On the other hand, I wonder if apple is starting to get worried about losing a trademark if it becomes too genericized. The addition of a single letter to a common English word is not exactly a practice limited solely to Apple, esomething and isomething terms have been around for some time. I'm also a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't lost trademark for Office and for Word, though they seem to make a point of using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office when referring to their own products, and productivity suite when referring to that class of software bundle without regard to originator.
Apple has now launched a product lacking the "i" with the Apple Watch, they might be worried about trademark, or they might be worried about the various negative implications of iWatch as a term.
A decent software developer with mechanical aptitude, a willingness to continue working after having dirty fluids dumped on one's self, and a selection of mechanic's tools can do most vehicle repairs himself.
I've seen very good software writers that couldn't assemble an office chair correctly. I've seen servers worked-on by software developers and other software-admins with stripped-out screws and broken tabs and latches because the fundamentals of operating in the physical world were beyond them, even though they were masters in the worlds of mathematics or computer programming.
One of the scariest things in the world is a programmer walking toward the server room with a screwdriver in his hand.
Ah, but then it comes down to the criteria for qualifying for public assistance, and the decisions that one makes and how those decisions affect the individual's life.
A friend of mine peaked in his early twenties. He was doing highly skilled technical work on embedded electronics. They moved the job and he couldn't bicycle or bus-ride to get there anymore. He worked computer repair for a depot place, but they closed. He ended up at a computer big-box store that is now closed. He followed coworkers from that big-box store into retail. He eventually had supervisors that didn't like him and would only give him ten hours a week to try to get him to quit, but he wouldn't quit to go anywhere else. Eventually they were fired and the new supervisors gave him full-time again, but shlepping retail packages to restock store shelves has taken its toll on him and it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone else would hire him.
He made a significant series of missteps along the way, arguably starting with not getting a driver's license. He's been geographically stuck and that has severely limited his options. Unfortunately I fully expect him to work to the grave because he doesn't qualify for much in the way of financial assistance because he has no dependents, nor is he physically bad enough off to qualify as disabled. I can't even say if I feel he deserves extra help or not. He has made his own way, and while it hasn't led him to bounty it has been full of opportunities that he did not exercise.
I believe that there should be safety-nets. I don't believe that there should be a basic living stipend, unless everyone, even those who work, receive it. I think it makes much more sense start using the stick approach to employers, to have tax levels that reflect the burden that not paying workers for full-time employment, and to reduce those taxes the more employees are full-time.
There are national-guard armories all over the country, plus every major city has a bomb squad. Arguably they'd need a bomb squad just to move something that they suspected to be a bomb in the first place anyway, so the whole point is that to simply react properly to the situation they'd have already needed professionals.
The only thing I could reasonably thing of that could look like the payload would be a lithium-ion battery, if one wasn't encased in hard plastic. The bag-like packaging is a bit amateurish even on high-end batteries, so one could conceivably wonder what was packaged inside. Even then, seeing no other power source it should be obvious what it is, and measuring the power coming through a conductor with a clamp meter should confirm it.
Some people are just interested in different things! Why force boys to take classes they don't want to take?
Because those things are generally helpful to be functional in life?
In hindsight it would have been good for "home economics" to have been a requirement for everyone. I came from a home where my parents were willing and able to help me start my adult life; they were able to assist navigating residential leases, automobile purchases, banks and credit cards, insurance, and other financial concepts, and even with their guidance it was still hard to get that aspect of life balanced. For young adults that either don't have parents to help or whose parents themselves never managed to figure this out it's much worse, and the cycle perpetuates.
As for the subjects outlined in the GP post, I wonder if a lot of newer hobbies have disproportionately applied to boys over girls, such that girls are not spending as much time on hobbies and are instead spending more of it on schoolwork. The subject that boys/men are mentioned as dominating are frequently also hobbies; computers and engineering can be a hobby as well as a profession so it would make sense that boys that develop an interest in working with computers, electronics, or physical machines would have a leg-up going into computer science or engineering, or would have developed a baseline that would help foster them into physics.
