You may want to look into MIT again. They just announced a couple of weeks ago that students from families that earn less than $75k/yr. will not have to pay tuition. They've also changed the factors they look at to determine financial aid for other income levels:
MIT has also always had a policy of basically, "You get in, and we'll help you figure out how to afford it."
A couple more things:
Students loans are *not* as bad as everyone makes them out to be. Especially graduating from a place like MIT, where you can expect $50+k/yr at your first job. It's also the "good" kind of debt - low interest rates, and interest payments that can be deducted on taxes.
Don't believe the anti-college (or anti-prestige) hype. It is absolutely worth it to spend four years at a place like MIT. It is true that you can gimp your way through and get nothing more out of it than any other school (or "real-world" experience) would give you. But, if you really want to do something exciting/amazing/etc., there's no easier place to make it happen than a place where you're surrounded by other bright/smart/energetic people.
Disclaimer: I graduated from MIT, and would not trade that experience for anything.
FTA: "Also rare for an ultraportable is the Air's full-size keyboard, which adds some (worthy) width to the body."
As the owner of a 12" Powerbook (which is allowing me to type this comment), I can attest to the fact that it was, most definitely, *not* the full-size keyboard that required the extra width.
Is it also the record companies that force Steve to sell OS X with DRM? Do not forget that OS X is tied to Mac hardware by a "Trusted Computing Module".
If I sing a song or write a play or paint a picture and I don't share it with you, am I violating your rights? I find that notion absurd. Creators should have the right to do as they will with their creations.
This is a multi-sided question. It depends on a couple of very important points:
What you mean by sharing
When copyright is granted
When copyright expires
I'll take it that by "sharing" you mean, "Allow another to use my work, as allowed by fair use, without harrassment." I'll take it that you do not mean simply, "Allow someone to experience my work" (as in if I don't share it, you'll never know it exists). I assume the first definition because if the work isn't published, there's not really much of an argument to have.
If my supposed definition of sharing is correct, then yes, you would be violating my rights by not sharing your work with me. Fair use allows me to use parts of your work in certain manners without your permission. RIAA/MPAA are trampling all over this fact, though. They use lawyers to threaten artists who attempt legitimate fair use, making the cost of fighting too expensive for the artist to even try. They also use DRM to prevent artists from even attempting fair use. This is not enforcement of law, this is vigilantism.
Now on to when your copyright began. It hasn't always been the case in this country that copyright was granted upon creation - it used to be necessary to apply for it. If this weren't the case, then there would be nothing you could do to stop me from using your work in my own if you did not own the copyright (fair use doesn't even apply here). So, if you tried anything, you would, indeed, be violating my rights (by preventing me from creating my work, an act of free speech).
Finally, the second point, when your copyright expires. It used to be that copyright expired in a reasonable amount of time in this country. After that time, we again had the situation where I was free to use your work however I wanted. Now, though, there will be nothing enter the public domain automatically (that's what it's called when copyright expires) until at least 2019. Do you know when the last works to have copyrights expire were created? Yes, that's right, about 1930. No artist today is free to use anything that has been created since 1930 without the express permission of the copyright owner (yes, normally fair use should cover this, but see an earlier paragraph about problems there).
I will consider granting you the notion that comparing freedom of culture to freedom of any physical resource is a poor argument. But, I hope that you will also allow me to put forward that to many people, past and present, myself included, living life is not worth the effort without culture. Look at all of the scholars and artists who went hungry just to buy books, pencils, paper, and other such supplies in order to shape the culture in which they lived. What is life without entertainment, argument, conversation, etc.? You can't have any of those without building on the thoughts and creations of others.
As I see other replies have already done, I will urge you to go to your local library (Ack! Sharing, not payment! Did we ask Larry first?!) and borrow a copy of Lawrence Lessig's book "Free Culture". It's a truly eye-opening read, and one that I would say is completely non-troll, non-sensational, and down to earth.
See previous comment regarding people with guns vs buying a CD.
As a sidenote, Lessig's book also includes a great graphic (Created by someone else!) about the legal regulation of firearms versus A/V recording equipment.
I say screw gaming! Focus on making the computer as useful as possible, and let the entertainment houses come on their own once people find that they'd rather have a Mac for the utility of it. To put it another way, I don't think there's anything Apple can do to bring games to their platform other than to make the best computer, and thereby increase their market share until the audience is large enough that game developers consider targeting it by their own choice.
I, for one, love having a machine that actually allows me to focus and get work done efficiently. My Mac is the best machine I've ever had in this category, and I'd rather see people focus on making it even more efficient for work than to waste their time wooing game developers.
