Having all the different versions of Vista is *absolutely correct* from an economic perspective. There's approximately zero functional difference between Vista Home Basic and Vista Ultimate edition, except for the very important extra $300 that they are allowing the customer to pay them. If they didn't collect that extra money, they'd be doing a damn poor job as a for-profit company.
They love it when you pirate their software. That way you train yourself in Microsoft products and create a barrier to switching later. Pirating Windows as a way to "get back" at MS is like trying to "get back" at a car thief by locking the rear passenger door on your new car.
That it's for the good of the children. So your argument is that kids should be exposed to the full weight of all that's available in the world from day one, regardless of whether or not they have the necessary cognitive skills to process it yet?
Wait a second... you're saying that a high school student doesn't have the cognitive skills to process Wikipedia?
I'm not saying that Wikipedia is the equivalent of watching a snuff film, but your argument boils down to the fact that you don't believe in any controls whatsoever on what children are exposed to.
I can't see what possible advantage there could be to denying children access to information. The downside is that they might go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofellatio and giggle a bit. The upside is that they might go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory and develop an interest in theoretical economics (or mathematics, or evolutionary biology). Or maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nieche and think a bit about philosophy. Allowing fear of the former to prevent the possibility of the latter is a terrible tradeoff. And yes, with the amount of time students spend in school they'll have some free time to surf the web on their own - that's good, not bad.
Sure, you can't rely on students teaching themselves. But, to act to directly prevent it is utter madness. Everyone is at least somewhat self taught - trying to take that away will produce significantly less functional human beings.
Your and other comments here so far strike me as basically just a lot of whining. Schools have always had approved and unapproved sources for research. When I was young, Encyclopedia Britannica was accepted as a source in my school, but Encyclopedia Americana was not.
Someone already posted this, but it can't be overemphasized: I'm sure that Encyclopedia Americana was still available in the school library. If not, I'm sure that they wouldn't confiscate it if you brought a copy to school.
That's probably a better system than "no child left behind", where every level of learning capacity is mixed together and no student is allowed to progress faster than the slowest learner in the class. Maybe more can be done for the "low-level" students in Japan, but on the other hand the policy you describe at least allows for there to be "high level" schools.
That's way better than the policy in the USA where there's no segmentation on ability until high school, and even then AP courses just allow the capable students to catch up with where every competent student should be (but they all get 5.5 high school GPAs on a 4 point scale).
the website has to have no educational value for us to consider blocking.
No nontrivial website has zero educational value. MySpace are especially easy to defend - since the content is user generated, users can put anything there. To demonstrate a complete lack of educational value, you would have to demonstrate that there exists no MySpace user who has chosen to post anything of educational value.
Actually though, I tend to think that anyone who legitimately argues that websites should be blocked in schools because they lack educational value has a fundamental misunderstanding of both the internet and the concept of education. The internet is a powerful communication tool - communication in general is absolutely necessary for education to occur. Every web site blocked in a school degrades the potential educational value of the web to that school's students.
If you're going to block websites at a school because it makes your job as a glorified babysitter easier, at least realize why you're doing it. Don't spread the malicious lie that the quality of education can be improved by degrading access to information sources and communication tools.
How is proprietary software a competitive differentiator? Your competitors can buy it too. Custom software can be a competitive differentiator, but proprietary software is strictly a bad deal - you're spending money for the single effect of forcing yourself to spend more money later when the proprietary software company decides to charge you for an upgrade.
BD-R disks work fine with no DRM hardware support. This stuff is only an issue if screw up and buy a "content disk" instead of downloading a movie or TV show from The Pirate Bay.
but I don't think Linux is quite there yet for the average user.
The only "there yet" step that has yet to occur is to be a promoted choice from vendors like Dell. Any normal user can buy a machine from a vendor like http://www.system76.com/ today with Ubuntu pre-installed, and it will serve their needs as well as a Mac would.
