The difference is that computers have a more standardized architecture than cell phones. With computers, there wasn't much stopping you from upgrading you PC from DOS 5 to DOS 6, or putting windows 3.1 on there. With cell phones, there's a plethora of proprietary hardware that makes upgrading to the newest OS a big pain. What we really need is more standardized hardware in the cell phone market. We need things to be more like regular computers with standardized hardware, so that you aren't at the mercy of the original manufacturer when you want to upgrade your operating system.
I fully agree. I didn't have a computer in my house until I was 12. In grade school we hardly ever used the computers. Sometimes, we got to go use the Unisys Icons, which weren't anything at all like the systems I used at home, and didn't even come with a mouse, but used a trackball instead. I was still able to pick up enough computers to become a software developer. There's no reason for a kid of this age to be on a computer. Granted, I let my kids play a game once a week or so for about 15 minutes (they are 4 and 2). However, most of the time they don't ask for it, and they know that even if they do ask, they often don't get to play on the computer.
Really have to say that the whole "baby signs" thing is really amazing. I got 3 kids, one of which isn't old enough to sign yet, but the other two it helped with a lot. Not being able to communicate what they want it a big trigger for tantrums and bad behaviours in children. Showing them how to sign to that they can get the point across, even before they can talk, or talk clearly is a big advantage.
This is one place where apple really shines. You buy a new machine, it comes with no stickers on it. It looks really sleek. No stickers, nice clean lines, really helps the machine look nice. I don't know why none of the PC makers can do this. Make a machine that is esthetically pleasing, and don't mess it up with stickers.
Also, does anybody find it odd how they related it to cars? When you buy a car, it has the manufacturer's logo, possibly a hood ornament, the type of car (sunbird, tempo, Ranger), the model of the car (SX,ZX,whatever). Also you get the dealership slapping their name on it too. Often the dealer will not only put their name on the body of the car, but also around the license plate. It's basically a billboard for the manufacturer and the dealership. I kind of equate it to buying a $50 t-shirt with some designer name printed across the front. Basically you're a walking billboard. I would love to be able to buy a car with no markings at all on it.
The problem is that a lot of people don't have a whole lot to do at work. It's not their fault they company doesn't know how to make full use of their resources. This is how many large companies work. Each person has a small menial task that has to get done. When something comes into their queue, they need to complete the task. And then they are left sitting until another task comes into their queue. You might say the solution is to have less people working, so you can fill up the queue faster, less downtime. Maybe all the work that is being done by 10 people could get done by a single person. But here's the problem. You'd have to find a person who could be trained to do all 10 of those jobs. Many people have trouble just mastering the 1 thing they need to do all day long, try finding people who can do 10 things. And if that person ever leaves, you now have to find a replacement who can do all of those jobs. It's much easier to just hire 1 person for each task. Even if it's more expensive in the end, because it means easier training, and less risk to the company,and it's easier to find replacement workers. It's kind of sad the way these companies work. So inefficient. However, I can see the logic in it. There's a lot of people out there who have trouble doing things on their own, who can't do anything unless they have specific instructions on how to accomplish it.
No, they aren't behind NATs, but if properly configured, they are behind secured firewalls, making them a lot harder to break into. And even if you do break into them, they are a lot harder to do anything with, because they are behind a firewall. Really the reason that Windows PCs are so much more vulnerable is because they have idiots operating them. Once the user opts to run a program, the program can pretty much do anything with that machine. All you have to do is promise smiley faces, and you'll have millions windows users actively downloading your application, and running it. It doesn't even matter if it flashes warnings saying that the app requires admin privileges. The user will happen just click on Next/OK/Yes until program is successfully installed, without reading a single thing. Once the user opts to run a program, there's not much any operating system or virus software can do. Even if you aren't running as admin, you can still have your program re-run every time the user logs in, and you can still cause quite a bit of damage, either by deleting the users files, or by sending the users data out to a server so some hacker can find interesting data.
The reason that people get phones from their carriers is that they get a discount on their phone when they buy it from the carrier and sign a contract. The problem is, is that you can't buy your own phone, and have a cheaper rate plan. The rate plan is the same price regardless of where your phone came from or whether or not you are on a contract. So you actually have to spend a lot more money to get a phone from someone other than your carrier.
