The best thing out there, designed specifically to address your concern, is the XO laptop by the laptop.org people for their "One Laptop Per Child" campaign
The XO laptop is molded in the day-go colors and toy-like shapes that appeals to very young kids. The third-world education minister that was XO's prime market knew from the beginning that it wasn't a product for the middle school and beyond.
I assign papers that must be typed, I have papers turned in online, and I plan to freely refer to texts, videos, and other resources that are available online. This gives an extra disadvantage to students that may be from the poorer end of the strata, and also means extra inefficiency for me, as I have to make allowances for students who don't have a computer available at home.
In other words, you've build your entire course around the experience and resources of the middle class student and what is convenient for you. You are looking for a quick. cheap, feel-good, solution that ignores --- among other things --- the problem of Internet access for the poor and their lack of experience online.
hmmmm unusual, the punishment, estimate of damages/losses actually seem reasonable for a change
Add revenues: 280,000 pounds = $ 432,000 US.
12 million streams @ $5 ea. = $60 million worth of licensed streams.
---- and when a movie is being streamed, I am going to assume that the downloader is sitting there watching it.
That the excuses the geek trots out for his downloads from Pirate Bay don't make any sense here. What he wants is a free movie night and that is the end of it.
12 million streams is an unlicensed wholesale distribution. If the real or intangible property being distributed on such a scale was anything other than a movie, I'd be interested in knowing if the sentence would be so light.
People pay for Office because other people actually use Office at work
Microsoft makes using Office at home ridiculously affordable for those using it at work.
This is just one example:
The Microsoft Home Use Program (HUP) is available to Volume Licensing customers with active Software Assurance benefits. Eligible employees may purchase qualifying Office software for use at home through an assigned Program Code provided by their organization.
No one in FOSS has come close to integrating a credible alternative to Outlook into a "free" office suite.
The stand-alone desktop office suite is a product for the nineties. Both Google and Microsoft see the future as tightly integrated office systems with components built for the client, the server, and the web, and mobile is not an after-thought or also-ran.
If one is wearing sunscreen, then "summer will never come" and the body will remain in a state of disrepair. Which benefits the health insurance industry (it's not a "health care" industry).
The geek tends to think like an adolescent.
Although most babies born in 1900 did not live past age 50, life expectancy at birth now exceeds 83 years in Japan --- the current leader ----and is at least 81 years in several other countries.
It wasn't until the 20th century that mortality rates began to decline within the older ages. Research for more recent periods shows a surprising and continuing improvement in life expectancy among those aged 80 or above.
The progressive increase in survival in these oldest age groups was not anticipated by demographers, and it raises questions about how high the average life expectancy can realistically rise and about the potential length of the human lifespan. While some experts assume that life expectancy must be approaching an upper limit, data on life expectancies between 1840 and 2007 show a steady increase averaging about three months of life per year.
In 1925, your life and health insurance client will be dead in 25 years. In 2015, your 25 year old client stands a good chance of living another 60 years. Which do you think yields a better return?
Just what every project manager wants to hear, "Everybody go home we found some bones. We'll call you when you can come back".
''Take your time, this is kind of cool,'' said John Suster, Cornerstone's project superintendent after his team notified him of the find.
''It's a perfect example of how a mass grading operation can still be sensitive to historical and paleontological concerns. We stop everything or go grade another area on the site,' 'said Cornerstone CEO, Ure Kretowicz, who was apparently excited his company found the fossils at the project site.
My older sister was in her late 60s and not at all tech savvy when she first encountered Linux.
The feel-good Linux conversion story is as old as Slashdot and always takes the same form. The convert is a close relation --- I am tempted to say "much older" and "dependent." The geek provides some hand-holding and free technical support--- and the happy ending is assured.
You never hear about the day when dear old Dad butt-kicked his evangelist son out the door and down the steps after he trashed a perfectly functional Windows system install and $1200 worth of heavily customized small business apps and PC games without asking.
So far, Windows 10 has reminded me repeatedly that I should: (1) Consider getting Office 365! (2) Consider installing Skype! (3) Should collect and use Bing Rewards! (4) That I should look into getting an Xbox! (5) That I should buy things from the Microsoft Store!