I'm sorry, I love to Windows bash as much as the next person, but I can't accept this one. The main reason I stayed away from Apple for so long was because the only experience I had with them made me believe that they were extremely fragile, crash-prone piles of junk.*
I grew up in the age that all computers in public schools were Apples. Every time I had to use one of them, it would undoubtedly include 5 minutes of the program crashing and the teacher having to restart the thing. If you hadn't just turned the computer on before you started your application, the app was guaranteed to fail. Meanwhile I had a Gateway at home that I could use without issue... at least more often than the school machines.
So, I'd suggest modifying your statement to Windows/MacOS caused people to fear breaking their computers. Or maybe even "most electronics producers of the 80s and 90s", as I can definitely recall VCRs, tape players, cordless phones, and all the rest that instilled a deep fear in many people that they could break their devices without even trying.
*I have finally gone to Mac OSX now, and it's worlds better than it used to be. It's not perfect, but you can tell some developers have a general idea of where they're going now.
Of course, some other fairly important people (Jeff Raskin, Donald Norman) argue that it's a faulty design to target new users. Designs aimed at new/inexperienced users are rarely any help to power users, and are often a detriment to them, as these designs tend to hide/disable many advanced features. Designs aimed at power users, however, allow frequent users to learn and adapt to get the most from their tools. Sure, a new user will often take a little longer to learn a power-user interface, but once they take their first step, they are able to grow and learn. A newbie interface just stifles everyone.
Another, not necessarily equivalent, way of saying this is that newbie users have no clue what they want and can deal with just about any interface. Power users, however, have very specific demands and suffer great losses to productivity when their interfaces change.
A great example is keyboard layout. It has been shown that an alphabetic keyboard layout gives new users only a slight speed advantage over a QWERTY layout (if any at all). Typists, however, are much faster on QWERTY than alphabetic - even after weeks of practice, IIRC. (Anyone remember if this example was in DOET or THI? I thought I remembered reading this one on the web, but I can't find the reference at the moment.)
Important Note: Please notice that I am not relating the new Office design to this discussion. I have not had the chance to use it, and I can not speak for how it feels. Like others here, I'm sure that MS has done usability studies on this design. Hopefully they have learned their lesson, did the study correctly, and are following the guidelines they extracted from it.
I know other people have already asked "Why would you use Excel/Calc for this?" but I'd like to try asking again, in addition to recommending tools that may better suit your needs.
You're a college student, in the EE department. Ask any one of a number of your classmates to introduce you to Matlab. You'll only regret it for about the first day while you learn the syntax. I guarantee your EE department, if not your school in general, has free copies on lab computers for you to use.
If you're looking for something free for your own workstation, I whole-heartedly recommend the amazing GnuPlot and R, the analysis language. It's incredible what those two tools can do - and they're completely free, and available for a whole host of platforms.
I know you feel like you have a pretty good setup with your spreadsheets now, but trust me - give those other pieces of software a try and you'll never go back to Excel/Calc.
Going to war or preparing for rising energy costs like everyone else? MSFT is a huge company. If energy costs rise significantly, be sure that the cost of running the company will rise significantly as well. Power for servers/lights/etc. Flights for employees to conferences/meetings. If energy costs were to rise very quickly, I bet they'd even roll out a program to help employees cope with rising transportation costs.
I haven't read either the financial report or the entire analyst reaction, but I'd say it's a premature analysis to say they're going to war.
well.. if ads didn't interfere with your use of your operating system would you still want them there?
so, you open up your vista control panel and there is a flashing ad for a singles site there.. technically that would have no impact on your use of the product?
Two things:
First, it's not a matter of want. Of course, in general, I don't want to see ads, and I want them not to take up extra space on my TV, in my newspaper, etc. It is a matter of economics - in general, I would rather spend the money I do and put up with a few ads rather than have to spend much more for the same content. I have to say, if I had to pay full, non-advertising price for the content available to me today, I'd probably pay for nothing outside of a news source (and NPR, BBC or NYTimes at that).
Second, I think you could have chosen a better example scenario. The one you gave, flashing ads on my screen, does impede the use of my computer (because it's distracting, and as my computer is mainly a business tool for me, rather than a piece of entertainment, I need to concentrate while using it), so it doesn't fit the argument. I argue that billboards in the subway do not impede your use of the subway because they are unobtrusive and easily ignored. If they were giant and flashing, such that they obscured maps and information, or caused traffic obstacles by distracting people, then they would degrade the subway experience.
In Europe, there are ads, but they are very limited, nothing like times square in NYC or Tokyo.
