And this story is old. I swear I saw it at least a couple months ago.
...Also I would bet that Snapper is doomed in ten years anyway. Ongoing analysis and JIT manufacturing can save money but can't reverse the US$:yuan exchange rate--and this is the real race Snapper is (losing) in. The ratio of quality to crap sold in most consumer items is rather disenheartening, and professional principles keeps snobby customers happy and gets applause from the peanut gallery but won't usually keep the lights on.
I am operating on a health and investment theory I like to call "dumb money".
What it revolves around is the principal that anything that lots of unintelligent people like is probably both unhealty to do and horribly overpriced as well--and I should therefore invest in it, but not use it myself. One idiot alone is just a random opinion of course (and generally a bad one), but when you average the opinions of increasing-numbers of idiots, the consistency is amazing.
The alien greys probably have a branch of mathematics for this.
~
I went for an assoc in CS hopefully to get started somewhere enroute to doing programming. Got the assoc and got nowhere.
Did I keep going for a higher degree?...Nope.
By that time I was seeing lots of long-timer programmers (10-20+ years in, yet 10-20+ years from retirement) getting out of IT entirely, because their depts were getting shredded in the name of outsourcing. And I saw lots of job ads posted asking for things like "masters deg. with several years experience in X, Y and Z...".
Asking for the very types of people who had just bailed.
And all the while, I heard ads for tech schools saying "there's still lots of IT jobs to be filled".
Oh well.
You can easily prevent "pointing a camcorder at a TV/CRT screen to make copies": if the sync rates of the two media (the display's refresh rate and the camcorder's frame rate) are very close, the image you record onto the camcorder will slowly fade in and out with the difference rate in the two media. Of course half the time you'd still see something on the camcorder recording, but it certainly isn't going to be anything you'd want to spend time watching. And it will only be visible about half the total time. How's that for DRM?
~
in the past, people had to buy Apple hardware just to be able to properly run Apple software.
Now that this is no longer true, how long do you really think Apple will keep giving away all that great free software?
Big changes are afoot--not necessarily Apple going to Windows, but still I'd bet there are a number of things that will be done differently for Apple users in the next few years. And not for the better, as far as they are concerned....
Apple used to always insist that they had a superior OS and hardware platform.
Then they dropped the OS they had written in-house for one based on BSD, and they are abandoning Classic support.
And now they have dropped the PPC platform and gone to "what everyone else is using".
So do tell, what is it exactly that "sets Apple apart" now? Aside from the price tag, a particular style of GUI and the big logos on pretty cases?....
This whole discussion of cost came up on one tech forum when they last released plans to sell the full keyboard.
They said then the famous "as much as a good cell phone", which could be what? Some people are happy with the $50 phones, but the latest PDA-style computer with mobile service? That could be near $1000.
So how about this:
A few of us looked around, and the cheapest backlit OLED displays we could find for sale were displays for cell-phones, and each display cost roughly $75 (for the cheaper ones, in bulk). Those displays were big enough for about six keys. Bulk isn't OEM pricing of course, but that would figure to around $12 per key (for a 32 x 32-pixel display only).
Now even if you are willing to cut that cost estimate in half, that still means that these displays would cost roughly $5 per key. For around a hundred keys, that's $500 alone. OLEDs certainly will get cheaper over time and this may take them a year to get together, but they won't get that much cheaper. By far the main products they are used for is mobile phone displays.
Plus there's a good-sized piece of work underneath to run the pretty pictures. I'd be very surprised if they could get this thing out for less than $500-$600. There are other companies that produce customised-key boards of the normal type (just with different physical key shapes and positions) and they get $200-$300 for those.
~
I used to assume that anyone "fatter than me" as just lazy, but at some point I realized that there have been times when I ate a lot (especially junk/fatty food) and times when I ate very little, and times when I exercised a lot and times when I exercised very little--and for the most part I have stayed slightly chubby pretty much the entire time.
What I do see fairly consistently is that a lot of people who are skinny, aren't really healthy--they're just smokers.
~
Lollerskates: Apple marries Intel, just as Intel product line takes back seat to AMD. Jobs spends huge sum of money to... -maintain second place, in a two-company vendor race.
,,,And, suffers new never-before-seen losses in the form of generic-install piracy.
..But the GOOD news is, the new Macth juth look faaaabulouth!
