In the education world, we are drooling over this concept. Instead of buying $1,200 laptops, we can buy $299 "mobile internet devices" that run Open Office and Firefox...
Let me back up. The majority of educational software is now web-based. 90% of middle and high school computer usage is either web based or using a dedicated word processor. It's not the Asus specifically that has us interested, but the concept. If you've seen the Asus, it's really more like a web appliance. The average person would look at it the same way they look at the iPhone or an ATM machine... they don't know or care what the OS is underneath.
So for education, this could be huge. As competition increases and these devices get down to $199, the previously expensive idea of "one laptop per child" does not seem so expensive any more. There are three groups of people who need to be paying close attention to this: Microsoft, Apple, and Textbook makers.
Put this together with education's interest in "Web 2.0," aka "The Read/Write Web" where all your school books and files are available to you online anywhere, and you're brewing up the perfect storm. Apple should be working on a device of their own right now, if they're smart, and Microsoft.... Microsoft should be praying.
Music doesn't mean as much to people as it did in the past. It's got so much more to compete with - Internet, cable, DVD's, video games, and on and on. And even though it's cheaper to make than ever before, the cost has gone up, due to corporate greed. The symptoms of this are rapidly declining CD sales, fewer and fewer venues for musicians to play at, and decreasing pay for those remaining gigs. Lots of people think that musicians should have to make a living playing live, but they should also recognize that musicians who gig for a living will all tell you that there are fewer places to play, and those that do pay are paying the same pay they gave out in 1970.
But people still enjoy MAKING music, and technology has made it easier for folks to make their own CDs. So we're ending up with a glut of amateur and semi-pro music. I do believe, though, that eventually the cream does rise to the top, and if you make good music, people will eventually find you. Maybe not lots of people, but some. Regardless, people who make music nowadays need to be making it because they love to... because there's not a lot of money in it. But for guys like me who already have careers, that's OK. We'll continue to make CD's because we love to make music.
The Loudness War is a serious issue for independent artists like myself. I mix and master my own music, and I've had friends ask me why it was so soft compared to their other music. They think it's because I recorded it in my own home studio as opposed to a "real" studio. When I try to explain the Loudness War, they have no clue what I'm talking about. So it's annoying to constantly have to apologize for creating dynamic range.
On my next CD, I'm going to put a big disclaimer on the back or something. Maybe like "Caution - This CD was mastered to sound good as opposed to sound loud like all the other crap on the market. If you want it louder, turn up your stereo/iPod."
Cue the line of Slashdotters who are also musicians who also have a CD available on CDBaby, trying to think of something to say that will earn at least a 3, but will not come off as a blatant ad for their own music.
There is a trend emerging, ever so slowly... It used to be Mac users attacking Windows users... More and more I'm starting to hear Windows users attacking Mac users. Fortunately, so long as the argument is "Mac is gay," I don't really feel like Mac users need to bother responding. Linux I respect, though... because once I'm in the command line, it's just like OS X. (ducks)
All we need is to package this in a little pin instead of a gun, and bosses can give them to their employees... and when they act up, the bosses can say...
Let loose the slashdot moaning about how bad the public education system is... regardless of the fact that the average slashdotter wouldn't last two days as a teacher. Boo hoo, the parents and administration won't support me and none of the kids want to learn, and I'm somehow supposed to motivate them. Welcome to public education. It's HARD to teach.
Here's some good advice for anyone - unless you've actually done a person's job, shut the hell up.
And yes, I HAVE taught. At one point in time I taught gifted 4th and 5th graders how to program, years ago. Some of those kids are now in college, studying computer programming. So I've actually DONE something.
You want to change public education? Triple teacher salaries to dramatically increase competition for jobs and radically improve the quality of teachers, and change USA culture so that parents and kids respect education (good luck.) Though since we seem to value money so much, increasing teacher salaries might have the same effect.
It's working for me now. It wasn't when I posted the message hours earlier, using BitTorrent for OS X. I guess I should have posted the exact error message BitTorrent gave me. Still, I'd love to thank the losers who modded my post as a troll. Fortunately, I don't give a rat's ass about my "karma" because I'm an adult with a real life outside of slashdot.
