Out of curiosity, why do you consider driving a hybrid to be nonsensical? It seems like a fine way to cut your fuel burning significantly without necessarily changing your habits.
I'm not saying it's the only way to do things. I myself have a fairly inefficient SUV because if I want to go to the mountains with my wife, my kid and my dog, there's no way all of us would fit in a Prius. That being said, wherever possible, I use public or zero-emission (walk, bike) transportation, and I think we've put less than 6000 miles on the beast in the last 12 months, including a 1500 mile round-trip road trip to visit family last chrisma-hannu-kwanzaa.
Point being, I agree that there are lots of ways to skin a cat, and many of those ways have short-term benefits (cost savings) as well as long term ones (earth savings). Unless you know something I don't about hybrids, what point is there in ridiculing the use of them to cut fuel consumption?
685*500 = 342,500. A first year maths teacher at Berkeley High School with a Masters in math or education, as of a few years ago, would take home 48k/year. Seven teachers. If this school is short on teachers, you have a good point. If, however, they already have a happy, not-overworked staff and a good student-teacher ratio, then seven more teachers might not be a great investment.
Really? On my HP11c, I programmed transformation functions in using reverse polish notation. I showed my trig teacher what I had done and asked if I could use it on a test, and after a moment's thought, he said he felt that I had demonstrated that I understood the concepts by translating them into functions on my calculator and gave me the thumbs up. Everyone else turned in papers chock fulla scribbles, and mine just had basic notes to show the teacher the main steps I was thinking of, and the answer.
Not every kid is an ADHD loser who will only be distracted by technology.
Of course, then I discovered pot and lost all interest in maths for a couple of years. That's when my computer became its biggest distraction. Thankfully, I outgrew that by the time I was 17.
Did you know that kids learn by playing games? I'll bet there are 100 great iPad apps for improving vocabulary, spelling, math and reasoning skills. I'll bet there are 100 great iPad apps for creating art, music, video and more. I'll bet there's nothing like that on a Nook or Kindle.
So why not a laptop? Watch a kid interacting with a tablet vs. a computer. My two year old LOVES banging on my keyboard, but he can't do anything interesting with it. But on my iphone, he's been able to find an app I created for him, and run it (tilting the screen and touching it to make the moon move behind pictures of things familiar to him). Hell, he figured out how to negotiate the photo library when he was a year old.
So it's easy. But it's also more fun for kids. A buddy of mine has computers all over the house. But when his 6-year-old wants to play a game or see a video or go on the web, he asks for the iPad first. And I know that's just one data point, but I've seen it all over the place. Give a kid a tablet, and they immediately, instinctively know how to interact with it, and more importantly, they WANT to interact with it.
Put that all together and you've got a great formula for learning. It doesn't need to be an iPad either. I like my Apple products and all, but I'd love to see some really good competition out there.
That being said, honestly, if the folks at Microsoft are smart, they won't build their own "iPad Killer" for some time. Instead, they should become experts at touch software by selling educational apps *on the iPad*. There's no reason they shouldn't be able to add another billion dollars a year to their bottom line and once again making MS a household name by riding the coat tails of Apple's success. Then take the lessons they learn and build their own killer tablet.
Additionally, it's not just GPS. RFID is actually almost as sinister. They're cheap, require no stored power source, and could conceivably be inserted into everything you own. While you couldn't be tracked (easily) out in the country, any business or government office you walk into could have an RFID sensor making it possible for you to leave breadcrumbs all over the place.
Apple had acknowledged to Congress last year only that "cell tower and Wi-Fi access point information" is "intermittently" collected and "transmitted to Apple" every 12 hours.
Citation? I don't doubt you, but just because you type it does not make it true. Especially in the auspices of someone who decries fanboi-ism, I'd expect to see an avoision of even the appearance of impropriety in fact-reporting.
There is no reason to panic, actually. Short term solution: turn off location services. Long term solution: Apple reduces the time cached data stays on the phone.
There's apparently a good reason for the cache, otherwise Android wouldn't do it, too. I can't see a reasonable cause for it to be cached ad infinitum, though.
Of course, as others have pointed out, bazillions of people affected by this have location services turned on so that they can check in with 4square, add locations to their tweets, do location-based searches on Google, and so on. People are leaving breadcrumbs all over the place. Heck, if they have location services on, I think most smartphones include it in photo metadata, so all someone has to do is look through your camera roll to figure out where you've been.
Of course, metadata or not, if you've got a picture of yourself in front of a cable car with a news stand nearby, it's pretty easy to tell where you are and when you were there.
Yup. Music's big four are really adept at stunting their own growth. If they see a third party adding value--and thus profiting--their first instinct is to shut it down because nobody is allowed to profit other than them. My feeling is that if they'd let MP3.com do their thing, they might have seen a temporary drop in revenues, but nowhere near the ongoing dip in major label sales we've seen over the past few years. And there wouldn't be nearly the level of bad blood in the market.
