...it's got a lot of "wow" factor, but just wait for the price on the technology to drop before you buy one- eventually, the e-ink tech is going to become as ubiquitous as the flash drive. Amazon did a good job of creating a great device, but eventually there are going to be so many clones out there that locking yourself into Amazon's platform (essentilly, Amazon was copying iTunes model) at such an early start might hit your pocketbook kinda hard... Just wait for cheap-ass readers, and then the publishing industry to set up their own store(s).
This is going to be an interesting battleground, especially in the education text-book market.
No, but the remote viewing is the evolution of the "sit in your chair, be quiet, pay attention" that school's have always used. As kids use technology to goof off in class, schools use the same tech to crack down on goofing off.
It's a terrible cycle to begin with, and goes against what we know about how to teach children in the first place.
Basically, this means the public schools get out of having to pay for educating their top students two years early, while the stuents are then expected to rack on an additional two years of community college debt, before undergrad programs start to take them.
Or, the kids somehow jump straight to a four year school and then find themselves SOL when no employer wants to hire 20 year olds.
PBS's Frontline had an interesting episode earlier this month - "Digital Nation" there's a section where a school official is remotely watching what kids are doing from a laptop, and showing a reporter how he does it... it's all inside the confines of the school, but it still scared me.
At the core of the problem here is that we have an education system that is still stuck in the 19th century.
exactly- the iPhone 9and Android to an extent) are popular because of the wide range of things they can do... I know I wouldn't give up high quality maps/gps for gaming on my phone. Building out a phone like that almost requires that you build a killer app store with it.
That's why I prefer Android's approach- they have an app store, anyone can get into it, OR, you can just install packages directly from websites... they give the choice of the nice, clean easy way, OR the DIY for those that want. The Android interface might not be quite as clean as the iPhone, but it gives a world more chioce.
Not unlike Ubuntu- you have the option of the super clean Apps installer, but there's nothing stopping the power user from doing more.
Yeah, I don't think anyone really realizes the power of Google now. They have a lot of power for content creators, advertisers, technology companies, and millions of people. It is not a start-up: It is the most powerful company on the face of the planet, but no one realizes this yet.
The one thing that isn't addressed here is if there is any software engineering going on to the games... my guess is that they need to do some rewriting to key parts of the software.
The whole point of a GPU is to handle specific, graphic related tasks, and that frees up the main processor to handle everything else. So why not have one set of servers that are tasked with processing data meant for a single GPU, another set that processes physics, and one that does sound, all that feed into another set that compresses and sends each frame, all in under 80ms.
Sure, this sounds impossible if you only have one computer handling it, but you've got an entire farm that is designed from the ground up to do this.
Did you watch the video? The first 5 minutes are all about overcoming latency issues and the architecture involved in that.
Do you know who Steve Pearlman is? He pretty much gave us QuickTime. He's got a history of incredibly forward thinking ideas, some took off, some didn't. This isn't like the Phantom console, where some MBA morons tried to do something. I don't think Pearlman would be out there showing this off unless there was some real meat going on here.
Remember- an optimized server farm processes data much differently than your home computer does. Sure, no single computer could index the entire internet and point you to web pages based on a query in under 1 second, but Google can with a large range of servers all doing part of the work. You can't say something is impossible just because you can't do it at home.
Here's one that would work on kids that young: Turn them into "packets" and have them travel through an open-ended maze in their effort to get to their desination.
Create an inter-connected maze that has no single entrence and exit, but a bunch of ways in and out. Each point is marked as a different city across the world. Let's say a kid enters in "Japan" and a computer screen tells him he needs to get to "New York". He then walks through the maze, where there are a series of hubs where he has to ask another terminal what direction he has to go in next.
It would be highly physical and an easy way to introduce kids to the simplest building blocks of the internet... you could even build it as a "series of tubes":)
I really hope you see this one to the end- please submit the end results to slashdot. Good luck!
I'm not fearful of the current Google, I'm fearful of the Google when we're three generations of leadership down the road and someone with fewer scruples is at the helm. What we need now more than ever is rock-solid privacy laws in this country that put looking at someone's data on par with searching their home... it can be done, but you need to get warrants and have a damn good reason to be doing it.
There is a lot of amazing advantages to having your data aggregated the way that Google has it, and it's not rocket science to manage the downsides.
I can verify this- I got a Droid on launch day, and one thing that drove me nuts was how long it took a barcode scanning app to focus and accquire the barcode... i just tried it again after writing off that ability, and sure enough, the time to focus is much, much shorter now.