Elton's point about getting out of your house and playing music is a good one.
Like many songwriters, I was convinced I could sell CD's and establish a music career online exclusively. Like many songwriters, I read books about getting fans on myspace, marketing your CD online, getting your CD onto iTunes, etc. Like many songwriters, I followed the steps to the letter and yet sold practically nothing.
But my songs were getting downloaded thousands of times where I'd put them up for free downloading.
I finally realized that it was more important to me that people heard my music than for me to try to make money. At that point I started using the Internet to locate places near me to play, and now I'm starting to gig in the Tampa area a bit and I've met lots of really cool musicians. True, I'm playing in coffee houses with my acoustic and there's not much (if any) money involved, but it's a hell of a lot of fun. I still sell CD's via iTunes and at live shows, but once I stopped caring whether they actually sold, I started having a whole lot more fun. And playing in front of 20 people is a lot more satisfying than having 2000 people download one of my songs.
As far as shutting down the Internet, well... that has to be the stupidest thing I've heard in at least the past ten years.
Once I saw it was Dvorak, all I read was "blah blah blah." I guess John got tired of writing articles to piss off Mac users and decided to try a bigger crowd...
This is just a bad idea all around. What has not been pointed out here is the cost difference... I can't speak for other states, but here in Florida a public school can get Microsoft Office for less than 50 bucks per machine, and the cheapest the home user can get it for is probably $!50 educational price. This whole debate brings up a huge point:
Kids (even in high school) often do not realize that one program will not necessarily open files from another. We see this ALL THE TIME in our high schools here in Pasco County, FL. Kids buy some piece of crap PC that comes with WordPerfect and then bring their files in on floppy disks in WordPerfect format and wonder why Office won't open it. We need two things:
1. Students need to learn that applications use proprietary formats and they're not interchangeable - you CAN save as text or rtf but you'll lose formatting, and
2. We, as a country (and as a planet, for that matter,) are really being hurt because we don't have one universal document file format type that all word processors can read and write. We USED to - it was called "text" or ".txt" as Windows users are wont to call it.
Telling kids they "ought" to fork out $150 for Microsoft software is irresponsible. We are a Mac based school district and as soon as OpenOffice runs native on OS X, I will be recommending it to ALL of our schools K-12, not as a replacement for Office, but as an alternative to Office. Then kids can, if they want, run the same suite at home and at school, for free.
This computer can do basic word processing and web browsing, so if that's what folks want it for, it's maybe a sellable idea. However, as earlier posters mentioned, let's remember that you get what you pay for and high quality is not going to be present from a low end box from a company like this. Also, don't forget to tack on the extra hundred bucks for el cheapo LCD display, so it's really a $400 computer, not a $300 computer.
Regarding education, it might be OK for the basic stuff but innovative teachers are going far beyond the basic word processing/web browsing thin client type stuff nowadays. I'm training a group of new teachers right now on iLife. In a fifth grade class, students can write, cast, direct, film, edit, and publish a movie on a topic they're studying to their own website on a school web server using iLife. They can compose their own soundtrack using GarageBand. They can make a podcast about the movie and put it on their website. They can take pictures of the process and make it a slideshow and publish THAT on their site. All easily possible because of iLife and the fact that today's Intel Macs have the CPU power to do all this stuff. You're not doing any of that on a cheapo PC. When kids make stuff, they learn more than just reading dry old textbooks. It's called constructivist learning. At the secondary level, the projects can and do get more in depth.
So if I'm a fifth grade teacher, I don't want one of these crap boxes. You can buy three crap boxes for the price of one iMac, but I'd rather have the iMac.
For me, Linux on the desktop is a joke. Can I get an equivalent for Logic Pro and Celemony Melodyne? I thought not.
Linux as a moodle server? Hell yes. Linux as my desktop? Not even close. Linux is fine for Joe User who only needs web surfing and e-mail. That ain't me.
