I'm not suggesting that MIDI would be better, and I'm guessing there are, in fact, some limitations of MIDI that make it inappropriate here, but I'm very curious what those limitations are, and why XML was chosen instead?
Well, here again we see that those guys cannot see things clearly from both sides. They just want free stuff.
Suppose the pro-piracy guys are wrong, and cannot see things clearly from both sides. It does not follow that they just want free stuff.
Not every case of someone being wrong is because of an ulterior motive.
I don't even concede that much, by the way. I demand that publishers use alternative ways to get money simply because piracy is not going away, and the cost of fighting piracy is too high for society in general. DRM is a burden on everyone. But I also don't think giving it away is the only other option here.
I really don't. I want that even less than I want ADF and jDeveloper.
Partly because I want the result to not suck. Can I use those tools to develop a frontend which is essentially static HTML? Not actually static, use some templates and sugar to make it easier to build, but is it actually reasonable to develop a frontend which doesn't have to talk to the server for every little thing?
But mostly, I want to develop and deploy on open platforms. I can't count the number of times it's been helpful to read the source of a library or tool I'm using, and there are a number of times when patching it directly has been the best option. Maybe that's an indication of the lack of quality of the particular frameworks and libraries I'm using, but from what I hear from the proprietary world, and certainly from my own experience with Oracle ADF, it's not really different there. In Oracle's case, it's often far, far worse, to the point where I really don't get why anyone willingly chooses Oracle for anything.
I know you're an AC, and maybe I'm foolish to expect more, but your main point:
If you want to keep your product closed, buy a damn license.
I answered in the post you're replying to:
we could not afford to either be stuck with an old version of a framework or pay licensing fees...
This point is even more asinine:
I've never understood why people complain that something is not free and open when they want to build closed and non free products.
The complaint isn't that it's "not free and open", it's that it's problematic for non-GPL'd stuff, proprietary or otherwise, and even for GPL'd software which wants to connect to non-GPL'd servers. Presumably you have no problem with the fact that your web browser, whatever its license is, can connect to a server running non-free code? Would you prefer it demanded the source code of every site you visited?
But see, as I pointed out, the author of EXT seemed to be insisting that this is what the GPL means:
they have a fairly perverse understanding of the GPL which suggests that using EXT would to build a frontend would require me to open source my entire backend.
Replace "my backend" with "any website I want to script with EXT" and you start to see the problem. What if I were to open-source the client? What if others were to write varying backends, proprietary and otherwise? Is this now a genuinely independent client, or is it a library that's being linked against, illegally in some situations?
This is why, even when I write entirely open source code that's never intended to be closed, I just go with BSD or MIT -- something that lets me ignore the legal bullshit and just write code.
Or using traditional application development tools to build a web app?
I like the Web, but I have to admit, GUI toolkits tend to be quite a bit better. I don't know how well this would actually work, but it would be nice to develop a web frontend using tools like glade or QtDesigner rather than what I do now with Haml and jQuery.
I'm very skeptical, though -- there are ways the Web is currently better than many desktop apps. Even ignoring issues like bandwidth and performance, would this give me an app which properly supports things like bookmarking, tabbed browsing, and the back button? Is it just drawing to canvas, or does it take advantage of native stuff?
From the video, the answer seems to be "no, and it's just drawing to canvas." If that's the case, I take back everything I just said, and I hope this is never deliberately used to build a web app. Still a cool idea, though.
This may have changed recently, but I distinctly remember having to strip EXT from a commercial product simply because we could not afford to either be stuck with an old version of a framework or pay licensing fees for a javascript toolkit.
What's worse, they went from not requiring that to requiring it, and they demanded more than the GPL asks for. In particular, they decided that the entire application included both the frontend and the backend. It probably wouldn't have been OK for us to GPL our frontend either, but both frontend and backend was out of the question.
Note that this disallows quite a lot of things which would otherwise make sense. For instance, if I develop some sort of backend-agnostic frontend in EXT, are people only allowed to ship it with fully GPL'd sites? What if it pulls data from, say, Google -- can they now demand all of Google's source as well? What if I use an entirely frontend-agnostic backend, something like CouchDB, so the entire application is effectively JavaScript -- would I then be in violation since CouchDB is Apache licensed?
Just where do you draw the line between merely interoperating with a server, and having that server be an integral part of your application?
I understand the business model. I'd probably even be ok with it if it was applied sanely, though I'd probably avoid it for my own projects -- at the end of the day, I like the simplicity of a BSD-like "do whatever you want" license. But to insist that JavaScript and PHP, say, are somehow "linked" in the GPL sense of the word is insane.
Mostly because the philosophy of jQuery seems to be embracing CSS and the DOM, rather than abstracting them away. It often feels like the API that was missing from the W3C spec.
The other, bigger reason I personally have been avoiding EXT is the attitude of the core developer(s) about the GPL -- in particular, they not only switched to the GPL lately, but they have a fairly perverse understanding of the GPL which suggests that using EXT would to build a frontend would require me to open source my entire backend. I'm all for open source, but given the choice between something GPL'd and something effectively BSD, I'll go with BSD unless there's a compelling reason not to.