There's a growing anti-Google movement, in large part being spear-headed by Newscorp. The writing is on the wall that traditional content protection (via physical media) no longer applies... traditional media companies are freaking out left and right and they think my locking out Google in favor of a search engine that might want to play ball their way (Microsoft), they can hold onto their media empires at the expense of their consumers... there are a lot of similarities between this idea and the RIAA suing the Napster into oblivion, only this time Google is A) not doing anything illegal and B) has the market and mindshare to not be effected by such things.
One possible scenario, if content publishers get their way would be a fractured internet, where Google no longer indexes content for the "big boys", and users have to turn to an alternative search engine for that sort of content (Bing) where Microsoft gives great control over the content to the publishers in exchange for some sort of fee... Users will either move all their searching over to Bing, or they won't even notice that the content is gone and wind up reading the content from smaller publishers (blogs) instead...
The long of the short of it: Big-ass media can't make money on the internet like they are used to, so they aim to destroy it. It's not going to fly and a lot of these organizations are going to go down in flames. I don't know if that is a good or a bad thing.
Your post says a lot about your family dynamics... there is a cycle going on here where they use the computer willy-nilly, and then when it gets screwed up, they know that you will fix it for free. What you need to do is make them pay for your services, so there are some stakes behind them asking you to fix it. That will probably curb their behavior when it comes to installing every toolbar known to man.
There is probably one major offender, and you could probably do some detective work to figure out who that person is if you tried.
This is why we had $147/barrel oil a few years ago, not speculators.
During that boom, I never once heard of anyone going without a delivery of oil. One would assume that if there was a real shortage of product, someone would have gone hungry.
We could do something like send a data center pre-loaded with, say, Wikipedia and the content of lots of popular sites pre-loaded, and then when it's possible, that massive server could get the latest news from Earth... not unlike how my iPhone updates with the latest news from the New York Times... it's just that we're sending a lot of static content that won't need to be changed very frequently.
Jockdom is no longer the best way to win wars... Look at Iraq and Afganistan- we're slowly moving away from big ass bombs to smarter, more humanitarian ways of winning a series of wars that have more to do with culture and education than with fighting. Jocks-schmocks!
Slashdot Mirror
...it's got a lot of "wow" factor, but just wait for the price on the technology to drop before you buy one- eventually, the e-ink tech is going to become as ubiquitous as the flash drive. Amazon did a good job of creating a great device, but eventually there are going to be so many clones out there that locking yourself into Amazon's platform (essentilly, Amazon was copying iTunes model) at such an early start might hit your pocketbook kinda hard... Just wait for cheap-ass readers, and then the publishing industry to set up their own store(s).
This is going to be an interesting battleground, especially in the education text-book market.
No, but the remote viewing is the evolution of the "sit in your chair, be quiet, pay attention" that school's have always used. As kids use technology to goof off in class, schools use the same tech to crack down on goofing off.
It's a terrible cycle to begin with, and goes against what we know about how to teach children in the first place.
Basically, this means the public schools get out of having to pay for educating their top students two years early, while the stuents are then expected to rack on an additional two years of community college debt, before undergrad programs start to take them.
Or, the kids somehow jump straight to a four year school and then find themselves SOL when no employer wants to hire 20 year olds.
PBS's Frontline had an interesting episode earlier this month - "Digital Nation" there's a section where a school official is remotely watching what kids are doing from a laptop, and showing a reporter how he does it... it's all inside the confines of the school, but it still scared me.
At the core of the problem here is that we have an education system that is still stuck in the 19th century.
I think that says more about our media consumption habits- I know I read blogs these days before I look to traditional media sources.
This guy had some good ideas in this essay. You could expand on some of this and have a great story line.
exactly- the iPhone 9and Android to an extent) are popular because of the wide range of things they can do... I know I wouldn't give up high quality maps/gps for gaming on my phone. Building out a phone like that almost requires that you build a killer app store with it.
That's why I prefer Android's approach- they have an app store, anyone can get into it, OR, you can just install packages directly from websites... they give the choice of the nice, clean easy way, OR the DIY for those that want. The Android interface might not be quite as clean as the iPhone, but it gives a world more chioce.
Not unlike Ubuntu- you have the option of the super clean Apps installer, but there's nothing stopping the power user from doing more.
Except... who is going to buy this? People that own iPhones!
Can you tether your iPhone?
I wish I had mod points... You nailed it.
When you pay off everyone and their brother to default to your service, you'll pick up a little momentum...
Yeah, I don't think anyone really realizes the power of Google now. They have a lot of power for content creators, advertisers, technology companies, and millions of people. It is not a start-up: It is the most powerful company on the face of the planet, but no one realizes this yet.
"Popular Science? More like Nerdular Nerdence."
