Even better, have it work over the cellular network. It's feasible to have a TV that doesn't hook up to the cable system (satellite TV, Free OTA, etc), but most people live in an area that is accessible by some form of cellular service. As long as the thought police could log into you TV and watch and listen to you (even at low quality) they can do their job. Unless you don't buy a TV (another reason for you to be a suspect) or make your house a faraday cage, then they basically have access to your house.
Some may become more cautious. The majority don't most people just live with the viruses and all the problems that come with them. They eventually go out and buy a new computer, and all is well again for about 2 weeks before that new machine gets infected. That or they end up buying an iPad, and not having to worry about that. I have no problem with the existence of the iPad and other similar devices, but there's no way that I would have one as my only computer.
That's the big problem though. What constitutes a "read", and how do they really track it? Simply clicking on a link to an article shouldn't really count as a read, as you could denial-of-service a whole bunch of people simply by sending them to a page with a bunch of iframes. It doesn't even fit with how many people use the internet, where they will open 15 links in different tabs, gloss over the first paragraph, decide the rest isn't worth reading and close the tab.
Yeah, it's a real double edged sword that one. Make it so that only a limited number of verified programs can be run on your computer, like Apple or any of the game consoles, and computer geeks will be whining that it's a walled garden, and "I should be able to run anything I want to". But the less savvy users when they have a system like Windows PC, or even MacOS, will undoubtedly mess it up by installing some kind of virus, or spyware, or what have you, in the promise of free music, smiley faces, or better performance out of the computer.
But a computer in the end, even an appliance computer still has to be turing complete. To be able to get a computer to do the things the users require (a calculator for instance, or run a spreadsheet) it has to be turing complete. A computer cannot be a appliance in quite the same way that a toaster, or a fridge, or a TV (the older ones without a computer inside) is an appliance. The trick (which only Apple has recently realized) is to make the computer seem like an appliance, and give no options which would let it operate out of their intended usage.
There is no possibility of writing an office suite completely compatible with MS Office. Especially with MS Word. The Doc format cannot be duplicated except by using the code written my Microsoft. Even their new XML based file format is a complete mess.
I think that for the most part, people tell you how to get things working using the config files because that's the way that is known to work, regardless of which distribution, or particular version of the distribution you are using. While there may be a way to do things through the UI, the people who answer on forums tend to be knowledgeable enough to know that at the end of the day, fixing something in the config file is often the best and quickest solution. A lot quicker than trying to remember the exact menu to go into on the specific distribution and version you happen to be using.
On a similar note, I find Ubuntu to be lacking in tools for administration, and find that there was a lot of time where I know of other distributions (Mandriva, at the time) that could easily configure the same things through the UI where Ubuntu could not. Ubuntu was much easier for the things it could do, and more things seemed to just work out of the box, but those that didn't work were a major pain to get working.
Personally, I don't run Linux at the moment on actual hardware. All my Linux needs are for "back-end" stuff and for that I just run in on VM, because in that limited virtual hardware world, it runs pretty flawlessly.
Which brings up the solution. Since Linux is free to distribute, that is, no licensing costs, wouldn't it be worth it for someone like HP or Dell to sell Linux computers, and use amount saved on licenses for better customer care. Somebody like HP is big enough to push around hardware manufacturers to get hardware drivers that actually do work. If a big company really took Linux seriously, then I think there's nothing really stopping it from getting at least as popular as Mac OS, most likely taking away market share from Windows.
This is what I was thinking. Crossword puzzles should be pretty easy to solve if you can brute force the thing. If you can't solve something, solve all the other clues in the other direction, and you have an answer. Unless these contests don't actually solve whole puzzles, but rather are given a partial puzzle with some parts filled in, and have to answer particular clues. Also, are the contestants allowed to use dictionaries, thesauruses, and other reference materials? Because if they aren't it's even more disappointing how well this computer did, since it would be easy for the computer to contain an entire dictionary, and every crossword puzzle ever published in it's memory.
I would even go a little further and start looking at games that have no violence in the least. Things like Endless Ocean, Animal Crossing, or Cookin' Mama. How anybody could get aggressive from simulated scuba diving is beyond me.
The fact that there would be need for a "licensing specialist" speaks volumes about the complexity of navigating the Microsoft licensing system. I think the major problem that MS is trying to stop is from somebody offering the same functionality to desktop users. Imagine a system where Mac and Linux users wouldn't have to buy a Windows license to access a full windows desktop. This could make switching to Mac (or Linux) a lot easier for most people. MS would sell a lot less licenses if a single license could be time-shared between 20 or 30 users
I would say that way too many businesses have things set up to be open to the internet at large. Configure your firewalls appropriately. If you need you RDP machine accessible from "the internet" then at least configure your firewalls so that only certain IPs can access that port. If that means providing a static IP to your employees that need to connect, then so be it. Sure it's convenient to be able to connect to your computers from any other internet connected computer in the world, but it is by no means secure.
While I agree that grammar Nazis can go a bit far, and I had no problem with what you just wrote (I'll ignore threw/through, this is/. after all), I find that a lot of people write impossible-to-parse sentences. I see this in business correspondence all the time. I'll get an email from a coworker, and I won't even know what they are asking because what they typed doesn't make any sense at all, or can be interpreted about 5 different ways. A lot of it comes from people being too lazy to just type out a whole sentence or paragraph, which is sometimes what is required to get the point across. I think a lot of it is due to people not being able to type fast enough, so they just get impatient, and write the shortest thing possible, instead of what actually makes sense.
It works both ways though. Many schools try to teach what's relevant in the workplace. Although there are some more "academic" institutions that will focus a lot on things like scala, lisp, haskell, and others, many schools will try to through in a few courses where you're using "industry" languages because they want their students to be able to get jobs afterwards.
Lack of proper debuggers are what keep me away from languages. Javascript without a debugger is fine if you want to write simple event handlers, but if you want to do a fully javascript driven site like GMail, then you're going to need the use of debuggers. Also, I'm pretty sure debuggers exist for all the languages you mentioned, so I'm not even sure what your exact point is.
Whether or not a programming language succeeds has a lot to do with how available the tools are. The language must have a good IDE, quality debugger and profilers. If it doesn't have these tools, it's not much use to serious projects. Nobody wants to write a serious application without the use of a modern debugger. If the tools aren't available, are difficult to set up, or cost too much, people won't start using your language. There's plenty of free and really good languages with great tooling out there that you'd have to come up with something pretty extraordinary to succeed without a proper toolset around you language to succeed. Oh that and a big API that does a lot of the work for you. Nobody wants to write all their own libraries for doing things that should be included in the API.
So most likely you'll have a tablet in conjunction with a desktop or laptop. Or maybe you'll have all three. What I wrote does not mean that people will stop buying PCs or laptops, but simply that eventually tablets will be good and cheap enough that a very large percentage of the population will have them. People didn't stop buying consoles when the home computer became cheap enough, and they didn't stop buying desktops when laptops became cheap enough. Many people just own all these devices. Tablets will eventually fall into this too.
According to this article, coffee falls into the "acquired tastes" category. Almost nobody likes it at first, but eventually your brain starts to associate the taste with receiving a drug (caffeine) and starts to interpret the taste of coffee as pleasurable. I think very few people would "like" (black) coffee if they only ever tasted decaffeinated coffee. Just as nobody would smoke if there was no drug involved. Also, even most coffee drinkers I know don't actually like coffee. Being in Canada, I know plenty of people who like their double-doubles (or triple-triples, or even quad...) , but I know very few people who like their coffee black. I've met almost nobody who likes Tim Hortons who also drinks their coffee black. Most people don't like coffee, but enjoy milky, sugary drinks which happen to contain some coffee, as long as they don't taste too much like coffee.
I don't think they will be doomed. Eventually the processor, the display, and everything else will be "good enough" for anything anybody wants to use a tablet for. The the prices will start to come down. Already you can get some seriously overspec'ed tablets for $300. What happens with the iPad 3 level of tablet only costs $300, or even $200. It will end up becoming something that just about everyone has, like a DVD player, or an MP3 player, or a TV. People will just buy them because even something really cheap will be something that accomplishes quite a bit.