Not sure where you've been in Europe, but I can speak for Berlin and Munich, and it's nearly as bad. Posters for concerts, clubs, and movies are posted on walls, just as they are here. The walls of the subway stations are lined with billboards. There are even moving advertisements on LCDs in some of the subway cars. Previews are still shown before movies, and television still has commercials. I think you picked two outliers in Times Square and Tokyo - most other places pale in comparison to those two.
well, the subway has record profits.. in NYC, several billion in surplus.
That is a sad thing. It's sad because I haven't been on a subway system in the US yet that is anywhere near an equal to those of Germany. I think if any public transit system in this country has any surplus money, they owe it to their patrons to improve their service. It's just embarassing sometimes. So, I'll give you this one.
the *main* reason people pay for "premium" channels like HBO and Cinemax etc (thus your paying more stmt) is because they don't have to deal with ads.
Actually, I think you're only half right here. People do pay for HBO and Cinemax to avoid ads, but not just for the sake of avoiding ads. They pay for the privelege of not having their movie experience disruputed by ads every 20 minutes. There are still ads on HBO and Cinemax, in case you didn't notice, but they're between the feature presentations, so they don't get in your way. No matter how much ads annoy you at the movie theatre, they don't actively interfere with your movie experience - they are all shown before the movie starts, and then you get the movie uninterrupted. The same goes for the subway and a yearbook - the ads do not interfere with your use of the product.
I think you're a bit uninformed. Yes, you paid to be on the subway or in the movie theatre, but your fare did not pay for your entire experience. The reason we're shown ads in so many places is because so many of these places cost much more to operate than people are willing to pay for them. Advertisers pay to have their ads put in these places, thereby offsetting some of the cost of admission.
Think back (or forward, knowing the typical/. crowd) to your high school yearbook. You paid $50 for it, and there were 15-20 pages of ads in the back. Here's why: your yearbook cost $200-500 to print, but no sane person would pay that much for a yearbook. So, your yearbook committee went out and sold advertising to offset the price and make it affordable for the average student.
Maybe you'd like to request a no-advertising option, where you pay a higher price and get no ads. But, I believe you would find that the general population wouldn't be interested.
I know this article was posted last night, so no one will be reading my reply, but I just had to make the point...
The article talks about the rise in laptop robbery, the unlawful taking of a laptop by use of force or violence, not laptop theft, the more general unlawful taking of a laptop.
The rise in laptop robbery is a worry because it's not just loss of property, but also the endangerment of life.
If the article were about theft, I would agree with everyone here that the rise in theft would probably be more aptly attributed to the rise in laptop ownership, than it would be to the rise in wifi hotspots. But, as the article is about robbery, and to commit robbery a robber needs someone to harm or threaten physically, and a person is much more likely to be near their laptop if they are using it, and they are more likely to be using it if there is a wifi connection, I'd say the article has probably found a meaningful correlation.
The ring itself is referred to as a "brass rat" around MIT because it's gold (brass-ish colored) with a beaver (rat) on the face. The version on the cannon is gold-plated aluminum.
Worrying about Oxygen running out, and the Inferno dying with Plan 9. Am I the only one laughing?
...yes, I know I am - I'm the one with shares of stock that I didn't sell while Lucent was at $80+. The laughter is the cure to melancholy. Maybe they'll be worth more than $3 sometime soon.:P
They expect anyone to be able to get anything done in Windows XP in 2-3 hours (the reported battery life)?! It will be even worse on any model that does not have a dedicated keyboard. I think MS has purposely created a product that will tank in order to kill this market before anyone else can make a viable entrance into it.
Post new information when someone develops an OS+interface that may actually be efficient on UMPC. Until then, I'm not interested... unless it's a fairly open platform, and I can get to work on that OS+interface myself.:)
Actually, I argue that my point about bandwidth usage is a concern. If you read the NYT article that was originally started in this thread, it started out with a couple living somehwere semi-urban, getting a cable or DSL line, puting a wireless AP on it, and then wondering why their connection became slow. Further on in the article, someone else realizes that their bandwidth could be being used in an unauthorized fashion, but six months down the line, they still haven't done anything to fix it.
My points are simple: 1. Many people don't want to share their bandwidth. 2. Many people don't understand that they are _sharing_ the bandwidth with others, not simply getting another connection that affects no one else. 3. A few people don't care if you are trying to be nice and share; they'll jump in and take all the bandwidth they can because it's free. 4. There's no easy way to regulate all of these cases today. I can shut my network to everyone, be greedy, and be satisfied. I can limit unknown connections to lower speeds, but that takes extra work on my behalf. I can open my AP to all, but I have no way of broadcasting to people that I'm doing it out of the kindness of my heart, rather than complete lack of knowledge, and I'd appreciate it if they behaved responsibly (and that they learned what responsibly means).
