will make it in the consumer market now is if it lets you watch flash-based porn on it. Soon even that will be gone, as the porn industry moves to HTML5/H264.
Basically, the rest of the market is fucked. Nobody can put out a device with the screen and build quality at the price points that Apple has, because nobody else has the volume to do it cost-effectively.
IPS screens are expensive...unless you buy them in bulk. The same goes with anything Apple is buying for their devices. Flash memory? Apple probably sells 2/5ths of the world production of flash. Crap, they must buy millions upon millions of molex connectors. How aboout glass? Yeah, it's not like anyone is opening new glass factories to make capacitive screens for these tablets. They're using what Apple doesn't want...or excess capacity run at off hours by the B team.
That's not to say tablet manufacturers won't make money. Apple makes tons of money in the PC market with a puny marketshare, relatively speaking. However, they won't make as much margin as Apple does in its PC niche because, when you come down to it, everyone else (non-Apple customers) is too cheap to buy gadgets at a price point that's sustainable.
That leaves two markets: government and verticals...the two areas where tablets actually exist in countable numbers. Verticals are soon going to be crushed by the iPad as well, unless they have odd physical requirements.
So there you go...a Q&D analysis of the 'tablet' market. Summary: go vertical now, before the iPad gets there. Or sell to governments.
It's also about tools, and apparently flash has a pretty good toolset.
Jobs doesn't care about flash content, he cares about flash. If the flash content can be used without flash itself, well, that'd be great.
Not sure why, but slashdot's headline writers are starting to sound more and more like tabloid writers. Why not say "Smokescreen to Adobe: flash off!"
Eh? What was that again sonny?
Yeah there's an analog hole, but hey, you could go to the library and scan the books there too.
I have hundreds of gigs of music, and a much smaller amount of movies. I'm not trapped in the Apple world...I like it here. In fact, I prefer the Apple world for the most part. Why would I move? Nothing else passes the order-of-magnitude threshold for change. In fact, most other things are a few steps backwards.
If anything, this is a failure of the tech industry, and especially of the Apple-bashers everywhere including /. If you think interface is so easy, you should go ahead and beat Apple with your super-duper whiz-bang UI. Instead, you have...gnome and KDE.
Could I use gnome/KDE? Sure! I could also cut off my leg and learn to hop. But why bother?
What, do the copy editors come from the Weekly World News now? Even fark has better, more accurate headlines.
They should be going after the author, not Apple. More FSF grandstanding.
"Andy's point was simple. Older Android devices that can't be upgraded to newer versions of the OS or run newer apps are no different than an iPhone from 2007 not being updated to OS 4."
Rubin obfuscates the problem by trying to simplify things, which is working. The issues:
* my android device can't be upgraded
* my android app don't work on x version of android
* my android app doesn't work on y version of hardware
iPhone 4.0 is irrelevant, since it doesn't exist yet. And it is not like iPhone 3Gs not moving to iPhone 4. It's more like an app on an iPhone 3G with iPhone OS 2.0 can't run iPhone OS 3.0 because (a) the device itself can't be upgraded to iPhone OS 3.0, and/or (2) because iPhone OS 3.0 isn't backwards-compatible with iPhone OS 2.0.
I have plenty of iPhone apps that were first-generation that still work. That sounds like an unlikely situation in the android world. I also have apps that work on all versions of OS and hardware. I have a few that require specific features (GPS) that don't exist on 1.0 hardware...so obviously don't work on newer devices. I had a few apps (WiFi scanners) that died under OS 3.0 that used to work.
It sounds, however, that compatibility across android and handset versions is not only not guaranteed with android, but that the incompatibility is to be expected...according to their chief architect.
Nice.
Industry standard?
http://www.qacafe.com/cdrouter
Sometimes when something sucks it's not them - it's you.
These kids should be in a field smoking weed, not inside playing those damn computer games!
It's not moore's law is tapering off. It's just that machines are so fast that 99% of the population doesn't need it.
Why i7 when a core duo would be just as good? Or an atom? You don't need a lot of processing power to log onto facebook, watch a Youtube video, or create and edit a word doc.
The world is changing, and many people in the field find it hard to believe. Just the other day I heard some tech make some crack about an underpowered core 2 duo box...for general office use. A P4 would be perfectly fine for that; a c2d is overkill.
Once they get the rights to build casinos alongside the wind farms they'll come on board.
5% is a lot of money if the market is $2bn. This is another online fallacy - small percentages = small returns.
I read the average Google ad CTR is 1%. Small number, or big number?
You are an EE, so you don't understand how markets work. Maybe you should go for a marketing degree instead.
Before Apple, there weren't a lot of mainstream PC makers that included USB. PS/2 and parallel were 'good enough'. Without a market, no peripheral manufacturer would make a USB peripheral; it would be a pointless waste of resources.
Once Apple introduced USB only Macs, it gave to segments of the industry (printers and scanners) a market...one that they've historically been a part of anyway. At that point the investment was required, not optional. As more printers and scanners got USB, more PCs got USB, etc. That's how a market is born. It to
The floppy, well, not so much. Apple was the first mainstream manufacturer to ship a CD-ROM drive standard, but the floppy's been around (and still will be around) for years.