This may have changed recently, but I distinctly remember having to strip EXT from a commercial product simply because we could not afford to either be stuck with an old version of a framework or pay licensing fees for a javascript toolkit. We switched pretty much entirely to jQuery, MooTools, and home-grown stuff.
There are quite a few luddites, but I think there's an equal measure of people who are simply more cautious. I'm far from a luddite, and I think my posting history will attest to that -- the sheer number of posts I've made will attest to that -- but I don't have a Facebook account. Not because I'm afraid of technology -- on the contrary, I know enough about technology to really, really hate what Facebook is doing to the Internet.
So, take these iPads. Sure, etexts are a hell of a lot better than forcing students to carry around a textbook. I'll be the first to admit that I would prefer them, that I would be the first to buy them, that I'd spend several times the price......except for the DRM.
It's not just that the iPad is a great idea as a general-purpose computing device that's been shat on by Apple's need to control everything, that the very first thing people in the know do with it is "jailbreak" it -- contrast to Android, where a free SDK is available for any OS, any student could just start developing apps, and share them with their friends without needing Apple's approval.
It's not just that I worry about the iPad "app" becoming the only option for a textbook, with other platforms shunned, even print. That's a long way off, but it is already happening -- there are apps with exclusive content for iStuff, and there are more than a few which would work fine as websites, but have been app-ified to cash in.
It's certainly not just that I worry about this being done horribly wrong, like the iPad-only publications which are, not even PDFs, but raster images of pages, because the entire process is still driven by a print-oriented workflow -- the lack of text thus completely destroying the biggest advantages of it being electronic, such as bookmarking, hyperlinks, and search.
No, the biggest thing stopping me from buying electronic textbooks, and being very skeptical of any school district which forces students to not only buy electronic, but to buy specifically from Apple, is the thought that right now, I can lend my book to a friend. I can either sell it for a decent price -- buying used and selling at the end of the semester is almost, but not quite, as cheap as renting -- or, if it ends up being useful, I can keep it. I can use it where I can't get power, let alone an Internet connection, and while I think these concerns are minor and becoming less relevant all the time, the few ebooks I buy, I have as DRM-free PDFs that work wherever I am, on any device I get my hands on, because I can make them work.
I'd be the first to suggest this sort of thing, if there were any hope of it being done right. Give students an open device, and if you can't get Creative-Commons texts, at least make them DRM-free -- it's not like there's an incentive to pirate if the school just blanket-licenses the books they need. Force the teachers to adapt to students who simultaneously have access to every distraction imaginable, and to the sum of all human knowledge, all at their fingertips and during class -- better make that lecture more interesting than who's dating who on Facebook, better make sure you teach something more than an aggregation of facts, better learn to hold their attention. Don't just give students thirty seconds on a multiple-choice quiz, give them an interesting problem to solve that can't be done with just a Google search, but can gain some advantage from the strengths of such a device.
Problem is, as soon as I hear the word iPad, that's my first clue it's not even going to be close to right.
Your first sentence gives it away. Deliberately inflammatory, likely to provoke a response -- thus, troll. In fact, three out of your four paragraphs are dedicated to insulting people you disagree with -- only one paragraph might have a point that's not inherently trollish.
If what you say is both logical and factual, surely you can provide some evidence for it, right? Shouldn't be too hard, if it's "all over" the Internet.
How the hell did you get to +5 insightful by implying that we can't tell the difference between preventing people from doing what they want with a device, and preventing developers from taking advantage of users?
Seriously, this is like implying that when we say "Good job" about putting spammers behind bars, you're surprised we weren't defending their freedom of speech. I know it's tempting to think in soundbites, but this isn't hard.
I am a developer and a researcher. I install (and uninstall) softwares day in and day out.
I'm with you there, but...
So the question really is can it become mainstream?
Wait, what? You just said you're a developer and a researcher. You're not even close to mainstream. This thing becoming mainstream is entirely orthogonal to whether it can replace a PC for you.
I'd rather it didn't become mainstream, but that's not really up to us.
That said, apps that encourage kids to spend real money for shit like costumes etc. are treading on moral thin ice.
So I have to ask...
Isn't this something the App Store was supposed to protect you with? At least according to Apple, who've generally tried to ban porn, you'd think they'd also ban apps which deliberately exploit children. I'm not saying I want Apple to ban anything, but they are pretty damned capricious about what they choose to ban or not.
Maybe I'm not being cynical enough. Maybe the difference is the amount of money these bring in...
Yep, Kids have no business engaging in a relationship earlier that 16 *in this nation* because the collective of society is just too effing market driven. You haven't had sex YET? What's Wrong with you?!!?
In other words, because of the pressure of society, you don't trust your children.
I guess I'm still stuck on where 12-year-olds being in a relationship is a problem, partly because I don't see 12-year-olds having sex as being a problem.