I agree - there are many ways to look/think/act on this issue. At the very least, I'm sure it will spawn some interesting anthropologic papers in the next few years. The internet is still a resource unlike any other that our society has yet to grasp fully, and that presents a lot of opinions about it, none necessarily right nor wrong.:)
Actually, I most definitely have heard of packet shaping. We ended up puting a shaper on the line at the fraternity house. What always bugged me about it was that it shaped everyone's packets, regardless of purpose. Most of us were of the opinion that traffic for academic use should have been completely unlimited. Download your psets and assigned reading as fast as you want. SSH to a lab computer and stream verbose compiler output as fast as you must. Transfer the 300 MB of data you just acquired from your experiment. But limit the porn. It just never worked the way we wanted, though. A bit of monitoring and some heuristics might have solved a good deal of the situation, but it just always seemed like personal knowledge and respect was the correct solution.
You are right, though. For me, at home, a packet shaper would do the trick. However, I don't feel that I should have to put in extra work to allow just anyone to use my network. It's much easier for me to just lock it down and not have to worry about it. It's better for security purposes that way anyway.
Here, here. That's exactly what I've been thinking while reading through these things. A good deal of the ideas in these proposals are exact copies of the iWork suite.
BUT, I have to say that I don't think this is a bad thing! I've been using Pages and Keynote for a few months now, and I absolutely love them. Pages is a little bit different than your average word processor, but that's what I love about it. It lets me create a document with my content, rather than hassle with settings and other blech. Until Apple decides to market iWork for other platforms, I applaud KOffice for learning from an innovative leader. Bring the good features to the rest of the masses, so they can see what they've been missing all these years!
I don't open my AP, and here's why: People still don't understand enough about how their computers and the networks that connect them work to be trusted in my environment. Having recently left college, I was around when my fraternity put in wired ethernet and later wireless APs. We told everyone when we put everything in, "We all share this $N k/sec. line. Do not hog bandwidth. Limit your downloads. This network is intended to allow brothers to do schoolwork in-house, rather than haul to campus." I must say that all of my fraternity brothers were pretty level-headed. None of them would have actively screwed over another brother. But, invariably, once a week or more the net would stop dead because one of them had Kazaa up, downloading seven seasons of anime and leaving their uploads unlimited. They weren't trying to be jerks, they just didn't understand how the network worked and how much bandwidth they were using.
So, I keep my AP closed. If I knew that my neighbors were knowledgeable, I'd open it to them. I open the network to anyone who visits me in my home - where I can click them off if they do something stupid. Unknowns - never on my network.
I've only seen multiline when there are multiple stories. If that's the case, I was trying to suggest a small circle by each story. So for three stories in a row, you'd have three smal humps at the left. If a single brief article can be multiple lines, then you're right - two graphics are needed.
Also, the one-bump-per-brief-article may be a little distracting - combining and using two different bumps may be nicer on the eyes. As long as it doesn't run into the same problem of making people wonder why the stories are grouped. *shrug*
I have to say I agree the with the grandparent. The quarter circle upward curve on the bottom left does associate the "brief articles" with the article above. I have a simple suggestion to fix it, though.
Just change the curve to a half circle. Then you'd get something like a little bubble for each brief article.
Seems like it would be easy, and I think the curve on top would help dissociate it with the story above it.
I spent quite a while this morning before this article came up wondering what relevence any of the brief articles had to the rest of the articles. It seems I'm not the only one.
I don't think I would ever use a textbook on such a device. One simple reason lies behind my statement, and it has to do with the way I use textbooks. Over half of the time I'm looking in a textbook, I'm trying to find information that I know I've heard or read before. Often times I know exactly what the page looks like, but can't remember the one important term.
So, when I go looking through a textbook, I'm skipping around - open in the middle, 50 pages forward, 15 back, etc. That's easy to do with the dead tree version - you can easily feel along the edges of the pages and get a good idea of how far you're going to turn.
On the electronic version, you're stuck with either turning one page at a time, or typing in the page number to which you want to turn (ok, maybe they have a +-10 page button, but still). It's much slower to search that way than the dead tree way.
I fight against this all the time. I love the fact that I can instantly grab the manual/spec sheet for just about any electronic item I'd want online. But once I have the component, and I'm actually putting it to use, I almost always end up printing out large sections (or all) of that same manual. It's much easier for me to be able to flip back and forth between a few pages in dead tree form than electronic form.