~
The real question here is that assuming the Mac laptop costs $2000 and a comparable PC laptop can be had for [significantly less than that], and now that both "evil" OS's (MS and OSx86 hacked) and Linux can be run on either piece of hardware,,,, why are you paying so much more for the Apple hardware?..... Yea I know it looks so bitchen but is "the look" worth an extra $1000 in Job's pocket?
~
Chuck Norris would do a roundhouse kick....
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
...and known Jobs the fuck out! (obligatory trendy-netspeak phrase)
When I first started reading this I got worried for a second--and then I remembered that I don't have an iPod, haven't installed iTunes and haven't ever paid for any music download.
I think the larger question here is if Apple is accumulating this info and associating it with the particular user,,,, and if they are selling or giving that info to anyone else. I for one do not welcome our new RIAA overlords.
And as I sit here now, I am pondering renaming a bunch of MP3's with artist, album and title names on variations of homosexuality, bestiality and Naziism and then installing iTunes--just to see what other selections it recommends....
~
I'm not seeing a whole lot of innovation here.
And I have said it before, will keep repeating it likely for a long time--the Microsoft Dual Strike game controller is the best game controller, ever. Those of you who never used one don't know what you missed. And it is useable as a regular mouse as well--for desktop-free net surfing, for example.
It's only shortcoming was that common action games needed a couple more buttons than it had. ~
Those "noisemaker" books, in bookstores--the electric books with the buttons on the side that make noise.
At every bookstore that sells them you see young children sitting, just pressing the buttons over and over and over again to hear the noises.
Most kids make no effort to even look at the pages.
As one who could read at a high level from an early age, I have ALWAYS felt that these things were among the worst gifts for a kid, just judging by the reactions they get in bookstores.
~
This is what amateur astronomy people call it when a "regular" person looks through a five-thousand-dollar backyard telescope and is dissappointed that they can't see the US flag left on the moon. .....
Amateur astronomy can be entertaining if 1) you resolve yourself to reading astronomy-related history on cloudy nights, 2) you don't live in an area of high light pollution and 3) you don't live in an area with a lot of biting insects....
~
Of course, then again, a P.I. would probably just use his mobile phone to call his own secretary, and have her place any calls he'd need from the office land-line. If he had to make the call himself, he'd wait until he could get to a land-line.
Someone familiar with how easy this info is to get would know how to avoid leaving a trail of it.
I think I've posted this response so many times elsewhere that I left off key parts: ....Trying to restrict sales to poor countries is dumb. If scale of enonomy is so important, then why not offer it anywhere that people will pay for it?...And if that is done, then the next question is... ....There is no useful media to use with these machines, including "the internet". Sorry, there just isn't. Those of you who would presume to use "the internet" to teach kids everything are mistaking spontaneity for rampant disorganization. Don't take my word for it, go and ask any grade-school teacher how well this would work. Lots of classrooms in first-world countries have PC's with internet connections right now, but most of their time is still spent with kids' noses stuck in books--because books provide a reliable collection of information to test the students on, and because the publishers often also include testing materials that correspond to the different sections of the books. Wikipedia provides neither of these things. ....A full keyboard isn't necessary to provide "classroom" functionality, and greatly increases the liklihood that the unit will be susceptible to physical damage. Assuming that we are dreaming for a moment--then a user of this device will need to be able to select a program and start it, page forwards and backwards through e-book files (of some sort, hopefully OSS) and ideally to be able to pick from four or five answer options when taking a quiz.
I have read this story so many times I have grown tired of explaining the problems with the whole idea.
I suppose that I am speaking about one thing, and Negroponte/MIT is attempting something else entirely, that their intended market doesn't seem to want. Amazon headhunters editing Wikipedia entries is cute and all, but in the grand scheme of things isn't really accomplishing much useful in their lives or anyone else's.
WOrking towards creating inexpensive electronic classrooms would be much more useful, especially since there are already learning toys for sale right now at Wal-Mart for ~$50 that come fairly close to fulfilling these requirements.
The more I read it, the more this entire effort seems to be "researchers in search of a project" than it does "researchers interested in modernising the classroom environment as inexpensively and effectively as possible".
~
This is the problem--that there is not really much useful media to put on these machines.
For the most part, "the Internet" in itself is not directly useful in a lower-grade classroom, unless you want to teach kids about porn. What electronic media is available is usually only optional, and designed to complement the printed books.