I purchased an HP Stream 8 knowing it came with the option of a free year's subscription to MS Office Personal. Click the tile to begin the installation.
Right click on a tile to turn off the live display or unpin the tile from the start menu. Some apps can be uninstalled from the start menu in two right clicks. None of this is rocket science.
I am not particularly troubled when a postage stamp sized tile that appears only when I open the Star menu displays headline news, local weather or an add for a new game in the Windows Store. I've been a frequent visitor to the Store since I installed Windows 8.
at an age when most of us are worried about retaining our jobs, retirement benefits and health insurance.
You managed a federal government mail room and a movie theater and are now for all practical purposes unemployable in the only jobs you have ever known.
Out of habit, you retained a full set of account books and ledgers documenting every pirate transaction,
Your guilty plea on the federal criminal charge soon to be followed by a settlement with the rights agencies for the damages they can now claim and win in the federal civil courts.
Just donate some new scripts the Hollywood industries, they're plagued with sequels, reboots and lame, reworked, versions of anything that came out before 1986.
The nerd and the geek have been obsessively crafting replicas of the ST:TOS Enterprise bridge, costumes, make-up and props for their fan-fiction productions since the seventies. I don't expect to see anything new coming from that direction.
Today you can produce a decent quality show with a couple thousand dollars in equipment.
We return now to the real world of digital media.
TV literary agent Peter Micelli was forthcoming about how Netflix --- and other digital media upstarts --- do business with Hollywood during a panel discussion Friday at the UCLA Entertainment Symposium. He went so far as to specify how much was spent to produce some of the series CAA has sold to Netflix.
''The cheapest show is $3.8 million an episode,'' Micelli told a crowd of more than 500 lawyers in the entertainment business. '' 'House of Cards' started at $4.5 million and (executive producer David) Fincher took it way above that.''
''The next series is 'Hemlock Grove' and they're doing that for about $4 million an episode,'' he said. '' 'Orange is the New Black' is just under $4 million as well. They're huge budgets shows, theyâ(TM)re doing things in a huge way.''
{"Netflix will] pay a large percentage of the budget . They control it for four years exclusively and then can turn around to re-sell to a cable channel.''
''Amazon is looking at it on a smaller scale, with comedies, but spending a million dollars per episode.''
I have family pictures from 130 years ago in non-digital format.
The geek assumes that his children will know where to find his digital archieves, how to access them and how to read them. That they won't be won't be overwhelmed by the complexity of the systems he has left behind.
There is a very simple way to fix the orphan works problem and also let Disney have Mickey forever.
To the geek, "Steamboat Willie" is just a symbol.
Eight minutes of silent era sight gags with a synchronized sound track. What he wants is the use of the trademarked character designs for the Mouse, Minnie, Pete and the rest.
Instead require that copyrights be renewed every ten years with a one year grace period. First renewal is free but you have to fill out a form on-line. Second renewal is $1,000. Fee for each subsequent renewal doubles. This will quickly place all of the non-economically via works into the public domain.
Let's call this what it is:
Copyright protection for the mega-corp.
The distressed writer like H.P. Lovecraft loses control of his work early on. The mega-corp squirrels away everything that might be bankable now or in the future. This is how the system worked in the pulp fiction era of Black Mask and Weird Tales, in the newspaper comic strips in their most creative and productive years, and in the gold and silver ages of the comic book.
The renewal won't double every ten years.
If you believe that, I have shares in a bridge to Brooklyn I would like to sell you.
They will be capped at a number the major players can afford as the snaffle up new titles and old by the thousands.
I have a quad-copter with a 4MP camera, that is good enough to do roof / solar-panel inspections. It weighs less than one pound.
How high a roof?
If a strike from 5 lb drone falling 10 ft can be lethal, how safe is it to be caught standing unawares beneath your 1 lb drone as it falls 30 to 40 ft?
This person seems to be confusing the mechanic for the automotive engineer.
Do you hire an architect when all you want to do is add on a new room --- or simply chose from a stock set of plans and a local contractor who knows his job?
They're giving it away free and they pushed a little "install me" button on current Win 7 and Win 8 installs. I'm actually surprised it's not higher. This 5% should be seen as a failure not a success.
