Don't you think a good UI could keep those features out of sight for the reader who does not want them? The current typed note taking is "out of the way."
If everyone were as passive a reader as you are, the Kindle would not provide for marginal notes. Some of us are more active readers and would prefer better integrated note taking.
A few years ago, I did a similar back-of-the envelope calculation and concluded that if Apple charged as much per bit to download songs as telcos charged for text messages, a song would cost more than $5,000.
Based on the email address and the info on the blog, it puts you right in dense Los Angeles suburbia.
The email address is my school. I live in West Los Angeles, but in a house built in 1946 that is and pretty far from my C. O. That being said, they may be lying about the distance and old wires -- it may be that they have under-provisioned the C. O.or backhaul. I don't trust them any more than I trust TWC. It would be nice if there were some viable competition. Maybe Google Fiber some day -- LA is shopping around for a municipal network partner -- but even Google may become "Comcastic" at some point.
FttH
I agree 100%. You might even own the line coming to your house -- the way you own your water, gas pipes and sewer pipes.
Nope, you still get cable TV. At least the several places I've had TWC Internet in NY, I also got free(ish) basic cable. It's only ten or twelve channels, but it includes the major networks and the local news.
Right -- same in Los Angeles -- a bunch of local channels -- many foreign language. I even got a $5 gift card from TWC because they mistakenly (?) blocked the Super Bowl (which I watched anyhow using a rabbit ear antenna).
Why didn't this guy cut his telephone service too?
I could not do that while in the store -- had to talk it over with my wife and may still do it. However, I wish I had tried it just to see if the rep could have found yet another promotion!
Can someone explain the Slashdot scoring algorithm to me? This egotistical boob is saying the same thing several others said and they got scores of "0." Why does this egotistical boob get a higher score than his/her predecessors?
Thanks for the inside story! Do the retention agents take your alternatives into account? If the girl had checked with Verizon and AT&T she would have seen that she had me.
On the phone -- I could not drop it on the spot without talking to my wife... plus lazy inertia. But, I do have telephone alternatives, which is more than I can say for Internet connectivity.
Verizon DSL is another weird story. I was their customer many years ago, getting around 5 Mbps down on a plan that promised up to 7. One day, they throttled it down to 1.5. When I complained, they told me that at my location with my geriatric wiring, I could only get 1.5. They were not willing to un-throttle it in spite of the fact that I had been getting 5 Mbps the day before. That is the day I became a TWC customer.
I just rechecked my Verizon DSL availability. They say I can get "high speed Internet enhanced" -- 1.1-3.0 Mbps down and 384 Kbps up.
In general, many people are like me -- busy and lazy -- and it takes something big like Verizon throttling my DSL or hearing that I was paying $40 for phone service to get them to get our attention.
Not to take away from GNU, but it was not the first freely exchanged open source software. In the batch processing days, every IBM branch office had a file cabinet full of shared software and organizations like SHARE did what the name suggests. Share was formed in 1955 and is still going.
Well, I am even older -- started on unit record equipment and really understood it. Later, I wire-wrapped a single board computer in order to learn about TTL. But I did that without understanding the physics. I could use relays and TTL chips, but did not understand them. Same with programming -- started with low-level assembly language then moved to higher levels of abstraction -- first IOCS routines then Fortran. Today we program at still higher levels of abstraction.
But, I never could have built a relay from scratch let alone a TTL chip. Even us old guys were far from self-sufficient and capable of restarting "the machine" if it failed. How long did it take people to get from mud to pottery, rocks to steel and concrete, raw meat to cooked,sheep hair to shirts? We are all extremely narrow specialists.
Also -- you've picked a tougher sounding life goal than Doug Engelbart did.
I visited Cuba a couple of times during the "special period," and saw poverty, closed factories, etc. The main adaptions I noted were -- regular power blackouts and tons of brand new Chinese bicycles.
If you are a fan of dystopian sci fi, check out EM Forster's "The machine stops."
I recall fooling with a Plato terminal back in the 60/70s when I was at the System Development Corporation. They had a program for time-shared
interactive education in the research directorate, but I was not working on it -- had a nice orange plasma display while we were working with vector CRT displays and TTYs.
Well put! It seemed that every paper written in those days cited Licklider's man-machine symbiosis. He had a vision and the skill to get funds to support that vision (including my dissertation). I met him once and we also had a mutual friend and I can also add that, in spite of a regal sounding name, he was, like Doug Engelbart, friendly and modest.
These folks knew each other -- Engelbart claimed Bush's "As We May Think" as a major inspiration and Bush, Weiner and Licklider were colleagues at MIT. They were also familiar with other time sharing and interactive computing projects at the time and members of that community -- especially Engelbart and Licklider. As you said -- they are links in a chain, but strong links.