What really needs to be created is MEDIA, electronic versions of suitable textbooks. And a database of quiz and test questions, organized by book sections, and a program to automatically check those answers. If the hardware had a way to do very-short-range networking (I'm thinking IR here, it only needs to work inside one room and not cause interference in adjoining rooms) then the ability to push file content over it and a way to check quiz answers in real-time would be a good thing too.
But you really don't need a whole laptop to do this. A laptop is really just adding a whole bunch more problems. A simnple e-book type device with a few input buttons would work. You wouldn't even really need a multi-tasking OS; this greatly cuts down on the speed and memory requirements of the hardware.
And finally, the thing's got to be drop-proof, water-proof, crayon-proof, ect. It needs to run off of regular disposeable (or possibly rechargeable) batteries, not $150 li-ion jobs. A laptop is NOT what will work for this.
And really--e-textbooks would/should be priced far lower than printed copies. There's no incentive for any school to even consider going to e-book use, if they are going to have to pay a bunch of money for hardware, and then pay a bunch more for "e-book licenses". If they just go with the printed books, they only pay a bunch once.
~
I got an assoc in compsci but due to the wonderful US tech job market conditions--still work at the grocery store where I put myself through school at.
Some time ago the corporation got a bright idea: mount several big plasma screens from the ceiling around the store, and show ads and whatever [?] on them. We being store-level peons weren't really told what the point was, the screens just showed up one day and the engineer guys came and bolted them to the ceiling.
At first they showed the local cable weather channel, which was nice--because it included a clock as well. It was actually useful that way, but that didn't last. After a few weeks of that, they switched to public-service type announcements. Not ads exactly, more like calming, soothing infomercials. One was for the Humane Society (the US pet and animal advocate group). Usually the infomercials said something and had a phone number to call, displayed near the end of the video, across the bottom of the screen.
The plasma screens were wide-screens (16:9) but the commercials obviously weren't, because at first they were stretched awkwardly across the entire width and height of the wide-screen. Well, after about two weeks, they "fixed" that problem,,, but,,,, the new problem was that they scaled the video (obviously 4:3) across the whole width of the 16:9 screen. So the bottom 30-percent of all the videos was now cut off--not visible at all. And all the phone numbers were displayed across the bottoms of the videos.
It ran like this for several months--looping the top-two-thirds of about a half-dozen commercials, over and over again. Then we came in one night and all the screens were taken down, and had been removed from the store entirely. I imagine that whoever was in charge of that whole program had no idea why they weren't getting much of any response to the ads.
....monitoring all electronic communication, that is. It is already technically possible to do this now--but there's this unsolvable practical problem with sifting through the massive amounts of data generated to find anything significant.
Let's take the 450 mil figure (ignoring the typo), and assume a country 1/10 of that, 45 million. Now let's say that every day, 50 percent of people are using one of the forms of communication. There are businesses where people make dozens of phone calls every day. A person casually surfing online can easily visit a dozen sites per hour, and some torrent clients can connect to dozens of different computers every minute. So how many events to log is that? In just one country, 23 million people multiplied by potentially dozens of transactions each per day, possibly hundreds. The daily events to log could easily run well into the hundreds of millions, from just this one country. It won't really be "useful" to government spooks unless it's all reachable by one database--and this is the EU--so they will be wanting one database to reach it all. Good Fucking Luck! There's no database system that can really do that, is there? And oh yea--not only does it need to be comprehensively searchable, but they want it maintained for 6 or 12 months, for net and phone traffic.
Hmmm, do I own any stock in tape-backup manufacturers?,,,
I would advise fine citizens of the EU not to worry themselves over this a whole lot. Whoever thought this up didn't know a lot about the technical limitations of current computer systems, or even of the cost that even attempting to construct such a system would total.
It sounds like an obvious idea--this concept of simply "monitoring everything"--but it really isn't practical now, and will continue to be less and less so in the future.
~
I had my credit-card info stolen recently. I have two credit cards--one I use regularly, and for buying online. The other I had only one regular local bill going onto, had not used that card for ANYTHING else for nearly a year.