The roll-out was always meant to move forward in manageable stages.
It was clear from the beginning that distribution to low-end tablets and other systems with very limited resources would be delayed.
But this was also true if you put a 15 year old -- or a 10 year old -- in front of a 1987 Macintosh.
Given the unlikely chance that his family could afford one ---
In October 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh 512K, with quadruple the memory of the original, at a price of US $3,195.
$7,338, adjusted for inflation.
Apple released the Macintosh Plus on January 10, 1986, for a price of US$ 2,600.
$5,661, adjusted for inflation.
It offered one megabyte of RAM, easily expandable to four megabytes by the use of socketed RAM boards. It also featured a SCSI parallel interface, allowing up to seven peripherals---such as hard drives and scanners---to be attached to the machine. Its floppy drive was increased to an 800 kB capacity. The Mac Plus was an immediate success and remained in production, unchanged, until October 15, 1990; on sale for just over four years and ten months, it was the longest-lived Macintosh in Apple's history.
In September 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW, an application that allowed software developers to create software for Macintosh on Macintosh, rather than cross compiling from a Lisa.
This is another way of saying that the barriers to entry for an MS-DOS developer were low.
In August 1987, Apple unveiled HyperCard and MultiFinder, which added cooperative multitasking to the Macintosh. Apple began bundling both with every Macintosh.
Updated Motorola CPUs made a faster machine possible, and in 1987 Apple took advantage of the new Motorola technology and introduced the Macintosh II at $5500, powered by a 16 MHz Motorola 68020 processor.
$11,554. adjusted for inflation.
The primary improvement in the Macintosh II was Color QuickDraw in ROM, a color version of the graphics language which was the heart of the machine.
To understand the significance of Windows 95, you only have to sense the emotions inspired by the rediscovery of the videos which shipped with Win 95. Edie Brickell - Good Times
This was not Charlie Chaplin. This was not "1984."
But, for hundreds of millions of quite ordinary people, this was their introduction to multimedia, the PC and the Internet.
How can you be self-employed and not have contingency plans in place for the times when you may forced off-line by illness, accident or other special circumstances? Such as a wife and kid who are demanding more uninterrupted face time than your smartphone.
You mean an idiot? Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid...Emoji are stupid, and people who use them are stupid by extension....
The intellectual play of combining words and pictures is centuries if not millennia old and really needs no defense. Rebus
There are always multiple wars going on in numerous places in the world, constantly. Many of these are being interfered with, instigated, or supported by the US and its allies.
I've got news for you, kid.
It has always been like that and you don't need an imperial power to drive the action, all you need is a sense that you are losing ground against the other.
It wasn't so very long ago when the geek was drawn to to the creation of intricate typographic art (aka ASCII art) and emotions.
The central idea of using of letters, numbers and symbols, dots and dashes, bits and bytes, to send simple cartoons or more complex and engaging images over low bandwidth connections is, after all, at least as old as the telegraph.
But it seems forbidden to build a full, working, global vocabulary of images at higher resolution --- in both black & white and color --- and drawing on sources from outside the geek community. The western geek community and the US, specifically.
What is it about the geek that compels him to bury his most interesting projects somewhere south of the The Ark of the Covenant? Never leaving behind the faintest clew to what it does or where it might be found.
Traditionally, the most common dowsing rod is a forked (Y-shaped) branch from a tree or bush. The dowser then walks slowly over the places where he suspects the target (for example, minerals or water) may be, and the dowsing rod dips, inclines or twitches when a discovery is made. This method is sometimes known as "willow witching".
Slashdot Mirror
No. The real solution is to lower the birthrate and eventually reduce the world population. Shifting money around wouldn't solve anything.
The only proven way to reduce the birth rate is economic development and that demands a substantial investment of time and money. Graph of Total Fertility Rate vs. GDP per capita of the corresponding country, 2009
The best thing out there, designed specifically to address your concern, is the XO laptop by the laptop.org people for their "One Laptop Per Child" campaign
The XO laptop is molded in the day-go colors and toy-like shapes that appeals to very young kids. The third-world education minister that was XO's prime market knew from the beginning that it wasn't a product for the middle school and beyond.