But that requires you have a seperate internet connection and use up your internet connection bandwidth. On demand for cable does not require this and actually has the advantage that anything you watch doesn't count on your internet bill.
Yes, but even if the kid is on a schedule, the schedule may interfere with whatever they are doing, such as being in your class. Also, if the kid is having a growth spurt, sometimes they will want to feed spontaneously, off their regular schedule. Or maybe the kid was feeling cranky at the previous feeding and didn't each as much and therefore needed to feed again ahead of schedule. There's a million reasons why the kid may need to eat during your class. And as long as she feels comfortable feeding the kid in public, why should you judge her.
Plus, my cable company already give the last 2 weeks of all the popular show "On Demand" for free. Its one of the things that really makes cable better than satellite. Satellite will never be able to offer on demand programming, and this is one of the way cable stays ahead. I don't think iTunes will be able to rent that many episodes at that price. At 24 episodes a season, that's $24. It costs about $50 a season even for the hour long shows. So it really doesn't make sense to pay $24 and own nothing in the end, when you could pay a little more and own a physical disk. There's so many ways to watch this stuff for free (on demand, network website, Hulu) that I don't see why anybody would pay for a rental.
They do know how one school compares to another. They figure this out by looking past performance of high schools. They look at how well the students did, which universities and colleges they attented, and look at how well they do at those schools. So, if student A from highschool X and Student B from highschool Y both go to university Z, and both students entered with the same average, and student A does better than student B, it means that highschool X better prepares their students than school Y, and then they weight the averages accordingly. Obviously there are some anolomolies, but once they average out the statistics over the entire population of students, the rankings get pretty good.
If it's stated in the contract exactly what they are throttling, and what they prioritizing, then I see no problem with that. Maybe some people would rather have faster access to Fox's servers, and they never use bittorrent. I think the problem with net neutrality isn't prioritizing one thing over another. It's prioritizing one thing over another and not letting the person paying for the service know about it. If an ISP wants to sell low latency connections to gamers, I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to. A smart ISP would also offer a package with higher throughput to places like NetFlix, iTunes, Hulu, and others, and try to work out a deal with many companies in order to offer some kind of rich media friendly service.
I would think so too. Adding in some intelligence to determine what server the packet is going to, and trying to figure out whether it is a "gaming packet" would take too much time. It may work for games routing to specific servers, but in the case of games where players set up their own servers, or the game uses a peer to peer network, I would think that it would be much to bothersome to try to prioritize traffic. They are probably just using it as a marketing ploy to get a lot of gamers on their network, and thereby make a lot of money off low bandwidth users. That is, games by themselves don't take up that much bandwidth, and most gamers who are worried about latency wouldn't be running high bandwidth things like torrents in the background.
That's not really true. A CEO of a large corporation may have 5000 employees below them. Now, a teacher, even teaching 50 students a year, which would be a classroom way too large, would have to be teaching for 100 years to touch that many lives. Not only that, but if you look at things like the auto industry, not only is it their own employees who are affected when something goes wrong, but the employees of a lot of other companies who supply them with parts, machinery, travel and other things. That's completely ignoring the fact that people are only paid what the market says they are worth. That is to say, what it would cost for somebody else of similar skills. The company pays the CEO 1 million dollars, because it believes that there are so few people who could do the job, that they must be worth a lot of money. Simlarly, in the teaching industry, there are a lot of people who are willing to take the pay. There are a lot of teachers who work part time, just for their chance to get into the union, because they know once they do, it's a job for life, with great benefits, and good hours.
Being from Canada, I always found the SATs to be an odd thing. You go through 12 years of schooling, getting graded the whole way along, and then the only thing that counts for getting into university is a test that takes a few hours. Seems like a bad system. It's prime target for cheating, first of all. A bad student could hire someone to take the test for them. I'm sure they check IDs and stuff, but I wouldn't go so far to say it hasn't been done, or isn't done on a regular basis. In Canada, they look at your marks from high school. There's a "university application centre" that handles the applications, and they know how different schools vary from other schools, and take that into account as well when processing the applications. It's a much better system. You get into university, not just based on a single test, but on your overall performance during high school.