But then again, if you're not looking for graphs or pictures, and you can think of the important term you're looking for, very little beats the speed of a fulltext search. Well, except a properly constructed index.:)
-CrazyWingman
P.S. This is not to say I would never use an ebook device. For fictional reading, especially on long trips, I'd just about force one on my wife. She always takes three or four books on a plane trip because she reads so fast. If I could cut down on the weight of that entertainment, it would make my life easier.:)
Slashdot Mirror
You may want to look into MIT again. They just announced a couple of weeks ago that students from families that earn less than $75k/yr. will not have to pay tuition. They've also changed the factors they look at to determine financial aid for other income levels:
Fin. Aid Boosted; No Tuition For Families Earning Under $75K
MIT has also always had a policy of basically, "You get in, and we'll help you figure out how to afford it."
A couple more things:
Disclaimer: I graduated from MIT, and would not trade that experience for anything.
FTA: "Also rare for an ultraportable is the Air's full-size keyboard, which adds some (worthy) width to the body."
As the owner of a 12" Powerbook (which is allowing me to type this comment), I can attest to the fact that it was, most definitely, *not* the full-size keyboard that required the extra width.
Is it also the record companies that force Steve to sell OS X with DRM? Do not forget that OS X is tied to Mac hardware by a "Trusted Computing Module".
If I sing a song or write a play or paint a picture and I don't share it with you, am I violating your rights? I find that notion absurd. Creators should have the right to do as they will with their creations.
This is a multi-sided question. It depends on a couple of very important points:
I'll take it that by "sharing" you mean, "Allow another to use my work, as allowed by fair use, without harrassment." I'll take it that you do not mean simply, "Allow someone to experience my work" (as in if I don't share it, you'll never know it exists). I assume the first definition because if the work isn't published, there's not really much of an argument to have.
If my supposed definition of sharing is correct, then yes, you would be violating my rights by not sharing your work with me. Fair use allows me to use parts of your work in certain manners without your permission. RIAA/MPAA are trampling all over this fact, though. They use lawyers to threaten artists who attempt legitimate fair use, making the cost of fighting too expensive for the artist to even try. They also use DRM to prevent artists from even attempting fair use. This is not enforcement of law, this is vigilantism.
Now on to when your copyright began. It hasn't always been the case in this country that copyright was granted upon creation - it used to be necessary to apply for it. If this weren't the case, then there would be nothing you could do to stop me from using your work in my own if you did not own the copyright (fair use doesn't even apply here). So, if you tried anything, you would, indeed, be violating my rights (by preventing me from creating my work, an act of free speech).
Finally, the second point, when your copyright expires. It used to be that copyright expired in a reasonable amount of time in this country. After that time, we again had the situation where I was free to use your work however I wanted. Now, though, there will be nothing enter the public domain automatically (that's what it's called when copyright expires) until at least 2019. Do you know when the last works to have copyrights expire were created? Yes, that's right, about 1930. No artist today is free to use anything that has been created since 1930 without the express permission of the copyright owner (yes, normally fair use should cover this, but see an earlier paragraph about problems there).
I will consider granting you the notion that comparing freedom of culture to freedom of any physical resource is a poor argument. But, I hope that you will also allow me to put forward that to many people, past and present, myself included, living life is not worth the effort without culture. Look at all of the scholars and artists who went hungry just to buy books, pencils, paper, and other such supplies in order to shape the culture in which they lived. What is life without entertainment, argument, conversation, etc.? You can't have any of those without building on the thoughts and creations of others.
As I see other replies have already done, I will urge you to go to your local library (Ack! Sharing, not payment! Did we ask Larry first?!) and borrow a copy of Lawrence Lessig's book "Free Culture". It's a truly eye-opening read, and one that I would say is completely non-troll, non-sensational, and down to earth.
See previous comment regarding people with guns vs buying a CD.
As a sidenote, Lessig's book also includes a great graphic (Created by someone else!) about the legal regulation of firearms versus A/V recording equipment.
I say screw gaming! Focus on making the computer as useful as possible, and let the entertainment houses come on their own once people find that they'd rather have a Mac for the utility of it. To put it another way, I don't think there's anything Apple can do to bring games to their platform other than to make the best computer, and thereby increase their market share until the audience is large enough that game developers consider targeting it by their own choice.
I, for one, love having a machine that actually allows me to focus and get work done efficiently. My Mac is the best machine I've ever had in this category, and I'd rather see people focus on making it even more efficient for work than to waste their time wooing game developers.
I'm sorry, I love to Windows bash as much as the next person, but I can't accept this one. The main reason I stayed away from Apple for so long was because the only experience I had with them made me believe that they were extremely fragile, crash-prone piles of junk.*
I grew up in the age that all computers in public schools were Apples. Every time I had to use one of them, it would undoubtedly include 5 minutes of the program crashing and the teacher having to restart the thing. If you hadn't just turned the computer on before you started your application, the app was guaranteed to fail. Meanwhile I had a Gateway at home that I could use without issue... at least more often than the school machines.