Even within the indie unknown music community, the idea of giving away your music for free is often met with cries of "You're helping to ruin it for the rest of us!" I sell CD's at CDBaby.com and on iTunes, but I am now giving away free downloads on my site. The reason? I have a day job. I don't support myself via music. I want people to hear my music. If they like it enough, maybe they'll buy a t-shirt or a coffee mug or a physical copy of the CD. That would make my web site a break-even deal, which would be nice.
But there are plenty of musicians who want to hang onto the old ideals. The fact is that the general public no longer thinks that music by the big names is worth any money, let alone the unknowns. The indie unsigned musicians have a chance right now to give away downloads and help change the business. Some of us are doing so, some are still fighting the old fight. I'd rather be on 5,000 iPods than sell a small number of copies.
Adding another CD won't matter. Linux won't take off in schools for a boatload of reasons, support being perhaps the biggest. We've got former and current classroom teachers running networks in schools. They've got their hands full with OS X Server, they're completely blown away by Windows 2003 Server, and they've got no hope of making Linux work campuswide with all of their current peripherals AND finding replacement software for all of their educational titles AND securing the thing so the kids don't mess it up AND keeping everything up and running AND finding open source alternatives to programs mandated by the state that don't come in anything but Windows and OS X AND... I could go on and on and on.
Linux will one day be the number one operating system, or some future OS based on it will. But not today.
The volume wars affect even artists like me who are unsigned. When we submit our music to radio stations, magazines for review, etc, most of the morons who listen to the CD's will immediately notice if your music isn't within the ballpark volume-wise of the other music they get, and they'll think less of you. For my last CD I tried to go as hot (volume-wise) as I could but still maintain a clean undistorted sound. It's not that hard to do, and it makes all the difference in the world. But my music is still nowhere near as loud as, say, the new Maroon 5 distorted overproduced clipped mess. Sigh.
John Swelly says "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched." I understand his problem with PowerPoint but absolute statements like this, in today's bullet point world, are not good. There are teachers using PowerPoint creatively and effectively. Instead of throwing out the tool, the proper educational practice should be to examine what's good and bad and improve how we use the tool. You can integrate video content into PowerPoint. My district (Pasco County, FL) has a license with unitedstreaming, a huge online warehouse of educational video clips. To bring a quicktime video into a PowerPoint slide on our computers (Macs,) you simply click and drag it. PowerPoint can combine sound, graphics, animation, text, and video to make compelling presentations. Let's toss the whole thing because most people don't use it properly! Let's NOT. If we adopt that strategy, we need to toss all of our computers too. The way to progress is to define goals and start moving toward them.
"Teachers don't freaking teach anything in class anymore." Really? I work in the public school system. I'm in schools every day. Are you? No? Then shut the f*ck up. Generalizations like "Teachers don't" label you an idiot anyway.
It's funny to use words like "competition" and "good for customers" when describing Microsoft. Microsoft has broken the law to squash competition many, many times. In fact, if you were to say "Name one technology company who has broken the law repeatedly to squash competition," anyone would answer "Microsoft." So it's rather tough for me to feel pity for them. Especially when they're already trying their typical FUD approach.
Apple's approach is to not announce anything, let the speculation build, and then surprise people, usually with a great, well thought out product. Almost every time they release a product it has at least one feature that no one saw coming. Microsoft's approach is FUD, rushing products to market despite issues, and using their monopoly power to try to create other monopolies. Having a long run approach with an inferior product means you have to be cheaper and you have to be considered "good enough." They pulled it off with the computer because it's a big expensive purchase. It won't work with a $150 portable music device.
I work at a high school as a Network Administrator and I have three things to say.
1. The school can't suspend a student for what they say in a blog, UNLESS the student was using a school computer during school time to do the blog. If he wasn't, they can't probably legally do anything unless the student's charges are disprovable, in which case they could sue him for libel, maybe.
2. It IS true that schools do NOT fully understand the Internet and they ARE afraid of it. In many cases they are overreacting to issues such as kids talking to each other on myspace. But part of the reason for that is that if a kid were to get into trouble outside of school because of something they read or did on myspace on a school computer, the parents would attempt to sue the school. Folks are really quick to point blame the schools for their kids making stupid decisions.