They had something else in common -- a sense that their careers were to be in service of humanity, not merely for self agrandisement.
Synchronous collaboration: used computers to support collaboration at the same time -- computer-based meeting room -- see photo on my post.
Asynchronous collaboration: Created shared database or documents created and edited by multiple people.
I think it may be that people like Doug are so smart they realize that they are not the smartest person on the planet. I am reminded of another visionary hero of that era, who funded a lot of Doug's work, J.C.R. Licklider. Lick was also super nice and humble. Another association -- Herbert Simon, AI pioneer and Nobel Laureate -- he once told me that he stored almost everything he knew in his friend's heads.
He was not quite that old, but he was not a kid. He worked on a lot of different pointing devices before settling on the mouse. He did a lot of testing. I recall one where he steered the cursor around using his knee. Up to that time, we just used light pens, which were imprecise and tiring.
> "Who knew that the most critical element of operating a data center in New York City was ensuring a steady supply of diesel fuel?
Anyone who paid attention to what happened to data centers when Katrina hit New Orleans. Check the Clay Shirky interview linked to in this post:
http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-internet-damage-caused-by-hurricane.html
The bill sets up a council of 9 faculty (from CSU, UC and Community Colleges) and they will be responsible for acquiring the books. If they acquire crappy books, faculty will not adopt them. If they do not offer enough to authors to entice them to produce typical ancillary material, faculty will not adopt them. The funds have not yet been allocated and I have no idea whether or not they will be sufficient to attact good, complete books. We will see. More detail at: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/10/governor-brown-signs-california-open_1.html.
You are assuming that the Creative Commons textbooks will not include the same sorts of question banks, PowerPoint slides, and other extras that make them easy to use as those from commercial publishers, If that is the case, you are right -- most professors are busy and unwilling to spend extra time on teaching -- but it may not be the case.
If by "incentives" you are thinking of bribes or kickbacks, you are either misinformed or paranoid.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you think a good UI could keep those features out of sight for the reader who does not want them? The current typed note taking is "out of the way."
If everyone were as passive a reader as you are, the Kindle would not provide for marginal notes. Some of us are more active readers and would prefer better integrated note taking.
90 000% profit
A few years ago, I did a similar back-of-the envelope calculation and concluded that if Apple charged as much per bit to download songs as telcos charged for text messages, a song would cost more than $5,000.
Based on the email address and the info on the blog, it puts you right in dense Los Angeles suburbia.
The email address is my school. I live in West Los Angeles, but in a house built in 1946 that is and pretty far from my C. O. That being said, they may be lying about the distance and old wires -- it may be that they have under-provisioned the C. O.or backhaul. I don't trust them any more than I trust TWC. It would be nice if there were some viable competition. Maybe Google Fiber some day -- LA is shopping around for a municipal network partner -- but even Google may become "Comcastic" at some point.
FttH
I agree 100%. You might even own the line coming to your house -- the way you own your water, gas pipes and sewer pipes.
Nope, you still get cable TV. At least the several places I've had TWC Internet in NY, I also got free(ish) basic cable. It's only ten or twelve channels, but it includes the major networks and the local news.
Right -- same in Los Angeles -- a bunch of local channels -- many foreign language. I even got a $5 gift card from TWC because they mistakenly (?) blocked the Super Bowl (which I watched anyhow using a rabbit ear antenna).
Why didn't this guy cut his telephone service too?
I could not do that while in the store -- had to talk it over with my wife and may still do it. However, I wish I had tried it just to see if the rep could have found yet another promotion!
Can someone explain the Slashdot scoring algorithm to me? This egotistical boob is saying the same thing several others said and they got scores of "0." Why does this egotistical boob get a higher score than his/her predecessors?
Good advice -- I am not sure what would have happened if I had just been on the phone. I will experiment next year -- they've got my interest now.
Thanks for the inside story! Do the retention agents take your alternatives into account? If the girl had checked with Verizon and AT&T she would have seen that she had me.
On the phone -- I could not drop it on the spot without talking to my wife ... plus lazy inertia. But, I do have telephone alternatives, which is more than I can say for Internet connectivity.
Verizon DSL is another weird story. I was their customer many years ago, getting around 5 Mbps down on a plan that promised up to 7. One day, they throttled it down to 1.5. When I complained, they told me that at my location with my geriatric wiring, I could only get 1.5. They were not willing to un-throttle it in spite of the fact that I had been getting 5 Mbps the day before. That is the day I became a TWC customer.
I just rechecked my Verizon DSL availability. They say I can get "high speed Internet enhanced" -- 1.1-3.0 Mbps down and 384 Kbps up.
In general, many people are like me -- busy and lazy -- and it takes something big like Verizon throttling my DSL or hearing that I was paying $40 for phone service to get them to get our attention.
