So long as the walled garden remains optional, simply one option of many, I'm perfectly fine with it. If the entire OS becomes walled off, then I have a problem. In the meanwhile, however, it's an excellent OS.
This does neatly skirt the Flash issue, though, and that issue is that Flash uses a bit too much juice for the results. I have a modern desktop PC no web page should casually drag down, and yet a particular combination flash ad on one site I visit brings it to its knees.
They've already shown in other research that children are capable of making up lost ground in math if math instruction is delayed until the brain is more developed and ready for it (we currently push basic arithmetic on minds not fully appropriate for such instruction). How much would engineering, physics, and other math-intense fields suffer if students had to do more of the math work later in their education, or even at college? College courses are generally more aggressive than high school courses. What would the implications of delayed math instruction be on these specialized fields, then, and the students who enter them?
This is true, though difficult for someone who just wants to play a game. That said, I read somewhere that most lefties are better with their right hands than most righties are with their left. Whether this is innate or a result of learning to interact in a right-handed world I know not.
This. Very much this. There are any number of bank and government softwares that still use these languages and are losing people able to deal with them to retirement. They may not be overjoyed that you are coming out of retirement to do it, but they may not have much choice.
Perhaps what we intend our software creations to do isn't necessarily more complex (though in many cases it is), our reliance upon APIs and robust OS hooks sometimes over-complicates the resulting code. In a way, something as simple as displaying text requires a much more complex piece of software on modern OS-driven hardware than it used to. It's good and it's bad. More to the point, it simply is.
Ah, see, I don't consider the legal maneuvering like suing people as dark as things like this issue with vague wording (creating an uncertain AND moving target for developers) and Microsoft's more illicit agreements with PC vendors and BIOS lock-in crap. The suing sucks and isn't helpful for the market as a whole, really, but it's not as questionable in that it takes place in legal courts and relies upon the law for operation. It's bad behavior, but not "dark".
I don't know about that "a lot worse than Microsoft ever did" bit. Microsoft has a very dark past, in some areas. And now Apple is developing one, too. Apple is being "evil" in other ways, some very different from the was Microsoft was "evil", but I would argue that Microsoft still has a much longer legacy of badness to cope with. Given Microsoft's recent attempts to become a little more transparent and Apple's descent into it's more bizarre control freakiness, it's possible Apple may catch up and eventually surpass, but they aren't there yet.
Generally speaking, the human eye is less sensitive to blue and most sensitive to red (more yellow, actually) and green. Making sure that the blue pixels are the brightest in the screen and changing the red pixel to something a little more yellow (assuming the firmware adjusts when recreating colors) would probably be the best approaches to catering to the human eye.
And it doesn't have to be as simple as "more or less". It could simply be difference. I think a netbook with a touch screen and the ability to fold tablet style, paired with a novel UI and a more streamlined, lower profile OS, could still do almost as much as a regular laptop. Almost. And most of what it does that is the same would be doable just as easily. At present, the netbook does everything more slowly and pathetically than it's bigger brother because it isn't replicating the functions appropriately to the reduced system and a fitting environment, it's simply doing the same functions with punier hardware.
I think they key is that most people buying netbooks don't want netbooks. They want something that's fancier than a smart phone but they don't really want another whole computer, and the netbook is simply the closest thing they can fine. These buyers likely DO want a computing appliance rather than a computer. My astonishment is with their willingness to accept the price tag, not the product itself.
Indeed, nobody has successfully implemented this, and you are also putting words in my mouth. I think the iPad is a great product which is astronomically out of my price range for what it can do. I think current technologies used in netbooks could produce a competitor with more power and just as much battery life provided some company can find a way to challenge Apple's OS-level approach to the iPad. It may be that Google is key to offering any meaningful competition to the iPad.
So long as you don't give consumers too many choices. Then they often become incapable of distinguishing real value as it is often obscured by nearly identical, yet somehow different, options.
With proper work, though, the modern netbook could easily morph into the next all-purpose tablet device. A touch-screen optimized interface on top of a slimmed OS and a few minor hardware design changes are all that are really needed to make a netbook into a powerful iPad competitor. Sadly, the OS/software is the real hangup.
Notice, too, that your OS options are ancient XP Home or the horrible under-performer Windows 7 Starter. Neither are a good OS for a netbook. What is needed is for the netbook to try to be more, or perhaps less, than a full notebook. Notice also how much extra a tablet/touch screen model adds to the price.