I think the problem that the ISPs face is that they don't want to charge grandma for the amount she is using. If you look at the way electricity is charged, strictly by usage, then the internet providers would stand to lose a lot of money if they could only charge people for what they used. While there are a lot of techies like us who download 100 GB per month, there are 100 grandmas and other similar people who only use 10 MB a month, because all they do is check their email, and the weather. I think that if things ever switched to truly usage based, that the people downloading a lot would curb their usage, so they could afford their bill, and a large chunk of people would be left paying something like $2 a month, because truly, that's all the data they use. I think the internet providers are trying to keep it the way it is, so that they can continue to charge all the low volume users $30 a month, even though they don't use anywhere close to that volume.
I could really see DRM working with eBook readers too. Have it connect via WiFi, and only to sites signed by the distributor of the device (like Amazon). Have the electronics encased in epoxy, so that adding a mod chip or modifying the hardware is next to impossible. Don't have the ability to plug anything in except a power cord. Then, you have a device which the end user cannot modify without big risk of completely destroying the device, and the only way to get content on it is to pay the person who originally sold you the device in the first place. Will it happen? Will people buy a device like this? Those are yet to be seen. But you could get some pretty effective DRM on a device that only connected to signed servers, and with hardware that couldn't easily be modified by end users. For extra protection, make the actual electronics smaller than the block of epoxy, and randomize the position of the board within the epoxy block so that you would have to xray the device to figure out where to drill into it.
I think Cory Doctorow said it first. The problem for most authors is not piracy, but obscurity. That is to say, if nobody has ever heard of you, or read your book, very few people will buy it. On the other hand, if you can get your book into the hands of people, and get them reading it, and it is good, then people will buy it. Cory Doctorow offers all his books online for free, in a multitude of formats, released at the same time as the hardcover version. He still sells quite a few copies of his books.
The Kindle is already $139. And it's not like computers where the device has to get faster and faster every generation. If they keep the technology at around the same level, they should be able to get the price down to around $50. Once that happens, everybody (in the western world) will have an eBook reader. They could even remove WiFi and put in a USB cable if they wanted to really cut down on the price. If they don't cut the price, some other manufacturer will produce a $50 eBook reader. It's only a matter of a couple years before these things get really cheap.
So Western Digital has 3 offerings, and isn't even easy to find on Newegg, as you have to go to SSD category, look at the list of Manufacturers, and then click on a link to see all the tiny manufacturers that don't even matter. It also has much lower performance than all the other drives. It only has 170 MB/s write speed, whereas most of the competition is up around 270 MB/s. And the Seagate drive can't even be found on NewEgg, and clicking on the "Comparison Shop" link on the site you did link to just goes to a dead end. After a little searching, I couldn't even find an english site to buy the thing on. Although you could probably supply me with a link, it doesn't matter, because for the most part they are unavailable at all the major retailers, so people won't buy them. So, while they do have SSDs, their offerings are terrible, and they are way behind the times. They need to play catch up with all the other manufacturers in a big way if they want to compete in this market.
Yes, those markets have been completely decimated by other storage solutions. Sure some floppy disks are sold, but the number of disks has taken a drastic hit in recent years. I imagine the same is true for tapes. People will still buy hard drives for many years to come, but if the only thing you sell are spinning disk hard drives, like Western Digital and Seagate, then you should be really worried, because while the market won't dry up over night, over the next 5 years, the market is going to diminish.
My write speed is usually limited by the fact that some large memory program gets swapped out to disk, and needs to get swapped back in. Or Some other app that has nothing to do with what I really want to get done decides to start thrashing the hard drive. If all everyone ever needed was to play mp3s, or watch a video, without doing anything else, we wouldn't need solid state drives. But once you start doing stuff that's quite intense on your drive, you start to realize why it would be nice to have a drive that can read faster for all your data. Once SSDs get up to around 2TB, people won't care about how large hard drives are. Because for the most part, SSDs will be big enough, and most people don't want to shell out and buy 2 drives.
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The difference is that computers have a more standardized architecture than cell phones. With computers, there wasn't much stopping you from upgrading you PC from DOS 5 to DOS 6, or putting windows 3.1 on there. With cell phones, there's a plethora of proprietary hardware that makes upgrading to the newest OS a big pain. What we really need is more standardized hardware in the cell phone market. We need things to be more like regular computers with standardized hardware, so that you aren't at the mercy of the original manufacturer when you want to upgrade your operating system.
I fully agree. I didn't have a computer in my house until I was 12. In grade school we hardly ever used the computers. Sometimes, we got to go use the Unisys Icons, which weren't anything at all like the systems I used at home, and didn't even come with a mouse, but used a trackball instead. I was still able to pick up enough computers to become a software developer. There's no reason for a kid of this age to be on a computer. Granted, I let my kids play a game once a week or so for about 15 minutes (they are 4 and 2). However, most of the time they don't ask for it, and they know that even if they do ask, they often don't get to play on the computer.
Really have to say that the whole "baby signs" thing is really amazing. I got 3 kids, one of which isn't old enough to sign yet, but the other two it helped with a lot. Not being able to communicate what they want it a big trigger for tantrums and bad behaviours in children. Showing them how to sign to that they can get the point across, even before they can talk, or talk clearly is a big advantage.
This is one place where apple really shines. You buy a new machine, it comes with no stickers on it. It looks really sleek. No stickers, nice clean lines, really helps the machine look nice. I don't know why none of the PC makers can do this. Make a machine that is esthetically pleasing, and don't mess it up with stickers. Also, does anybody find it odd how they related it to cars? When you buy a car, it has the manufacturer's logo, possibly a hood ornament, the type of car (sunbird, tempo, Ranger), the model of the car (SX,ZX,whatever). Also you get the dealership slapping their name on it too. Often the dealer will not only put their name on the body of the car, but also around the license plate. It's basically a billboard for the manufacturer and the dealership. I kind of equate it to buying a $50 t-shirt with some designer name printed across the front. Basically you're a walking billboard. I would love to be able to buy a car with no markings at all on it.
The problem is that a lot of people don't have a whole lot to do at work. It's not their fault they company doesn't know how to make full use of their resources. This is how many large companies work. Each person has a small menial task that has to get done. When something comes into their queue, they need to complete the task. And then they are left sitting until another task comes into their queue. You might say the solution is to have less people working, so you can fill up the queue faster, less downtime. Maybe all the work that is being done by 10 people could get done by a single person. But here's the problem. You'd have to find a person who could be trained to do all 10 of those jobs. Many people have trouble just mastering the 1 thing they need to do all day long, try finding people who can do 10 things. And if that person ever leaves, you now have to find a replacement who can do all of those jobs. It's much easier to just hire 1 person for each task. Even if it's more expensive in the end, because it means easier training, and less risk to the company,and it's easier to find replacement workers. It's kind of sad the way these companies work. So inefficient. However, I can see the logic in it. There's a lot of people out there who have trouble doing things on their own, who can't do anything unless they have specific instructions on how to accomplish it.
No, they aren't behind NATs, but if properly configured, they are behind secured firewalls, making them a lot harder to break into. And even if you do break into them, they are a lot harder to do anything with, because they are behind a firewall. Really the reason that Windows PCs are so much more vulnerable is because they have idiots operating them. Once the user opts to run a program, the program can pretty much do anything with that machine. All you have to do is promise smiley faces, and you'll have millions windows users actively downloading your application, and running it. It doesn't even matter if it flashes warnings saying that the app requires admin privileges. The user will happen just click on Next/OK/Yes until program is successfully installed, without reading a single thing. Once the user opts to run a program, there's not much any operating system or virus software can do. Even if you aren't running as admin, you can still have your program re-run every time the user logs in, and you can still cause quite a bit of damage, either by deleting the users files, or by sending the users data out to a server so some hacker can find interesting data.
The reason that people get phones from their carriers is that they get a discount on their phone when they buy it from the carrier and sign a contract. The problem is, is that you can't buy your own phone, and have a cheaper rate plan. The rate plan is the same price regardless of where your phone came from or whether or not you are on a contract. So you actually have to spend a lot more money to get a phone from someone other than your carrier.
But that requires you have a seperate internet connection and use up your internet connection bandwidth. On demand for cable does not require this and actually has the advantage that anything you watch doesn't count on your internet bill.
Yes, but even if the kid is on a schedule, the schedule may interfere with whatever they are doing, such as being in your class. Also, if the kid is having a growth spurt, sometimes they will want to feed spontaneously, off their regular schedule. Or maybe the kid was feeling cranky at the previous feeding and didn't each as much and therefore needed to feed again ahead of schedule. There's a million reasons why the kid may need to eat during your class. And as long as she feels comfortable feeding the kid in public, why should you judge her.
Did I read that right? Do they actually call the training facilities "Stables". Talk about adding insult to injury.
Plus, my cable company already give the last 2 weeks of all the popular show "On Demand" for free. Its one of the things that really makes cable better than satellite. Satellite will never be able to offer on demand programming, and this is one of the way cable stays ahead. I don't think iTunes will be able to rent that many episodes at that price. At 24 episodes a season, that's $24. It costs about $50 a season even for the hour long shows. So it really doesn't make sense to pay $24 and own nothing in the end, when you could pay a little more and own a physical disk. There's so many ways to watch this stuff for free (on demand, network website, Hulu) that I don't see why anybody would pay for a rental.
And yet we sighted people still can't connect a bluetooth keyboard.
They do know how one school compares to another. They figure this out by looking past performance of high schools. They look at how well the students did, which universities and colleges they attented, and look at how well they do at those schools. So, if student A from highschool X and Student B from highschool Y both go to university Z, and both students entered with the same average, and student A does better than student B, it means that highschool X better prepares their students than school Y, and then they weight the averages accordingly. Obviously there are some anolomolies, but once they average out the statistics over the entire population of students, the rankings get pretty good.
Go back to the old style olympics. Compete nude. It's the only fair way.
If it's stated in the contract exactly what they are throttling, and what they prioritizing, then I see no problem with that. Maybe some people would rather have faster access to Fox's servers, and they never use bittorrent. I think the problem with net neutrality isn't prioritizing one thing over another. It's prioritizing one thing over another and not letting the person paying for the service know about it. If an ISP wants to sell low latency connections to gamers, I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to. A smart ISP would also offer a package with higher throughput to places like NetFlix, iTunes, Hulu, and others, and try to work out a deal with many companies in order to offer some kind of rich media friendly service.
I would think so too. Adding in some intelligence to determine what server the packet is going to, and trying to figure out whether it is a "gaming packet" would take too much time. It may work for games routing to specific servers, but in the case of games where players set up their own servers, or the game uses a peer to peer network, I would think that it would be much to bothersome to try to prioritize traffic. They are probably just using it as a marketing ploy to get a lot of gamers on their network, and thereby make a lot of money off low bandwidth users. That is, games by themselves don't take up that much bandwidth, and most gamers who are worried about latency wouldn't be running high bandwidth things like torrents in the background.
That's not really true. A CEO of a large corporation may have 5000 employees below them. Now, a teacher, even teaching 50 students a year, which would be a classroom way too large, would have to be teaching for 100 years to touch that many lives. Not only that, but if you look at things like the auto industry, not only is it their own employees who are affected when something goes wrong, but the employees of a lot of other companies who supply them with parts, machinery, travel and other things. That's completely ignoring the fact that people are only paid what the market says they are worth. That is to say, what it would cost for somebody else of similar skills. The company pays the CEO 1 million dollars, because it believes that there are so few people who could do the job, that they must be worth a lot of money. Simlarly, in the teaching industry, there are a lot of people who are willing to take the pay. There are a lot of teachers who work part time, just for their chance to get into the union, because they know once they do, it's a job for life, with great benefits, and good hours.
Being from Canada, I always found the SATs to be an odd thing. You go through 12 years of schooling, getting graded the whole way along, and then the only thing that counts for getting into university is a test that takes a few hours. Seems like a bad system. It's prime target for cheating, first of all. A bad student could hire someone to take the test for them. I'm sure they check IDs and stuff, but I wouldn't go so far to say it hasn't been done, or isn't done on a regular basis. In Canada, they look at your marks from high school. There's a "university application centre" that handles the applications, and they know how different schools vary from other schools, and take that into account as well when processing the applications. It's a much better system. You get into university, not just based on a single test, but on your overall performance during high school.