This isn't a graphics processor issue - even the crappiest embedded graphics cards that show up in mainstream consumer PCs can easily handle modes like 1600x1200. That's been true for years now.
The problem is twofold: Display technology, and user acceptance of crappy displays. This has just been made worse by the transition to LCD displays - that probably set us back 4 years on screen resolution gains by itself.
That won't be the problem, because plastic disks are a dying product, and selling plastic disks is a dying business. Everything will be stored remotely, in the future.
Selling plastic disks with movies on them for 1000x the cost to manufacture probably is an obsolete business model. On the other hand, I don't think that physical media for personal use (i.e. DVD+R's) are going anywhere anytime soon. We can start arguing about the cost/benifit tradeoff of storing my data at a remote datacenter the minute I have a 100+ meg upstream from my house to this datacenter.
Future historians will be reading the contents of a massive datacenter in Missouri, if anything; not an HD-DVD, or a DVD.
I'm sure that that's what the people who set up the Library of Alexandria thought about their project too. Centralized data storage is a bad plan - unless there's a really good decentralized backup system in place.
Umm, they won't need a player, just a player key, from a player that didn't have its key revoked sometime during the production run of the disc they want to watch.
True. That'll be really easy in the near future. Then it will degrade to wildly aggravating. Then, at some point after that, it will become nigh on impossible.
In any case, do you really think that historians are going to want to recover data from mass-produced consumer discs? You'd think they'd be more interested in the actual source material, not the product.
Sure, but that won't always be available. I think that at least one "mass produced consumer disk" has a much higher chance of surviving intact for any given amount of time than unique masters / source material.
The only situation where what you says matters is if the data is unique, in which case it's not going to be protected by AACS. And any data protected by strong encryption is hard/impossible to recover if you lose the key, regardless of the medium.
Find me a copy of Euclid's "Conics". It wasn't written that long ago, and quite a few copies were made. Today the work has been completely lost, but if any one of the copies that were made were to be found - even severely damaged - we'd have most of the content of the book pretty easy. Even if the ink was faded on every page.
A copy of some bit of data should be usable. The fact that the most widely distributed "popular literature" of today is explicitly made worthless for anyone who doesn't have a specific piece of complex (and tamper resistant) electronics specifically designed to make the data harder to access is absurd.
Dude, you have the Abstract Math gene. Most of us don't.
An "abstract math gene" probably isn't the issue. It's just an issue of practice - most good programmers today have many years of experience working with object oriented and procedural programming languages. Functional programming is different, and it takes practice to get used to - years of practice to be as comfortable as what you're used to.
Further, a pure functional system is utterly useless since IO is a side effect. This doesn't change the fact that those areas of a program that can be written purely functionally are likely to be much easier to deal with that way - and that a lot of the other stuff that is generally associated with functional languages (i.e. closures) would be amazingly useful even in IO-heavy components.
Home broadband in the USA is still mostly asymmetric. That's great for downloading stuff from iTunes, but for any other application a crappy upstream is crippling. Personally, I use min(up, down) to compare different services - but I'd suggest sqrt(up * down) as a good compromise if you see higher download speed as an advantage.
Based on that, a 6 meg symmetrical connection is slightly better than a 15/2 asymmetric connection - which seems about right.
It's really important that everyone understand that AACS copy protection cannot be brute forced. They're using AES for the actual encryption - if someone wrote a program that could crack that directly the news would be a lot more significant than "DVD copy protection hacked".
Given that AES won't be cracked, any attack on AACS copy protection must be a key recovery attack. Luckily, key recovery attacks aren't that hard when you get a key with every player you buy. But... the fact that cracking AES is hard means that reading HD-DVD/BluRay disks may become completely impossible when players are no longer available.
Hacking something together to read a Beta tape is possible. Annoying. It might cost tens of thousands of dollars to build. But it's possible - it's just analog magnetic patterns on a tape. Reading an HD-DVD without a HD-DVD player won't be possible. That'll be a serious issue for historians in the future, if people don't leave enough pirated DVD-R's around with the unencrypted content on them.
