Everyone who writes software already has a Windows or Linux PC. Buying a Mac just so you can write iOS apps is an extra expense that must be factored into the total cost of iOS development if you're not already a Mac user. (That's most people, btw. Apple may be a big name, but Macs are still an obscure alternative.)
I can write Windows apps on Linux and vice versa. I can write Android and Blackberry apps on any system I like. I don't need to buy additional hardware or pay for special software. This is not the case with iOS development.
This is not a BINARY format. A binary format is an executable.
When did that happen?
The distinction between a "binary" file and others was always a bit dubious, though it does have a clear meaning in FTP. (When it comes down to it, it's all binary really. Though early FTP programs would convert between ASCII and EBCDIC when you sent a text file between two systems that used different encodings, a nice feature at the time.)
I was under the impression that it meant a format that wasn't human-readable (something other than plain text). So XLS would be considered a "binary" file type, where a CSV wouldn't be.
How would you classify PDF (it's a mix of both) or BMP (a "binary" format if I've ever seen one)?
epub is interesting, in that it's typically just HTML and CSS (plain text) possibly some images (binary) wrapped up in a zip file (binary). Do you count the wrapper or the contents? Do you call it a mix?
Well, if I were sending an epub via FTP, I'd make sure that I sent it in binary mode.
So unless for some reason people stop liking their iphones (which seems unlikely) there's no bubble here.
Other platforms eclipsed Apple a while ago in terms of features and usability. Android phones offer a great alternative with features and options that you'll never get from Apple. RIM's new OS takes mobile computing to a whole new level, and not just technically, they even offer a drastically superior UI to the famous iOS interface.
It doesn't take long to go from top to bottom. Blackberry was the best selling phone brand when we began 2011 -- they were first passed by Android in Q1, then Apple by in Q2. They're still growing, and have some great new products both on the market and in the pipe, but that hasn't stopped the doomsayers.
Apple, on the other hand, has had nothing new to offer in years, just boring updates to their old product line (a bit like RIM in 2009, only with fewer new products). Apple's strong position in the smartphone market can and, unless they start innovating now, will fall just as quickly. That is, once consumers notice how far Apple has slipped behind the competition.
The tech press isn't likely to give Apple a pass with the iPhone 5 after getting burned by Siri, the supposed "future of mobile computing" that had all-but completely fizzled out by November. I suspect that we've already seen Apple's best days.
And the number of "fanboys" appear to grow exponentially each quarter
Looks like someone doesn't know what the exponential growth is...
How exactly do you imagine that Apple manages to keep on getting all these new fans?
The market is growing and they're a well-known brand. That's not too complicated for you, is it?
Hell, RIM's subscriber base grew more than 40% last year. Not too bad for a supposedly dying company! How exactly do you image that Blackberry manages to keep on getting all these new fans?
You think as if all consumers are idiots and will put down good hard earned money for shitty products.
Maybe not all, but certainly most.
Consumers are idiots who will happily pay more for an inferior product for idiotic reasons like it's a particular color or is stamped with a particular brand name.
Need more? Take a look at eBay some time. Buyers, like total idiots, will frequently bid a used item's price above what you'd pay for new retail! It's why it's so damn difficult to get a bargain on the site these days.
Hell, if consumers weren't morons, and rewarded the best (highest quality) products with their dollars, we'd be talking about how Creative changed the music industry with the Nomad. Instead, they bought that other player famously described "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
So, why did consumers by shit when they could have had a much better product? Brilliant marketing. MP3 players were unheard of at the time, and digital music was a bit dubious following the Napster fiasco. Apple had the brand-recognition and the white ear-bud ads that made them look mainstream, acceptable, and even "cool". Never mind how lame the iPod was compared to competing products or how wretched the sound produced by those ultra-low quality ear-buds was. They sold like hotcakes. (Before you bring up iTMS, remember that it didn't exist until long after "iPod" was a household name.)
So, yeah, consumers are idiots who will put down a good bit of their hard-earned money for shitty products. What on earth made you think that consumers were rational?
Wow, you must be a very interesting and well rounded individual. Why learn anything if you don't bother to learn every detail? Why learn at all if you think you'll "never need it".
Should students know something about how a car engine works before they learn how to drive? Of course! There is much more to driving the just pushing the petals and turning the wheel -- some basic knowledge about how a car works will go a long way to making students safe and competent drivers.
Would you teach someone how to drive a car with a manual transmission without giving them a basic understanding of how a transmission works? Well, you might -- but your student will have a much more difficult time learning how to drive!
Do you honestly believe that the purpose of PE is to learn how to play basketball (or other sports)? If so, you've missed the point entirely.
