I looked at the article, but the screenshots caught my eye... took a look. Gave up trying to figure out exactly what the interfaces are presenting. I don't think the interface will be popular. The interface is noisy, way too much going on in the screen and it's all over the place (this is a trend begun in XP... I pretty much have all of any windows screens I used toggled back to "classic" (ick) windows).
The interface, to me, is confusing... again another trend I see/saw in the XP UI.
Can't wait to see in addition to the "glitz" how many flickering, spinning, etc. graphics become part of the "presentation"... Also, guess I can't wait to get my hands on a 10Ghz CPU machine to keep from choking to death on the chaff.
I'll be fine as soon as I get my cygwin up and running. Sigh.
It may be an ad, but it is disingenuously presented as information... Microsoft does this masterfully... their web site is a source for knowledge base articles, a source for patches and updates, AND it is a kiosk for all their wares. But the lines blur here when compared to an ad in a normal context, e.g., a magazine (granted, some play fancy tricks to make magazine ads look like news but apparently there's a requirement they MUST put a disclaimer), a TV ad, etc.
To the ad-unaware, this looks like a "howto" on purchasing mp3 players, not a shill for Microsoft.
(Still, all of your points are valid... good post.)
My guess is fine print isn't even necessary at a university, assuming it's a public university (and even assuming it isn't). They pretty much own everything they've made available for the students' environments. Even paid for, the university makes the policy oh how and why things are allocated. I don't think it's a good thing what they're doing here, but if I felt myself in the crosshairs of possible litigation I'd probably consider the same restrictions. Stinks, doesn't it?
Yes, but doesn't that only prove he (she) was doing SOME legal downloading.... producing evidence of legal doings doesn't disprove illegal doings. Unless the user can produce logs accounting for every single byte, the university prolly takes the conservative stance (and prolly does anyway) all BitTorrent is inherently not okay until proven otherwise (funny, what a topsy-turvy world this has become).
hmmmm, don't think I was referring to grandma (not that I don't think she's human...)
We disagree on whether it should be easily readable. Sure there's the mechanism for including unreadable "stuff", but I submit Microsoft could make their formats a whole lot more "open" and usable in xml than they have. And I suspect their approach is not accidental.
And, being easy to machine parse is another "huh?". As far as I can tell, anything in reasonably defined canonical form should be easy to machine parse -- xml holds no monopoly in that arena. I'd have to say I find some of the mechanisms to parse xml with code MORE obtuse than other approaches (where xml gets used inappropriately, people end up doing a LOT more work than necessary to use, move, modify, etc. data).
Anyway, my main point is Microsoft could be friendlier but isn't... but then, they don't have to be.
Like I said, as I understand it.... while I try to be fair with Microsoft, I've had enough experiences with them (worked there.... promised me NT was going to be the next unix.... , and behind closed doors I saw enough to walk out... this was before the DOJ stepped in. As I left I explained that what they were doing was, if not illegal, certainly unethical) that sometimes I'm going to leave the work for them to unsully themselves to themselves.
I have enough to do without spending every waking moment making sure I'm totally fair to Microsoft -- they've certainly not done that with the rest of the world.
I apologize for the inaccuracy -- I really do have a recollection that there was obfuscation in their xml DOC implementation. (and, yes, I KNOW they've published their formats "publicly" since way before xml...)
xml itself is designed to be easy to use, easy to read in "human" form...
The problem with the MS implementation as I have understood it is Microsoft has used xml as transport for their proprietary DOC format, not defined their DOC structure in xml. There's a difference here. The former being the case, yes, you can get to the xml and "see" the DOC, but it is just an ascii encoded binary... so, you really get nothing more than the old proprietary stuff, AND an extra layer of obfuscation! Hardly what xml was supposed to be about.
Re:I just wrote my local paper about this
on
PSP Launch Coverage
·
· Score: 1
Crikey, Kamapuaa, you're right!.... I should've distilled the e-mail for/., I was in a hurry... Mark already thinks I'm crazy. I correspond with him on occasion... so he knows my bent. I'll be more careful in the future. (btw, I AM a crazy.)
Re:I just wrote my local paper about this
on
PSP Launch Coverage
·
· Score: 1
yeah, I correspond with this guy... so, it was way wordy, and way folksy, and way undistilled.... I held my breath and cut and pasted... I normally would pare it WAY down for/........ Sorry about that, but thanks for the feedback. You're absolutely dead on.