A DPI setting is basically irrelevant if the UI is primarily made up of bitmapped elements, or if the primary unit of measure for layout is "pixels". This is a serious issue with most of the GUI interfaces that are available, and even for the web.
Hopefully, implementing 3D interfaces like Aqua and Aero has caused OS developers to use more resolution independent vector graphics, but this class of issue will still be significant until a really good solution is implemented (maybe per-window DPI settings with hardware scaling).
Wait a second... there are people out there who run LCDs at non-native resolution because "the default fonts are too small"? That's disgusting - I didn't know that Windows sucked that much - hopefully Vista has a resolution-independent UI now.
Further, No wonder there are arguments about HDTV not looking better than DVDs. Many people are apparently just utterly oblivious to picture quality.
If you want me to stop what I'm doing, tell you about it, and then pay you a fee for some action of mine - you are the one who needs to justify your demand. The default is that my actions are none of your business unless they involve you.
As far as I'm concerned, that includes giving a mixed CD to a friend or creating a perfect replica of my car and giving that away.
Two T3's isn't enough bandwidth for any campus big enough to have "student housing" on it. That's not even enough bandwidth for two HD video streams, much less any sort of interesting academic use.
That being said, don't you know that anytime an industry makes its customers actually pay for something, it's a serious crime in these quarters?
Since when does any industry get to make their customers pay for anything? Especially things that don't even involve the industry?
The Car Industry doesn't get to make me pay when I get my car painted. They don't get to pay when I get my photo taken next to my car. They don't even get to make me tell them when I do these things. Why should the Record Industry get to make me pay for things that don't involve them?
That sounds like a good idea, as long as you ignore the feedback effect of any government auctions. I'm not sure that making H1B visas a revenue source is really conducive to fair policy decisions in the future.
Who generally aren't running antique custom applications for which the source code no longer exists and which probably wouldn't compile even if it did... plenty of companies are doing that on PCs.
Some companies are doing that. Most aren't. Even for those who are, it's not like the machines they are running the applications on today will vanish if they buy new machines with a different processor architecture.
The real reason x86 won't go away any time soon is that MS has decided that's the only thing it's going to support, and MS powers most of the computers in the world.
Microsoft powers most of the desktop computers in the world.
This distinction is important - most computers aren't desktop computers, aren't x86, and aren't running Windows. Many of these systems are still 8 or 16 bit, but some of them are 32 bit with memory management and will run free-Unix systems like GNU/Linux and OpenBSD just fine.
Holy crap. How can you get a patent on [using a network protocol] over [a network technology]. I'm going to go patent [HTTP] over [Ethernet]. Then I'm going to patent [DNS] over [A Packet Switched Network]. Then I'm going to patent [IP] over [Fiber Optic Cables].
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Having all the different versions of Vista is *absolutely correct* from an economic perspective. There's approximately zero functional difference between Vista Home Basic and Vista Ultimate edition, except for the very important extra $300 that they are allowing the customer to pay them. If they didn't collect that extra money, they'd be doing a damn poor job as a for-profit company.
They love it when you pirate their software. That way you train yourself in Microsoft products and create a barrier to switching later. Pirating Windows as a way to "get back" at MS is like trying to "get back" at a car thief by locking the rear passenger door on your new car.
I think we've discovered the real problem, right here.
Wait a second... you're saying that a high school student doesn't have the cognitive skills to process Wikipedia?
I can't see what possible advantage there could be to denying children access to information. The downside is that they might go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofellatio and giggle a bit. The upside is that they might go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory and develop an interest in theoretical economics (or mathematics, or evolutionary biology). Or maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nieche and think a bit about philosophy. Allowing fear of the former to prevent the possibility of the latter is a terrible tradeoff. And yes, with the amount of time students spend in school they'll have some free time to surf the web on their own - that's good, not bad.
Sure, you can't rely on students teaching themselves. But, to act to directly prevent it is utter madness. Everyone is at least somewhat self taught - trying to take that away will produce significantly less functional human beings.