We are trying to do that, and established semi-monopolistic entities like the local cable company and the local landline telephone company are fighting against governments allowing new players for consumer-grade high-speed data from entering the market.
Want it to happen faster? Stop electing officials in your city, county, state, and utility districts that won't let new competitors come in.
Cell towers are not generally connected to each other for the primary backbone by radio. They may be connected by radio as a fault tolerant connection, or as an out-of-band means of management should the primary fiber backbone be interrupted, but radio is predominately used for the last-mile delivery, not for the backbone.
Did you read the part about trenching and putting in conduit? He wants to put in the necessary infrastructure to do it the right way.
The vast majority of the standards that cars have to meet are about passenger safety, emissions, and fuel economy. There is a standard for electronic interfacing to an automotive computer, but its specifications are widely known. The "open source" side of bringing a car to market (ie, the computer controls) is probably not the hard part.
I'm thinking that the Firefox project is now starting to follow Chrome too closely. I'd like to know why they have to increment major-version-numbers every time they recompile too.
I wish that were true more widely. Unfortunately I've seen plenty of employers that will not really consider hiring (or promoting beyond entry-level) those that lack certifications.
When Microsoft attempted to implement it I remember people pronouncing it "telePHONY". But I think they were limiting that pronounciation to Microsoft's implementation only.
Did I specify an age at which I thought that students should start learning to work with computers? Did I state that general-education curriculum should be applied to those computers?
I believe I advocated for the computers to be used as a form of technology-specific class, not as a general-purpose tool.
There are lots of reasons to be networked, even for specific-purpose computers. For education, simply being able to use any random kiosk or tablet on the network to pick-up where one left-off instead of being tied to a specific device is already a good reason.
The problem comes about when an attempt to satisfy that good reason becomes an avenue for a whole bunch of bad consequences.
A problem can be attacked from more than one angle. Courts are already starting to take exceptions to the use of Stingray fake cell towers, and if what I've read is correct, it's costing the prosecution convictions. If undisclosed and unwarranted surveillance means that prosecution cannot happen then they'll have to rethink how they go about procedure.
Don't let-up the pressure but give it time to happen. This kind of thing takes years or decades to resolve, not weeks or months.
"The organization warns that classroom technology can be a distraction if implemented unwisely..."
I've been saying this for a decade. If the computer that the student uses is a general-purpose computer and can do 10,000 things, of which only one thing is that which the student should be doing, the student is going to be overwhelmingly tempted to do one of the rest of those 9,999 things instead, especially if that other thing is more fun.
Software for teaching computers needs to be developed. It needs to limit the available options to the lessons and only a few diversions, like how computers were before they were networked in schools.
Teach them sex ed, hygiene, agriculture, and other basic skills that will actually help them survive. Knowing HTML isn't going to be of any bloody value to them at this time.
I don't know. There are some cases where skipping some otherwise-logical steps actually works. My dad grew up on a farm that didn't even get electricity until the 1950s, has a well for fresh water, and had a friggin' outhouse until the sixties when a proper septic system (far away from that well) was installed. He got a degree in computing science (then still a sciences program rather than engineering or business) and made real gains in employment compared to his siblings that just went into whatever local trades or jobs were available in the area.
When my brother and I were kids he got us a PC (an 8088, already obsolete as the 386 had been out for a couple of years) because we had Apple IIs in school, even though his entire career was big-iron and minicomps and he didn't deal with PCs themselves other than as a user; we used the books that came with the PC to learn how to work with DOS and with BASIC, and while I don't work with DOS or with BASIC anymore, the command line fundamentals I learned have applied to a career working with CLI-based servers and networking equipment, and some of the lessons from BASIC have helped when working with scripting languages like bash.
It's not that they have to teach all of these Indian children how to use computers as experts, that's completely unrealistic. What they need to do is to provide access to computers that those kids that want to experiment with can learn on, things that are fairly simple without necessarily having all of the bells and whistles. The computer-software equivalent of a Heathkit.