I just wrote my local paper about this
on
PSP Launch Coverage
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Liked your article on Sony's new playstation... a few thoughts though...
I too have long considered Sony to be a great innovator but here is what has frustrated me for sooooo long and here is why I probably will NEVER buy a Sony product again unless and until they change some of their practices.... I'll illustrate by example:
long ago, after a few years of owning one of Yamaha's very first digital receivers with no remote control, I decided to "move up".... and fell in lust with a nice Sony unit at the local electronics store (this was in Omaha)... The Sony boasted 100 watts per channel to my Yamaha's 50 watts per channel AND it had a remote control. I excitedly told the salesman how much I looked forward to having a remote control unit and the doubling of the power would be a nice bonus. When I told him I was "replacing" my Yamaha, to his credit, he stopped me and told me if I took the Sony home I would be SO disappointed. He said the 100 watt Sony in a side-by-side comparison with my 50 watt Yamaha would be pathetic, the Sony wouldn't even stand a chance. Whaaaa? He also showed me how when you turned the volume all the way up on the Sony when it was set to phono input (yes it was in the day of LP's), you could hear bleed over sound from the FM tuner, ick..... He told me to try that with the Yamaha, I did, dead silence... He explained Sony sold sizzle, but no steak.... by skimping on things like shielding on wires to block induction of adjacent signal sources. Okay, lesson learned.... but my Sony radar was up.
Skip to the mid 90's or so. I was absolutely infatuated with Sony's new Minidisk format -- what a cool way to have such great sounding music in such a small form factor. Granted, the recording unit I purchased was $700, but I was willing to pay the bleeding edge price knowing from experience technology prices drop steeply and when I would be ready to buy additional units I could get a comparable recorder for less than half the price I paid then. I watched for 2 years.... no price drop.... mentioned to a salesman at Magnolia (now I'd moved to Seattle)... He explained the minidisk technology was Sony's own proprietary format, and Sony had refused to license the technology to anyone else for any reasonable fees and thus maintained a lock on the market and the pricing... and that was the reason the price never came down. Shit! My original unit has long since broken and I have long since abandoned Minidisks.
Then came digital cameras. Again, Sony jumped in with THEIR answer to the evolving standard storage media at the time, their memory stick.... proprietary, expensive, and non-standard. This time I didn't bite, but watched the same behavior... the memory stick, while adopted by some never came down in price and never was released from the Sony control. (Their prerogative of course.)
Now they've introduced their UMDs (Universal Media Discs), a proprietary new medium , yet ANOTHER proprietary format?!? It's almost unbelievable -- they're kind of like the Microsoft of the electronics industry except they don't have near the control and monopoly. No thanks, I don't need their proprietary solutions that are incompatible with anything else I own....
Come to think of it... I'm not so surprised, or maybe it's a lucky thing Sony's Beta never became the standard, while I wasn't really there to be part of that decision in my purchasing power... but maybe VHS was the better choice after all (even though it wasn't quite as good technically).
I owned a cell phone capable of web 7 years ago, I believe it was called a Duetto, or something like that. Of course there were very limited sites available, but at the time there was (don't know if it exists anymore) an effort to write for handheld devices with something called HDML. The phone's display was character based, and the surfing was painfully slow, painfully limited, and not worth any money paid for the service subscription.
It kind of became (and today becomes) the chicken and the egg.... which comes first? Enough users to make the extra design and coding worthwhile (especially retro-fitting existing web sites)?, or enough web sites small-device-ready to entice a reasonable demographic?
My personal feelings are web experience on tiny devices is abysmal.... can't imagine there's really any pent up demand nor any huge future demand for something like this. (I actually am a bit from the old school of really liking a phone to be a phone, a camera to be a camera, etc.)
This is a placeholder.... I'll include more details of why you shouldn't believe the NEXT slashdot article.... Let me get this posted.... and I'll follow up! (Hey, if the other guy can get modded informative for that.... this, since it's for a future article ought to be insightful). And, no, I'm NOT a GoogleGuy.
I can NEVER accept DRM, but not on any grounds that there shouldn't be SOME control over distribution, etc., of media, but more on the premise of the absolute certainty DRM can NEVER be implemented perfectly, i.e., there are always going to be those who can circumvent DRM.... and THOSE are the people the DRM folks are going after.
On the other hand, the honest, trusting OTHER customers are the ones who, in addition to now having to understand how DRM works, and how to use it, will fall prey to the unexpected glitches.... (family gathering to watch digital home videos.... uh-oh... for whatever reason, the DRM mechanism on the player won't let them watch THEIR OWN VIDEO! (I know some would argue that a good thing...:-))
The hapless unsuspecting users now don't know if their equipment is broken, or they've broken some law.... so next they turn to:.....