No child will remember to take them in the morning. Children are not as mindful of consequences as you think....
And my point was, being mindful of consequences is exactly what you should be teaching them. This isn't armchair speculation on what a "child" might or might not do, this is my own memory of what I was like as a young adult.
It's worth mentioning, these sorts of consequences were drilled into my head early and often, but not to the point of nagging. My parents had my respect -- again, largely because they didn't pull shit like intercepting all my communications -- so when they told me about stuff like that, I listened. From a very early age, I was taught things like, "If she tells you she's on the pill, make her show you those pills, because you'd be the one paying child support if she keeps it." Never mind forgetting in "the heat of the moment", I still remember that over a decade later.
Notice the difference here -- my parents were treating me like an adult. An adult who didn't have all the facts yet, and an adult who needed advice and guidance, but an adult nonetheless. They weren't laying me down the law, they were telling me what they felt was best and why, and I knew it at the time. You, on the other hand, look down on "children" in an act of almost pure age-ism, and your response is to immediately fall into the parent-child roles -- they are the child, you make the rules, they're irresponsible, etc. Time and time again, I've seen this be a self-fulfilling prophecy, extending well into the real world.
You as a Parent are responsible for choosing her peers. If you're not there to guide them in their selection...
You're half-right. If you think that "choosing" is the same thing as "guiding", you have failed.
You need access to all their communications, because they haven't yet earned the trust required to allow them to have that unfettered communication.
Earning trust requires the potential to break trust. In this case, it requires that you either let them have that communication until they show they can't handle it, or let them think they can, and the latter requires a level of dishonesty which is likely to be damaging later on.
That is what trust means, from a security standpoint -- to trust someone is to give them the ability to screw you over in some way. Without the ability to violate that trust, it's not trust.
Bottom line is this, All these people that say I am over protective, is my indication I have it right.
Fascinating -- people saying you're wrong is your indication you have it right?
As a youth, whenever I made the same argument, was in anger over the realization that so in so's parent's weren't going to let me get close enough to her to have my way.
Close enough to explore. To discover. To make that sort of decision on your own.
And I'm not even talking about the experience of having to deal with others whose parents are over-protective. I'm talking about having been raised by parents who weren't. It's not a perfect analogy, but you don't learn to walk by being held up the whole way -- you learn to walk by falling. Parents shouldn't be there to hold you up the whole way, they should be there as a safety net so you never fall too far.
Of course, if I was interested in someone as tightly-controlled as your child, my solution would be to wait till she rebels
Well, I hate teamspeak too, why force me to use proprietary junk when we have Mumble? But there are, in fact, games where stopping to type, even "rudimentary" things, is a competitive disadvantage, and strong communication is a massive competitive advantage. Natural Selection (not 2) finally made me get a headset for gaming.
Unless it's also tuned to your voice, that's still problematic -- if it's a generic "Hey Computer", I could put it in a malicious YouTube video. "Hey Computer: Format C:" Then, with perfect timing for the "Are you sure?" prompt, "Yes."
Even if it's not malicious, it sure makes it difficult to, say, watch screencasts. And even tuned to your voice, now you can't watch your own screencasts? Yeah, that'll be great.
In the case of Star Trek, there are plenty of terminals, including pads they carry around. The only reason speech ended up being efficient at all was the natural language processing -- you could actually ask the computer a question, and as long as it was a question which could in principle be answered by a computer, the computer would do the work of translating it for you.
Even so, once the computer found an "answer", often they'd page through it with touchscreens. Saying "next page" isn't that useful.
When you use a whitelist system, every website that isn't whitelisted is blocked.
Then why would it be "shortly after" and not "immediately after"? And how does that explain this part:
"Well, that doesn't explain why the website was fully accessible for the entire time it was up, up until they started blocking it on Friday," Tate countered.
Were it anyone else, I honestly doubt I'd care. It is reasonable to collect enough information to distinguish applicants. While I don't particularly like the last four digits of your SSN being used for this sort of thing, it's not like Google is the only one doing that.
all but one of the printers my business uses, and support for that one is flaky.....
Since that was the only part of your rant which answers my question, let me answer that with another question: Which ones? I'm not a contributer of the CUPS project, but, you know, model numbers would be nice. You also didn't answer this question:
did they really have the sort of volume where a rollback to Windows was cheaper than writing printer drivers, and writing printer drivers was cheaper than buying a printer with open drivers?
Because from what I understand, printers are far, far cheaper than Windows, and writing printer drivers is the most expensive way of all. I mean, maybe you had a legitimately bad experience, but this just sounds to me like they are Doing It Wrong in every way possible.
To address the rest of your rant:
Linux users need to learn to take criticism properly. The simple fact is that for most non-geeks, Linux sucks...
Constructive criticism, I'll take. That's just pointless bashing. Tell me why it sucks, what needs to be changed.
why should I need one of the worst applications ever written (CUPS) anyway?
Hey, guess what? More pointless bashing. Again, tell me why it sucks.