Kids that become good with computers will probably become the first adults from the region to become professionals with them. They'll drive demand for new infrastructure for computers in the area and will develop the ability to maintain it. That will open up the area for more use outside of professional interest, which will in-turn help foster interest and will continue to help drive an increase in infrastructure.
I don't know what to do about the language barrier, nor do I know what specific platforms and software would now make a good equivalent to that DOS/BASIC/8088 setup I learned on, but going to tablets with Windows 10 or going to fully-loaded Linux boxes with vi are probably not the right approaches. The TI idea sounds good, but the platform might not be quite significant enough either.
What it if actually starts the ball-rolling, so that maybe more legislation later can further actually accomplish something?
I think it's bullshit that anything over a certain age was considered 'abandoned' when other laws actually mandate the retention of old communications as legal records. At least this starts to make a difference.
Their website shows very old party-line and hand-crank wooden phones. I doubt that there are many examples of these left as when they would have been replaced in-service they wouldn't have been worth anything.
There was no ample warning; the radio talked about people that were literally pulled from their homes by the firemen attempting to fight the fire as the fireline approached residences. The people responsible for the museum were probably themselves too busy with their personal problems to take time to save the museum contents.
On the other hand, back when Bell owned literally the entire telephone network from the handset to the central office they designed their telephones to last for decades and to provide good call quality. Once the regulations changed and now anyone could manufacture/sell a telephone, the quality of non-Western-Electric phones dropped so far that there are many old landline phones that have terrible acoustic properties. I know because my parents were cheapskates and we had them.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, I wonder if apple is starting to get worried about losing a trademark if it becomes too genericized. The addition of a single letter to a common English word is not exactly a practice limited solely to Apple, esomething and isomething terms have been around for some time. I'm also a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't lost trademark for Office and for Word, though they seem to make a point of using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office when referring to their own products, and productivity suite when referring to that class of software bundle without regard to originator.
Apple has now launched a product lacking the "i" with the Apple Watch, they might be worried about trademark, or they might be worried about the various negative implications of iWatch as a term.
A decent software developer with mechanical aptitude, a willingness to continue working after having dirty fluids dumped on one's self, and a selection of mechanic's tools can do most vehicle repairs himself.
I've seen very good software writers that couldn't assemble an office chair correctly. I've seen servers worked-on by software developers and other software-admins with stripped-out screws and broken tabs and latches because the fundamentals of operating in the physical world were beyond them, even though they were masters in the worlds of mathematics or computer programming.
One of the scariest things in the world is a programmer walking toward the server room with a screwdriver in his hand.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
They moved the job and he couldn't bicycle or bus-ride to get there anymore.
WTF?????
You consider that an excuse or even a reasonable extenuating circumstance for not continuing to be successful?
Fuck me. And now you want to give this loser moron money????
Fuck us All!
No, I don't. That arguably was his first major mistake, not doing what it took to remain employed at that level.
Ah, but then it comes down to the criteria for qualifying for public assistance, and the decisions that one makes and how those decisions affect the individual's life.
A friend of mine peaked in his early twenties. He was doing highly skilled technical work on embedded electronics. They moved the job and he couldn't bicycle or bus-ride to get there anymore. He worked computer repair for a depot place, but they closed. He ended up at a computer big-box store that is now closed. He followed coworkers from that big-box store into retail. He eventually had supervisors that didn't like him and would only give him ten hours a week to try to get him to quit, but he wouldn't quit to go anywhere else. Eventually they were fired and the new supervisors gave him full-time again, but shlepping retail packages to restock store shelves has taken its toll on him and it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone else would hire him.
He made a significant series of missteps along the way, arguably starting with not getting a driver's license. He's been geographically stuck and that has severely limited his options. Unfortunately I fully expect him to work to the grave because he doesn't qualify for much in the way of financial assistance because he has no dependents, nor is he physically bad enough off to qualify as disabled. I can't even say if I feel he deserves extra help or not. He has made his own way, and while it hasn't led him to bounty it has been full of opportunities that he did not exercise.