In the time span of three days, BOTH credit cards had charges from unknown companies on the other side of (my) country (USA) put on them. The amounts? $9.95. The companies names did not turn up in Google, the items on the CC bill had non-toll-free phone numbers that did not turn up in reverse lookups or online phone directories. They both had state codes on the CC invoice but their telephone area codes revealed them to be located in tiny one-horse towns in remote areas of other states. I refused to call the phone numbers (even though the credit card companies suggested doing so) because I did not want any fraudulent phone charges as well; I told the credit-card people that THEY could call those numbers in a 3-way call, and listen in as I asked WTF was this charge for? Would have been entertaining no doubt, but both credit-card companies declined to do so. The credit card companies' said that their info states that these companies were "event ticket vendors".
The charge info was as follows:
Evergreen Alliance LLC 206-407-3000 WA
DLX, LLC TEL5304532876 MN
One credit card company (happily, the one I use way more) automatically sent the investigation forms and refunded the amount.... but the other company stated that "normally, they do not refun a charge unless it is $10 or more". When they called me on the matter, I calmly asked it this meant that anyone could steal 9.95 from me as many times as they wanted, and they said that they would send the forms to request refunding the amount.
On the one hand I understand the reasoning that every fraudulent charge that they go after costs money--but it is obvious that if they set any sort of lower floor amount, thieves will strike for amounts just under that amount.
So in practice, it ignoring any level of theft will only serve to drastically increase theft at that level.
Quite plainly, there can be no "acceptable" level of theft.
~~~
Yea reading through the report site, it gets rather tiring. Hawaiians could probably drop the page count of their native dictionary by about 30% just by getting rid of all but one word for "molten rock that comes out of a mountain". Was having separate names for every shape the stuff forms into ever really necessary?
How do you say "holy shit, this is a lot of fucking lava" in Hawaiian?
~
Citibank is one company that offers free "virtual account numbers" for their credit cards, to help protect you from CC info theft when ordering online. I don't know of any others that do right off, plz chime in if you know.
(Assuming you have a credit card with them) you log on to the website and the program generates a different temporary card number that bills to your regular card. The virtual card has a 1-month expiration date, and only acccepts one single charge (I found that out the first time I tried to use the same virtual account number at three different online retailers--the first one went through, the other later two got rejected. I had to send them each a different virtual number). This way you don't ever need to use your real card number online, and the number you do give is always different, and it can't be charged multiple times,,, or even at all after two months at the most. (prevents logged CC numbers at online retailers from getting hax0red and used later)
There are probably a lot of reasons to not like Citibank, but this is one thing they have done that is very good.
---And of course this would not have prevented the situation from happening, but it certainly cuts down on the possible excess charging that can be done. I don't know what other credit-card companies do it, none of the rest of mine do, but I don't use any other credit-card for online transactions at all anymore. ~
-if you have a Master's and several years experience in all the entrprise-level software, hardware and procedures that the company that you're applying to already uses. Otherwise, it's all rather a waste of effort on your part.
I worked at a grocery store while I got an associate's. After I graduated I couldn't afford to go on to live and go to a 4-year college on what I earned at the grocery store, and couldn't find any IT job that would pay even near what I was making at the grocery store. This isn't a sob story, just a warning to prospective CIS students: the entry-level jobs you might have seen five years ago aren't "paying less", they are "mostly non-existant".
I got off rather easy, I paid cash for my measly sheepskin. I know a lot of people who jumped right in to 4-year schools on student loans; they are not in the field as well and are financially doing even worse.
, ,,-now all we need to find is someplace where fairly-pure hydrogen bubbles up out of holes in the ground. I understand Neptune is a good prospect.
-Or, in this case, a place where magnesium and aluminum bubble up out of the ground. -Or I suppose (since we are engaging our imaginations anyway) where already-formed wires of them squirt up out of tiny holes in the ground. Yea, that would be perfect.....
...of fucking college students out of even more money.
I had a class that used a webct "book" once, the book was a technicolor rag, nearly useless. About 180 out of its 250 pages were colorful pointless or redundant diagrams or borders, or "real life examples" that perfectly mirrored what was being explained in the paragraph--two inches away. The insructor rarely even opened it, but we had to "turn in" quizzes through the webCT online bulletin board. And the password each student used was shrink-wrapped inside each book, with a useless-CD as well. The bookstore would not accept any opened software for return or resale, and the webCT cancelled each year's passwords every year--forcing all students to always buy a new copy, just to get a new password, so they could turn in classroom assignments online, through the webCT website. ...-Which if I am remembering right, was basically just a few short online quizzes and an email/bulletin board service. Whoopee.
That was a couple years back, but at that point webCT simply couldn't make a decent book.