I dare you to setup a PC with Linux and CUPS and then ask your parents to do something important with it.
Well, first of all, if this is your sole argument for how much CUPS sucks, I'm sorry, but for running a printserver (or any kind of server), I'll take a scriptable commandline over a parent-proof GUI any day. It's nice when they aren't mutually exclusive, though, as seems to be the case with CUPS.
To address your complaint more directly, not only have I done this with Linux, with a fair amount of success -- printing documents is important, and it works just as well with CUPS as with anything else -- but I dare you to tell me my parents would get frustrated and give up on a shiny new Mac. That's right, CUPS is used as the Mac printing stack.
If they ever have to add a new printer, they'll never succeed.
The last time I did this in Kubuntu, I clicked "System Settings", then "Printers", then "New Printer". In a few clicks, it even automatically portscanned my local network looking for printers. It's been even longer since I tried this for USB than for network printers, but each time, I was surprised at how much was done for me.
Printing in Linux simply stinks; half the time you get blank pages, or pages of garbage ASCII characters instead of the nice output that any idiot can get from Windows or a Mac with a couple of mouse clicks. No average PC user thinks of firing up a web browser and entering a raw IP address into the URL line to get at the printer controls.
And with that, I'm convinced you know almost nothing about CUPS and almost nothing about modern desktop Linux. Did you even try the GUI way of doing this? I didn't have to fire up a web browser and enter a raw IP address. When I print a document, it shows up in the system tray just like it's supposed to. But it is kind of cool that I can control my printserver from that web interface if I need to, say, add a new printer to a printserver, not to be confused with adding a new printserver to my local machine.
But hey, you mentioned any idiot can get nice output from a Mac with a couple of mouse clicks. I'll say it again: Mac uses CUPS. I thought CUPS was "one of the worst applications ever written"?
Linux audio similarly sucks (can we please have a single standard programming interface that supports both open- and closed-source applications equally well?!?!?!,
...erm...which standard programming interface that Linux currently supports doesn't support both open and closed source apps? I must be confused -- I have sever
All are scenarios where bad consequences were avoided because a child's privacy was invaded.
Actually, two are scenarios where bad consequences were avoided, but could have been avoided through other means. The first was you being a dick. "Canceled that relationship" -- seriously? More like, talk to them about birth control -- which you're going to have to do anyway, and it doesn't have to be about a particular relationship.
But the other two:
Scenario two, Another Parent and her Daughter sends mine a facebook message about losing her virginity and her BF didn't use a condom. The mother intercepted that mail and took her to the doc for a day after pill, an examination, and other kit.
First off, the part where her BF didn't use a condom -- oh, and she wasn't on the pill? These things can still happen when the kids know something about birth control, but it's a lot less likely.
Let me put it this way: I knew about contraception when I was 10, at least. I also knew that there are places you can go which will treat situations like this with appropriate discretion. In other words, if something like this happened (which it probably wouldn't -- I knew about condoms), it's entirely possible that the situation would be resolved without my parents ever hearing a word. It is also possible that I would talk to one (not both) in order to get any information I was missing.
Scenario 3, Boy rsvp's to an invitation for a gang fight.
Never once growing up was I ever tempted to join a gang.
I should also add that once you know this kind of thing is going on, the kid has forfeited their privacy, but not before. Give them a chance to show it can work.
And the Cuffs go on.
Are you serious? Please tell me you're joking.
You're suggesting parents get arrested because they didn't demand access to their child's Facebook account? What next, I should be jailed because I didn't install a keylogger or look over their shoulder every second of every day to make sure they didn't have a secondary Facebook account or email address? Or, I really should've had a camera installed in my child's bedroom?
Sorry, no, I'm not buying it. Children aren't adults, and it does make sense to restrict their rights somewhat, but that doesn't mean they're guilty until proven innocent.
If more parents were prosecuted for reckless endangerment for not monitoring their child's communications this would be less of a problem.
It would just introduce other problems.
Why do you think a child joins a gang in the first place?
I'm not a psychologist, so this is just a guess, but I'd think it has a lot to do with the gang treating them like an adult, giving them adult responsibilities, giving them respect where others don't.
So when your child finds out that you don't trust or respect them enough to let them make decisions about their own body, that you're instead going to do everything you can to deliberately kill their relationships because they might screw up on the birth control, how much more likely are they to go join that gang?
I mean, yes, they'll hate you for something, but there's a difference between the kind of fights almost every kid has growing up, and the realization that "Wow, dad, that was pretty morally questionable right there. I really can't trust you, can I?"
It's bad enough that you'd treat your own children this way, but what I find truly despicable about your position is that you want to force everyone to do it your way.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not suggesting that MIDI would be better, and I'm guessing there are, in fact, some limitations of MIDI that make it inappropriate here, but I'm very curious what those limitations are, and why XML was chosen instead?
Well, here again we see that those guys cannot see things clearly from both sides. They just want free stuff.
Suppose the pro-piracy guys are wrong, and cannot see things clearly from both sides. It does not follow that they just want free stuff.