No, it's actually more. I just ran the analyzer and it shows my trip to the SF Bay Area in January. I'm sure, like many other are saying, that it's just a cell-tower-location-caching system. But it'd be nice if stuff like this were auto-purged after a few days.
Most of these are individual products, not platforms which need ongoing support to have value. That is to say, if you're going to replace your computer every two or three years, then the design (cube, dalmation, etc) is not a huge factor. But regardless of which Mac you're running, at least for most of the last 10 years, you could run OS X on it. Apple hasn't had a Vista or Kin-level abandonment in that time.
Some of these things were just proofs-of-concept to encourage the third party market. I don't really think that Apple wanted to get into the hifi market, but they needed something to show the opportunity. Similarly, with the hockeypuck mouse, my first thought when I got one with my B/W G3 was, "Man, they really want to help third-party USB mouse makers." And I went out and bought a Logitech mouse that I used for five years until I replaced it with a Microsoft laser mouse which I'm still using today.
I think that the biggest flop so far is Ping, from that list. I know a lot of people who swear by.Mac/Mobile Me; I have yet to see the value. Rumor has it that big changes are coming... if they release it as a free service for Mac/iOS users, then I might find myself transitioning away from a lot of Google-hosted cloud services. My understanding is that MobileMe is a good service; it's just that it might not be good enough to warrant a $99/yr charge for many.
I don't believe you. I don't believe anything good about Sweden since I found out that the Swedish Bikini Team was a bunch of American models, many of whom weren't even blond!
It's pretty standard for pre-pay services to have an expiration date. Not that I love it or anything, but that's not what's slickest about it. What I like about the idea is that if I were to buy an iPad (I haven't, but I'm thinking about it), I might get the 3g because I wouldn't have to get the tethering plan, but if I needed Internet access outside of Wifi range for just a few days, $15 would cover it.
Considering I've paid half that for an hour's access to wifi at an airport (it was good for a day, but I only was at the 'port for an hour before my plane took off; who really spends a full day at an aiport?) and more than that for 24 hour's access to a hotel's wifi, $15 for 250MB over 30 days is pretty good.
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Out of curiosity, why do you consider driving a hybrid to be nonsensical? It seems like a fine way to cut your fuel burning significantly without necessarily changing your habits.
I'm not saying it's the only way to do things. I myself have a fairly inefficient SUV because if I want to go to the mountains with my wife, my kid and my dog, there's no way all of us would fit in a Prius. That being said, wherever possible, I use public or zero-emission (walk, bike) transportation, and I think we've put less than 6000 miles on the beast in the last 12 months, including a 1500 mile round-trip road trip to visit family last chrisma-hannu-kwanzaa.
Point being, I agree that there are lots of ways to skin a cat, and many of those ways have short-term benefits (cost savings) as well as long term ones (earth savings). Unless you know something I don't about hybrids, what point is there in ridiculing the use of them to cut fuel consumption?
That's it... they need the Flux Capacitor!
iPad: smaller screen than a laptop, less RAM, less HD space, fewer apps. Lame.
685*500 = 342,500. A first year maths teacher at Berkeley High School with a Masters in math or education, as of a few years ago, would take home 48k/year. Seven teachers. If this school is short on teachers, you have a good point. If, however, they already have a happy, not-overworked staff and a good student-teacher ratio, then seven more teachers might not be a great investment.
Really? On my HP11c, I programmed transformation functions in using reverse polish notation. I showed my trig teacher what I had done and asked if I could use it on a test, and after a moment's thought, he said he felt that I had demonstrated that I understood the concepts by translating them into functions on my calculator and gave me the thumbs up. Everyone else turned in papers chock fulla scribbles, and mine just had basic notes to show the teacher the main steps I was thinking of, and the answer.
Not every kid is an ADHD loser who will only be distracted by technology.
Of course, then I discovered pot and lost all interest in maths for a couple of years. That's when my computer became its biggest distraction. Thankfully, I outgrew that by the time I was 17.
Did you know that kids learn by playing games? I'll bet there are 100 great iPad apps for improving vocabulary, spelling, math and reasoning skills. I'll bet there are 100 great iPad apps for creating art, music, video and more. I'll bet there's nothing like that on a Nook or Kindle.
So why not a laptop? Watch a kid interacting with a tablet vs. a computer. My two year old LOVES banging on my keyboard, but he can't do anything interesting with it. But on my iphone, he's been able to find an app I created for him, and run it (tilting the screen and touching it to make the moon move behind pictures of things familiar to him). Hell, he figured out how to negotiate the photo library when he was a year old.
So it's easy. But it's also more fun for kids. A buddy of mine has computers all over the house. But when his 6-year-old wants to play a game or see a video or go on the web, he asks for the iPad first. And I know that's just one data point, but I've seen it all over the place. Give a kid a tablet, and they immediately, instinctively know how to interact with it, and more importantly, they WANT to interact with it.
Put that all together and you've got a great formula for learning. It doesn't need to be an iPad either. I like my Apple products and all, but I'd love to see some really good competition out there.