I think the problem that the ISPs face is that they don't want to charge grandma for the amount she is using. If you look at the way electricity is charged, strictly by usage, then the internet providers would stand to lose a lot of money if they could only charge people for what they used. While there are a lot of techies like us who download 100 GB per month, there are 100 grandmas and other similar people who only use 10 MB a month, because all they do is check their email, and the weather. I think that if things ever switched to truly usage based, that the people downloading a lot would curb their usage, so they could afford their bill, and a large chunk of people would be left paying something like $2 a month, because truly, that's all the data they use. I think the internet providers are trying to keep it the way it is, so that they can continue to charge all the low volume users $30 a month, even though they don't use anywhere close to that volume.
I could really see DRM working with eBook readers too. Have it connect via WiFi, and only to sites signed by the distributor of the device (like Amazon). Have the electronics encased in epoxy, so that adding a mod chip or modifying the hardware is next to impossible. Don't have the ability to plug anything in except a power cord. Then, you have a device which the end user cannot modify without big risk of completely destroying the device, and the only way to get content on it is to pay the person who originally sold you the device in the first place. Will it happen? Will people buy a device like this? Those are yet to be seen. But you could get some pretty effective DRM on a device that only connected to signed servers, and with hardware that couldn't easily be modified by end users. For extra protection, make the actual electronics smaller than the block of epoxy, and randomize the position of the board within the epoxy block so that you would have to xray the device to figure out where to drill into it.
I think Cory Doctorow said it first. The problem for most authors is not piracy, but obscurity. That is to say, if nobody has ever heard of you, or read your book, very few people will buy it. On the other hand, if you can get your book into the hands of people, and get them reading it, and it is good, then people will buy it. Cory Doctorow offers all his books online for free, in a multitude of formats, released at the same time as the hardcover version. He still sells quite a few copies of his books.
The Kindle is already $139. And it's not like computers where the device has to get faster and faster every generation. If they keep the technology at around the same level, they should be able to get the price down to around $50. Once that happens, everybody (in the western world) will have an eBook reader. They could even remove WiFi and put in a USB cable if they wanted to really cut down on the price. If they don't cut the price, some other manufacturer will produce a $50 eBook reader. It's only a matter of a couple years before these things get really cheap.
So Western Digital has 3 offerings, and isn't even easy to find on Newegg, as you have to go to SSD category, look at the list of Manufacturers, and then click on a link to see all the tiny manufacturers that don't even matter. It also has much lower performance than all the other drives. It only has 170 MB/s write speed, whereas most of the competition is up around 270 MB/s. And the Seagate drive can't even be found on NewEgg, and clicking on the "Comparison Shop" link on the site you did link to just goes to a dead end. After a little searching, I couldn't even find an english site to buy the thing on. Although you could probably supply me with a link, it doesn't matter, because for the most part they are unavailable at all the major retailers, so people won't buy them. So, while they do have SSDs, their offerings are terrible, and they are way behind the times. They need to play catch up with all the other manufacturers in a big way if they want to compete in this market.
Yes, those markets have been completely decimated by other storage solutions. Sure some floppy disks are sold, but the number of disks has taken a drastic hit in recent years. I imagine the same is true for tapes. People will still buy hard drives for many years to come, but if the only thing you sell are spinning disk hard drives, like Western Digital and Seagate, then you should be really worried, because while the market won't dry up over night, over the next 5 years, the market is going to diminish.
My write speed is usually limited by the fact that some large memory program gets swapped out to disk, and needs to get swapped back in. Or Some other app that has nothing to do with what I really want to get done decides to start thrashing the hard drive. If all everyone ever needed was to play mp3s, or watch a video, without doing anything else, we wouldn't need solid state drives. But once you start doing stuff that's quite intense on your drive, you start to realize why it would be nice to have a drive that can read faster for all your data. Once SSDs get up to around 2TB, people won't care about how large hard drives are. Because for the most part, SSDs will be big enough, and most people don't want to shell out and buy 2 drives.