So, I'd suggest modifying your statement to Windows/MacOS caused people to fear breaking their computers. Or maybe even "most electronics producers of the 80s and 90s", as I can definitely recall VCRs, tape players, cordless phones, and all the rest that instilled a deep fear in many people that they could break their devices without even trying.
*I have finally gone to Mac OSX now, and it's worlds better than it used to be. It's not perfect, but you can tell some developers have a general idea of where they're going now.
Of course, some other fairly important people (Jeff Raskin, Donald Norman) argue that it's a faulty design to target new users. Designs aimed at new/inexperienced users are rarely any help to power users, and are often a detriment to them, as these designs tend to hide/disable many advanced features. Designs aimed at power users, however, allow frequent users to learn and adapt to get the most from their tools. Sure, a new user will often take a little longer to learn a power-user interface, but once they take their first step, they are able to grow and learn. A newbie interface just stifles everyone.
Another, not necessarily equivalent, way of saying this is that newbie users have no clue what they want and can deal with just about any interface. Power users, however, have very specific demands and suffer great losses to productivity when their interfaces change.
A great example is keyboard layout. It has been shown that an alphabetic keyboard layout gives new users only a slight speed advantage over a QWERTY layout (if any at all). Typists, however, are much faster on QWERTY than alphabetic - even after weeks of practice, IIRC. (Anyone remember if this example was in DOET or THI? I thought I remembered reading this one on the web, but I can't find the reference at the moment.)
Important Note: Please notice that I am not relating the new Office design to this discussion. I have not had the chance to use it, and I can not speak for how it feels. Like others here, I'm sure that MS has done usability studies on this design. Hopefully they have learned their lesson, did the study correctly, and are following the guidelines they extracted from it.
I know other people have already asked "Why would you use Excel/Calc for this?" but I'd like to try asking again, in addition to recommending tools that may better suit your needs.
You're a college student, in the EE department. Ask any one of a number of your classmates to introduce you to Matlab. You'll only regret it for about the first day while you learn the syntax. I guarantee your EE department, if not your school in general, has free copies on lab computers for you to use.
If you're looking for something free for your own workstation, I whole-heartedly recommend the amazing GnuPlot and R, the analysis language. It's incredible what those two tools can do - and they're completely free, and available for a whole host of platforms.
I know you feel like you have a pretty good setup with your spreadsheets now, but trust me - give those other pieces of software a try and you'll never go back to Excel/Calc.
Going to war or preparing for rising energy costs like everyone else? MSFT is a huge company. If energy costs rise significantly, be sure that the cost of running the company will rise significantly as well. Power for servers/lights/etc. Flights for employees to conferences/meetings. If energy costs were to rise very quickly, I bet they'd even roll out a program to help employees cope with rising transportation costs.
I haven't read either the financial report or the entire analyst reaction, but I'd say it's a premature analysis to say they're going to war.
well..
if ads didn't interfere with your use of your operating system would you still want them there?
so, you open up your vista control panel and there is a flashing ad for a singles site there.. technically that would have no impact on your use of the product?
Two things:
First, it's not a matter of want. Of course, in general, I don't want to see ads, and I want them not to take up extra space on my TV, in my newspaper, etc. It is a matter of economics - in general, I would rather spend the money I do and put up with a few ads rather than have to spend much more for the same content. I have to say, if I had to pay full, non-advertising price for the content available to me today, I'd probably pay for nothing outside of a news source (and NPR, BBC or NYTimes at that).
Second, I think you could have chosen a better example scenario. The one you gave, flashing ads on my screen, does impede the use of my computer (because it's distracting, and as my computer is mainly a business tool for me, rather than a piece of entertainment, I need to concentrate while using it), so it doesn't fit the argument. I argue that billboards in the subway do not impede your use of the subway because they are unobtrusive and easily ignored. If they were giant and flashing, such that they obscured maps and information, or caused traffic obstacles by distracting people, then they would degrade the subway experience.
In Europe, there are ads, but they are very limited, nothing like times square in NYC or Tokyo.
Not sure where you've been in Europe, but I can speak for Berlin and Munich, and it's nearly as bad. Posters for concerts, clubs, and movies are posted on walls, just as they are here. The walls of the subway stations are lined with billboards. There are even moving advertisements on LCDs in some of the subway cars. Previews are still shown before movies, and television still has commercials. I think you picked two outliers in Times Square and Tokyo - most other places pale in comparison to those two.
well, the subway has record profits.. in NYC, several billion in surplus.