Someone already posted this, but it can't be overemphasized: I'm sure that Encyclopedia Americana was still available in the school library. If not, I'm sure that they wouldn't confiscate it if you brought a copy to school.
That's probably a better system than "no child left behind", where every level of learning capacity is mixed together and no student is allowed to progress faster than the slowest learner in the class. Maybe more can be done for the "low-level" students in Japan, but on the other hand the policy you describe at least allows for there to be "high level" schools.
That's way better than the policy in the USA where there's no segmentation on ability until high school, and even then AP courses just allow the capable students to catch up with where every competent student should be (but they all get 5.5 high school GPAs on a 4 point scale).
No nontrivial website has zero educational value. MySpace are especially easy to defend - since the content is user generated, users can put anything there. To demonstrate a complete lack of educational value, you would have to demonstrate that there exists no MySpace user who has chosen to post anything of educational value.
Actually though, I tend to think that anyone who legitimately argues that websites should be blocked in schools because they lack educational value has a fundamental misunderstanding of both the internet and the concept of education. The internet is a powerful communication tool - communication in general is absolutely necessary for education to occur. Every web site blocked in a school degrades the potential educational value of the web to that school's students.
If you're going to block websites at a school because it makes your job as a glorified babysitter easier, at least realize why you're doing it. Don't spread the malicious lie that the quality of education can be improved by degrading access to information sources and communication tools.
How is proprietary software a competitive differentiator? Your competitors can buy it too. Custom software can be a competitive differentiator, but proprietary software is strictly a bad deal - you're spending money for the single effect of forcing yourself to spend more money later when the proprietary software company decides to charge you for an upgrade.
BD-R disks work fine with no DRM hardware support. This stuff is only an issue if screw up and buy a "content disk" instead of downloading a movie or TV show from The Pirate Bay.
The only "there yet" step that has yet to occur is to be a promoted choice from vendors like Dell. Any normal user can buy a machine from a vendor like http://www.system76.com/ today with Ubuntu pre-installed, and it will serve their needs as well as a Mac would.
This isn't a graphics processor issue - even the crappiest embedded graphics cards that show up in mainstream consumer PCs can easily handle modes like 1600x1200. That's been true for years now.
The problem is twofold: Display technology, and user acceptance of crappy displays. This has just been made worse by the transition to LCD displays - that probably set us back 4 years on screen resolution gains by itself.
Selling plastic disks with movies on them for 1000x the cost to manufacture probably is an obsolete business model. On the other hand, I don't think that physical media for personal use (i.e. DVD+R's) are going anywhere anytime soon. We can start arguing about the cost/benifit tradeoff of storing my data at a remote datacenter the minute I have a 100+ meg upstream from my house to this datacenter.
I'm sure that that's what the people who set up the Library of Alexandria thought about their project too. Centralized data storage is a bad plan - unless there's a really good decentralized backup system in place.
True. That'll be really easy in the near future. Then it will degrade to wildly aggravating. Then, at some point after that, it will become nigh on impossible.
Sure, but that won't always be available. I think that at least one "mass produced consumer disk" has a much higher chance of surviving intact for any given amount of time than unique masters / source material.
Find me a copy of Euclid's "Conics". It wasn't written that long ago, and quite a few copies were made. Today the work has been completely lost, but if any one of the copies that were made were to be found - even severely damaged - we'd have most of the content of the book pretty easy. Even if the ink was faded on every page.
A copy of some bit of data should be usable. The fact that the most widely distributed "popular literature" of today is explicitly made worthless for anyone who doesn't have a specific piece of complex (and tamper resistant) electronics specifically designed to make the data harder to access is absurd.
An "abstract math gene" probably isn't the issue. It's just an issue of practice - most good programmers today have many years of experience working with object oriented and procedural programming languages. Functional programming is different, and it takes practice to get used to - years of practice to be as comfortable as what you're used to.
