Posts to the true believers does nothing but reinforce the suspicion that your eyes and ears are closed to dissenting voices.
There is better spy tech out there than Google Glass. That isn't a good argument for making the use of concealed recording devices socially acceptable. You shouldn't be arguing that short battery life makes Glass harmless, Batteries can be swapped in and out, as many as you can carry.
Are you seriously trying to argue the merit of a film based on ticket sales? Or about which hole some character in the film likes to fuck?
You haven't a clue about the content or themes of "Frozen," "The Hunger Games" trilogy or "Gravity."
"The Art of Frozen," out of print, and in fine condition, sells at the rare book price of $100. The sheet music for "Frozen" is #49 in book sales at Amazon, #1 in all categories of music book sales at Amazon, Frozen: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack
3D, remember, is a video technology the geek fondly likes to think is defunct.
We are not talking about throwaways here --- we are talking products that a film's core audience consider an essential buy-in --- and it happens damn rarely on this scale.
The "merit" of the film isn't essential to my argument.
That a film released on Thanksgiving Day remains a top ten box office draw in the states past St. Patrick's Day is. That "Frozen" was successfully translated into at least 43 languages and a hit in every one of them means you have a product with a global reach and appeal.
That will have the producer of the AAA game or low-budget Indie sitting up and listening,
Sound more like feminist victimization rehashed...
Sounds to me more like game developers are thinking long and hard about what is happening elsewhere in the entertainment industry.
["Frozen"] took the No. 13 spot on the all-time worldwide box office list this week, passing "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" and "Jurassic Park."
It's been a big week for "Frozen," which has been in the top ten at the box office in the U.S. and Canada for 17 weeks.
On Wednesday, Disney said that "Frozen" had sold 3.2 million DVD and Blu-Rays on Tuesday, becoming one of the biggest home entertainment debuts in recent years.
Disney chairman and chief executive Robert Iger told shareholders Tuesday that "Frozen" was on pace to be the most successful animated film in history, surpassing "Toy Story 3," which ranks No. 11 on the all-time list with $1.063 billion.
And thanks to its ubiquitous anthem "Let it Go," the soundtrack has sold over 1.4 million albums in the U.S. It has also been streamed more than 100 million times on Spotify.
In Blu-Ray sales at Amazon, "Frozen" is #1, "Catching Fire" #2 and "Gravity" in 3D #10.
The point being that ditching gender stereotypes in mass media can have a very big financial payoff. If it means ditching the foul mouthed, misogynistic and eternally adolescent male audience that perpetuates these stereotypes, that can be a price worth paying.
There was never a chance of giving away the meters to an NPO, trade school, or public school. The hardware would inevitably be as suspect as the look-alike case. I am not convinced that there is a place for the $15 multimeter even in the makerbot movement.
Any shorthand description of Fluke and its product lines will read like corporate PR. but that can't be helped.
Fluke, a subsidiary of Danaher (maker of Craftsman tools), makes handheld electronic test tools used by electricians, HVAC technicians, and engineers to install, maintain, and service electrical and electronic equipment. Its multimeters, oscilloscopes, and other devices measure current, voltage resistance, frequency, pressure, temperature, and air quality. It also makes calibrators and calibration software, waveform generators, and power harmonics meters. Its Fluke Biomedical unit makes patient simulators, diagnostic imaging, and radiation safety products, among others.
The cheapest Fluke multimeter I could find online sells for about $150 and is CAT III rated for 600 volts.
This category refers to measurements on hard-wired equipment in fixed installations, distribution boards, and circuit breakers. Other examples are wiring, including cables, bus bars, junction boxes, switches, socket outlets in the fixed installation, and stationary motors with permanent connections to fixed installations.
OLPC's goal was to induce the creation of computers affordable in the third-world and usable in an environment where basic utilities are not available.
OLPC was a product of the MIT Media Lab and presented to the third world education minister as a take-it-or-leave it package deal in which the laptop hardware was only one component.
The minister was expected to buy big as an act of faith.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of units. No trial deployments, no building out slowly.
The constructivist philosophy of education of OLPC's promoters was gospel truth and not to be questioned. Here at last was a promise fulfilled ---- mass education without the need for teachers.