When un-crippled devices proved to complex to use and maintain. The average person doesn't actually need a full-on PC for most tasks. The said, the iPad is damn expensive for a limited computing appliance.
Apple's custom AAC metadata means the DRM-free files don't always work quite right with other AAC-capable devices. Usually, but not always. And while I'm sure they see the embedding of personal information as a great way to track people who leak music onto networks, I would prefer the absolute minimum information which could conceivably be used to that end. I don't like the files on my computer littered with extra junk that doesn't have anything to do with what the file does, especially if that junk is about me.
Better compatibility with non-Apple devices, for one. "Works on most" isn't good enough. If someone's following the spec it should "just work", Apple or not.
The DRM-less iTunes tracks still have lots of private tracking information inserted into them. Further, Apple still maintains a relatively closed system. So while it's not DRM, per se, it is evidence that Apple prefers to have control. It's not just content providers. It's content providers and Apple, working sometimes together, sometimes at odds, to ensure content control, with the end user in very last place when it comes to personal control over content.
You are right. This is indeed a problem in the US. Even private universities do it. A local private university, strong in tech and engineering, occasionally (every couple or 4 years) has some sizable layoffs or restructuring and has to let go 10+ people. This should be a troubling indication right there. When they do it, they have security and police escort the employees to the door right there on the spot. It's a shitty way to do business and yet it's the gold standard.
If there's one aspect of Apple that has rarely strayed, it's closed architecture hardware and software, and restrictive, or at least expensive, licensing costs. During bust and boom, those are Apple standards. Webkit and Darwin are probably the major exceptions, software-wise, and those are carefully separated from the higher levels of OS code.
Well, I am now enlightened about the Newton, though that Apple just wrote a new OS for it is no small thing. I've seen the OS praised from all corners. Also, I know few people who had heard of the Sharp hardware, so Apple tried to give it a wider audience. I suppose, then, that this simply demonstrates that Apple was a stronger innovator in the area of software.
I still stand by my firewire comments. 1394 is firewire without the name, and it originated at Apple, and it's a damn fine standard.
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So long as the walled garden remains optional, simply one option of many, I'm perfectly fine with it. If the entire OS becomes walled off, then I have a problem. In the meanwhile, however, it's an excellent OS.
This does neatly skirt the Flash issue, though, and that issue is that Flash uses a bit too much juice for the results. I have a modern desktop PC no web page should casually drag down, and yet a particular combination flash ad on one site I visit brings it to its knees.
They've already shown in other research that children are capable of making up lost ground in math if math instruction is delayed until the brain is more developed and ready for it (we currently push basic arithmetic on minds not fully appropriate for such instruction). How much would engineering, physics, and other math-intense fields suffer if students had to do more of the math work later in their education, or even at college? College courses are generally more aggressive than high school courses. What would the implications of delayed math instruction be on these specialized fields, then, and the students who enter them?
This is true, though difficult for someone who just wants to play a game. That said, I read somewhere that most lefties are better with their right hands than most righties are with their left. Whether this is innate or a result of learning to interact in a right-handed world I know not.
Clearly, he will need to find a skinny lawyer.
This. Very much this. There are any number of bank and government softwares that still use these languages and are losing people able to deal with them to retirement. They may not be overjoyed that you are coming out of retirement to do it, but they may not have much choice.
Perhaps what we intend our software creations to do isn't necessarily more complex (though in many cases it is), our reliance upon APIs and robust OS hooks sometimes over-complicates the resulting code. In a way, something as simple as displaying text requires a much more complex piece of software on modern OS-driven hardware than it used to. It's good and it's bad. More to the point, it simply is.
Ah, see, I don't consider the legal maneuvering like suing people as dark as things like this issue with vague wording (creating an uncertain AND moving target for developers) and Microsoft's more illicit agreements with PC vendors and BIOS lock-in crap. The suing sucks and isn't helpful for the market as a whole, really, but it's not as questionable in that it takes place in legal courts and relies upon the law for operation. It's bad behavior, but not "dark".
I don't know about that "a lot worse than Microsoft ever did" bit. Microsoft has a very dark past, in some areas. And now Apple is developing one, too. Apple is being "evil" in other ways, some very different from the was Microsoft was "evil", but I would argue that Microsoft still has a much longer legacy of badness to cope with. Given Microsoft's recent attempts to become a little more transparent and Apple's descent into it's more bizarre control freakiness, it's possible Apple may catch up and eventually surpass, but they aren't there yet.