That being said, honestly, if the folks at Microsoft are smart, they won't build their own "iPad Killer" for some time. Instead, they should become experts at touch software by selling educational apps *on the iPad*. There's no reason they shouldn't be able to add another billion dollars a year to their bottom line and once again making MS a household name by riding the coat tails of Apple's success. Then take the lessons they learn and build their own killer tablet.
Never heard of them.
Additionally, it's not just GPS. RFID is actually almost as sinister. They're cheap, require no stored power source, and could conceivably be inserted into everything you own. While you couldn't be tracked (easily) out in the country, any business or government office you walk into could have an RFID sensor making it possible for you to leave breadcrumbs all over the place.
Just being silly.
Apple had acknowledged to Congress last year only that "cell tower and Wi-Fi access point information" is "intermittently" collected and "transmitted to Apple" every 12 hours.
Citation? I don't doubt you, but just because you type it does not make it true. Especially in the auspices of someone who decries fanboi-ism, I'd expect to see an avoision of even the appearance of impropriety in fact-reporting.
Ooohhhh... where can I get these GPS shoes?
Oh, come on. He's good enough, he's smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like him!
There is no reason to panic, actually. Short term solution: turn off location services. Long term solution: Apple reduces the time cached data stays on the phone.
There's apparently a good reason for the cache, otherwise Android wouldn't do it, too. I can't see a reasonable cause for it to be cached ad infinitum, though.
Of course, as others have pointed out, bazillions of people affected by this have location services turned on so that they can check in with 4square, add locations to their tweets, do location-based searches on Google, and so on. People are leaving breadcrumbs all over the place. Heck, if they have location services on, I think most smartphones include it in photo metadata, so all someone has to do is look through your camera roll to figure out where you've been.
Of course, metadata or not, if you've got a picture of yourself in front of a cable car with a news stand nearby, it's pretty easy to tell where you are and when you were there.
... as a collection of sensationalist, attention-whoring, hippies.
That unnecessary final comma is responsible for at least a pound of CO2 being released into the air.
Yup. Music's big four are really adept at stunting their own growth. If they see a third party adding value--and thus profiting--their first instinct is to shut it down because nobody is allowed to profit other than them. My feeling is that if they'd let MP3.com do their thing, they might have seen a temporary drop in revenues, but nowhere near the ongoing dip in major label sales we've seen over the past few years. And there wouldn't be nearly the level of bad blood in the market.
Once upon a time, this is also what MP3.com tried to do, but the music industry buried them.
OK, I'll just shut my yap now.
No, it's actually more. I just ran the analyzer and it shows my trip to the SF Bay Area in January. I'm sure, like many other are saying, that it's just a cell-tower-location-caching system. But it'd be nice if stuff like this were auto-purged after a few days.
Based on this post, I'm inferring incorrect assumptions about you right..this...moment!
Whoever modded the parent down probably also supports tax cuts for the wealthy.
Good list. I'd suggest two things, though:
.Mac/Mobile Me; I have yet to see the value. Rumor has it that big changes are coming... if they release it as a free service for Mac/iOS users, then I might find myself transitioning away from a lot of Google-hosted cloud services. My understanding is that MobileMe is a good service; it's just that it might not be good enough to warrant a $99/yr charge for many.
Most of these are individual products, not platforms which need ongoing support to have value. That is to say, if you're going to replace your computer every two or three years, then the design (cube, dalmation, etc) is not a huge factor. But regardless of which Mac you're running, at least for most of the last 10 years, you could run OS X on it. Apple hasn't had a Vista or Kin-level abandonment in that time.
Some of these things were just proofs-of-concept to encourage the third party market. I don't really think that Apple wanted to get into the hifi market, but they needed something to show the opportunity. Similarly, with the hockeypuck mouse, my first thought when I got one with my B/W G3 was, "Man, they really want to help third-party USB mouse makers." And I went out and bought a Logitech mouse that I used for five years until I replaced it with a Microsoft laser mouse which I'm still using today.
I think that the biggest flop so far is Ping, from that list. I know a lot of people who swear by
This is a very, very astute set of observations.
I'm considering the same option. Do you find that you use the GPS often enough that it merits the $100 extra cost?
I don't believe you. I don't believe anything good about Sweden since I found out that the Swedish Bikini Team was a bunch of American models, many of whom weren't even blond!
It's pretty standard for pre-pay services to have an expiration date. Not that I love it or anything, but that's not what's slickest about it. What I like about the idea is that if I were to buy an iPad (I haven't, but I'm thinking about it), I might get the 3g because I wouldn't have to get the tethering plan, but if I needed Internet access outside of Wifi range for just a few days, $15 would cover it.
Considering I've paid half that for an hour's access to wifi at an airport (it was good for a day, but I only was at the 'port for an hour before my plane took off; who really spends a full day at an aiport?) and more than that for 24 hour's access to a hotel's wifi, $15 for 250MB over 30 days is pretty good.