I assign papers that must be typed, I have papers turned in online, and I plan to freely refer to texts, videos, and other resources that are available online. This gives an extra disadvantage to students that may be from the poorer end of the strata, and also means extra inefficiency for me, as I have to make allowances for students who don't have a computer available at home.
In other words, you've build your entire course around the experience and resources of the middle class student and what is convenient for you. You are looking for a quick. cheap, feel-good, solution that ignores --- among other things --- the problem of Internet access for the poor and their lack of experience online.
hmmmm unusual, the punishment, estimate of damages/losses actually seem reasonable for a change
Add revenues: 280,000 pounds = $ 432,000 US.
12 million streams @ $5 ea. = $60 million worth of licensed streams.
---- and when a movie is being streamed, I am going to assume that the downloader is sitting there watching it.
That the excuses the geek trots out for his downloads from Pirate Bay don't make any sense here. What he wants is a free movie night and that is the end of it.
12 million streams is an unlicensed wholesale distribution. If the real or intangible property being distributed on such a scale was anything other than a movie, I'd be interested in knowing if the sentence would be so light.
People pay for Office because other people actually use Office at work
Microsoft makes using Office at home ridiculously affordable for those using it at work.
This is just one example:
The Microsoft Home Use Program (HUP) is available to Volume Licensing customers with active Software Assurance benefits. Eligible employees may purchase qualifying Office software for use at home through an assigned Program Code provided by their organization.
Home Use Program
The Power of Office in Your Home Only $9.95
No one in FOSS has come close to integrating a credible alternative to Outlook into a "free" office suite.
The stand-alone desktop office suite is a product for the nineties. Both Google and Microsoft see the future as tightly integrated office systems with components built for the client, the server, and the web, and mobile is not an after-thought or also-ran.
If one is wearing sunscreen, then "summer will never come" and the body will remain in a state of disrepair. Which benefits the health insurance industry (it's not a "health care" industry).
The geek tends to think like an adolescent.
Although most babies born in 1900 did not live past age 50, life expectancy at birth now exceeds 83 years in Japan --- the current leader ----and is at least 81 years in several other countries.
It wasn't until the 20th century that mortality rates began to decline within the older ages. Research for more recent periods shows a surprising and continuing improvement in life expectancy among those aged 80 or above.
The progressive increase in survival in these oldest age groups was not anticipated by demographers, and it raises questions about how high the average life expectancy can realistically rise and about the potential length of the human lifespan. While some experts assume that life expectancy must be approaching an upper limit, data on life expectancies between 1840 and 2007 show a steady increase averaging about three months of life per year.
Global Health and Aging
In 1925, your life and health insurance client will be dead in 25 years. In 2015, your 25 year old client stands a good chance of living another 60 years. Which do you think yields a better return?
Just what every project manager wants to hear, "Everybody go home we found some bones. We'll call you when you can come back".
''Take your time, this is kind of cool,'' said John Suster, Cornerstone's project superintendent after his team notified him of the find.
''It's a perfect example of how a mass grading operation can still be sensitive to historical and paleontological concerns. We stop everything or go grade another area on the site,' 'said Cornerstone CEO, Ure Kretowicz, who was apparently excited his company found the fossils at the project site.
My older sister was in her late 60s and not at all tech savvy when she first encountered Linux.
The feel-good Linux conversion story is as old as Slashdot and always takes the same form. The convert is a close relation --- I am tempted to say "much older" and "dependent." The geek provides some hand-holding and free technical support--- and the happy ending is assured.
You never hear about the day when dear old Dad butt-kicked his evangelist son out the door and down the steps after he trashed a perfectly functional Windows system install and $1200 worth of heavily customized small business apps and PC games without asking.
So far, Windows 10 has reminded me repeatedly that I should: (1) Consider getting Office 365! (2) Consider installing Skype! (3) Should collect and use Bing Rewards! (4) That I should look into getting an Xbox! (5) That I should buy things from the Microsoft Store!
I purchased an HP Stream 8 knowing it came with the option of a free year's subscription to MS Office Personal. Click the tile to begin the installation.
Right click on a tile to turn off the live display or unpin the tile from the start menu. Some apps can be uninstalled from the start menu in two right clicks. None of this is rocket science.
I am not particularly troubled when a postage stamp sized tile that appears only when I open the Star menu displays headline news, local weather or an add for a new game in the Windows Store. I've been a frequent visitor to the Store since I installed Windows 8.
You are 57 years old ---
at an age when most of us are worried about retaining our jobs, retirement benefits and health insurance.
You managed a federal government mail room and a movie theater and are now for all practical purposes unemployable in the only jobs you have ever known.
Out of habit, you retained a full set of account books and ledgers documenting every pirate transaction,
Your guilty plea on the federal criminal charge soon to be followed by a settlement with the rights agencies for the damages they can now claim and win in the federal civil courts.
Just donate some new scripts the Hollywood industries, they're plagued with sequels, reboots and lame, reworked, versions of anything that came out before 1986.
The nerd and the geek have been obsessively crafting replicas of the ST:TOS Enterprise bridge, costumes, make-up and props for their fan-fiction productions since the seventies. I don't expect to see anything new coming from that direction.
Today you can produce a decent quality show with a couple thousand dollars in equipment.
We return now to the real world of digital media.
TV literary agent Peter Micelli was forthcoming about how Netflix --- and other digital media upstarts --- do business with Hollywood during a panel discussion Friday at the UCLA Entertainment Symposium. He went so far as to specify how much was spent to produce some of the series CAA has sold to Netflix.
''The cheapest show is $3.8 million an episode,'' Micelli told a crowd of more than 500 lawyers in the entertainment business. '' 'House of Cards' started at $4.5 million and (executive producer David) Fincher took it way above that.''
''The next series is 'Hemlock Grove' and they're doing that for about $4 million an episode,'' he said. '' 'Orange is the New Black' is just under $4 million as well. They're huge budgets shows, theyâ(TM)re doing things in a huge way.''
{"Netflix will] pay a large percentage of the budget . They control it for four years exclusively and then can turn around to re-sell to a cable channel.''
''Amazon is looking at it on a smaller scale, with comedies, but spending a million dollars per episode.''
Netflix Series Spending Revealed [March 8 2013]
The geek thinks consumer grade video tech and maybe some OS solutions for F/X, audio and editing.
The pro thinks about the time, material resources, talent, imagination and experience that he will need across the board.
I have family pictures from 130 years ago in non-digital format.
The geek assumes that his children will know where to find his digital archieves, how to access them and how to read them. That they won't be won't be overwhelmed by the complexity of the systems he has left behind.
There is a very simple way to fix the orphan works problem and also let Disney have Mickey forever.
To the geek, "Steamboat Willie" is just a symbol.
Eight minutes of silent era sight gags with a synchronized sound track. What he wants is the use of the trademarked character designs for the Mouse, Minnie, Pete and the rest.
Instead require that copyrights be renewed every ten years with a one year grace period. First renewal is free but you have to fill out a form on-line. Second renewal is $1,000. Fee for each subsequent renewal doubles. This will quickly place all of the non-economically via works into the public domain.
Let's call this what it is:
Copyright protection for the mega-corp.
The distressed writer like H.P. Lovecraft loses control of his work early on. The mega-corp squirrels away everything that might be bankable now or in the future. This is how the system worked in the pulp fiction era of Black Mask and Weird Tales, in the newspaper comic strips in their most creative and productive years, and in the gold and silver ages of the comic book.
The renewal won't double every ten years.
If you believe that, I have shares in a bridge to Brooklyn I would like to sell you.
They will be capped at a number the major players can afford as the snaffle up new titles and old by the thousands.
I have a quad-copter with a 4MP camera, that is good enough to do roof / solar-panel inspections. It weighs less than one pound.
How high a roof?
If a strike from 5 lb drone falling 10 ft can be lethal, how safe is it to be caught standing unawares beneath your 1 lb drone as it falls 30 to 40 ft?
This person seems to be confusing the mechanic for the automotive engineer.
Do you hire an architect when all you want to do is add on a new room --- or simply chose from a stock set of plans and a local contractor who knows his job?
They're giving it away free and they pushed a little "install me" button on current Win 7 and Win 8 installs. I'm actually surprised it's not higher. This 5% should be seen as a failure not a success.
The roll-out was always meant to move forward in manageable stages.
It was clear from the beginning that distribution to low-end tablets and other systems with very limited resources would be delayed.
Actually, the common saying... was "Windows 95 sucks less."
No it wasn't.
The geek is only deluding himself when he claims that Win 95 wasn't one of the most successful and significant product launches in tech.
But this was also true if you put a 15 year old -- or a 10 year old -- in front of a 1987 Macintosh.
Given the unlikely chance that his family could afford one ---
In October 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh 512K, with quadruple the memory of the original, at a price of US $3,195.
$7,338, adjusted for inflation.
Apple released the Macintosh Plus on January 10, 1986, for a price of US$ 2,600.
$5,661, adjusted for inflation.
It offered one megabyte of RAM, easily expandable to four megabytes by the use of socketed RAM boards. It also featured a SCSI parallel interface, allowing up to seven peripherals---such as hard drives and scanners---to be attached to the machine. Its floppy drive was increased to an 800 kB capacity. The Mac Plus was an immediate success and remained in production, unchanged, until October 15, 1990; on sale for just over four years and ten months, it was the longest-lived Macintosh in Apple's history.
In September 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW, an application that allowed software developers to create software for Macintosh on Macintosh, rather than cross compiling from a Lisa.
This is another way of saying that the barriers to entry for an MS-DOS developer were low.
In August 1987, Apple unveiled HyperCard and MultiFinder, which added cooperative multitasking to the Macintosh. Apple began bundling both with every Macintosh.
Updated Motorola CPUs made a faster machine possible, and in 1987 Apple took advantage of the new Motorola technology and introduced the Macintosh II at $5500, powered by a 16 MHz Motorola 68020 processor.
$11,554. adjusted for inflation.
The primary improvement in the Macintosh II was Color QuickDraw in ROM, a color version of the graphics language which was the heart of the machine.
Macintosh. CPI Inflation Calculator
To understand the significance of Windows 95, you only have to sense the emotions inspired by the rediscovery of the videos which shipped with Win 95. Edie Brickell - Good Times
This was not Charlie Chaplin. This was not "1984."
But, for hundreds of millions of quite ordinary people, this was their introduction to multimedia, the PC and the Internet.
Step 1: Stop reading Slashdot
That isn't going to be a problem much longer unless DICE finds a buyer.
I go camping to get away from that shit.
Good lord, yes.
How can you be self-employed and not have contingency plans in place for the times when you may forced off-line by illness, accident or other special circumstances? Such as a wife and kid who are demanding more uninterrupted face time than your smartphone.
You mean an idiot? Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid...Emoji are stupid, and people who use them are stupid by extension....
The intellectual play of combining words and pictures is centuries if not millennia old and really needs no defense. Rebus
There are always multiple wars going on in numerous places in the world, constantly. Many of these are being interfered with, instigated, or supported by the US and its allies.
I've got news for you, kid.
It has always been like that and you don't need an imperial power to drive the action, all you need is a sense that you are losing ground against the other.
What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
It wasn't so very long ago when the geek was drawn to to the creation of intricate typographic art (aka ASCII art) and emotions.
The central idea of using of letters, numbers and symbols, dots and dashes, bits and bytes, to send simple cartoons or more complex and engaging images over low bandwidth connections is, after all, at least as old as the telegraph.
But it seems forbidden to build a full, working, global vocabulary of images at higher resolution --- in both black & white and color --- and drawing on sources from outside the geek community. The western geek community and the US, specifically.
Check out "nyuzi.org". It came out before MIAOW.
What is it about the geek that compels him to bury his most interesting projects somewhere south of the The Ark of the Covenant? Never leaving behind the faintest clew to what it does or where it might be found.
Traditionally, the most common dowsing rod is a forked (Y-shaped) branch from a tree or bush. The dowser then walks slowly over the places where he suspects the target (for example, minerals or water) may be, and the dowsing rod dips, inclines or twitches when a discovery is made. This method is sometimes known as "willow witching".