And the way the system is working, they will never need to--because the people who choose to use it are not the same people who pay $65 for it and then throw it away five months later.
~
Slashdot Mirror
And this story is old. I swear I saw it at least a couple months ago.
...Also I would bet that Snapper is doomed in ten years anyway. Ongoing analysis and JIT manufacturing can save money but can't reverse the US$:yuan exchange rate--and this is the real race Snapper is (losing) in. The ratio of quality to crap sold in most consumer items is rather disenheartening, and professional principles keeps snobby customers happy and gets applause from the peanut gallery but won't usually keep the lights on.
I am operating on a health and investment theory I like to call "dumb money".
What it revolves around is the principal that anything that lots of unintelligent people like is probably both unhealty to do and horribly overpriced as well--and I should therefore invest in it, but not use it myself. One idiot alone is just a random opinion of course (and generally a bad one), but when you average the opinions of increasing-numbers of idiots, the consistency is amazing.
The alien greys probably have a branch of mathematics for this.
~
I went for an assoc in CS hopefully to get started somewhere enroute to doing programming. Got the assoc and got nowhere. ...Nope.
Did I keep going for a higher degree?
By that time I was seeing lots of long-timer programmers (10-20+ years in, yet 10-20+ years from retirement) getting out of IT entirely, because their depts were getting shredded in the name of outsourcing. And I saw lots of job ads posted asking for things like "masters deg. with several years experience in X, Y and Z...".
Asking for the very types of people who had just bailed.
And all the while, I heard ads for tech schools saying "there's still lots of IT jobs to be filled".
Oh well.
You can easily prevent "pointing a camcorder at a TV/CRT screen to make copies": if the sync rates of the two media (the display's refresh rate and the camcorder's frame rate) are very close, the image you record onto the camcorder will slowly fade in and out with the difference rate in the two media. Of course half the time you'd still see something on the camcorder recording, but it certainly isn't going to be anything you'd want to spend time watching. And it will only be visible about half the total time. How's that for DRM?
~
in the past, people had to buy Apple hardware just to be able to properly run Apple software.
Now that this is no longer true, how long do you really think Apple will keep giving away all that great free software?
Big changes are afoot--not necessarily Apple going to Windows, but still I'd bet there are a number of things that will be done differently for Apple users in the next few years. And not for the better, as far as they are concerned....
Apple used to always insist that they had a superior OS and hardware platform.
Then they dropped the OS they had written in-house for one based on BSD, and they are abandoning Classic support.
And now they have dropped the PPC platform and gone to "what everyone else is using".
So do tell, what is it exactly that "sets Apple apart" now? Aside from the price tag, a particular style of GUI and the big logos on pretty cases?....
This whole discussion of cost came up on one tech forum when they last released plans to sell the full keyboard.
They said then the famous "as much as a good cell phone", which could be what? Some people are happy with the $50 phones, but the latest PDA-style computer with mobile service? That could be near $1000.
So how about this:
A few of us looked around, and the cheapest backlit OLED displays we could find for sale were displays for cell-phones, and each display cost roughly $75 (for the cheaper ones, in bulk). Those displays were big enough for about six keys. Bulk isn't OEM pricing of course, but that would figure to around $12 per key (for a 32 x 32-pixel display only).
Now even if you are willing to cut that cost estimate in half, that still means that these displays would cost roughly $5 per key. For around a hundred keys, that's $500 alone. OLEDs certainly will get cheaper over time and this may take them a year to get together, but they won't get that much cheaper. By far the main products they are used for is mobile phone displays.
Plus there's a good-sized piece of work underneath to run the pretty pictures. I'd be very surprised if they could get this thing out for less than $500-$600. There are other companies that produce customised-key boards of the normal type (just with different physical key shapes and positions) and they get $200-$300 for those.
~
I used to assume that anyone "fatter than me" as just lazy, but at some point I realized that there have been times when I ate a lot (especially junk/fatty food) and times when I ate very little, and times when I exercised a lot and times when I exercised very little--and for the most part I have stayed slightly chubby pretty much the entire time.
What I do see fairly consistently is that a lot of people who are skinny, aren't really healthy--they're just smokers.
~
Lollerskates: Apple marries Intel, just as Intel product line takes back seat to AMD. Jobs spends huge sum of money to... -maintain second place, in a two-company vendor race.
,,,And, suffers new never-before-seen losses in the form of generic-install piracy.