I believe that there should be safety-nets. I don't believe that there should be a basic living stipend, unless everyone, even those who work, receive it. I think it makes much more sense start using the stick approach to employers, to have tax levels that reflect the burden that not paying workers for full-time employment, and to reduce those taxes the more employees are full-time.
What's really scary, is that under the right conditions, that show could spontaneously deflagrate....
There are national-guard armories all over the country, plus every major city has a bomb squad. Arguably they'd need a bomb squad just to move something that they suspected to be a bomb in the first place anyway, so the whole point is that to simply react properly to the situation they'd have already needed professionals.
The only thing I could reasonably thing of that could look like the payload would be a lithium-ion battery, if one wasn't encased in hard plastic. The bag-like packaging is a bit amateurish even on high-end batteries, so one could conceivably wonder what was packaged inside. Even then, seeing no other power source it should be obvious what it is, and measuring the power coming through a conductor with a clamp meter should confirm it.
Some people are just interested in different things! Why force boys to take classes they don't want to take?
Because those things are generally helpful to be functional in life?
In hindsight it would have been good for "home economics" to have been a requirement for everyone. I came from a home where my parents were willing and able to help me start my adult life; they were able to assist navigating residential leases, automobile purchases, banks and credit cards, insurance, and other financial concepts, and even with their guidance it was still hard to get that aspect of life balanced. For young adults that either don't have parents to help or whose parents themselves never managed to figure this out it's much worse, and the cycle perpetuates.
As for the subjects outlined in the GP post, I wonder if a lot of newer hobbies have disproportionately applied to boys over girls, such that girls are not spending as much time on hobbies and are instead spending more of it on schoolwork. The subject that boys/men are mentioned as dominating are frequently also hobbies; computers and engineering can be a hobby as well as a profession so it would make sense that boys that develop an interest in working with computers, electronics, or physical machines would have a leg-up going into computer science or engineering, or would have developed a baseline that would help foster them into physics.
We are trying to do that, and established semi-monopolistic entities like the local cable company and the local landline telephone company are fighting against governments allowing new players for consumer-grade high-speed data from entering the market.
Want it to happen faster? Stop electing officials in your city, county, state, and utility districts that won't let new competitors come in.
Cell towers are not generally connected to each other for the primary backbone by radio. They may be connected by radio as a fault tolerant connection, or as an out-of-band means of management should the primary fiber backbone be interrupted, but radio is predominately used for the last-mile delivery, not for the backbone.
Did you read the part about trenching and putting in conduit? He wants to put in the necessary infrastructure to do it the right way.
The vast majority of the standards that cars have to meet are about passenger safety, emissions, and fuel economy. There is a standard for electronic interfacing to an automotive computer, but its specifications are widely known. The "open source" side of bringing a car to market (ie, the computer controls) is probably not the hard part.
I'm thinking that the Firefox project is now starting to follow Chrome too closely. I'd like to know why they have to increment major-version-numbers every time they recompile too.
I wish that were true more widely. Unfortunately I've seen plenty of employers that will not really consider hiring (or promoting beyond entry-level) those that lack certifications.
What if I don't have a sister?
When Microsoft attempted to implement it I remember people pronouncing it "telePHONY". But I think they were limiting that pronounciation to Microsoft's implementation only.
Did I specify an age at which I thought that students should start learning to work with computers? Did I state that general-education curriculum should be applied to those computers?
I believe I advocated for the computers to be used as a form of technology-specific class, not as a general-purpose tool.
There are lots of reasons to be networked, even for specific-purpose computers. For education, simply being able to use any random kiosk or tablet on the network to pick-up where one left-off instead of being tied to a specific device is already a good reason.
The problem comes about when an attempt to satisfy that good reason becomes an avenue for a whole bunch of bad consequences.