3. It's popular to hate schools and teachers here on slashdot, and I didn't really think too highly of my high school education either, but really most of the people I work with care about their jobs, and they're good people. I feel sorry for them, because they teach all the students - not just the bright, well behaved ones but also the obnoxious surly defiant unthankful disrespectful teens who think they know everything and don't care about anyone but themselves. They know that this stage of life is notorious for testing boundries and rebelling against authority. And they come into work each day and do the best they can, most of the folks. Most of the people here on slashdot couldn't do their job for a week without running home and crying into their huggy pillow. Blame the curriculum, or blame the bad teachers, but please don't lump all teachers into that category. Seeing posts saying all teachers suck get moderated high makes those of us here who are mature just sorta shake our heads. Slashdot readers and mods will argue for logic in one sentence and fail to apply it in the next.
...I like prescription music sites. I released my first CD a year and a half ago, and I can tell you that in terms of sales, it's gone something like this:
1. Actual physical CD's sold at CDBaby.com
2. Individual songs sold on iTunes
3. Entire CD sold on iTunes
4. All the subscription sites (napster, rhapsody, etc) combined
However, the most EXPOSURE I've gotten in the subscription sites. True, I only get paid 4 cents per song per listen, and it takes a lot of listens to add up, but an independent artist is much more likely to get people to listen to them via the subscription services. So I like the model. As a consumer, I have no interest in it, but as an artist it's helping me gain exposure.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me back up. The majority of educational software is now web-based. 90% of middle and high school computer usage is either web based or using a dedicated word processor. It's not the Asus specifically that has us interested, but the concept. If you've seen the Asus, it's really more like a web appliance. The average person would look at it the same way they look at the iPhone or an ATM machine... they don't know or care what the OS is underneath.
So for education, this could be huge. As competition increases and these devices get down to $199, the previously expensive idea of "one laptop per child" does not seem so expensive any more. There are three groups of people who need to be paying close attention to this: Microsoft, Apple, and Textbook makers.
Put this together with education's interest in "Web 2.0," aka "The Read/Write Web" where all your school books and files are available to you online anywhere, and you're brewing up the perfect storm. Apple should be working on a device of their own right now, if they're smart, and Microsoft.... Microsoft should be praying.
It's a generalization, of course, but it's true. Read "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. Any GTD fan will agree that multi-tasking is bad.
But people still enjoy MAKING music, and technology has made it easier for folks to make their own CDs. So we're ending up with a glut of amateur and semi-pro music. I do believe, though, that eventually the cream does rise to the top, and if you make good music, people will eventually find you. Maybe not lots of people, but some. Regardless, people who make music nowadays need to be making it because they love to... because there's not a lot of money in it. But for guys like me who already have careers, that's OK. We'll continue to make CD's because we love to make music.
On my next CD, I'm going to put a big disclaimer on the back or something. Maybe like "Caution - This CD was mastered to sound good as opposed to sound loud like all the other crap on the market. If you want it louder, turn up your stereo/iPod."
Is that good enough for a 3?
There is a trend emerging, ever so slowly... It used to be Mac users attacking Windows users... More and more I'm starting to hear Windows users attacking Mac users. Fortunately, so long as the argument is "Mac is gay," I don't really feel like Mac users need to bother responding. Linux I respect, though... because once I'm in the command line, it's just like OS X. (ducks)
"Your agonizer, please..."
Let loose the slashdot moaning about how bad the public education system is... regardless of the fact that the average slashdotter wouldn't last two days as a teacher. Boo hoo, the parents and administration won't support me and none of the kids want to learn, and I'm somehow supposed to motivate them. Welcome to public education. It's HARD to teach. Here's some good advice for anyone - unless you've actually done a person's job, shut the hell up. And yes, I HAVE taught. At one point in time I taught gifted 4th and 5th graders how to program, years ago. Some of those kids are now in college, studying computer programming. So I've actually DONE something. You want to change public education? Triple teacher salaries to dramatically increase competition for jobs and radically improve the quality of teachers, and change USA culture so that parents and kids respect education (good luck.) Though since we seem to value money so much, increasing teacher salaries might have the same effect.