Will teaching students basic programming skills make them better computer users? Of course it will! Do they need to know the intimate details of IEEE 754-1985 standard floating point numbers? Of course not!
You make it sound like the intent here is to teach kids how computers work from the silicon up before we let them open MS Word. That's very clearly not the case, nor would any sane individual advocate that.
BASIC would be a fine language, even today. The key is to get kids thinking about what automation can do for them. Which language you use is irrelevant.
I agree... sort of... I do think that some languages are better suited for beginners than others and that it is very relevant which language you pick. For instance, BASIC is perfect for middle school and up, where something like Logo would make a much better choice for younger children.
On automation, I don't think that's the most important thing they should take away from a programming class. That is, unless I've misunderstood what you mean by "automation".
I'm not a carpenter, but I'm grateful for the basic drafting and woodworking skills that I was "forced" to learn at school. They've made otherwise impossible home repairs something I can do myself. If I were to pay someone to do those repairs, I have a sense of how to evaluate their work, and I can tell if they're trying to take advantage of me.
I'm not an auto mechanic, but I'm glad that I know how to do basic auto maintenance. If I don't do the work myself, I know what I can expect when I take my car to a professional, and what I should expect to pay. Even better, I can tell when I have a problem and what needs to be done to correct it before I find myself on the side of the road. (This was especially useful once when my alternator belt broke on the interstate. I was able to identify the problem and have the tow-truck driver bring a new belt with him. I was back on the road with only an hours delay.)
I'm not chef or a tailor, but I learned to sew and cook in the compulsory home economics class when I was in school. If you can't understand the utility of those skills, I don't know what to tell you.
I'm not a physicist, but thanks to the basic physics I learned in school I can solve all sorts of common problems involving weights and measures. Neither am I a mathematician, but thanks to my positive experience with public education, I find that I actually do use algebra and geometry to solve various household problems with surprising regularity. I don't need to guess at a lot of things, I can just do the math. (These two go hand-in-hand.)
I could go on.
The point, of course, is that teaching basic programming skills isn't a waste of time for those who will never be professional programmers. Those skills can be applied to other areas of their lives. They may solve a problem by writing a script, or just apply the critical thinking skills they develop to solving other problems.
We don't teach logic or rhetoric in schools, and they certainly aren't learning how to reason from their "science" classes. Any school kid can tell you the "scientific method" but you'll have a much harder time trying to find a kid who understands it, let alone one that can actually apply it!
Computer programming forces you to learn critical reasoning skills which are not domain-specific. If every computer on the planet disappeared tomorrow, it would *still* be useful to teach basic computer programming.
The difference? Those three textbooks still work. They'll still work long after your iPad is polluting a stream in China. They can go decades without so much as an hours charge. They can be borrowed, sold, traded, or given away without the publisher getting involved in any way. They never stop working because the publisher wants it to expire or lock you out because of some DRM issue. They can also hold supplemental material, like an interesting paper or article, neatly between the pages -- or useful notes written neatly in the margins to be discovered later by you or another interested reader.
If only Apple had invented the index card when you were in school!
More seriously, the highlight bit wouldn't help you much in the situation the parent is talking about. That is, if you've ever used a book the way he's describing. I know I'd often hold a section in place to reference much more than just a phrase or definition.
Imagine you're working through a section of a Chemistry text, you may want to frequently reference the periodic table printed inside the back cover as well as a chart or table from a previous chapter, and one or two parts a page or so away from the current section of the text you're reading. Needless to say, a highlight isn't going to cut it!
You may also be holding a place because you think you might want to reference something in a different section, but you're not sure what is or isn't relevant just yet.
If you've got a good spacial memory, you may want to reference something you didn't think was terribly important when you first read it, but remember that it was "near the page with the pink box on the bottom, somewhere before or after chapter 6".
And, of course, the ebook argument wins on searchability. But let's face it, an Index/TOC is practically just as good. Unless you're searching for absolutely every occurrence of a specific word, a good index is just as good.
A good, well designed, index is MUCH better than search feature. Go over to your shelf and pick out a few books and compare indexes (indices?). If you catch a few good ones and a few bad ones in your sample, you'll see what I mean.
The worst indexes are the ones that are closest to search: the horrid auto-generated ones that are nothing more than a list of words and page numbers.
years from now Apple won't be remembered for the iMacs or iPods, but for successfully revolutionising education as we know it
Here's a better prediction: 20 years from now we'll all wonder why anyone ever thought Apple revolutionized anything. Old Slashdot users with those coveted low 8 digit UID's will talk about how people thought they were cool. (That is, in between bitching about how much Slashdot sucks now and was way better back when they started reading the site in 2022).