That is a sad thing. It's sad because I haven't been on a subway system in the US yet that is anywhere near an equal to those of Germany. I think if any public transit system in this country has any surplus money, they owe it to their patrons to improve their service. It's just embarassing sometimes. So, I'll give you this one.
the *main* reason people pay for "premium" channels like HBO and Cinemax etc (thus your paying more stmt) is because they don't have to deal with ads.
Actually, I think you're only half right here. People do pay for HBO and Cinemax to avoid ads, but not just for the sake of avoiding ads. They pay for the privelege of not having their movie experience disruputed by ads every 20 minutes. There are still ads on HBO and Cinemax, in case you didn't notice, but they're between the feature presentations, so they don't get in your way. No matter how much ads annoy you at the movie theatre, they don't actively interfere with your movie experience - they are all shown before the movie starts, and then you get the movie uninterrupted. The same goes for the subway and a yearbook - the ads do not interfere with your use of the product.
I think you're a bit uninformed. Yes, you paid to be on the subway or in the movie theatre, but your fare did not pay for your entire experience. The reason we're shown ads in so many places is because so many of these places cost much more to operate than people are willing to pay for them. Advertisers pay to have their ads put in these places, thereby offsetting some of the cost of admission.
/. crowd) to your high school yearbook. You paid $50 for it, and there were 15-20 pages of ads in the back. Here's why: your yearbook cost $200-500 to print, but no sane person would pay that much for a yearbook. So, your yearbook committee went out and sold advertising to offset the price and make it affordable for the average student.
Think back (or forward, knowing the typical
Maybe you'd like to request a no-advertising option, where you pay a higher price and get no ads. But, I believe you would find that the general population wouldn't be interested.
I know this article was posted last night, so no one will be reading my reply, but I just had to make the point...
The article talks about the rise in laptop robbery, the unlawful taking of a laptop by use of force or violence, not laptop theft, the more general unlawful taking of a laptop.
The rise in laptop robbery is a worry because it's not just loss of property, but also the endangerment of life.
If the article were about theft, I would agree with everyone here that the rise in theft would probably be more aptly attributed to the rise in laptop ownership, than it would be to the rise in wifi hotspots. But, as the article is about robbery, and to commit robbery a robber needs someone to harm or threaten physically, and a person is much more likely to be near their laptop if they are using it, and they are more likely to be using it if there is a wifi connection, I'd say the article has probably found a meaningful correlation.
The ring itself is referred to as a "brass rat" around MIT because it's gold (brass-ish colored) with a beaver (rat) on the face. The version on the cannon is gold-plated aluminum.
Did you mean this to be funny?
Worrying about Oxygen running out, and the Inferno dying with Plan 9. Am I the only one laughing?
...yes, I know I am - I'm the one with shares of stock that I didn't sell while Lucent was at $80+. The laughter is the cure to melancholy. Maybe they'll be worth more than $3 sometime soon. :P
They expect anyone to be able to get anything done in Windows XP in 2-3 hours (the reported battery life)?! It will be even worse on any model that does not have a dedicated keyboard. I think MS has purposely created a product that will tank in order to kill this market before anyone else can make a viable entrance into it.
... unless it's a fairly open platform, and I can get to work on that OS+interface myself. :)
Post new information when someone develops an OS+interface that may actually be efficient on UMPC. Until then, I'm not interested
Actually, I argue that my point about bandwidth usage is a concern. If you read the NYT article that was originally started in this thread, it started out with a couple living somehwere semi-urban, getting a cable or DSL line, puting a wireless AP on it, and then wondering why their connection became slow. Further on in the article, someone else realizes that their bandwidth could be being used in an unauthorized fashion, but six months down the line, they still haven't done anything to fix it.
:)
My points are simple:
1. Many people don't want to share their bandwidth.
2. Many people don't understand that they are _sharing_ the bandwidth with others, not simply getting another connection that affects no one else.
3. A few people don't care if you are trying to be nice and share; they'll jump in and take all the bandwidth they can because it's free.
4. There's no easy way to regulate all of these cases today. I can shut my network to everyone, be greedy, and be satisfied. I can limit unknown connections to lower speeds, but that takes extra work on my behalf. I can open my AP to all, but I have no way of broadcasting to people that I'm doing it out of the kindness of my heart, rather than complete lack of knowledge, and I'd appreciate it if they behaved responsibly (and that they learned what responsibly means).
I agree - there are many ways to look/think/act on this issue. At the very least, I'm sure it will spawn some interesting anthropologic papers in the next few years. The internet is still a resource unlike any other that our society has yet to grasp fully, and that presents a lot of opinions about it, none necessarily right nor wrong.