It's working for me now. It wasn't when I posted the message hours earlier, using BitTorrent for OS X. I guess I should have posted the exact error message BitTorrent gave me. Still, I'd love to thank the losers who modded my post as a troll. Fortunately, I don't give a rat's ass about my "karma" because I'm an adult with a real life outside of slashdot.
Like many songwriters, I was convinced I could sell CD's and establish a music career online exclusively. Like many songwriters, I read books about getting fans on myspace, marketing your CD online, getting your CD onto iTunes, etc. Like many songwriters, I followed the steps to the letter and yet sold practically nothing.
But my songs were getting downloaded thousands of times where I'd put them up for free downloading.
I finally realized that it was more important to me that people heard my music than for me to try to make money. At that point I started using the Internet to locate places near me to play, and now I'm starting to gig in the Tampa area a bit and I've met lots of really cool musicians. True, I'm playing in coffee houses with my acoustic and there's not much (if any) money involved, but it's a hell of a lot of fun. I still sell CD's via iTunes and at live shows, but once I stopped caring whether they actually sold, I started having a whole lot more fun. And playing in front of 20 people is a lot more satisfying than having 2000 people download one of my songs.
As far as shutting down the Internet, well... that has to be the stupidest thing I've heard in at least the past ten years.
The torrent is broken.
Once I saw it was Dvorak, all I read was "blah blah blah." I guess John got tired of writing articles to piss off Mac users and decided to try a bigger crowd...
Kids (even in high school) often do not realize that one program will not necessarily open files from another. We see this ALL THE TIME in our high schools here in Pasco County, FL. Kids buy some piece of crap PC that comes with WordPerfect and then bring their files in on floppy disks in WordPerfect format and wonder why Office won't open it. We need two things:
1. Students need to learn that applications use proprietary formats and they're not interchangeable - you CAN save as text or rtf but you'll lose formatting, and
2. We, as a country (and as a planet, for that matter,) are really being hurt because we don't have one universal document file format type that all word processors can read and write. We USED to - it was called "text" or ".txt" as Windows users are wont to call it.
Telling kids they "ought" to fork out $150 for Microsoft software is irresponsible. We are a Mac based school district and as soon as OpenOffice runs native on OS X, I will be recommending it to ALL of our schools K-12, not as a replacement for Office, but as an alternative to Office. Then kids can, if they want, run the same suite at home and at school, for free.
Regarding education, it might be OK for the basic stuff but innovative teachers are going far beyond the basic word processing/web browsing thin client type stuff nowadays. I'm training a group of new teachers right now on iLife. In a fifth grade class, students can write, cast, direct, film, edit, and publish a movie on a topic they're studying to their own website on a school web server using iLife. They can compose their own soundtrack using GarageBand. They can make a podcast about the movie and put it on their website. They can take pictures of the process and make it a slideshow and publish THAT on their site. All easily possible because of iLife and the fact that today's Intel Macs have the CPU power to do all this stuff. You're not doing any of that on a cheapo PC. When kids make stuff, they learn more than just reading dry old textbooks. It's called constructivist learning. At the secondary level, the projects can and do get more in depth.
So if I'm a fifth grade teacher, I don't want one of these crap boxes. You can buy three crap boxes for the price of one iMac, but I'd rather have the iMac.
...than those records they used to sell with "birthday" songs on them. Made them for all the popular names. Crap then... crap now. Nuff said.
Linux as a moodle server? Hell yes. Linux as my desktop? Not even close. Linux is fine for Joe User who only needs web surfing and e-mail. That ain't me.
But there are plenty of musicians who want to hang onto the old ideals. The fact is that the general public no longer thinks that music by the big names is worth any money, let alone the unknowns. The indie unsigned musicians have a chance right now to give away downloads and help change the business. Some of us are doing so, some are still fighting the old fight. I'd rather be on 5,000 iPods than sell a small number of copies.
Adding another CD won't matter. Linux won't take off in schools for a boatload of reasons, support being perhaps the biggest. We've got former and current classroom teachers running networks in schools. They've got their hands full with OS X Server, they're completely blown away by Windows 2003 Server, and they've got no hope of making Linux work campuswide with all of their current peripherals AND finding replacement software for all of their educational titles AND securing the thing so the kids don't mess it up AND keeping everything up and running AND finding open source alternatives to programs mandated by the state that don't come in anything but Windows and OS X AND... I could go on and on and on. Linux will one day be the number one operating system, or some future OS based on it will. But not today.