Not every case of someone being wrong is because of an ulterior motive.
I don't even concede that much, by the way. I demand that publishers use alternative ways to get money simply because piracy is not going away, and the cost of fighting piracy is too high for society in general. DRM is a burden on everyone. But I also don't think giving it away is the only other option here.
I really don't. I want that even less than I want ADF and jDeveloper.
Partly because I want the result to not suck. Can I use those tools to develop a frontend which is essentially static HTML? Not actually static, use some templates and sugar to make it easier to build, but is it actually reasonable to develop a frontend which doesn't have to talk to the server for every little thing?
But mostly, I want to develop and deploy on open platforms. I can't count the number of times it's been helpful to read the source of a library or tool I'm using, and there are a number of times when patching it directly has been the best option. Maybe that's an indication of the lack of quality of the particular frameworks and libraries I'm using, but from what I hear from the proprietary world, and certainly from my own experience with Oracle ADF, it's not really different there. In Oracle's case, it's often far, far worse, to the point where I really don't get why anyone willingly chooses Oracle for anything.
I know you're an AC, and maybe I'm foolish to expect more, but your main point:
If you want to keep your product closed, buy a damn license.
I answered in the post you're replying to:
we could not afford to either be stuck with an old version of a framework or pay licensing fees...
This point is even more asinine:
I've never understood why people complain that something is not free and open when they want to build closed and non free products.
The complaint isn't that it's "not free and open", it's that it's problematic for non-GPL'd stuff, proprietary or otherwise, and even for GPL'd software which wants to connect to non-GPL'd servers. Presumably you have no problem with the fact that your web browser, whatever its license is, can connect to a server running non-free code? Would you prefer it demanded the source code of every site you visited?
But see, as I pointed out, the author of EXT seemed to be insisting that this is what the GPL means:
they have a fairly perverse understanding of the GPL which suggests that using EXT would to build a frontend would require me to open source my entire backend.
Replace "my backend" with "any website I want to script with EXT" and you start to see the problem. What if I were to open-source the client? What if others were to write varying backends, proprietary and otherwise? Is this now a genuinely independent client, or is it a library that's being linked against, illegally in some situations?
This is why, even when I write entirely open source code that's never intended to be closed, I just go with BSD or MIT -- something that lets me ignore the legal bullshit and just write code.
Or using traditional application development tools to build a web app?
I like the Web, but I have to admit, GUI toolkits tend to be quite a bit better. I don't know how well this would actually work, but it would be nice to develop a web frontend using tools like glade or QtDesigner rather than what I do now with Haml and jQuery.
I'm very skeptical, though -- there are ways the Web is currently better than many desktop apps. Even ignoring issues like bandwidth and performance, would this give me an app which properly supports things like bookmarking, tabbed browsing, and the back button? Is it just drawing to canvas, or does it take advantage of native stuff?
From the video, the answer seems to be "no, and it's just drawing to canvas." If that's the case, I take back everything I just said, and I hope this is never deliberately used to build a web app. Still a cool idea, though.
Right, which I mentioned explicitly:
This may have changed recently, but I distinctly remember having to strip EXT from a commercial product simply because we could not afford to either be stuck with an old version of a framework or pay licensing fees for a javascript toolkit.
What's worse, they went from not requiring that to requiring it, and they demanded more than the GPL asks for. In particular, they decided that the entire application included both the frontend and the backend. It probably wouldn't have been OK for us to GPL our frontend either, but both frontend and backend was out of the question.
Note that this disallows quite a lot of things which would otherwise make sense. For instance, if I develop some sort of backend-agnostic frontend in EXT, are people only allowed to ship it with fully GPL'd sites? What if it pulls data from, say, Google -- can they now demand all of Google's source as well? What if I use an entirely frontend-agnostic backend, something like CouchDB, so the entire application is effectively JavaScript -- would I then be in violation since CouchDB is Apache licensed?
Just where do you draw the line between merely interoperating with a server, and having that server be an integral part of your application?
I understand the business model. I'd probably even be ok with it if it was applied sanely, though I'd probably avoid it for my own projects -- at the end of the day, I like the simplicity of a BSD-like "do whatever you want" license. But to insist that JavaScript and PHP, say, are somehow "linked" in the GPL sense of the word is insane.
Mostly because the philosophy of jQuery seems to be embracing CSS and the DOM, rather than abstracting them away. It often feels like the API that was missing from the W3C spec.
The other, bigger reason I personally have been avoiding EXT is the attitude of the core developer(s) about the GPL -- in particular, they not only switched to the GPL lately, but they have a fairly perverse understanding of the GPL which suggests that using EXT would to build a frontend would require me to open source my entire backend. I'm all for open source, but given the choice between something GPL'd and something effectively BSD, I'll go with BSD unless there's a compelling reason not to.
This may have changed recently, but I distinctly remember having to strip EXT from a commercial product simply because we could not afford to either be stuck with an old version of a framework or pay licensing fees for a javascript toolkit. We switched pretty much entirely to jQuery, MooTools, and home-grown stuff.
a robot touch isn't a reproduction of a human touch, it's a simulation of a human touch - which is something else entirely.
What's the difference? Particularly if the simulation is derived heavily from actual human touches?
you're responding the meanings embedded in them by.... (drum roll) human beings.
I fail to see how a human can't embed meaning in an algorithm.
There are quite a few luddites, but I think there's an equal measure of people who are simply more cautious. I'm far from a luddite, and I think my posting history will attest to that -- the sheer number of posts I've made will attest to that -- but I don't have a Facebook account. Not because I'm afraid of technology -- on the contrary, I know enough about technology to really, really hate what Facebook is doing to the Internet.
So, take these iPads. Sure, etexts are a hell of a lot better than forcing students to carry around a textbook. I'll be the first to admit that I would prefer them, that I would be the first to buy them, that I'd spend several times the price... ...except for the DRM.
It's not just that the iPad is a great idea as a general-purpose computing device that's been shat on by Apple's need to control everything, that the very first thing people in the know do with it is "jailbreak" it -- contrast to Android, where a free SDK is available for any OS, any student could just start developing apps, and share them with their friends without needing Apple's approval.
It's not just that I worry about the iPad "app" becoming the only option for a textbook, with other platforms shunned, even print. That's a long way off, but it is already happening -- there are apps with exclusive content for iStuff, and there are more than a few which would work fine as websites, but have been app-ified to cash in.
It's certainly not just that I worry about this being done horribly wrong, like the iPad-only publications which are, not even PDFs, but raster images of pages, because the entire process is still driven by a print-oriented workflow -- the lack of text thus completely destroying the biggest advantages of it being electronic, such as bookmarking, hyperlinks, and search.
No, the biggest thing stopping me from buying electronic textbooks, and being very skeptical of any school district which forces students to not only buy electronic, but to buy specifically from Apple, is the thought that right now, I can lend my book to a friend. I can either sell it for a decent price -- buying used and selling at the end of the semester is almost, but not quite, as cheap as renting -- or, if it ends up being useful, I can keep it. I can use it where I can't get power, let alone an Internet connection, and while I think these concerns are minor and becoming less relevant all the time, the few ebooks I buy, I have as DRM-free PDFs that work wherever I am, on any device I get my hands on, because I can make them work.
I'd be the first to suggest this sort of thing, if there were any hope of it being done right. Give students an open device, and if you can't get Creative-Commons texts, at least make them DRM-free -- it's not like there's an incentive to pirate if the school just blanket-licenses the books they need. Force the teachers to adapt to students who simultaneously have access to every distraction imaginable, and to the sum of all human knowledge, all at their fingertips and during class -- better make that lecture more interesting than who's dating who on Facebook, better make sure you teach something more than an aggregation of facts, better learn to hold their attention. Don't just give students thirty seconds on a multiple-choice quiz, give them an interesting problem to solve that can't be done with just a Google search, but can gain some advantage from the strengths of such a device.
Problem is, as soon as I hear the word iPad, that's my first clue it's not even going to be close to right.
You've just fallen victim to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
Your first sentence gives it away. Deliberately inflammatory, likely to provoke a response -- thus, troll. In fact, three out of your four paragraphs are dedicated to insulting people you disagree with -- only one paragraph might have a point that's not inherently trollish.
If what you say is both logical and factual, surely you can provide some evidence for it, right? Shouldn't be too hard, if it's "all over" the Internet.
How the hell did you get to +5 insightful by implying that we can't tell the difference between preventing people from doing what they want with a device, and preventing developers from taking advantage of users?
Seriously, this is like implying that when we say "Good job" about putting spammers behind bars, you're surprised we weren't defending their freedom of speech. I know it's tempting to think in soundbites, but this isn't hard.
I am a developer and a researcher. I install (and uninstall) softwares day in and day out.
I'm with you there, but...
So the question really is can it become mainstream?
Wait, what? You just said you're a developer and a researcher. You're not even close to mainstream. This thing becoming mainstream is entirely orthogonal to whether it can replace a PC for you.
I'd rather it didn't become mainstream, but that's not really up to us.
So could the records of the radar gun in all probability.
In which case, it's your word against his, and the cop wins by default.
It's not just that GPS records can theoretically be falsified -- this is a smartphone app. It would be easy.
I can't really agree, partly because it really looks like Steve Jobs isn't controlling these applications.
That said, apps that encourage kids to spend real money for shit like costumes etc. are treading on moral thin ice.
So I have to ask...
Isn't this something the App Store was supposed to protect you with? At least according to Apple, who've generally tried to ban porn, you'd think they'd also ban apps which deliberately exploit children. I'm not saying I want Apple to ban anything, but they are pretty damned capricious about what they choose to ban or not.
Maybe I'm not being cynical enough. Maybe the difference is the amount of money these bring in...
Yep, Kids have no business engaging in a relationship earlier that 16 *in this nation* because the collective of society is just too effing market driven. You haven't had sex YET? What's Wrong with you?!!?
In other words, because of the pressure of society, you don't trust your children.
I guess I'm still stuck on where 12-year-olds being in a relationship is a problem, partly because I don't see 12-year-olds having sex as being a problem.
No child will remember to take them in the morning. Children are not as mindful of consequences as you think....
And my point was, being mindful of consequences is exactly what you should be teaching them. This isn't armchair speculation on what a "child" might or might not do, this is my own memory of what I was like as a young adult.
It's worth mentioning, these sorts of consequences were drilled into my head early and often, but not to the point of nagging. My parents had my respect -- again, largely because they didn't pull shit like intercepting all my communications -- so when they told me about stuff like that, I listened. From a very early age, I was taught things like, "If she tells you she's on the pill, make her show you those pills, because you'd be the one paying child support if she keeps it." Never mind forgetting in "the heat of the moment", I still remember that over a decade later.
Notice the difference here -- my parents were treating me like an adult. An adult who didn't have all the facts yet, and an adult who needed advice and guidance, but an adult nonetheless. They weren't laying me down the law, they were telling me what they felt was best and why, and I knew it at the time. You, on the other hand, look down on "children" in an act of almost pure age-ism, and your response is to immediately fall into the parent-child roles -- they are the child, you make the rules, they're irresponsible, etc. Time and time again, I've seen this be a self-fulfilling prophecy, extending well into the real world.
You as a Parent are responsible for choosing her peers. If you're not there to guide them in their selection...
You're half-right. If you think that "choosing" is the same thing as "guiding", you have failed.
You need access to all their communications, because they haven't yet earned the trust required to allow them to have that unfettered communication.
Earning trust requires the potential to break trust. In this case, it requires that you either let them have that communication until they show they can't handle it, or let them think they can, and the latter requires a level of dishonesty which is likely to be damaging later on.
That is what trust means, from a security standpoint -- to trust someone is to give them the ability to screw you over in some way. Without the ability to violate that trust, it's not trust.
Bottom line is this, All these people that say I am over protective, is my indication I have it right.
Fascinating -- people saying you're wrong is your indication you have it right?
As a youth, whenever I made the same argument, was in anger over the realization that so in so's parent's weren't going to let me get close enough to her to have my way.
Close enough to explore. To discover. To make that sort of decision on your own.
And I'm not even talking about the experience of having to deal with others whose parents are over-protective. I'm talking about having been raised by parents who weren't. It's not a perfect analogy, but you don't learn to walk by being held up the whole way -- you learn to walk by falling. Parents shouldn't be there to hold you up the whole way, they should be there as a safety net so you never fall too far.
Of course, if I was interested in someone as tightly-controlled as your child, my solution would be to wait till she rebels
Well, I hate teamspeak too, why force me to use proprietary junk when we have Mumble? But there are, in fact, games where stopping to type, even "rudimentary" things, is a competitive disadvantage, and strong communication is a massive competitive advantage. Natural Selection (not 2) finally made me get a headset for gaming.
It seems like that removes the biggest advantage to voice: the ability to command a computer from across the room.
Unless it's also tuned to your voice, that's still problematic -- if it's a generic "Hey Computer", I could put it in a malicious YouTube video. "Hey Computer: Format C:" Then, with perfect timing for the "Are you sure?" prompt, "Yes."
Even if it's not malicious, it sure makes it difficult to, say, watch screencasts. And even tuned to your voice, now you can't watch your own screencasts? Yeah, that'll be great.
In the case of Star Trek, there are plenty of terminals, including pads they carry around. The only reason speech ended up being efficient at all was the natural language processing -- you could actually ask the computer a question, and as long as it was a question which could in principle be answered by a computer, the computer would do the work of translating it for you.
Even so, once the computer found an "answer", often they'd page through it with touchscreens. Saying "next page" isn't that useful.
When you use a whitelist system, every website that isn't whitelisted is blocked.
Then why would it be "shortly after" and not "immediately after"? And how does that explain this part:
"Well, that doesn't explain why the website was fully accessible for the entire time it was up, up until they started blocking it on Friday," Tate countered.
Would we?
Were it anyone else, I honestly doubt I'd care. It is reasonable to collect enough information to distinguish applicants. While I don't particularly like the last four digits of your SSN being used for this sort of thing, it's not like Google is the only one doing that.
all but one of the printers my business uses, and support for that one is flaky.....
Since that was the only part of your rant which answers my question, let me answer that with another question: Which ones? I'm not a contributer of the CUPS project, but, you know, model numbers would be nice. You also didn't answer this question:
did they really have the sort of volume where a rollback to Windows was cheaper than writing printer drivers, and writing printer drivers was cheaper than buying a printer with open drivers?
Because from what I understand, printers are far, far cheaper than Windows, and writing printer drivers is the most expensive way of all. I mean, maybe you had a legitimately bad experience, but this just sounds to me like they are Doing It Wrong in every way possible.