..But the GOOD news is, the new Macth juth look faaaabulouth!
~
The real question here is that assuming the Mac laptop costs $2000 and a comparable PC laptop can be had for [significantly less than that], and now that both "evil" OS's (MS and OSx86 hacked) and Linux can be run on either piece of hardware,,,, why are you paying so much more for the Apple hardware?..... Yea I know it looks so bitchen but is "the look" worth an extra $1000 in Job's pocket?
~
...and known Jobs the fuck out! (obligatory trendy-netspeak phrase)
When I first started reading this I got worried for a second--and then I remembered that I don't have an iPod, haven't installed iTunes and haven't ever paid for any music download.
I think the larger question here is if Apple is accumulating this info and associating it with the particular user,,,, and if they are selling or giving that info to anyone else. I for one do not welcome our new RIAA overlords.
And as I sit here now, I am pondering renaming a bunch of MP3's with artist, album and title names on variations of homosexuality, bestiality and Naziism and then installing iTunes--just to see what other selections it recommends....
~
I'm not seeing a whole lot of innovation here.
And I have said it before, will keep repeating it likely for a long time--the Microsoft Dual Strike game controller is the best game controller, ever. Those of you who never used one don't know what you missed. And it is useable as a regular mouse as well--for desktop-free net surfing, for example.
It's only shortcoming was that common action games needed a couple more buttons than it had.
~
Those "noisemaker" books, in bookstores--the electric books with the buttons on the side that make noise.
At every bookstore that sells them you see young children sitting, just pressing the buttons over and over and over again to hear the noises.
Most kids make no effort to even look at the pages.
As one who could read at a high level from an early age, I have ALWAYS felt that these things were among the worst gifts for a kid, just judging by the reactions they get in bookstores. ~
This is what amateur astronomy people call it when a "regular" person looks through a five-thousand-dollar backyard telescope and is dissappointed that they can't see the US flag left on the moon.
.....
Amateur astronomy can be entertaining if 1) you resolve yourself to reading astronomy-related history on cloudy nights, 2) you don't live in an area of high light pollution and 3) you don't live in an area with a lot of biting insects....
~
Of course, then again, a P.I. would probably just use his mobile phone to call his own secretary, and have her place any calls he'd need from the office land-line. If he had to make the call himself, he'd wait until he could get to a land-line.
Someone familiar with how easy this info is to get would know how to avoid leaving a trail of it.
~
I think I've posted this response so many times elsewhere that I left off key parts:
....Trying to restrict sales to poor countries is dumb. If scale of enonomy is so important, then why not offer it anywhere that people will pay for it? ...And if that is done, then the next question is...
....There is no useful media to use with these machines, including "the internet". Sorry, there just isn't. Those of you who would presume to use "the internet" to teach kids everything are mistaking spontaneity for rampant disorganization. Don't take my word for it, go and ask any grade-school teacher how well this would work. Lots of classrooms in first-world countries have PC's with internet connections right now, but most of their time is still spent with kids' noses stuck in books--because books provide a reliable collection of information to test the students on, and because the publishers often also include testing materials that correspond to the different sections of the books. Wikipedia provides neither of these things.
....A full keyboard isn't necessary to provide "classroom" functionality, and greatly increases the liklihood that the unit will be susceptible to physical damage. Assuming that we are dreaming for a moment--then a user of this device will need to be able to select a program and start it, page forwards and backwards through e-book files (of some sort, hopefully OSS) and ideally to be able to pick from four or five answer options when taking a quiz.
I have read this story so many times I have grown tired of explaining the problems with the whole idea.
I suppose that I am speaking about one thing, and Negroponte/MIT is attempting something else entirely, that their intended market doesn't seem to want. Amazon headhunters editing Wikipedia entries is cute and all, but in the grand scheme of things isn't really accomplishing much useful in their lives or anyone else's.
WOrking towards creating inexpensive electronic classrooms would be much more useful, especially since there are already learning toys for sale right now at Wal-Mart for ~$50 that come fairly close to fulfilling these requirements.
The more I read it, the more this entire effort seems to be "researchers in search of a project" than it does "researchers interested in modernising the classroom environment as inexpensively and effectively as possible".
~
This is the problem--that there is not really much useful media to put on these machines.
For the most part, "the Internet" in itself is not directly useful in a lower-grade classroom, unless you want to teach kids about porn. What electronic media is available is usually only optional, and designed to complement the printed books.