Many scholastic benchmarks are already computer-based.
Your argument is about as strong as saying kids do badly on tests because they don't use bubble-sheets for learning.
A problem can be attacked from more than one angle. Courts are already starting to take exceptions to the use of Stingray fake cell towers, and if what I've read is correct, it's costing the prosecution convictions. If undisclosed and unwarranted surveillance means that prosecution cannot happen then they'll have to rethink how they go about procedure.
Don't let-up the pressure but give it time to happen. This kind of thing takes years or decades to resolve, not weeks or months.
"The organization warns that classroom technology can be a distraction if implemented unwisely..."
I've been saying this for a decade. If the computer that the student uses is a general-purpose computer and can do 10,000 things, of which only one thing is that which the student should be doing, the student is going to be overwhelmingly tempted to do one of the rest of those 9,999 things instead, especially if that other thing is more fun.
Software for teaching computers needs to be developed. It needs to limit the available options to the lessons and only a few diversions, like how computers were before they were networked in schools.
Teach them sex ed, hygiene, agriculture, and other basic skills that will actually help them survive. Knowing HTML isn't going to be of any bloody value to them at this time.
I don't know. There are some cases where skipping some otherwise-logical steps actually works. My dad grew up on a farm that didn't even get electricity until the 1950s, has a well for fresh water, and had a friggin' outhouse until the sixties when a proper septic system (far away from that well) was installed. He got a degree in computing science (then still a sciences program rather than engineering or business) and made real gains in employment compared to his siblings that just went into whatever local trades or jobs were available in the area.
When my brother and I were kids he got us a PC (an 8088, already obsolete as the 386 had been out for a couple of years) because we had Apple IIs in school, even though his entire career was big-iron and minicomps and he didn't deal with PCs themselves other than as a user; we used the books that came with the PC to learn how to work with DOS and with BASIC, and while I don't work with DOS or with BASIC anymore, the command line fundamentals I learned have applied to a career working with CLI-based servers and networking equipment, and some of the lessons from BASIC have helped when working with scripting languages like bash.
It's not that they have to teach all of these Indian children how to use computers as experts, that's completely unrealistic. What they need to do is to provide access to computers that those kids that want to experiment with can learn on, things that are fairly simple without necessarily having all of the bells and whistles. The computer-software equivalent of a Heathkit.
Kids that become good with computers will probably become the first adults from the region to become professionals with them. They'll drive demand for new infrastructure for computers in the area and will develop the ability to maintain it. That will open up the area for more use outside of professional interest, which will in-turn help foster interest and will continue to help drive an increase in infrastructure.
I don't know what to do about the language barrier, nor do I know what specific platforms and software would now make a good equivalent to that DOS/BASIC/8088 setup I learned on, but going to tablets with Windows 10 or going to fully-loaded Linux boxes with vi are probably not the right approaches. The TI idea sounds good, but the platform might not be quite significant enough either.
What it if actually starts the ball-rolling, so that maybe more legislation later can further actually accomplish something?
I think it's bullshit that anything over a certain age was considered 'abandoned' when other laws actually mandate the retention of old communications as legal records. At least this starts to make a difference.
Wow. I have two Telephony Museums!
Their website shows very old party-line and hand-crank wooden phones. I doubt that there are many examples of these left as when they would have been replaced in-service they wouldn't have been worth anything.
There was no ample warning; the radio talked about people that were literally pulled from their homes by the firemen attempting to fight the fire as the fireline approached residences. The people responsible for the museum were probably themselves too busy with their personal problems to take time to save the museum contents.
*laugh*
On the other hand, back when Bell owned literally the entire telephone network from the handset to the central office they designed their telephones to last for decades and to provide good call quality. Once the regulations changed and now anyone could manufacture/sell a telephone, the quality of non-Western-Electric phones dropped so far that there are many old landline phones that have terrible acoustic properties. I know because my parents were cheapskates and we had them.