The volume wars affect even artists like me who are unsigned. When we submit our music to radio stations, magazines for review, etc, most of the morons who listen to the CD's will immediately notice if your music isn't within the ballpark volume-wise of the other music they get, and they'll think less of you. For my last CD I tried to go as hot (volume-wise) as I could but still maintain a clean undistorted sound. It's not that hard to do, and it makes all the difference in the world. But my music is still nowhere near as loud as, say, the new Maroon 5 distorted overproduced clipped mess. Sigh.
John Swelly says "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched." I understand his problem with PowerPoint but absolute statements like this, in today's bullet point world, are not good. There are teachers using PowerPoint creatively and effectively. Instead of throwing out the tool, the proper educational practice should be to examine what's good and bad and improve how we use the tool. You can integrate video content into PowerPoint. My district (Pasco County, FL) has a license with unitedstreaming, a huge online warehouse of educational video clips. To bring a quicktime video into a PowerPoint slide on our computers (Macs,) you simply click and drag it. PowerPoint can combine sound, graphics, animation, text, and video to make compelling presentations. Let's toss the whole thing because most people don't use it properly! Let's NOT. If we adopt that strategy, we need to toss all of our computers too. The way to progress is to define goals and start moving toward them.
"Teachers don't freaking teach anything in class anymore." Really? I work in the public school system. I'm in schools every day. Are you? No? Then shut the f*ck up. Generalizations like "Teachers don't" label you an idiot anyway.
Apple's approach is to not announce anything, let the speculation build, and then surprise people, usually with a great, well thought out product. Almost every time they release a product it has at least one feature that no one saw coming. Microsoft's approach is FUD, rushing products to market despite issues, and using their monopoly power to try to create other monopolies. Having a long run approach with an inferior product means you have to be cheaper and you have to be considered "good enough." They pulled it off with the computer because it's a big expensive purchase. It won't work with a $150 portable music device.
1. The school can't suspend a student for what they say in a blog, UNLESS the student was using a school computer during school time to do the blog. If he wasn't, they can't probably legally do anything unless the student's charges are disprovable, in which case they could sue him for libel, maybe.
2. It IS true that schools do NOT fully understand the Internet and they ARE afraid of it. In many cases they are overreacting to issues such as kids talking to each other on myspace. But part of the reason for that is that if a kid were to get into trouble outside of school because of something they read or did on myspace on a school computer, the parents would attempt to sue the school. Folks are really quick to point blame the schools for their kids making stupid decisions.
3. It's popular to hate schools and teachers here on slashdot, and I didn't really think too highly of my high school education either, but really most of the people I work with care about their jobs, and they're good people. I feel sorry for them, because they teach all the students - not just the bright, well behaved ones but also the obnoxious surly defiant unthankful disrespectful teens who think they know everything and don't care about anyone but themselves. They know that this stage of life is notorious for testing boundries and rebelling against authority. And they come into work each day and do the best they can, most of the folks. Most of the people here on slashdot couldn't do their job for a week without running home and crying into their huggy pillow. Blame the curriculum, or blame the bad teachers, but please don't lump all teachers into that category. Seeing posts saying all teachers suck get moderated high makes those of us here who are mature just sorta shake our heads. Slashdot readers and mods will argue for logic in one sentence and fail to apply it in the next.
DAMMIT! I'm ALWAYS doing that. I think I need a subscription for a drug that makes me remember stuff better...
1. Actual physical CD's sold at CDBaby.com
2. Individual songs sold on iTunes
3. Entire CD sold on iTunes
4. All the subscription sites (napster, rhapsody, etc) combined
However, the most EXPOSURE I've gotten in the subscription sites. True, I only get paid 4 cents per song per listen, and it takes a lot of listens to add up, but an independent artist is much more likely to get people to listen to them via the subscription services. So I like the model. As a consumer, I have no interest in it, but as an artist it's helping me gain exposure.