What really needs to be created is MEDIA, electronic versions of suitable textbooks. And a database of quiz and test questions, organized by book sections, and a program to automatically check those answers. If the hardware had a way to do very-short-range networking (I'm thinking IR here, it only needs to work inside one room and not cause interference in adjoining rooms) then the ability to push file content over it and a way to check quiz answers in real-time would be a good thing too.
But you really don't need a whole laptop to do this. A laptop is really just adding a whole bunch more problems. A simnple e-book type device with a few input buttons would work. You wouldn't even really need a multi-tasking OS; this greatly cuts down on the speed and memory requirements of the hardware.
And finally, the thing's got to be drop-proof, water-proof, crayon-proof, ect. It needs to run off of regular disposeable (or possibly rechargeable) batteries, not $150 li-ion jobs. A laptop is NOT what will work for this.
And really--e-textbooks would/should be priced far lower than printed copies. There's no incentive for any school to even consider going to e-book use, if they are going to have to pay a bunch of money for hardware, and then pay a bunch more for "e-book licenses". If they just go with the printed books, they only pay a bunch once.
~
...they get you with the warranty info.
There is no escape.
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Some time ago the corporation got a bright idea: mount several big plasma screens from the ceiling around the store, and show ads and whatever [?] on them. We being store-level peons weren't really told what the point was, the screens just showed up one day and the engineer guys came and bolted them to the ceiling.
At first they showed the local cable weather channel, which was nice--because it included a clock as well. It was actually useful that way, but that didn't last. After a few weeks of that, they switched to public-service type announcements. Not ads exactly, more like calming, soothing infomercials. One was for the Humane Society (the US pet and animal advocate group). Usually the infomercials said something and had a phone number to call, displayed near the end of the video, across the bottom of the screen.
The plasma screens were wide-screens (16:9) but the commercials obviously weren't, because at first they were stretched awkwardly across the entire width and height of the wide-screen. Well, after about two weeks, they "fixed" that problem,,, but,,,, the new problem was that they scaled the video (obviously 4:3) across the whole width of the 16:9 screen. So the bottom 30-percent of all the videos was now cut off--not visible at all. And all the phone numbers were displayed across the bottoms of the videos.
It ran like this for several months--looping the top-two-thirds of about a half-dozen commercials, over and over again. Then we came in one night and all the screens were taken down, and had been removed from the store entirely. I imagine that whoever was in charge of that whole program had no idea why they weren't getting much of any response to the ads.
Let's take the 450 mil figure (ignoring the typo), and assume a country 1/10 of that, 45 million. Now let's say that every day, 50 percent of people are using one of the forms of communication. There are businesses where people make dozens of phone calls every day. A person casually surfing online can easily visit a dozen sites per hour, and some torrent clients can connect to dozens of different computers every minute. So how many events to log is that? In just one country, 23 million people multiplied by potentially dozens of transactions each per day, possibly hundreds. The daily events to log could easily run well into the hundreds of millions, from just this one country. It won't really be "useful" to government spooks unless it's all reachable by one database--and this is the EU--so they will be wanting one database to reach it all. Good Fucking Luck! There's no database system that can really do that, is there? And oh yea--not only does it need to be comprehensively searchable, but they want it maintained for 6 or 12 months, for net and phone traffic.
Hmmm, do I own any stock in tape-backup manufacturers?,,,
I would advise fine citizens of the EU not to worry themselves over this a whole lot. Whoever thought this up didn't know a lot about the technical limitations of current computer systems, or even of the cost that even attempting to construct such a system would total.
It sounds like an obvious idea--this concept of simply "monitoring everything"--but it really isn't practical now, and will continue to be less and less so in the future.
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I had my credit-card info stolen recently. I have two credit cards--one I use regularly, and for buying online. The other I had only one regular local bill going onto, had not used that card for ANYTHING else for nearly a year.
In the time span of three days, BOTH credit cards had charges from unknown companies on the other side of (my) country (USA) put on them. The amounts? $9.95. The companies names did not turn up in Google, the items on the CC bill had non-toll-free phone numbers that did not turn up in reverse lookups or online phone directories. They both had state codes on the CC invoice but their telephone area codes revealed them to be located in tiny one-horse towns in remote areas of other states. I refused to call the phone numbers (even though the credit card companies suggested doing so) because I did not want any fraudulent phone charges as well; I told the credit-card people that THEY could call those numbers in a 3-way call, and listen in as I asked WTF was this charge for? Would have been entertaining no doubt, but both credit-card companies declined to do so. The credit card companies' said that their info states that these companies were "event ticket vendors".