With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages --- simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens.
The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.
[Reading deep into the comments here, these Ethiopian kids may not have been as pristinely illiterate in the use of words or images as Negroponte would like to have us think.]
Open Source or the Sugar UI was not open to question either.
The problem from the education minister's point of view becomes how to transition his kids to traditional desktop environments and programs --- particularly when the money may not be there to purchase and support computers which are usable in the primary grades only.
Confirmed distribution of the OLPC laptop outside of Mexico, Central and South America are all but non-existent. Deployment of XO laptops
That doesn't make a good case for a culturally-independent constructivist philosophy of education --- at the core of which is the notion that kids in the primary grades can teach each other and that adults are redundant. Which lead inevitably to fire-and-forget "parachute drop" deployments.
OLPC hardware was never as robust as claimed.
Several defects in OLPC XO-1 hardware have emerged in the field, and laptop repair is often neglected by students or their families (who are responsible for maintenance) due to the relatively high cost of some components (such as displays).
The Sugar interface has been difficult for teachers to learn, and the mesh networking feature in the OLPC XO-1 was buggy and went mostly unused in the field.
The OLPC XO-1 hardware lacks connectivity to external monitors or projectors, and teachers are not provided with software for remote assessment. As a result, students are unable to present their work to the whole class, and teachers must also assess students' work from the individual laptops. Teachers often find it difficult to use the keyboard and screen, which were designed with student use in mind.
Rwanda provides an interesting example of the conflict between the theory and reality of OLPC.
Rwanda had a total primary school population of just over 2.3 million as of 2011. As of September 2012, exactly four years after the launch, according to the Rwanda Education Board, there were about 115,000 computers in primary schools across the country.
The aim is to have half a million of the laptops distributed, and at least one million by 2017
At least one school in each of the 416 sectors in Rwanda is expected to get the laptops. A sector is the equivalent of a sub-district or division in Kenya.
Rwanda's situation is no different from much of East Africa. Uptake for the laptops could be better, except for two main reasons.
The first major reason is inadequate infrastructure, especially electricity supply to schools. The OLPC laptops are mainly operated using electricity, while many schools are yet to be connected to the national grid. Efforts are, however, under way to install solar electricity in as many schools are possible.
The second is inadequate capacity, in terms of numbers and computer literacy, of the primary school teachers. As of May 2012, the OLPC Project had trained just over 1,500 teachers and heads of school --- not only in computer literacy, but in troubleshooting hardware, software and applications.
There is good reason for such technical training of the teachers. Computers often tend to break down for one reason or another, especially in the hands of children. Giving the teachers the ability to diagnose what the problem is likely to be, and how to fix it, is crucial.
Caution has already been urged before the laptop project is implemented in Kenya. It has already been pointed out that the imminent laptop project may not be viable without first addressing teachers' computer literacy, including the woefully inadequate school infrastructure in much of the country, and ensuring the computers are loaded with relevant curriculum.
This includes addressing issues of poverty that tend to hinder access to education. A significant number of school-going children in Kenya lack basic needs, including food and clothes, which has raised questions of feasibility for such an ambitious project.
Seriously, I was sick of his guilt-peddling bullshit decades ago.
It isn't a question of guilt. It is a question of demographics.
In the future the biggest demographic change in the U.S. is the rise of the majority-minority, an odd concept that shows that we still haven't gotten over the ides that white males are the norm and everyone else is a stranger. To thrive domestically as well as globally, being multicultural is essential.
The geek would probably agree that the Republican Party is slowly losing ground as a national force because it is too white, male, inbred and insular. He probably knows that the conflict between the poor and middle class of San Francisco runs deeper than gentrification,
But he refuses to draw any larger conclusions from the evidence which surrounds him.
It can be easily argued that in the modern era, ignorance of the law MUST be allowed as a valid defense.
The laws which lie at the core of your own trade or profession are something you should be expected to know. It is no secret to the OEM manufacturer or to anyone in the import/export trade that counterfeit goods are subject to seizure at the US border.