Because a non-profit with a few thousand entries needs something more complex? I understand not this complex hatred for FileMaker Pro.
Generally speaking, the human eye is less sensitive to blue and most sensitive to red (more yellow, actually) and green. Making sure that the blue pixels are the brightest in the screen and changing the red pixel to something a little more yellow (assuming the firmware adjusts when recreating colors) would probably be the best approaches to catering to the human eye.
I just want to thank you for coining the term "netbookery". It is an awesome, and truly worth, word, by sound and mouth feel alone.
And it doesn't have to be as simple as "more or less". It could simply be difference. I think a netbook with a touch screen and the ability to fold tablet style, paired with a novel UI and a more streamlined, lower profile OS, could still do almost as much as a regular laptop. Almost. And most of what it does that is the same would be doable just as easily. At present, the netbook does everything more slowly and pathetically than it's bigger brother because it isn't replicating the functions appropriately to the reduced system and a fitting environment, it's simply doing the same functions with punier hardware.
I think they key is that most people buying netbooks don't want netbooks. They want something that's fancier than a smart phone but they don't really want another whole computer, and the netbook is simply the closest thing they can fine. These buyers likely DO want a computing appliance rather than a computer. My astonishment is with their willingness to accept the price tag, not the product itself.
Indeed, nobody has successfully implemented this, and you are also putting words in my mouth. I think the iPad is a great product which is astronomically out of my price range for what it can do. I think current technologies used in netbooks could produce a competitor with more power and just as much battery life provided some company can find a way to challenge Apple's OS-level approach to the iPad. It may be that Google is key to offering any meaningful competition to the iPad.
So long as you don't give consumers too many choices. Then they often become incapable of distinguishing real value as it is often obscured by nearly identical, yet somehow different, options.
With proper work, though, the modern netbook could easily morph into the next all-purpose tablet device. A touch-screen optimized interface on top of a slimmed OS and a few minor hardware design changes are all that are really needed to make a netbook into a powerful iPad competitor. Sadly, the OS/software is the real hangup.
Notice, too, that your OS options are ancient XP Home or the horrible under-performer Windows 7 Starter. Neither are a good OS for a netbook. What is needed is for the netbook to try to be more, or perhaps less, than a full notebook. Notice also how much extra a tablet/touch screen model adds to the price.
When un-crippled devices proved to complex to use and maintain. The average person doesn't actually need a full-on PC for most tasks. The said, the iPad is damn expensive for a limited computing appliance.
That's possible as well, but it is known that Apple uses some non-spec metadata.
Apple's custom AAC metadata means the DRM-free files don't always work quite right with other AAC-capable devices. Usually, but not always. And while I'm sure they see the embedding of personal information as a great way to track people who leak music onto networks, I would prefer the absolute minimum information which could conceivably be used to that end. I don't like the files on my computer littered with extra junk that doesn't have anything to do with what the file does, especially if that junk is about me.
Better compatibility with non-Apple devices, for one. "Works on most" isn't good enough. If someone's following the spec it should "just work", Apple or not.
The DRM-less iTunes tracks still have lots of private tracking information inserted into them. Further, Apple still maintains a relatively closed system. So while it's not DRM, per se, it is evidence that Apple prefers to have control. It's not just content providers. It's content providers and Apple, working sometimes together, sometimes at odds, to ensure content control, with the end user in very last place when it comes to personal control over content.
You are right. This is indeed a problem in the US. Even private universities do it. A local private university, strong in tech and engineering, occasionally (every couple or 4 years) has some sizable layoffs or restructuring and has to let go 10+ people. This should be a troubling indication right there. When they do it, they have security and police escort the employees to the door right there on the spot. It's a shitty way to do business and yet it's the gold standard.
If there's one aspect of Apple that has rarely strayed, it's closed architecture hardware and software, and restrictive, or at least expensive, licensing costs. During bust and boom, those are Apple standards. Webkit and Darwin are probably the major exceptions, software-wise, and those are carefully separated from the higher levels of OS code.
Well, I am now enlightened about the Newton, though that Apple just wrote a new OS for it is no small thing. I've seen the OS praised from all corners. Also, I know few people who had heard of the Sharp hardware, so Apple tried to give it a wider audience. I suppose, then, that this simply demonstrates that Apple was a stronger innovator in the area of software.
I still stand by my firewire comments. 1394 is firewire without the name, and it originated at Apple, and it's a damn fine standard.