The only thing I can think of that is more pure profitable than telephone service is telephone company text messages.
Read the post -- I'd dropped Cable TV long ago -- this was Internet and telephone only.
Not to take away from GNU, but it was not the first freely exchanged open source software. In the batch processing days, every IBM branch office had a file cabinet full of shared software and organizations like SHARE did what the name suggests. Share was formed in 1955 and is still going.
Well, I am even older -- started on unit record equipment and really understood it. Later, I wire-wrapped a single board computer in order to learn about TTL. But I did that without understanding the physics. I could use relays and TTL chips, but did not understand them. Same with programming -- started with low-level assembly language then moved to higher levels of abstraction -- first IOCS routines then Fortran. Today we program at still higher levels of abstraction.
But, I never could have built a relay from scratch let alone a TTL chip. Even us old guys were far from self-sufficient and capable of restarting "the machine" if it failed. How long did it take people to get from mud to pottery, rocks to steel and concrete, raw meat to cooked,sheep hair to shirts? We are all extremely narrow specialists.
Also -- you've picked a tougher sounding life goal than Doug Engelbart did.
I visited Cuba a couple of times during the "special period," and saw poverty, closed factories, etc. The main adaptions I noted were -- regular power blackouts and tons of brand new Chinese bicycles.
If you are a fan of dystopian sci fi, check out EM Forster's "The machine stops."
Dramatization video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvrGUnIFuRs
Text: http://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-Stops.pdf
I recall fooling with a Plato terminal back in the 60/70s when I was at the System Development Corporation. They had a program for time-shared interactive education in the research directorate, but I was not working on it -- had a nice orange plasma display while we were working with vector CRT displays and TTYs.
Well put! It seemed that every paper written in those days cited Licklider's man-machine symbiosis. He had a vision and the skill to get funds to support that vision (including my dissertation). I met him once and we also had a mutual friend and I can also add that, in spite of a regal sounding name, he was, like Doug Engelbart, friendly and modest.
These folks knew each other -- Engelbart claimed Bush's "As We May Think" as a major inspiration and Bush, Weiner and Licklider were colleagues at MIT. They were also familiar with other time sharing and interactive computing projects at the time and members of that community -- especially Engelbart and Licklider. As you said -- they are links in a chain, but strong links.
They had something else in common -- a sense that their careers were to be in service of humanity, not merely for self agrandisement.
For an overview of the connection between Bush-Licklider-Engelbart, including links to As We May Think and Man-Machine Symbiosis paper, see this teaching module: http://cis275topics.blogspot.com/2010/10/web-history-and-internet-culture.html.
This is no time to be a literal, pedantic dork. If you speak English, you know what I meant.
Synchronous collaboration: used computers to support collaboration at the same time -- computer-based meeting room -- see photo on my post. Asynchronous collaboration: Created shared database or documents created and edited by multiple people.
I think it may be that people like Doug are so smart they realize that they are not the smartest person on the planet. I am reminded of another visionary hero of that era, who funded a lot of Doug's work, J.C.R. Licklider. Lick was also super nice and humble. Another association -- Herbert Simon, AI pioneer and Nobel Laureate -- he once told me that he stored almost everything he knew in his friend's heads.
He was not quite that old, but he was not a kid. He worked on a lot of different pointing devices before settling on the mouse. He did a lot of testing. I recall one where he steered the cursor around using his knee. Up to that time, we just used light pens, which were imprecise and tiring.
I meant on a computer -- who did it before that?
If you think cost and access are problems in poor and rural parts of the US, consider the plight of people in developing nations. The potential for online education is great: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/05/online-education-market-is-global.html but sufficiently cheap, fast access typically non-existent: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-access-and-bandwidth-divide-in.html
> "Who knew that the most critical element of operating a data center in New York City was ensuring a steady supply of diesel fuel? Anyone who paid attention to what happened to data centers when Katrina hit New Orleans. Check the Clay Shirky interview linked to in this post: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-internet-damage-caused-by-hurricane.html
The bill sets up a council of 9 faculty (from CSU, UC and Community Colleges) and they will be responsible for acquiring the books. If they acquire crappy books, faculty will not adopt them. If they do not offer enough to authors to entice them to produce typical ancillary material, faculty will not adopt them. The funds have not yet been allocated and I have no idea whether or not they will be sufficient to attact good, complete books. We will see. More detail at: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/10/governor-brown-signs-california-open_1.html.
You are assuming that the Creative Commons textbooks will not include the same sorts of question banks, PowerPoint slides, and other extras that make them easy to use as those from commercial publishers, If that is the case, you are right -- most professors are busy and unwilling to spend extra time on teaching -- but it may not be the case. If by "incentives" you are thinking of bribes or kickbacks, you are either misinformed or paranoid.