The one thing that isn't addressed here is if there is any software engineering going on to the games... my guess is that they need to do some rewriting to key parts of the software.
The whole point of a GPU is to handle specific, graphic related tasks, and that frees up the main processor to handle everything else. So why not have one set of servers that are tasked with processing data meant for a single GPU, another set that processes physics, and one that does sound, all that feed into another set that compresses and sends each frame, all in under 80ms.
Sure, this sounds impossible if you only have one computer handling it, but you've got an entire farm that is designed from the ground up to do this.
Did you watch the video? The first 5 minutes are all about overcoming latency issues and the architecture involved in that.
Do you know who Steve Pearlman is? He pretty much gave us QuickTime. He's got a history of incredibly forward thinking ideas, some took off, some didn't. This isn't like the Phantom console, where some MBA morons tried to do something. I don't think Pearlman would be out there showing this off unless there was some real meat going on here.
Remember- an optimized server farm processes data much differently than your home computer does. Sure, no single computer could index the entire internet and point you to web pages based on a query in under 1 second, but Google can with a large range of servers all doing part of the work. You can't say something is impossible just because you can't do it at home.
if Microsoft does this, then the Playstation becomes the console for the large.
Here's one that would work on kids that young: Turn them into "packets" and have them travel through an open-ended maze in their effort to get to their desination.
:)
Create an inter-connected maze that has no single entrence and exit, but a bunch of ways in and out. Each point is marked as a different city across the world. Let's say a kid enters in "Japan" and a computer screen tells him he needs to get to "New York". He then walks through the maze, where there are a series of hubs where he has to ask another terminal what direction he has to go in next.
It would be highly physical and an easy way to introduce kids to the simplest building blocks of the internet... you could even build it as a "series of tubes"
I really hope you see this one to the end- please submit the end results to slashdot. Good luck!
I'm not fearful of the current Google, I'm fearful of the Google when we're three generations of leadership down the road and someone with fewer scruples is at the helm. What we need now more than ever is rock-solid privacy laws in this country that put looking at someone's data on par with searching their home... it can be done, but you need to get warrants and have a damn good reason to be doing it.
There is a lot of amazing advantages to having your data aggregated the way that Google has it, and it's not rocket science to manage the downsides.
I can verify this- I got a Droid on launch day, and one thing that drove me nuts was how long it took a barcode scanning app to focus and accquire the barcode... i just tried it again after writing off that ability, and sure enough, the time to focus is much, much shorter now.
There's a growing anti-Google movement, in large part being spear-headed by Newscorp. The writing is on the wall that traditional content protection (via physical media) no longer applies... traditional media companies are freaking out left and right and they think my locking out Google in favor of a search engine that might want to play ball their way (Microsoft), they can hold onto their media empires at the expense of their consumers... there are a lot of similarities between this idea and the RIAA suing the Napster into oblivion, only this time Google is A) not doing anything illegal and B) has the market and mindshare to not be effected by such things.
One possible scenario, if content publishers get their way would be a fractured internet, where Google no longer indexes content for the "big boys", and users have to turn to an alternative search engine for that sort of content (Bing) where Microsoft gives great control over the content to the publishers in exchange for some sort of fee... Users will either move all their searching over to Bing, or they won't even notice that the content is gone and wind up reading the content from smaller publishers (blogs) instead...
The long of the short of it: Big-ass media can't make money on the internet like they are used to, so they aim to destroy it. It's not going to fly and a lot of these organizations are going to go down in flames. I don't know if that is a good or a bad thing.
Your post says a lot about your family dynamics... there is a cycle going on here where they use the computer willy-nilly, and then when it gets screwed up, they know that you will fix it for free. What you need to do is make them pay for your services, so there are some stakes behind them asking you to fix it. That will probably curb their behavior when it comes to installing every toolbar known to man.
There is probably one major offender, and you could probably do some detective work to figure out who that person is if you tried.
This is why we had $147/barrel oil a few years ago, not speculators.
During that boom, I never once heard of anyone going without a delivery of oil. One would assume that if there was a real shortage of product, someone would have gone hungry.
We could do something like send a data center pre-loaded with, say, Wikipedia and the content of lots of popular sites pre-loaded, and then when it's possible, that massive server could get the latest news from Earth... not unlike how my iPhone updates with the latest news from the New York Times... it's just that we're sending a lot of static content that won't need to be changed very frequently.
It's certainly the best way to win wars.
Jockdom is no longer the best way to win wars... Look at Iraq and Afganistan- we're slowly moving away from big ass bombs to smarter, more humanitarian ways of winning a series of wars that have more to do with culture and education than with fighting. Jocks-schmocks!
i remember reading that as well. I would be willing to bet their tech is similar to this.