The charge info was as follows:
Evergreen Alliance LLC 206-407-3000 WA
DLX, LLC TEL5304532876 MN
One credit card company (happily, the one I use way more) automatically sent the investigation forms and refunded the amount.... but the other company stated that "normally, they do not refun a charge unless it is $10 or more". When they called me on the matter, I calmly asked it this meant that anyone could steal 9.95 from me as many times as they wanted, and they said that they would send the forms to request refunding the amount.
On the one hand I understand the reasoning that every fraudulent charge that they go after costs money--but it is obvious that if they set any sort of lower floor amount, thieves will strike for amounts just under that amount.
So in practice, it ignoring any level of theft will only serve to drastically increase theft at that level.
Quite plainly, there can be no "acceptable" level of theft.
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Yea reading through the report site, it gets rather tiring. Hawaiians could probably drop the page count of their native dictionary by about 30% just by getting rid of all but one word for "molten rock that comes out of a mountain". Was having separate names for every shape the stuff forms into ever really necessary?
How do you say "holy shit, this is a lot of fucking lava" in Hawaiian?
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Citibank is one company that offers free "virtual account numbers" for their credit cards, to help protect you from CC info theft when ordering online. I don't know of any others that do right off, plz chime in if you know.
(Assuming you have a credit card with them) you log on to the website and the program generates a different temporary card number that bills to your regular card. The virtual card has a 1-month expiration date, and only acccepts one single charge (I found that out the first time I tried to use the same virtual account number at three different online retailers--the first one went through, the other later two got rejected. I had to send them each a different virtual number). This way you don't ever need to use your real card number online, and the number you do give is always different, and it can't be charged multiple times,,, or even at all after two months at the most. (prevents logged CC numbers at online retailers from getting hax0red and used later)
There are probably a lot of reasons to not like Citibank, but this is one thing they have done that is very good.
---And of course this would not have prevented the situation from happening, but it certainly cuts down on the possible excess charging that can be done. I don't know what other credit-card companies do it, none of the rest of mine do, but I don't use any other credit-card for online transactions at all anymore.
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-if you have a Master's and several years experience in all the entrprise-level software, hardware and procedures that the company that you're applying to already uses. Otherwise, it's all rather a waste of effort on your part.
I worked at a grocery store while I got an associate's. After I graduated I couldn't afford to go on to live and go to a 4-year college on what I earned at the grocery store, and couldn't find any IT job that would pay even near what I was making at the grocery store.
This isn't a sob story, just a warning to prospective CIS students: the entry-level jobs you might have seen five years ago aren't "paying less", they are "mostly non-existant".
I got off rather easy, I paid cash for my measly sheepskin. I know a lot of people who jumped right in to 4-year schools on student loans; they are not in the field as well and are financially doing even worse.
, , ,-now all we need to find is someplace where fairly-pure hydrogen bubbles up out of holes in the ground. I understand Neptune is a good prospect.
-Or, in this case, a place where magnesium and aluminum bubble up out of the ground. -Or I suppose (since we are engaging our imaginations anyway) where already-formed wires of them squirt up out of tiny holes in the ground. Yea, that would be perfect.....
...of fucking college students out of even more money.
I had a class that used a webct "book" once, the book was a technicolor rag, nearly useless. About 180 out of its 250 pages were colorful pointless or redundant diagrams or borders, or "real life examples" that perfectly mirrored what was being explained in the paragraph--two inches away. The insructor rarely even opened it, but we had to "turn in" quizzes through the webCT online bulletin board. And the password each student used was shrink-wrapped inside each book, with a useless-CD as well. The bookstore would not accept any opened software for return or resale, and the webCT cancelled each year's passwords every year--forcing all students to always buy a new copy, just to get a new password, so they could turn in classroom assignments online, through the webCT website.
...-Which if I am remembering right, was basically just a few short online quizzes and an email/bulletin board service. Whoopee.
That was a couple years back, but at that point webCT simply couldn't make a decent book.
And the way the system is working, they will never need to--because the people who choose to use it are not the same people who pay $65 for it and then throw it away five months later.
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