Further, a pure functional system is utterly useless since IO is a side effect. This doesn't change the fact that those areas of a program that can be written purely functionally are likely to be much easier to deal with that way - and that a lot of the other stuff that is generally associated with functional languages (i.e. closures) would be amazingly useful even in IO-heavy components.
Home broadband in the USA is still mostly asymmetric. That's great for downloading stuff from iTunes, but for any other application a crappy upstream is crippling. Personally, I use min(up, down) to compare different services - but I'd suggest sqrt(up * down) as a good compromise if you see higher download speed as an advantage.
Based on that, a 6 meg symmetrical connection is slightly better than a 15/2 asymmetric connection - which seems about right.
It's really important that everyone understand that AACS copy protection cannot be brute forced. They're using AES for the actual encryption - if someone wrote a program that could crack that directly the news would be a lot more significant than "DVD copy protection hacked".
Given that AES won't be cracked, any attack on AACS copy protection must be a key recovery attack. Luckily, key recovery attacks aren't that hard when you get a key with every player you buy. But... the fact that cracking AES is hard means that reading HD-DVD/BluRay disks may become completely impossible when players are no longer available.
Hacking something together to read a Beta tape is possible. Annoying. It might cost tens of thousands of dollars to build. But it's possible - it's just analog magnetic patterns on a tape. Reading an HD-DVD without a HD-DVD player won't be possible. That'll be a serious issue for historians in the future, if people don't leave enough pirated DVD-R's around with the unencrypted content on them.
A DPI setting is basically irrelevant if the UI is primarily made up of bitmapped elements, or if the primary unit of measure for layout is "pixels". This is a serious issue with most of the GUI interfaces that are available, and even for the web.
Hopefully, implementing 3D interfaces like Aqua and Aero has caused OS developers to use more resolution independent vector graphics, but this class of issue will still be significant until a really good solution is implemented (maybe per-window DPI settings with hardware scaling).
Wait a second... there are people out there who run LCDs at non-native resolution because "the default fonts are too small"? That's disgusting - I didn't know that Windows sucked that much - hopefully Vista has a resolution-independent UI now.
Further, No wonder there are arguments about HDTV not looking better than DVDs. Many people are apparently just utterly oblivious to picture quality.
If you want me to stop what I'm doing, tell you about it, and then pay you a fee for some action of mine - you are the one who needs to justify your demand. The default is that my actions are none of your business unless they involve you.
As far as I'm concerned, that includes giving a mixed CD to a friend or creating a perfect replica of my car and giving that away.
Two T3's isn't enough bandwidth for any campus big enough to have "student housing" on it. That's not even enough bandwidth for two HD video streams, much less any sort of interesting academic use.
Since when does any industry get to make their customers pay for anything? Especially things that don't even involve the industry?
The Car Industry doesn't get to make me pay when I get my car painted. They don't get to pay when I get my photo taken next to my car. They don't even get to make me tell them when I do these things. Why should the Record Industry get to make me pay for things that don't involve them?
Like what? As I remember it, from a user functionality perspective, Windows 3.1 and the first release of Windows 95 were pretty similar.
That sounds like a good idea, as long as you ignore the feedback effect of any government auctions. I'm not sure that making H1B visas a revenue source is really conducive to fair policy decisions in the future.
Some companies are doing that. Most aren't. Even for those who are, it's not like the machines they are running the applications on today will vanish if they buy new machines with a different processor architecture.
Microsoft powers most of the desktop computers in the world.
This distinction is important - most computers aren't desktop computers, aren't x86, and aren't running Windows. Many of these systems are still 8 or 16 bit, but some of them are 32 bit with memory management and will run free-Unix systems like GNU/Linux and OpenBSD just fine.
Holy crap. How can you get a patent on [using a network protocol] over [a network technology]. I'm going to go patent [HTTP] over [Ethernet]. Then I'm going to patent [DNS] over [A Packet Switched Network]. Then I'm going to patent [IP] over [Fiber Optic Cables].