"Revolutionising education" Do you hear yourself? Look at what Apple is offering. Look at what has been on the market for years. Now, do you still think they've done something special?
Companies like Apple have no problem influencing laws with nice cashy money, that usually doesn't affect them, or mandates that education facilities use their baked in DRM. Which in the end, like all things government, screw us all with good intentions
Wait, that's neither government nor born of good intentions! It's corporate influence on government and evil intentions!
This is why Citizens United was so important, and why we have Occupy movements all around the country. You're pointing the finger at the hired gun, and purposefully ignoring the crime boss that gave him a fist-full of cash!
Electronic textbooks are not an Apple innovation. No, they're not doing it first. They're not doing it better. Other than pricing, they're not even doing it differently.
Their only "innovation" here is locking people into their infrastructure, and making it as difficult as possible for cash-strapped schools to migrate away from the platform when they discover than paying $40/unit for a textbook that's good for 15+ years (subject dependent, of course) costs way less than the equivalent ebook for $15 after you factor in the cost of replacing the constant stream of broken iPads. (In my experience, Apple makes their displays out of insta-shatter glass. I've only seen two iPhones in the wild without cracked screens. One was new-in-box, the other was one day old -- and had a broken power button.)
There is plenty to complain about regarding electronic textbooks, by Apple or any other player. Apple isn't making the situation better -- they're actually making it MUCH worse -- for consumers, schools, publishers... well, everyone but Apple!
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone who writes software already has a Windows or Linux PC. Buying a Mac just so you can write iOS apps is an extra expense that must be factored into the total cost of iOS development if you're not already a Mac user. (That's most people, btw. Apple may be a big name, but Macs are still an obscure alternative.)
I can write Windows apps on Linux and vice versa. I can write Android and Blackberry apps on any system I like. I don't need to buy additional hardware or pay for special software. This is not the case with iOS development.
This is not a BINARY format. A binary format is an executable.
When did that happen?
The distinction between a "binary" file and others was always a bit dubious, though it does have a clear meaning in FTP. (When it comes down to it, it's all binary really. Though early FTP programs would convert between ASCII and EBCDIC when you sent a text file between two systems that used different encodings, a nice feature at the time.)
I was under the impression that it meant a format that wasn't human-readable (something other than plain text). So XLS would be considered a "binary" file type, where a CSV wouldn't be.
How would you classify PDF (it's a mix of both) or BMP (a "binary" format if I've ever seen one)?
epub is interesting, in that it's typically just HTML and CSS (plain text) possibly some images (binary) wrapped up in a zip file (binary). Do you count the wrapper or the contents? Do you call it a mix?
Well, if I were sending an epub via FTP, I'd make sure that I sent it in binary mode.
Feeling a bit touchy today, are you?
You mad, bro?
(LOL at "actions")
Clearly I was wrong. You're no Apple fan.
You're a hard-core Apple zealot!
No one knows, but they're all 100% certain that Apple made a fortune by developing something that didn't exist before.
I mean, everyone knows that. They just can't remember what it was right now.
So unless for some reason people stop liking their iphones (which seems unlikely) there's no bubble here.
Other platforms eclipsed Apple a while ago in terms of features and usability. Android phones offer a great alternative with features and options that you'll never get from Apple. RIM's new OS takes mobile computing to a whole new level, and not just technically, they even offer a drastically superior UI to the famous iOS interface.
It doesn't take long to go from top to bottom. Blackberry was the best selling phone brand when we began 2011 -- they were first passed by Android in Q1, then Apple by in Q2. They're still growing, and have some great new products both on the market and in the pipe, but that hasn't stopped the doomsayers.
Apple, on the other hand, has had nothing new to offer in years, just boring updates to their old product line (a bit like RIM in 2009, only with fewer new products). Apple's strong position in the smartphone market can and, unless they start innovating now, will fall just as quickly. That is, once consumers notice how far Apple has slipped behind the competition.
The tech press isn't likely to give Apple a pass with the iPhone 5 after getting burned by Siri, the supposed "future of mobile computing" that had all-but completely fizzled out by November. I suspect that we've already seen Apple's best days.
Woo, SuperKendall the Apple Zealot strikes again.
He's competing with BasilBrush for the coveted "Cheif Slashdot Apple Fan" position now that Bonch seems to have disappeared.
And the number of "fanboys" appear to grow exponentially each quarter
Looks like someone doesn't know what the exponential growth is...
How exactly do you imagine that Apple manages to keep on getting all these new fans?
The market is growing and they're a well-known brand. That's not too complicated for you, is it?
Hell, RIM's subscriber base grew more than 40% last year. Not too bad for a supposedly dying company! How exactly do you image that Blackberry manages to keep on getting all these new fans?
You think as if all consumers are idiots and will put down good hard earned money for shitty products.
Maybe not all, but certainly most.
Consumers are idiots who will happily pay more for an inferior product for idiotic reasons like it's a particular color or is stamped with a particular brand name.
Need more? Take a look at eBay some time. Buyers, like total idiots, will frequently bid a used item's price above what you'd pay for new retail! It's why it's so damn difficult to get a bargain on the site these days.
Hell, if consumers weren't morons, and rewarded the best (highest quality) products with their dollars, we'd be talking about how Creative changed the music industry with the Nomad. Instead, they bought that other player famously described "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
So, why did consumers by shit when they could have had a much better product? Brilliant marketing. MP3 players were unheard of at the time, and digital music was a bit dubious following the Napster fiasco. Apple had the brand-recognition and the white ear-bud ads that made them look mainstream, acceptable, and even "cool". Never mind how lame the iPod was compared to competing products or how wretched the sound produced by those ultra-low quality ear-buds was. They sold like hotcakes. (Before you bring up iTMS, remember that it didn't exist until long after "iPod" was a household name.)
So, yeah, consumers are idiots who will put down a good bit of their hard-earned money for shitty products. What on earth made you think that consumers were rational?
You should check out QNX on the Playbook -- It's undoubtedly rather heavily inspired by WebOS, and smooth as silk.
You can't think of a single good use for a spreadsheet? Or do you think that spreadsheets are just fine, but Excel is inferior to some other product?
Wow, you must be a very interesting and well rounded individual. Why learn anything if you don't bother to learn every detail? Why learn at all if you think you'll "never need it".
Should students know something about how a car engine works before they learn how to drive? Of course! There is much more to driving the just pushing the petals and turning the wheel -- some basic knowledge about how a car works will go a long way to making students safe and competent drivers.
Would you teach someone how to drive a car with a manual transmission without giving them a basic understanding of how a transmission works? Well, you might -- but your student will have a much more difficult time learning how to drive!
Do you honestly believe that the purpose of PE is to learn how to play basketball (or other sports)? If so, you've missed the point entirely.
Will teaching students basic programming skills make them better computer users? Of course it will! Do they need to know the intimate details of IEEE 754-1985 standard floating point numbers? Of course not!
You make it sound like the intent here is to teach kids how computers work from the silicon up before we let them open MS Word. That's very clearly not the case, nor would any sane individual advocate that.
BASIC would be a fine language, even today. The key is to get kids thinking about what automation can do for them. Which language you use is irrelevant.
I agree... sort of ... I do think that some languages are better suited for beginners than others and that it is very relevant which language you pick. For instance, BASIC is perfect for middle school and up, where something like Logo would make a much better choice for younger children.
On automation, I don't think that's the most important thing they should take away from a programming class. That is, unless I've misunderstood what you mean by "automation".
I'm not a carpenter, but I'm grateful for the basic drafting and woodworking skills that I was "forced" to learn at school. They've made otherwise impossible home repairs something I can do myself. If I were to pay someone to do those repairs, I have a sense of how to evaluate their work, and I can tell if they're trying to take advantage of me.
I'm not an auto mechanic, but I'm glad that I know how to do basic auto maintenance. If I don't do the work myself, I know what I can expect when I take my car to a professional, and what I should expect to pay. Even better, I can tell when I have a problem and what needs to be done to correct it before I find myself on the side of the road. (This was especially useful once when my alternator belt broke on the interstate. I was able to identify the problem and have the tow-truck driver bring a new belt with him. I was back on the road with only an hours delay.)
I'm not chef or a tailor, but I learned to sew and cook in the compulsory home economics class when I was in school. If you can't understand the utility of those skills, I don't know what to tell you.
I'm not a physicist, but thanks to the basic physics I learned in school I can solve all sorts of common problems involving weights and measures. Neither am I a mathematician, but thanks to my positive experience with public education, I find that I actually do use algebra and geometry to solve various household problems with surprising regularity. I don't need to guess at a lot of things, I can just do the math. (These two go hand-in-hand.)
I could go on.
The point, of course, is that teaching basic programming skills isn't a waste of time for those who will never be professional programmers. Those skills can be applied to other areas of their lives. They may solve a problem by writing a script, or just apply the critical thinking skills they develop to solving other problems.
We don't teach logic or rhetoric in schools, and they certainly aren't learning how to reason from their "science" classes. Any school kid can tell you the "scientific method" but you'll have a much harder time trying to find a kid who understands it, let alone one that can actually apply it!