"Ignorance of the law" seems like a plausible defense only in the absence of any context ----which is why the geek's pleas of ignorance of the law never quite ring true,
There currently is no system in place for them to have been able to vet the order beforehand for possible trademark violations
Google returns 2,380,000 hits for "Fluke Multimeter." The Wikipedia posts a color photo of a Fluke design, which is instantly recognizable from twenty feet off. Multimeter As an earlier poster remarked, you can't be in this business and not know Fluke.
GPL Sounds reasonable. In order to receive organs from other donors, you must also consent to be a donor.
The successful donor organ will most likely come from the fit young adult who dies in a traffic accident.
Meaning a kid in his late teens or early twenties who still considers himself immortal. You won't get his consent unless you require if to obtain a driver's license, motor vehicle permit or something else he wants badly enough to sit down long enough to complete the necessary paperwork. .
The driver in this picture looks as tense and cramped as if he were sandwiched on a high-speed expressway between two triple length truck trailers. I'm six foot tall and getting in and out of this low-rider doesn't promise to be any great joy either.
I need an all-weather commuter car for upstate New York, not a $24K scooter designed for the photo-op in San Francisco,
Men can be very rough to their coworkers and subordinates.
This doesn't say a hell of a lot for the traditional male dominant corporate culture, Even in professional sports there has been a push-back against this kind of adolescent behavior.
The last time I landed in Las Vegas I was stunned at how much of the us is completely and totally unoccupied.
Las Vegas is an adult-oriented theme park in the desert 270 miles northeast of Los Angeles and 100 miles east of Death Valley. Hoover Dam made the modern city possible. Casino gambling made it profitable.
Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college, and I don't think anybody would say he made a mistake
Zuckerberg may not have graduated from Harvard, but he is the product of a traditional liberal arts education:
He transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy in his junior year in high school, where he won prizes in science (math, astronomy and physics) and classical studies. On his college application, Zuckerberg claimed that he could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. He was captain of the fencing team. In college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad. Napster co-founder Sean Parker, a close friend, notes that Zuckerberg was "really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff", recalling how he once quoted lines from the Roman epic poem Aeneid, by Virgil, during a Facebook product conference.
If a customer needs instant courier delivery of a prescription drug, chances are good the drug will be a controlled substance, and the customer elderly, disabled or just out of hospital --- simply answering the door is about all you can legitimately ask of them.
Commercial software represents about 1% of our economy
and your source for this number is to be found where?
Commercial software is usually tightly integrated into the workflow of a business. The clerical working using MS Office, the architect or engineer running AutoCAD. The contribution of these programs to the economy can't be measured without looking at the productivity of their users and the quality of their work.
The bridge becomes a national landmark, it is structurally sound, completed on time and under budget.
Try buying Spinozas Philosophy in paper, it's expensive but you can get it at Gutenberg for free.
Spinoza in a modern English translation with a proper introduction and notes will save the reader time and pain. I have tried reading the classics in Gutenberg, but they always send me back to Penguin Books and other sources.
Many of the most successful countries with test results, have a school system where only the best continue on to more schooling the rest go to vocational schools.
I am not sure what a "vocational school" is in a post-industrial environment. I am not even sure any more what "best" means in this context.
Slashdot Mirror
Posts to the true believers does nothing but reinforce the suspicion that your eyes and ears are closed to dissenting voices.
There is better spy tech out there than Google Glass. That isn't a good argument for making the use of concealed recording devices socially acceptable. You shouldn't be arguing that short battery life makes Glass harmless, Batteries can be swapped in and out, as many as you can carry.
Are you seriously trying to argue the merit of a film based on ticket sales? Or about which hole some character in the film likes to fuck?
You haven't a clue about the content or themes of "Frozen," "The Hunger Games" trilogy or "Gravity."
"The Art of Frozen," out of print, and in fine condition, sells at the rare book price of $100. The sheet music for "Frozen" is #49 in book sales at Amazon, #1 in all categories of music book sales at Amazon, Frozen: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack
"Frozen" in 3D is #7 in DVD and Blu-Ray sales at Amazon.co.uk. Frozen [Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray] [Region Free]
3D, remember, is a video technology the geek fondly likes to think is defunct.
We are not talking about throwaways here --- we are talking products that a film's core audience consider an essential buy-in --- and it happens damn rarely on this scale.
The "merit" of the film isn't essential to my argument.
That a film released on Thanksgiving Day remains a top ten box office draw in the states past St. Patrick's Day is. That "Frozen" was successfully translated into at least 43 languages and a hit in every one of them means you have a product with a global reach and appeal.
That will have the producer of the AAA game or low-budget Indie sitting up and listening,
But if you insist on some measure of "quality," the Wikipedia lists some 59 wins and 94 nominations to date for "Frozen" in all categories. List of accolades received by Frozen (2013 film)
Sound more like feminist victimization rehashed...
Sounds to me more like game developers are thinking long and hard about what is happening elsewhere in the entertainment industry.
["Frozen"] took the No. 13 spot on the all-time worldwide box office list this week, passing "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" and "Jurassic Park."
It's been a big week for "Frozen," which has been in the top ten at the box office in the U.S. and Canada for 17 weeks.
On Wednesday, Disney said that "Frozen" had sold 3.2 million DVD and Blu-Rays on Tuesday, becoming one of the biggest home entertainment debuts in recent years.
Disney chairman and chief executive Robert Iger told shareholders Tuesday that "Frozen" was on pace to be the most successful animated film in history, surpassing "Toy Story 3," which ranks No. 11 on the all-time list with $1.063 billion.
And thanks to its ubiquitous anthem "Let it Go," the soundtrack has sold over 1.4 million albums in the U.S. It has also been streamed more than 100 million times on Spotify.
'Frozen' surpasses 'Jurassic Park' on all-time box office list
In Blu-Ray sales at Amazon, "Frozen" is #1, "Catching Fire" #2 and "Gravity" in 3D #10.
The point being that ditching gender stereotypes in mass media can have a very big financial payoff. If it means ditching the foul mouthed, misogynistic and eternally adolescent male audience that perpetuates these stereotypes, that can be a price worth paying.
There was never a chance of giving away the meters to an NPO, trade school, or public school. The hardware would inevitably be as suspect as the look-alike case. I am not convinced that there is a place for the $15 multimeter even in the makerbot movement.
Any shorthand description of Fluke and its product lines will read like corporate PR. but that can't be helped.
Fluke, a subsidiary of Danaher (maker of Craftsman tools), makes handheld electronic test tools used by electricians, HVAC technicians, and engineers to install, maintain, and service electrical and electronic equipment. Its multimeters, oscilloscopes, and other devices measure current, voltage resistance, frequency, pressure, temperature, and air quality. It also makes calibrators and calibration software, waveform generators, and power harmonics meters. Its Fluke Biomedical unit makes patient simulators, diagnostic imaging, and radiation safety products, among others.
Fluke Corporation Company Profile
The cheapest Fluke multimeter I could find online sells for about $150 and is CAT III rated for 600 volts.
This category refers to measurements on hard-wired equipment in fixed installations, distribution boards, and circuit breakers. Other examples are wiring, including cables, bus bars, junction boxes, switches, socket outlets in the fixed installation, and stationary motors with permanent connections to fixed installations.
What are Measurement Categories (CAT I, CAT II, etc...)?
OLPC's goal was to induce the creation of computers affordable in the third-world and usable in an environment where basic utilities are not available.
OLPC was a product of the MIT Media Lab and presented to the third world education minister as a take-it-or-leave it package deal in which the laptop hardware was only one component.
The minister was expected to buy big as an act of faith.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of units. No trial deployments, no building out slowly.
The constructivist philosophy of education of OLPC's promoters was gospel truth and not to be questioned. Here at last was a promise fulfilled ---- mass education without the need for teachers.
With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages --- simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens.
The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.
Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves
[Reading deep into the comments here, these Ethiopian kids may not have been as pristinely illiterate in the use of words or images as Negroponte would like to have us think.]
Open Source or the Sugar UI was not open to question either.
The problem from the education minister's point of view becomes how to transition his kids to traditional desktop environments and programs --- particularly when the money may not be there to purchase and support computers which are usable in the primary grades only.
Confirmed distribution of the OLPC laptop outside of Mexico, Central and South America are all but non-existent. Deployment of XO laptops
That doesn't make a good case for a culturally-independent constructivist philosophy of education --- at the core of which is the notion that kids in the primary grades can teach each other and that adults are redundant. Which lead inevitably to fire-and-forget "parachute drop" deployments.
OLPC hardware was never as robust as claimed.
Several defects in OLPC XO-1 hardware have emerged in the field, and laptop repair is often neglected by students or their families (who are responsible for maintenance) due to the relatively high cost of some components (such as displays).
The Sugar interface has been difficult for teachers to learn, and the mesh networking feature in the OLPC XO-1 was buggy and went mostly unused in the field.
The OLPC XO-1 hardware lacks connectivity to external monitors or projectors, and teachers are not provided with software for remote assessment. As a result, students are unable to present their work to the whole class, and teachers must also assess students' work from the individual laptops. Teachers often find it difficult to use the keyboard and screen, which were designed with student use in mind.
Hardware and software bugs
Rwanda provides an interesting example of the conflict between the theory and reality of OLPC.
Rwanda had a total primary school population of just over 2.3 million as of 2011. As of September 2012, exactly four years after the launch, according to the Rwanda Education Board, there were about 115,000 computers in primary schools across the country.
The aim is to have half a million of the laptops distributed, and at least one million by 2017
At least one school in each of the 416 sectors in Rwanda is expected to get the laptops. A sector is the equivalent of a sub-district or division in Kenya.
Rwanda's situation is no different from much of East Africa. Uptake for the laptops could be better, except for two main reasons.
The first major reason is inadequate infrastructure, especially electricity supply to schools. The OLPC laptops are mainly operated using electricity, while many schools are yet to be connected to the national grid. Efforts are, however, under way to install solar electricity in as many schools are possible.
The second is inadequate capacity, in terms of numbers and computer literacy, of the primary school teachers. As of May 2012, the OLPC Project had trained just over 1,500 teachers and heads of school --- not only in computer literacy, but in troubleshooting hardware, software and applications.
There is good reason for such technical training of the teachers. Computers often tend to break down for one reason or another, especially in the hands of children. Giving the teachers the ability to diagnose what the problem is likely to be, and how to fix it, is crucial.
Caution has already been urged before the laptop project is implemented in Kenya. It has already been pointed out that the imminent laptop project may not be viable without first addressing teachers' computer literacy, including the woefully inadequate school infrastructure in much of the country, and ensuring the computers are loaded with relevant curriculum.
This includes addressing issues of poverty that tend to hinder access to education. A significant number of school-going children in Kenya lack basic needs, including food and clothes, which has raised questions of feasibility for such an ambitious project.
What Kenya could learn from Rwanda on One Laptop per Child
movies consisting of interviews and recollections, and their non-linear construction, have been done before.
But how many have succeeded at the box office?
Seriously, I was sick of his guilt-peddling bullshit decades ago.
It isn't a question of guilt. It is a question of demographics.
In the future the biggest demographic change in the U.S. is the rise of the majority-minority, an odd concept that shows that we still haven't gotten over the ides that white males are the norm and everyone else is a stranger.
To thrive domestically as well as globally, being multicultural is essential.
How Will Changing Demographics in the U.S, Influence Business In the Coming Decade?
The geek would probably agree that the Republican Party is slowly losing ground as a national force because it is too white, male, inbred and insular. He probably knows that the conflict between the poor and middle class of San Francisco runs deeper than gentrification,
But he refuses to draw any larger conclusions from the evidence which surrounds him.
It can be easily argued that in the modern era, ignorance of the law MUST be allowed as a valid defense.
The laws which lie at the core of your own trade or profession are something you should be expected to know. It is no secret to the OEM manufacturer or to anyone in the import/export trade that counterfeit goods are subject to seizure at the US border.
"Ignorance of the law" seems like a plausible defense only in the absence of any context ----which is why the geek's pleas of ignorance of the law never quite ring true,
Schools are struggling to find the funds to replace textbooks, let alone put their hands on some good hardware like this
Just because the case looks like the real thing doesn't mean the hardware is worth shit.
There currently is no system in place for them to have been able to vet the order beforehand for possible trademark violations
Google returns 2,380,000 hits for "Fluke Multimeter." The Wikipedia posts a color photo of a Fluke design, which is instantly recognizable from twenty feet off. Multimeter As an earlier poster remarked, you can't be in this business and not know Fluke.
GPL Sounds reasonable. In order to receive organs from other donors, you must also consent to be a donor.
The successful donor organ will most likely come from the fit young adult who dies in a traffic accident.
Meaning a kid in his late teens or early twenties who still considers himself immortal. You won't get his consent unless you require if to obtain a driver's license, motor vehicle permit or something else he wants badly enough to sit down long enough to complete the necessary paperwork. .
The driver in this picture looks as tense and cramped as if he were sandwiched on a high-speed expressway between two triple length truck trailers. I'm six foot tall and getting in and out of this low-rider doesn't promise to be any great joy either.
I need an all-weather commuter car for upstate New York, not a $24K scooter designed for the photo-op in San Francisco,
She sounds like a bitch on wheels with a jetpack strapped to her for good measure.
This woman was not an employee. Her abusive - dictatorial - power came solely from being the founder's wife ----
and the men who let her run riot,
I don't understand the clamour to define this as sexism when 90% of the alleged harassment was from the founder's wife.
How does the wife of the founder become a presence and power in the workplace without the support of her husband?
Men can be very rough to their coworkers and subordinates.
This doesn't say a hell of a lot for the traditional male dominant corporate culture, Even in professional sports there has been a push-back against this kind of adolescent behavior.
Her problem wasn't sexism, it was with the founder's wife (so she says).
How often does a founder or CEO's wife become a power in the workplace?
How often in the last five or ten years have you met and spoken to the spouses of the senior execs in your own company?
The last time I landed in Las Vegas I was stunned at how much of the us is completely and totally unoccupied.
Las Vegas is an adult-oriented theme park in the desert 270 miles northeast of Los Angeles and 100 miles east of Death Valley. Hoover Dam made the modern city possible. Casino gambling made it profitable.
Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college, and I don't think anybody would say he made a mistake
Zuckerberg may not have graduated from Harvard, but he is the product of a traditional liberal arts education:
He transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy in his junior year in high school, where he won prizes in science (math, astronomy and physics) and classical studies. On his college application, Zuckerberg claimed that he could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. He was captain of the fencing team. In college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.
Napster co-founder Sean Parker, a close friend, notes that Zuckerberg was "really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff", recalling how he once quoted lines from the Roman epic poem Aeneid, by Virgil, during a Facebook product conference.
Mark Zuckerberg
If a customer needs instant courier delivery of a prescription drug, chances are good the drug will be a controlled substance, and the customer elderly, disabled or just out of hospital --- simply answering the door is about all you can legitimately ask of them.
Commercial software represents about 1% of our economy
and your source for this number is to be found where?
Commercial software is usually tightly integrated into the workflow of a business. The clerical working using MS Office, the architect or engineer running AutoCAD. The contribution of these programs to the economy can't be measured without looking at the productivity of their users and the quality of their work.
The bridge becomes a national landmark, it is structurally sound, completed on time and under budget.
Try buying Spinozas Philosophy in paper, it's expensive but you can get it at Gutenberg for free.
Spinoza in a modern English translation with a proper introduction and notes will save the reader time and pain. I have tried reading the classics in Gutenberg, but they always send me back to Penguin Books and other sources.
There are many more buyers for an early Frank Sinatra recording than there are for a copy of The Red Pony.
Not the best example. The Red Pony remains in print in hardcover, the Library of America, Penguin paperback, Kindle and audio book editions.
On my Windows 8.1 desktop, I can get VLC for free
In the world of Metro, I can get the same app for $3.99
I went out and successfully installed the free VLC Modern app through the Windows store while trying to make sense of your post.
Many of the most successful countries with test results, have a school system where only the best continue on to more schooling the rest go to vocational schools.
I am not sure what a "vocational school" is in a post-industrial environment. I am not even sure any more what "best" means in this context.