To address the rest of your rant:
Linux users need to learn to take criticism properly. The simple fact is that for most non-geeks, Linux sucks...
Constructive criticism, I'll take. That's just pointless bashing. Tell me why it sucks, what needs to be changed.
why should I need one of the worst applications ever written (CUPS) anyway?
Hey, guess what? More pointless bashing. Again, tell me why it sucks.
I dare you to setup a PC with Linux and CUPS and then ask your parents to do something important with it.
Well, first of all, if this is your sole argument for how much CUPS sucks, I'm sorry, but for running a printserver (or any kind of server), I'll take a scriptable commandline over a parent-proof GUI any day. It's nice when they aren't mutually exclusive, though, as seems to be the case with CUPS.
To address your complaint more directly, not only have I done this with Linux, with a fair amount of success -- printing documents is important, and it works just as well with CUPS as with anything else -- but I dare you to tell me my parents would get frustrated and give up on a shiny new Mac. That's right, CUPS is used as the Mac printing stack.
If they ever have to add a new printer, they'll never succeed.
The last time I did this in Kubuntu, I clicked "System Settings", then "Printers", then "New Printer". In a few clicks, it even automatically portscanned my local network looking for printers. It's been even longer since I tried this for USB than for network printers, but each time, I was surprised at how much was done for me.
Printing in Linux simply stinks; half the time you get blank pages, or pages of garbage ASCII characters instead of the nice output that any idiot can get from Windows or a Mac with a couple of mouse clicks. No average PC user thinks of firing up a web browser and entering a raw IP address into the URL line to get at the printer controls.
And with that, I'm convinced you know almost nothing about CUPS and almost nothing about modern desktop Linux. Did you even try the GUI way of doing this? I didn't have to fire up a web browser and enter a raw IP address. When I print a document, it shows up in the system tray just like it's supposed to. But it is kind of cool that I can control my printserver from that web interface if I need to, say, add a new printer to a printserver, not to be confused with adding a new printserver to my local machine.
But hey, you mentioned any idiot can get nice output from a Mac with a couple of mouse clicks. I'll say it again: Mac uses CUPS. I thought CUPS was "one of the worst applications ever written"?
Linux audio similarly sucks (can we please have a single standard programming interface that supports both open- and closed-source applications equally well?!?!?!,
...erm...which standard programming interface that Linux currently supports doesn't support both open and closed source apps? I must be confused -- I have sever
All are scenarios where bad consequences were avoided because a child's privacy was invaded.
Actually, two are scenarios where bad consequences were avoided, but could have been avoided through other means. The first was you being a dick. "Canceled that relationship" -- seriously? More like, talk to them about birth control -- which you're going to have to do anyway, and it doesn't have to be about a particular relationship.
But the other two:
Scenario two, Another Parent and her Daughter sends mine a facebook message about losing her virginity and her BF didn't use a condom. The mother intercepted that mail and took her to the doc for a day after pill, an examination, and other kit.
First off, the part where her BF didn't use a condom -- oh, and she wasn't on the pill? These things can still happen when the kids know something about birth control, but it's a lot less likely.
Let me put it this way: I knew about contraception when I was 10, at least. I also knew that there are places you can go which will treat situations like this with appropriate discretion. In other words, if something like this happened (which it probably wouldn't -- I knew about condoms), it's entirely possible that the situation would be resolved without my parents ever hearing a word. It is also possible that I would talk to one (not both) in order to get any information I was missing.
Scenario 3, Boy rsvp's to an invitation for a gang fight.
Never once growing up was I ever tempted to join a gang.
I should also add that once you know this kind of thing is going on, the kid has forfeited their privacy, but not before. Give them a chance to show it can work.
And the Cuffs go on.
Are you serious? Please tell me you're joking.
You're suggesting parents get arrested because they didn't demand access to their child's Facebook account? What next, I should be jailed because I didn't install a keylogger or look over their shoulder every second of every day to make sure they didn't have a secondary Facebook account or email address? Or, I really should've had a camera installed in my child's bedroom?
Sorry, no, I'm not buying it. Children aren't adults, and it does make sense to restrict their rights somewhat, but that doesn't mean they're guilty until proven innocent.
If more parents were prosecuted for reckless endangerment for not monitoring their child's communications this would be less of a problem.
It would just introduce other problems.
Why do you think a child joins a gang in the first place?
I'm not a psychologist, so this is just a guess, but I'd think it has a lot to do with the gang treating them like an adult, giving them adult responsibilities, giving them respect where others don't.
So when your child finds out that you don't trust or respect them enough to let them make decisions about their own body, that you're instead going to do everything you can to deliberately kill their relationships because they might screw up on the birth control, how much more likely are they to go join that gang?
I mean, yes, they'll hate you for something, but there's a difference between the kind of fights almost every kid has growing up, and the realization that "Wow, dad, that was pretty morally questionable right there. I really can't trust you, can I?"
It's bad enough that you'd treat your own children this way, but what I find truly despicable about your position is that you want to force everyone to do it your way.