I'm not so sure... I got a couple big hard drives and started ripping my stuff and storing it on a NAS. It's pretty time consuming. I got about 30 or 40 movies done, but haven't done any in a while. There's a lot of messing around that I had to do to get it work right. I find that I have to use separate programs for ripping and conversion, because many discs have bad sectors (intentionally) to try to throw off less intelligent ripping programs. Not only that, but I found I got varying results. Some videos have audio out of sync even if I used the same settings that worked for all the other discs. A couple bucks a disk isn't that much when you consider how much work is involved. A technical person who also happens to make a lot of money (not uncommon) who doesn't want to waste a ton of free time converting DVDs could easily go for this. Although I'd think it would be much more palatable if you could also bring in a hard drive and get copies of the movies for your own use, and not restrict the viewing to online only.
This is my biggest problem with video games right now. Everyone is charging the same price for every game regardless of how good the game actually is, or how much time and money went into making the game. I don't mind spending $60 on games. But I don't get more than 2 games a year at that price. And those 2 games last me about the entire year. Because, if I'm going to spend $60, I'm going to make sure that I don't end up spending $60 for a game I'm only going to play for 2 hours.
I think the reason nobody has made a game worth $60 on the tablet is that tablets are just too much of a moving target. $60 games (ones that are actually worth $60) take years to develop. The tablet hasn't been around long enough for developers to be able to gauge where it's going to be in 6 months.
Isn't the rotation of the earth, shifting of the continental plates, movement of their earth around the sun, and any other movement throwing off the clock. Actually how does one define "not moving". Moving is always relative to something else. If I stand still, I'm not moving relative to the ground, but I am moving relative to the sun, which is moving relative to the galaxy, which is moving relative to all the other galaxies. Is there a scientfic definition of "not moving" that doesn't use other objects as a reference?
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, have it work over the cellular network. It's feasible to have a TV that doesn't hook up to the cable system (satellite TV, Free OTA, etc), but most people live in an area that is accessible by some form of cellular service. As long as the thought police could log into you TV and watch and listen to you (even at low quality) they can do their job. Unless you don't buy a TV (another reason for you to be a suspect) or make your house a faraday cage, then they basically have access to your house.
Some may become more cautious. The majority don't most people just live with the viruses and all the problems that come with them. They eventually go out and buy a new computer, and all is well again for about 2 weeks before that new machine gets infected. That or they end up buying an iPad, and not having to worry about that. I have no problem with the existence of the iPad and other similar devices, but there's no way that I would have one as my only computer.
That's the big problem though. What constitutes a "read", and how do they really track it? Simply clicking on a link to an article shouldn't really count as a read, as you could denial-of-service a whole bunch of people simply by sending them to a page with a bunch of iframes. It doesn't even fit with how many people use the internet, where they will open 15 links in different tabs, gloss over the first paragraph, decide the rest isn't worth reading and close the tab.
Yeah, it's a real double edged sword that one. Make it so that only a limited number of verified programs can be run on your computer, like Apple or any of the game consoles, and computer geeks will be whining that it's a walled garden, and "I should be able to run anything I want to". But the less savvy users when they have a system like Windows PC, or even MacOS, will undoubtedly mess it up by installing some kind of virus, or spyware, or what have you, in the promise of free music, smiley faces, or better performance out of the computer.
But a computer in the end, even an appliance computer still has to be turing complete. To be able to get a computer to do the things the users require (a calculator for instance, or run a spreadsheet) it has to be turing complete. A computer cannot be a appliance in quite the same way that a toaster, or a fridge, or a TV (the older ones without a computer inside) is an appliance. The trick (which only Apple has recently realized) is to make the computer seem like an appliance, and give no options which would let it operate out of their intended usage.
There is no possibility of writing an office suite completely compatible with MS Office. Especially with MS Word. The Doc format cannot be duplicated except by using the code written my Microsoft. Even their new XML based file format is a complete mess.
I think that for the most part, people tell you how to get things working using the config files because that's the way that is known to work, regardless of which distribution, or particular version of the distribution you are using. While there may be a way to do things through the UI, the people who answer on forums tend to be knowledgeable enough to know that at the end of the day, fixing something in the config file is often the best and quickest solution. A lot quicker than trying to remember the exact menu to go into on the specific distribution and version you happen to be using.
On a similar note, I find Ubuntu to be lacking in tools for administration, and find that there was a lot of time where I know of other distributions (Mandriva, at the time) that could easily configure the same things through the UI where Ubuntu could not. Ubuntu was much easier for the things it could do, and more things seemed to just work out of the box, but those that didn't work were a major pain to get working.
Personally, I don't run Linux at the moment on actual hardware. All my Linux needs are for "back-end" stuff and for that I just run in on VM, because in that limited virtual hardware world, it runs pretty flawlessly.
Which brings up the solution. Since Linux is free to distribute, that is, no licensing costs, wouldn't it be worth it for someone like HP or Dell to sell Linux computers, and use amount saved on licenses for better customer care. Somebody like HP is big enough to push around hardware manufacturers to get hardware drivers that actually do work. If a big company really took Linux seriously, then I think there's nothing really stopping it from getting at least as popular as Mac OS, most likely taking away market share from Windows.
This is what I was thinking. Crossword puzzles should be pretty easy to solve if you can brute force the thing. If you can't solve something, solve all the other clues in the other direction, and you have an answer. Unless these contests don't actually solve whole puzzles, but rather are given a partial puzzle with some parts filled in, and have to answer particular clues. Also, are the contestants allowed to use dictionaries, thesauruses, and other reference materials? Because if they aren't it's even more disappointing how well this computer did, since it would be easy for the computer to contain an entire dictionary, and every crossword puzzle ever published in it's memory.
Not in the UK. Or Canada, or Australia. Actually I think the Americans are the only ones that have it wrong.
There's always Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
I would even go a little further and start looking at games that have no violence in the least. Things like Endless Ocean, Animal Crossing, or Cookin' Mama. How anybody could get aggressive from simulated scuba diving is beyond me.
The fact that there would be need for a "licensing specialist" speaks volumes about the complexity of navigating the Microsoft licensing system. I think the major problem that MS is trying to stop is from somebody offering the same functionality to desktop users. Imagine a system where Mac and Linux users wouldn't have to buy a Windows license to access a full windows desktop. This could make switching to Mac (or Linux) a lot easier for most people. MS would sell a lot less licenses if a single license could be time-shared between 20 or 30 users
I would say that way too many businesses have things set up to be open to the internet at large. Configure your firewalls appropriately. If you need you RDP machine accessible from "the internet" then at least configure your firewalls so that only certain IPs can access that port. If that means providing a static IP to your employees that need to connect, then so be it. Sure it's convenient to be able to connect to your computers from any other internet connected computer in the world, but it is by no means secure.
While I agree that grammar Nazis can go a bit far, and I had no problem with what you just wrote (I'll ignore threw/through, this is /. after all), I find that a lot of people write impossible-to-parse sentences. I see this in business correspondence all the time. I'll get an email from a coworker, and I won't even know what they are asking because what they typed doesn't make any sense at all, or can be interpreted about 5 different ways. A lot of it comes from people being too lazy to just type out a whole sentence or paragraph, which is sometimes what is required to get the point across. I think a lot of it is due to people not being able to type fast enough, so they just get impatient, and write the shortest thing possible, instead of what actually makes sense.
It works both ways though. Many schools try to teach what's relevant in the workplace. Although there are some more "academic" institutions that will focus a lot on things like scala, lisp, haskell, and others, many schools will try to through in a few courses where you're using "industry" languages because they want their students to be able to get jobs afterwards.
Lack of proper debuggers are what keep me away from languages. Javascript without a debugger is fine if you want to write simple event handlers, but if you want to do a fully javascript driven site like GMail, then you're going to need the use of debuggers. Also, I'm pretty sure debuggers exist for all the languages you mentioned, so I'm not even sure what your exact point is.
Whether or not a programming language succeeds has a lot to do with how available the tools are. The language must have a good IDE, quality debugger and profilers. If it doesn't have these tools, it's not much use to serious projects. Nobody wants to write a serious application without the use of a modern debugger. If the tools aren't available, are difficult to set up, or cost too much, people won't start using your language. There's plenty of free and really good languages with great tooling out there that you'd have to come up with something pretty extraordinary to succeed without a proper toolset around you language to succeed. Oh that and a big API that does a lot of the work for you. Nobody wants to write all their own libraries for doing things that should be included in the API.
So most likely you'll have a tablet in conjunction with a desktop or laptop. Or maybe you'll have all three. What I wrote does not mean that people will stop buying PCs or laptops, but simply that eventually tablets will be good and cheap enough that a very large percentage of the population will have them. People didn't stop buying consoles when the home computer became cheap enough, and they didn't stop buying desktops when laptops became cheap enough. Many people just own all these devices. Tablets will eventually fall into this too.
According to this article, coffee falls into the "acquired tastes" category. Almost nobody likes it at first, but eventually your brain starts to associate the taste with receiving a drug (caffeine) and starts to interpret the taste of coffee as pleasurable. I think very few people would "like" (black) coffee if they only ever tasted decaffeinated coffee. Just as nobody would smoke if there was no drug involved. Also, even most coffee drinkers I know don't actually like coffee. Being in Canada, I know plenty of people who like their double-doubles (or triple-triples, or even quad...) , but I know very few people who like their coffee black. I've met almost nobody who likes Tim Hortons who also drinks their coffee black. Most people don't like coffee, but enjoy milky, sugary drinks which happen to contain some coffee, as long as they don't taste too much like coffee.
I don't think they will be doomed. Eventually the processor, the display, and everything else will be "good enough" for anything anybody wants to use a tablet for. The the prices will start to come down. Already you can get some seriously overspec'ed tablets for $300. What happens with the iPad 3 level of tablet only costs $300, or even $200. It will end up becoming something that just about everyone has, like a DVD player, or an MP3 player, or a TV. People will just buy them because even something really cheap will be something that accomplishes quite a bit.
I'm not so sure... I got a couple big hard drives and started ripping my stuff and storing it on a NAS. It's pretty time consuming. I got about 30 or 40 movies done, but haven't done any in a while. There's a lot of messing around that I had to do to get it work right. I find that I have to use separate programs for ripping and conversion, because many discs have bad sectors (intentionally) to try to throw off less intelligent ripping programs. Not only that, but I found I got varying results. Some videos have audio out of sync even if I used the same settings that worked for all the other discs. A couple bucks a disk isn't that much when you consider how much work is involved. A technical person who also happens to make a lot of money (not uncommon) who doesn't want to waste a ton of free time converting DVDs could easily go for this. Although I'd think it would be much more palatable if you could also bring in a hard drive and get copies of the movies for your own use, and not restrict the viewing to online only.
This is my biggest problem with video games right now. Everyone is charging the same price for every game regardless of how good the game actually is, or how much time and money went into making the game. I don't mind spending $60 on games. But I don't get more than 2 games a year at that price. And those 2 games last me about the entire year. Because, if I'm going to spend $60, I'm going to make sure that I don't end up spending $60 for a game I'm only going to play for 2 hours.
I think the reason nobody has made a game worth $60 on the tablet is that tablets are just too much of a moving target. $60 games (ones that are actually worth $60) take years to develop. The tablet hasn't been around long enough for developers to be able to gauge where it's going to be in 6 months.
Isn't the rotation of the earth, shifting of the continental plates, movement of their earth around the sun, and any other movement throwing off the clock. Actually how does one define "not moving". Moving is always relative to something else. If I stand still, I'm not moving relative to the ground, but I am moving relative to the sun, which is moving relative to the galaxy, which is moving relative to all the other galaxies. Is there a scientfic definition of "not moving" that doesn't use other objects as a reference?