Computer programming forces you to learn critical reasoning skills which are not domain-specific. If every computer on the planet disappeared tomorrow, it would *still* be useful to teach basic computer programming.
Now I'm positive that you don't know what a straw man argument is!
I don't think you know what a straw man argument is.
The difference? Those three textbooks still work. They'll still work long after your iPad is polluting a stream in China. They can go decades without so much as an hours charge. They can be borrowed, sold, traded, or given away without the publisher getting involved in any way. They never stop working because the publisher wants it to expire or lock you out because of some DRM issue. They can also hold supplemental material, like an interesting paper or article, neatly between the pages -- or useful notes written neatly in the margins to be discovered later by you or another interested reader.
I know which one I'd rather carry around.
If only Apple had invented the index card when you were in school!
More seriously, the highlight bit wouldn't help you much in the situation the parent is talking about. That is, if you've ever used a book the way he's describing. I know I'd often hold a section in place to reference much more than just a phrase or definition.
Imagine you're working through a section of a Chemistry text, you may want to frequently reference the periodic table printed inside the back cover as well as a chart or table from a previous chapter, and one or two parts a page or so away from the current section of the text you're reading. Needless to say, a highlight isn't going to cut it!
You may also be holding a place because you think you might want to reference something in a different section, but you're not sure what is or isn't relevant just yet.
If you've got a good spacial memory, you may want to reference something you didn't think was terribly important when you first read it, but remember that it was "near the page with the pink box on the bottom, somewhere before or after chapter 6".
That's what flipping is all about.
And, of course, the ebook argument wins on searchability. But let's face it, an Index/TOC is practically just as good. Unless you're searching for absolutely every occurrence of a specific word, a good index is just as good.
A good, well designed, index is MUCH better than search feature. Go over to your shelf and pick out a few books and compare indexes (indices?). If you catch a few good ones and a few bad ones in your sample, you'll see what I mean.
The worst indexes are the ones that are closest to search: the horrid auto-generated ones that are nothing more than a list of words and page numbers.
years from now Apple won't be remembered for the iMacs or iPods, but for successfully revolutionising education as we know it
Here's a better prediction: 20 years from now we'll all wonder why anyone ever thought Apple revolutionized anything. Old Slashdot users with those coveted low 8 digit UID's will talk about how people thought they were cool. (That is, in between bitching about how much Slashdot sucks now and was way better back when they started reading the site in 2022).
"Revolutionising education" Do you hear yourself? Look at what Apple is offering. Look at what has been on the market for years. Now, do you still think they've done something special?
Those "paper books" are way to easy to sell on the "gray market". So called "used book sales" deprive starving publishers of much needed revenue.
Even worse, someone might choose to read an out-of-print book rather than the latest release.
That's basically like stealing money right out of someones pocket. Are you some kind of thief?
Companies like Apple have no problem influencing laws with nice cashy money, that usually doesn't affect them, or mandates that education facilities use their baked in DRM. Which in the end, like all things government, screw us all with good intentions
Wait, that's neither government nor born of good intentions! It's corporate influence on government and evil intentions!
This is why Citizens United was so important, and why we have Occupy movements all around the country. You're pointing the finger at the hired gun, and purposefully ignoring the crime boss that gave him a fist-full of cash!
Electronic textbooks are not an Apple innovation. No, they're not doing it first. They're not doing it better. Other than pricing, they're not even doing it differently.
Their only "innovation" here is locking people into their infrastructure, and making it as difficult as possible for cash-strapped schools to migrate away from the platform when they discover than paying $40/unit for a textbook that's good for 15+ years (subject dependent, of course) costs way less than the equivalent ebook for $15 after you factor in the cost of replacing the constant stream of broken iPads. (In my experience, Apple makes their displays out of insta-shatter glass. I've only seen two iPhones in the wild without cracked screens. One was new-in-box, the other was one day old -- and had a broken power button.)
There is plenty to complain about regarding electronic textbooks, by Apple or any other player. Apple isn't making the situation better -- they're actually making it MUCH worse -- for consumers, schools, publishers ... well, everyone but Apple!
Are they pro-life with respect to the organisms that cause the plague?
You don't have to go that far. Just ask them if they support the death penalty.
You'll be amazed at how many "pro lifers" think that killing people a few years after they're born is fantastic.
So you've twisted language from 230 years ago which has long been since been invalidated into a +5. You are a nothing but a another shitty troll.
I don't know about that. It sounds like he's a fantastic troll. A shitty troll wouldn't have managed a +5 or hooked so many posters.