Actually, I most definitely have heard of packet shaping. We ended up puting a shaper on the line at the fraternity house. What always bugged me about it was that it shaped everyone's packets, regardless of purpose. Most of us were of the opinion that traffic for academic use should have been completely unlimited. Download your psets and assigned reading as fast as you want. SSH to a lab computer and stream verbose compiler output as fast as you must. Transfer the 300 MB of data you just acquired from your experiment. But limit the porn. It just never worked the way we wanted, though. A bit of monitoring and some heuristics might have solved a good deal of the situation, but it just always seemed like personal knowledge and respect was the correct solution.
You are right, though. For me, at home, a packet shaper would do the trick. However, I don't feel that I should have to put in extra work to allow just anyone to use my network. It's much easier for me to just lock it down and not have to worry about it. It's better for security purposes that way anyway.
Here, here. That's exactly what I've been thinking while reading through these things. A good deal of the ideas in these proposals are exact copies of the iWork suite.
BUT, I have to say that I don't think this is a bad thing! I've been using Pages and Keynote for a few months now, and I absolutely love them. Pages is a little bit different than your average word processor, but that's what I love about it. It lets me create a document with my content, rather than hassle with settings and other blech. Until Apple decides to market iWork for other platforms, I applaud KOffice for learning from an innovative leader. Bring the good features to the rest of the masses, so they can see what they've been missing all these years!
I don't open my AP, and here's why: People still don't understand enough about how their computers and the networks that connect them work to be trusted in my environment. Having recently left college, I was around when my fraternity put in wired ethernet and later wireless APs. We told everyone when we put everything in, "We all share this $N k/sec. line. Do not hog bandwidth. Limit your downloads. This network is intended to allow brothers to do schoolwork in-house, rather than haul to campus." I must say that all of my fraternity brothers were pretty level-headed. None of them would have actively screwed over another brother. But, invariably, once a week or more the net would stop dead because one of them had Kazaa up, downloading seven seasons of anime and leaving their uploads unlimited. They weren't trying to be jerks, they just didn't understand how the network worked and how much bandwidth they were using.
So, I keep my AP closed. If I knew that my neighbors were knowledgeable, I'd open it to them. I open the network to anyone who visits me in my home - where I can click them off if they do something stupid. Unknowns - never on my network.
How is this not from the shave-and-a-haircut department? :)
I've only seen multiline when there are multiple stories. If that's the case, I was trying to suggest a small circle by each story. So for three stories in a row, you'd have three smal humps at the left. If a single brief article can be multiple lines, then you're right - two graphics are needed.
Also, the one-bump-per-brief-article may be a little distracting - combining and using two different bumps may be nicer on the eyes. As long as it doesn't run into the same problem of making people wonder why the stories are grouped. *shrug*
I have to say I agree the with the grandparent. The quarter circle upward curve on the bottom left does associate the "brief articles" with the article above. I have a simple suggestion to fix it, though.
Just change the curve to a half circle. Then you'd get something like a little bubble for each brief article.
Seems like it would be easy, and I think the curve on top would help dissociate it with the story above it.
I spent quite a while this morning before this article came up wondering what relevence any of the brief articles had to the rest of the articles. It seems I'm not the only one.
I don't think I would ever use a textbook on such a device. One simple reason lies behind my statement, and it has to do with the way I use textbooks. Over half of the time I'm looking in a textbook, I'm trying to find information that I know I've heard or read before. Often times I know exactly what the page looks like, but can't remember the one important term.
:)
:)
So, when I go looking through a textbook, I'm skipping around - open in the middle, 50 pages forward, 15 back, etc. That's easy to do with the dead tree version - you can easily feel along the edges of the pages and get a good idea of how far you're going to turn.
On the electronic version, you're stuck with either turning one page at a time, or typing in the page number to which you want to turn (ok, maybe they have a +-10 page button, but still). It's much slower to search that way than the dead tree way.
I fight against this all the time. I love the fact that I can instantly grab the manual/spec sheet for just about any electronic item I'd want online. But once I have the component, and I'm actually putting it to use, I almost always end up printing out large sections (or all) of that same manual. It's much easier for me to be able to flip back and forth between a few pages in dead tree form than electronic form.
But then again, if you're not looking for graphs or pictures, and you can think of the important term you're looking for, very little beats the speed of a fulltext search. Well, except a properly constructed index.
-CrazyWingman
P.S. This is not to say I would never use an ebook device. For fictional reading, especially on long trips, I'd just about force one on my wife. She always takes three or four books on a plane trip because she reads so fast. If I could cut down on the weight of that entertainment, it would make my life easier.
The Wizard of Oz had the 'ding dong the witch is dead' song edited out.
Um, which 'ding dong the witch is dead' song? The only ones I've ever heard are: