By purchasing Apple's DRM-laden files, you are accepting Apple's DRM. Yes, you may plan on stripping it so you can play the file with WMP or whatever, but when you bought that file you also bought and paid for a little piece of DRM and did your part to encourage it.
By paying for DRM and then stripping it, you are not telling the companies that DRM is not acceptable. You are telling the companies that what they need is STRONGER DRM.
I don't care how much you whine about DRM being bad and the RIAA being bad and all. If you purchase DRM-encoded files or buy music from the RIAA, you are paying to support the very things you are whining about. In the grand scheme, software like PlayFair is a step backward for the anti-DRM crowd. It's an attempt to live with DRM, not a refusal to accept it, and trying to think of it otherwise is missing the point.
No, I think that the radio and MTV format has a hand in this, too. I still listen to a lot of albums that are designed to be coherent wholes, and in a lot of cases the songs on them just don't stand as well when played out of context. If you want a great example, try listening to that Pink Floyd greatest hits CD sometime.
The music industry knows this, and knows that most folks buy albums because they heard one really great song from that album on the radio, so they have started pushing artists to work on doing CDs with the now-common "2 hits and 13 pieces of filler" format.
Artists want to make money, just like everyone else, and they want to get signed, so they go for it.
So yeah, everyone has a hand in this trend, but I don't think it started with the recording artists. Of course, I also don't think that it started with radio. Most people had radios long before they were doing much in the way of buying recordings of music, and long before the vinyl LP format that gave us the albums we know of today existed. So if album production were really as radio-controlled as folks complain it is, I imagine that good solid albums would either never have become popular, or they have always been this popular and folks are just getting all nostalgic.
I think maybe people who think boy bands are a new phenomenon haven't heard of Motown.
1. Newspapers. Duh. (Granted, from an environmental standpoint I much prefer the idea of electronic news sources, which can be superior to either one depending on your attention span.)
2. A lot of news is completely useless if you don't have an understanding of what it means. TV generally fails on this - there's only so much information you can provide when you have to cram each story into a minute or two time slot. Some magazine programs on TV and radio do a better job, but books are really the only forum that allows enough space to really explore all of the subtleties that are involved in current events.
Granted, whether or not that matters really depends on if you're interested in being current for the sake of voyeurism or if you're trying to keep up in the world for the sake of making informed political decisions.
If it's for the former, Fox News, The Register, etc. are fine and dandy. If it's for the latter, you darn well better have a basic understanding of, say, modern economic theory (and hopefully some alternative economic ideas) before you start trying to make opinions on anything pertaining to economic policy.
I won't use RealPlayer on my computer, but I wish I could. Sure, they were evil and ran a closed codec and all that, but one thing they were was a competitor in the media codec market that wasn't bound to any one platform. This was good in its own right, but also created some room for other competitors to try and get into the market - Ogg, for example.
Now that Real is basically irrelevant, we have Quicktime/AAC and Windows Media. Both are a pain in the ass if you don't run Windows or MacOS, what with the reverse engineering and all. And I really worry that with the vast majority of the world getting Quicktime, iTunes and WMP for free with their browsers, Ogg may start to lose whatever market share it has, esp. since at present there isn't much long-term incentive for making each company's pet media players play Ogg files.
The problem isn't women being potrayed as sexy. The problem is women being potrayed as weak and over-emotional.
And there are times where the fact that a sexy woman is the protagonist in a video game can be used to negative affect. It's sort of like the way tomato soup isn't a problem in itself, but I don't like it quite so much after it's been spilled on my lap. Of course, the article didn't really get much into subtleties like that, so I guess it's a moot point.
Assuming you read the article, I really do feel sorry for you if you can't tell the difference between the way a woman is dressed and her personality.
I'm no geologist, but it seems strange to me that in the process of a magnetic field reversal the earth's magnetic field would just go away for a few thousand years. Wouldn't the field just rotate over time, so that the magnetic north pole continues to drift until it is near the geographic south pole?
It was years ago that this happened, so apparently things have changed. The problems I remembered were with networking and process management. Heck, maybe the prof was using some random crufty implementation of perl rather than the latest and greatest.
RMS's point wasn't that Sun is doing something wrong by holding onto Sun. RMS's point was to say to the Free Software community that any software they write that depends on a non-Free platform, library, whatever is not truly Free. Like he said in the article, this is the same as his beef with KDE - but that beef is now gone thanks to TrollTech going to a dual-license scheme. His point is that Free Software developers who choose to use Java are entraping themselves, not that Sun is trying to maliciously entrap developers.
It's also worth pointing out that at no point in the article was he talking about OSS developers.
Also, they're more logical to humans than stuff like LISP.
This point seems a bit unstable to me. I don't see why an Algol-like syntax would be more logical to humans for any reason other than that most folks learn to program in BASIC or C or because the syntax is relatively similar to standard mathematical notation. But in this case the argument would be that the syntax is usually more familiar to most people, not more logical. If it is inherently logical to anything, it's logical to computers, not humans.
If there's anywhere where folks seem to have a hard time with, for example, the LISP family, it's the recursion and not the syntax. Personally, I agree that LISP was harder to get used to than languages that have Algol-style syntax, but I'm not willing to say it was because of my human nature and not because I had already been programming in BASIC and C for ~10 years. And now that I'm used to it, I've found it is the most useful thing in the world, to the point that when I'm working out how to write a difficult function I generally use LISP syntax for my pseudocode because I've found it is much easier for me to make prototypes that will end up working.
I agree that languages take on because folks are interested in how finacially beneficial that language is, but that has nothing to do with whether or not it is an objectively well-designed language. I submit COBOL as evidence.
I don't have much experience in python, but I can say that Perl does not run well on all environments. Some of its standard functions are UNIX-dependent, so it is very easy to write something that does not run properly in other environments such as Windows. Last time I checked, the perldoc pages don't even bother to mention that xxx function might not work or won't work in the advertised manner on xxx platform.
I remember this really got me into trouble at college - I made the mistake of doing some homework in perl on my Linux box. When my professor went to grade it, he tried running it on a Windows computer. Instead of running beautifully as it did on my computer it threw up a bunch of error messages and crashed and the professor ended up assuming that I never bothered to debug the program.
In all seriousness, I do not consider the USA to be a capitalist country. Capitalism depends on "invisible hand" market forces that come from having multiple competitors in a given industry. The fallacy that a lot of pundits and politicans would have us believe is that the best way to make capitalism work is to have a completely laissez-faire approach to the market.
There is no such thing as a completely free market - or at least, a completely free market is an inherently unstable phenomenon. For a healthy capitalist economy, the market needs to be controlled by the government to ensure that there are no monopolies or cartels. If one company or organization basically has complete control over a portion of the market, is that market really free?
To avoid situations like these, you need just the right amount of regulation in order to check monopolies and cartels as much as possible. When a market is controlled by the government, it's not completely free, either, but it's the lesser of two evils as far as the economy is concerned. More importantly, these regulations must be firmly and aggressively enforced. It may be true that the RIAA does have some competition in that there are small independent labels, but this doesn't change the fact that the RIAA has the power to control the market.
Of course, the difficulty is in creating laws such that you can avoid technicalities like these without causing real problems for enterprise, esp. in emerging industries.
(Hence the need for more benevolent dictators, I think?)
Re:$33 cd? It is going to decrease profit
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Well, considering that the RIAA still hasn't figured out that the ridiculous prices CDs sell for is one of the major reasons why illegal filesharing became so popular in the first place, I'm somehow not surprised that they don't realize this point, either.
I think maybe they've been milking so much money for so long that they don't realize how expensive their music is. How else could they not reason that if I'm not willing to pay $14-$20 for a CD, why would I be willing to pay something like $15-$40+ for electronic copies of the music where I have to worry about keeping it backed up incase of hard drive crashes and I don't get to have a copy of the jewel case, liner notes, etc.?
At this point in time, I only have legal music on my computer. I've been trying to take the moral high ground and stick with golden ethics even if it means giving money to these shitheads. Granted, they're still shitheads so I try to stick to (truly) indie labels, used CD's, and $10 albums bands sell at their concerts. If they go through with this plan, though, I think I'll change my operating mantra from "turn the other cheek" to "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and download a copy of every single filesharing program I can get my hands on.
I think the "as we know it" is the key word here. It creates a new juggling act that teachers have to deal with. On one hand, calculators are extremely useful for the things at which humans are error prone. If students can use calculators or Mathematica or something, they can check their arithmetic much more reliably, which is great for isolating problems with learning concepts from basic mathematical errors. Granted, some people don't see this as a bonus since it's good to be able to do arithmetic reliably without aid. For smaller numbers I agree, but in the real world people use calculators for arithmetic with numbers that have a lot of sig figs. Making students do this arithmetic by hand is just distracting them from learning the concepts they are supposed to be learning. On the other hand, many students are prone to using these devices and applications as crutches and try to get away with doing things like using their calculator's implementation of Newton's Method instead of solving the problem themselves.
Some professors have found solutions to this problem, others havent. When I was at college, I think our math department had achieved a pretty good level of harmony with Mathematica - we were expected to do a lot of stuff by hand or in our heads - Gaussian elimination, for example - but in order to make the math seem useful, we were also exptected to be able to solve real-world problems with the stuff we learned. Not contrived "real-world" problems from your high-school textbook, but stuff like interpreting large and dirty scientific datasets where the specific technique we would have to use to solve the problem was something we could figure out, but not something that had been explicitly laid out by the textbook or in lecture. We had to apply the concepts we had learned to figure out the problem, but there was no way we were going to chug out that arithmetic by hand - when was the last time you tried to work on a 16x16 matrix using a pencil and paper? How about a 100x100 one?
My use for headphones is that I can get extremely high quality sound in some $100 monitors rather than blowing much more for that to get the same quality out of loudspeakers.
For a moment we'll assume that they are actually going to succeed in cloning a version of windows before that one is several versions obsolete and used by almost nobody. And we'll assume that they implement enough of Win32 to make it a good server OS (DirectX can wait), and implement all the server infrastructure that so many servers for NT/2k use, and that they reverse-engineer any cruft they come across that's undocumented but used by some important program, and get copies of all those API calls implemented properly, and all the other crap thy have to get done. (Again, they have to hit a moving target while they do all this.)
Assuming all that, what happens when they get a cease-and-desist letter from Microsoft owing to the fact that their entire GUI is an almost exact rip-off of Windows NT, including bundled apps like the text editor, and that they all use the same name as the stuff in Windows. What's the use of an OS that's no longer being developed owing to the fact that its core team has just been shipped off to a Gulag camp somewhere in Antarctica? It's not going to keep up with Microsoft very long under those conditions.
But it's probably worth pointing out that a whole lot of Linux users also have a Windows box sitting around somewhere (or sharing space inside the Linux box.) Mac users tend to only have a Mac.
So there might be a lot of Linux users who just use WP for Windows and more would be using OpenOffice. On the Mac, though, a signifigantly higher percentage of of users are probably screaming for a decent office suite since they don't own PC's, OO.org's OS X port isn't exactly the greatest thing in the world, and AppleWorks is flat-out poop.
The reason why the Mac market hasn't been to strong for games is because Mac gamers do buy PCs for games, and the Mac ports are usually crappy so why bother buying it?
I think if I ran into that problem, I would solve it by hitting my manager on the head with the magic, "Hey, you can cut and paste entire blocks of cells, not just cells in a single column!" cluestick.
And if the manager is moving blocks in ways that break formula cells somewhere else in the spreadsheet, it's time for a blow on the head with the, "Hey, don't fuck with shit you don't know about!" cluestick.
I wouldn't be able to vote because I'd be in Canada still working on earning my citizenship long before it came down to a choice between letting Dubya or Britney Spears run my country.
The new Danas are much more sophisticated. They run PalmOS and store actual text files. You can use them to edit MS Word documents if you want. For $50 over the price of the basic version, you get Wi-Fi and can check your e-mail, surf, etc.
Figuratively speaking, bigger is not always better. Sure the laptop is smaller and has a bigger screen. But the laptop carries a price tag up in the next order of magnitude (The cheapest 12" PowerBook costs $1070 more than the most expensive Dana) and an order of magnitude less battery life. That definitely counts as a huge loss in portability to me.
One doesn't need to be financially constrained to think that the Dana is a better choice. Especially when one already owns another laptop.
But that's essentially what the Dana is. Except the Dana has a much larger (and wider) screen, which makes it much better than any other PalmOS device for serious writing. And the keyboard is much, MUCH nicer than any other keyboard for a PalmOS device that I've used - and better than many laptop keyboards. The keys have a much better response, and you can use the keyboard on your lap since you aren't trying to keep your PDA balanced upright on top of a flimsy foldable keyboard. It probably costs less than Palm phones, too.
I got to help test drive an AlphaSmart Dana at a previous job, and seriously considered buying one for myself despite the fact that I already owned both a laptop and a Handspring Visor. The high-end model even has 802.11b, which is rare in PalmOS devices. For certain uses (having something to carry around with me at all times so I could work on text documents during down time in my case), they're really much nicer than a PDA (near-worthless for any serious work with text documents and has only an hour or two's battery life if being used continuously) or a laptop (darn heavy and also can't spend too much time away from a power outlet without dying).
I've never used the QuickPad. It's much cheaper, but it doesn't run PalmOS - which I consider a major plus on the Dana. What's the point of having computer, any computer, if you can't install video games on it? Other than that and the more limited feature set it means for the QuickPad, it seems like the QuickPad provides better stowability at the expense of a poorer view of the screen by making the screen flat rather than tilted upward.
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By purchasing Apple's DRM-laden files, you are accepting Apple's DRM. Yes, you may plan on stripping it so you can play the file with WMP or whatever, but when you bought that file you also bought and paid for a little piece of DRM and did your part to encourage it.
By paying for DRM and then stripping it, you are not telling the companies that DRM is not acceptable. You are telling the companies that what they need is STRONGER DRM.
I don't care how much you whine about DRM being bad and the RIAA being bad and all. If you purchase DRM-encoded files or buy music from the RIAA, you are paying to support the very things you are whining about. In the grand scheme, software like PlayFair is a step backward for the anti-DRM crowd. It's an attempt to live with DRM, not a refusal to accept it, and trying to think of it otherwise is missing the point.
No, I think that the radio and MTV format has a hand in this, too. I still listen to a lot of albums that are designed to be coherent wholes, and in a lot of cases the songs on them just don't stand as well when played out of context. If you want a great example, try listening to that Pink Floyd greatest hits CD sometime.
The music industry knows this, and knows that most folks buy albums because they heard one really great song from that album on the radio, so they have started pushing artists to work on doing CDs with the now-common "2 hits and 13 pieces of filler" format.
Artists want to make money, just like everyone else, and they want to get signed, so they go for it.
So yeah, everyone has a hand in this trend, but I don't think it started with the recording artists. Of course, I also don't think that it started with radio. Most people had radios long before they were doing much in the way of buying recordings of music, and long before the vinyl LP format that gave us the albums we know of today existed. So if album production were really as radio-controlled as folks complain it is, I imagine that good solid albums would either never have become popular, or they have always been this popular and folks are just getting all nostalgic.
I think maybe people who think boy bands are a new phenomenon haven't heard of Motown.
1. Newspapers. Duh. (Granted, from an environmental standpoint I much prefer the idea of electronic news sources, which can be superior to either one depending on your attention span.)
2. A lot of news is completely useless if you don't have an understanding of what it means. TV generally fails on this - there's only so much information you can provide when you have to cram each story into a minute or two time slot. Some magazine programs on TV and radio do a better job, but books are really the only forum that allows enough space to really explore all of the subtleties that are involved in current events.
Granted, whether or not that matters really depends on if you're interested in being current for the sake of voyeurism or if you're trying to keep up in the world for the sake of making informed political decisions.
If it's for the former, Fox News, The Register, etc. are fine and dandy. If it's for the latter, you darn well better have a basic understanding of, say, modern economic theory (and hopefully some alternative economic ideas) before you start trying to make opinions on anything pertaining to economic policy.
I won't use RealPlayer on my computer, but I wish I could. Sure, they were evil and ran a closed codec and all that, but one thing they were was a competitor in the media codec market that wasn't bound to any one platform. This was good in its own right, but also created some room for other competitors to try and get into the market - Ogg, for example.
Now that Real is basically irrelevant, we have Quicktime/AAC and Windows Media. Both are a pain in the ass if you don't run Windows or MacOS, what with the reverse engineering and all. And I really worry that with the vast majority of the world getting Quicktime, iTunes and WMP for free with their browsers, Ogg may start to lose whatever market share it has, esp. since at present there isn't much long-term incentive for making each company's pet media players play Ogg files.
RTFA.
The problem isn't women being potrayed as sexy. The problem is women being potrayed as weak and over-emotional.
And there are times where the fact that a sexy woman is the protagonist in a video game can be used to negative affect. It's sort of like the way tomato soup isn't a problem in itself, but I don't like it quite so much after it's been spilled on my lap. Of course, the article didn't really get much into subtleties like that, so I guess it's a moot point.
Assuming you read the article, I really do feel sorry for you if you can't tell the difference between the way a woman is dressed and her personality.
I'm no geologist, but it seems strange to me that in the process of a magnetic field reversal the earth's magnetic field would just go away for a few thousand years. Wouldn't the field just rotate over time, so that the magnetic north pole continues to drift until it is near the geographic south pole?
It was years ago that this happened, so apparently things have changed. The problems I remembered were with networking and process management. Heck, maybe the prof was using some random crufty implementation of perl rather than the latest and greatest.
RMS's point wasn't that Sun is doing something wrong by holding onto Sun. RMS's point was to say to the Free Software community that any software they write that depends on a non-Free platform, library, whatever is not truly Free. Like he said in the article, this is the same as his beef with KDE - but that beef is now gone thanks to TrollTech going to a dual-license scheme.
His point is that Free Software developers who choose to use Java are entraping themselves, not that Sun is trying to maliciously entrap developers.
It's also worth pointing out that at no point in the article was he talking about OSS developers.
Also, they're more logical to humans than stuff like LISP.
This point seems a bit unstable to me. I don't see why an Algol-like syntax would be more logical to humans for any reason other than that most folks learn to program in BASIC or C or because the syntax is relatively similar to standard mathematical notation. But in this case the argument would be that the syntax is usually more familiar to most people, not more logical. If it is inherently logical to anything, it's logical to computers, not humans.
If there's anywhere where folks seem to have a hard time with, for example, the LISP family, it's the recursion and not the syntax. Personally, I agree that LISP was harder to get used to than languages that have Algol-style syntax, but I'm not willing to say it was because of my human nature and not because I had already been programming in BASIC and C for ~10 years. And now that I'm used to it, I've found it is the most useful thing in the world, to the point that when I'm working out how to write a difficult function I generally use LISP syntax for my pseudocode because I've found it is much easier for me to make prototypes that will end up working.
I agree that languages take on because folks are interested in how finacially beneficial that language is, but that has nothing to do with whether or not it is an objectively well-designed language. I submit COBOL as evidence.
I don't have much experience in python, but I can say that Perl does not run well on all environments. Some of its standard functions are UNIX-dependent, so it is very easy to write something that does not run properly in other environments such as Windows. Last time I checked, the perldoc pages don't even bother to mention that xxx function might not work or won't work in the advertised manner on xxx platform.
I remember this really got me into trouble at college - I made the mistake of doing some homework in perl on my Linux box. When my professor went to grade it, he tried running it on a Windows computer. Instead of running beautifully as it did on my computer it threw up a bunch of error messages and crashed and the professor ended up assuming that I never bothered to debug the program.
In all seriousness, I do not consider the USA to be a capitalist country. Capitalism depends on "invisible hand" market forces that come from having multiple competitors in a given industry. The fallacy that a lot of pundits and politicans would have us believe is that the best way to make capitalism work is to have a completely laissez-faire approach to the market.
There is no such thing as a completely free market - or at least, a completely free market is an inherently unstable phenomenon. For a healthy capitalist economy, the market needs to be controlled by the government to ensure that there are no monopolies or cartels. If one company or organization basically has complete control over a portion of the market, is that market really free?
To avoid situations like these, you need just the right amount of regulation in order to check monopolies and cartels as much as possible. When a market is controlled by the government, it's not completely free, either, but it's the lesser of two evils as far as the economy is concerned. More importantly, these regulations must be firmly and aggressively enforced. It may be true that the RIAA does have some competition in that there are small independent labels, but this doesn't change the fact that the RIAA has the power to control the market.
Of course, the difficulty is in creating laws such that you can avoid technicalities like these without causing real problems for enterprise, esp. in emerging industries.
(Hence the need for more benevolent dictators, I think?)
Well, considering that the RIAA still hasn't figured out that the ridiculous prices CDs sell for is one of the major reasons why illegal filesharing became so popular in the first place, I'm somehow not surprised that they don't realize this point, either.
I think maybe they've been milking so much money for so long that they don't realize how expensive their music is. How else could they not reason that if I'm not willing to pay $14-$20 for a CD, why would I be willing to pay something like $15-$40+ for electronic copies of the music where I have to worry about keeping it backed up incase of hard drive crashes and I don't get to have a copy of the jewel case, liner notes, etc.?
At this point in time, I only have legal music on my computer. I've been trying to take the moral high ground and stick with golden ethics even if it means giving money to these shitheads. Granted, they're still shitheads so I try to stick to (truly) indie labels, used CD's, and $10 albums bands sell at their concerts. If they go through with this plan, though, I think I'll change my operating mantra from "turn the other cheek" to "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and download a copy of every single filesharing program I can get my hands on.
I think the "as we know it" is the key word here. It creates a new juggling act that teachers have to deal with. On one hand, calculators are extremely useful for the things at which humans are error prone. If students can use calculators or Mathematica or something, they can check their arithmetic much more reliably, which is great for isolating problems with learning concepts from basic mathematical errors. Granted, some people don't see this as a bonus since it's good to be able to do arithmetic reliably without aid. For smaller numbers I agree, but in the real world people use calculators for arithmetic with numbers that have a lot of sig figs. Making students do this arithmetic by hand is just distracting them from learning the concepts they are supposed to be learning.
On the other hand, many students are prone to using these devices and applications as crutches and try to get away with doing things like using their calculator's implementation of Newton's Method instead of solving the problem themselves.
Some professors have found solutions to this problem, others havent. When I was at college, I think our math department had achieved a pretty good level of harmony with Mathematica - we were expected to do a lot of stuff by hand or in our heads - Gaussian elimination, for example - but in order to make the math seem useful, we were also exptected to be able to solve real-world problems with the stuff we learned. Not contrived "real-world" problems from your high-school textbook, but stuff like interpreting large and dirty scientific datasets where the specific technique we would have to use to solve the problem was something we could figure out, but not something that had been explicitly laid out by the textbook or in lecture. We had to apply the concepts we had learned to figure out the problem, but there was no way we were going to chug out that arithmetic by hand - when was the last time you tried to work on a 16x16 matrix using a pencil and paper? How about a 100x100 one?
My use for headphones is that I can get extremely high quality sound in some $100 monitors rather than blowing much more for that to get the same quality out of loudspeakers.
I really hope they gave some credit to Andrei Tarkovsky.
But once the DRM is stripped, what's to stop you from redistributing it?
For a moment we'll assume that they are actually going to succeed in cloning a version of windows before that one is several versions obsolete and used by almost nobody. And we'll assume that they implement enough of Win32 to make it a good server OS (DirectX can wait), and implement all the server infrastructure that so many servers for NT/2k use, and that they reverse-engineer any cruft they come across that's undocumented but used by some important program, and get copies of all those API calls implemented properly, and all the other crap thy have to get done. (Again, they have to hit a moving target while they do all this.)
Assuming all that, what happens when they get a cease-and-desist letter from Microsoft owing to the fact that their entire GUI is an almost exact rip-off of Windows NT, including bundled apps like the text editor, and that they all use the same name as the stuff in Windows. What's the use of an OS that's no longer being developed owing to the fact that its core team has just been shipped off to a Gulag camp somewhere in Antarctica? It's not going to keep up with Microsoft very long under those conditions.
But it's probably worth pointing out that a whole lot of Linux users also have a Windows box sitting around somewhere (or sharing space inside the Linux box.) Mac users tend to only have a Mac.
So there might be a lot of Linux users who just use WP for Windows and more would be using OpenOffice. On the Mac, though, a signifigantly higher percentage of of users are probably screaming for a decent office suite since they don't own PC's, OO.org's OS X port isn't exactly the greatest thing in the world, and AppleWorks is flat-out poop.
The reason why the Mac market hasn't been to strong for games is because Mac gamers do buy PCs for games, and the Mac ports are usually crappy so why bother buying it?
I think if I ran into that problem, I would solve it by hitting my manager on the head with the magic, "Hey, you can cut and paste entire blocks of cells, not just cells in a single column!" cluestick.
And if the manager is moving blocks in ways that break formula cells somewhere else in the spreadsheet, it's time for a blow on the head with the, "Hey, don't fuck with shit you don't know about!" cluestick.
I wouldn't be able to vote because I'd be in Canada still working on earning my citizenship long before it came down to a choice between letting Dubya or Britney Spears run my country.
. . . it's undead.
The educational discount I got on my 15" PowerBook was only $50.
The new Danas are much more sophisticated. They run PalmOS and store actual text files. You can use them to edit MS Word documents if you want. For $50 over the price of the basic version, you get Wi-Fi and can check your e-mail, surf, etc.
Figuratively speaking, bigger is not always better. Sure the laptop is smaller and has a bigger screen. But the laptop carries a price tag up in the next order of magnitude (The cheapest 12" PowerBook costs $1070 more than the most expensive Dana) and an order of magnitude less battery life. That definitely counts as a huge loss in portability to me.
One doesn't need to be financially constrained to think that the Dana is a better choice. Especially when one already owns another laptop.
But that's essentially what the Dana is. Except the Dana has a much larger (and wider) screen, which makes it much better than any other PalmOS device for serious writing. And the keyboard is much, MUCH nicer than any other keyboard for a PalmOS device that I've used - and better than many laptop keyboards. The keys have a much better response, and you can use the keyboard on your lap since you aren't trying to keep your PDA balanced upright on top of a flimsy foldable keyboard. It probably costs less than Palm phones, too.
I got to help test drive an AlphaSmart Dana at a previous job, and seriously considered buying one for myself despite the fact that I already owned both a laptop and a Handspring Visor. The high-end model even has 802.11b, which is rare in PalmOS devices. For certain uses (having something to carry around with me at all times so I could work on text documents during down time in my case), they're really much nicer than a PDA (near-worthless for any serious work with text documents and has only an hour or two's battery life if being used continuously) or a laptop (darn heavy and also can't spend too much time away from a power outlet without dying).
I've never used the QuickPad. It's much cheaper, but it doesn't run PalmOS - which I consider a major plus on the Dana. What's the point of having computer, any computer, if you can't install video games on it? Other than that and the more limited feature set it means for the QuickPad, it seems like the QuickPad provides better stowability at the expense of a poorer view of the screen by making the screen flat rather than tilted upward.
Personally, I'd go with the Dana.