The NEXT victims of all of the DRM craze, the technical support people! (i.e., lots of slashdotters....). Now I'll be getting calls from my neighbors because they can't figure out how to get their dvd to play because of some glitch with DRM? Give me a break..
And, don't underestimate for a moment that these glitches aren't going to come up -- they always do -- and we are always left as the ones to provide solutions and support.
Meanwhile, the thieves and crooks will continue with their sport. Go figure.
I wish... (hope we're far enough to be out of the modding radar....). I actually have had a recent very bad experience with amazon.... so this took a bit of a swallow to recommend this way, but the "Mastering..." is SUCH a great book... I think any professional should have at LEAST "Mastering..." as part of their library (like I said in original post, can't vouch for that book... the general reviews I've seen lead me to think it isn't nearly as good).
While I can't vouch for the quality of the reviewed book,if you want something definitive on regular expressions,
Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl is an absolute must for your professional library. Jeffrey breaks down and then builds back up what regular expressions are and how they work, and offers an entire matrix breakout of the slightly different implementations among the most common utilities (grep, sed, awk, perl...). Not to shill for amazon, but if you select the reviewed book, the "buy this book too, and you get this great price" deal actually includes the Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition. . Get 'em both, you won't be sorry.
And the DRM and MPAA and the.... are the ones instigating. Only time will tell, but I've always felt PC's are mostly a novelty and the ONLY thing that has kept the buying public in lockstep so far has been the ongoing promise of "This time we really really mean it when we say we've vastly improved it (Microsoft, especially), and it is MUCH easier to use...", with the implicit eventual promise PC's will become sublime. If you've ever read the Peanuts cartoon, and remember the ongoing relationship between Lucy and Charlie Brown with Lucy promising "this time" she won't pull the football away when Charlie Brown tries to kick it, you may have a feeling for whay I think the PC industry is pulling off (away?).
The only way PC's will become sublime is when they've sublimated into the background as os's tend more and more to be implemented as embedded technology, thus making other ordinary items and appliances more efficient, more effective, easier to use, more powerful, etc.
Let's face it (IMO)... computers are amazingly complex machines, and it's close to a miracle they can be navigated at all, but I'm not seeing any evidence they are becoming easier to use, just more confusing. But I AM seeing evidence of people throwing up their hands and giving up... (my neighbors have gotten rid of their computer, my parents only keep theirs because I PROMISE to continue to help them and support them with it.... many others I know never use their computers and say they really don't have a need for further purchases...) Maybe the marketing machine can continue to sustain the PC marketplace, but I doubt it...
from my parent (previous) post: There is an amazing book on this topic -- it's a fairly dense (ironic) read, but hits on lots of these points, and offers research, and real life descriptions where computers were and were not effective. As one might guess after some thought, the positive "effect" of computers in the classroom has/had little to do with the fact that there were computers, and much more to do with well-rounded and caring staff dedicated to the education goals. I don't have the link or book name readily available, but if there are enough responses, or interest, I will reply to my post with the link....
from the post:..., Worth noting that it took almost 20 years for PCs in the corporate environment to actually have a positive impact on productivity; might the same be true in education?...,
First I would probably be happy to argue the thesis of "positive" impact as questionable, or at least unproveable. (How many times have you watched in pain as someone wrings their hands in angst trying to decide on a font?) I actually walked the entire floor once (this was in 1991) asking ANYONE how I inserted a "new page" in a FrameMaker document... I knew there was a way, but could NOT find the option ANYWHERE. Most interesting for me walking the floor wasn't that NOONE knew how to insert a page break was the myriad ways people dealt with the issue (most common behavior was to insert CR's until the page "broke".... sheesh). (And, for the record, even our team "documentarian" (what the heck is THAT?) didn't know how to do the page break either.)
Ah, but back to the topic at hand. There really are 2 different contexts (at least) between the workplace and the education system. The education system's first and foremost goal is to educate, not necessarily how to use a computer. There are many reasons schools can't make productive use of computers to advance "educational productivity", I'll mention a couple:
teachers aren't equipped and trained themselves to teach others about computers
schools rarely are current in computer technology, and if a school just happens to be current (usually happens right after new construction and passed bonds -- go figure), they quickly fall out of currency with the lightning pace of advancing computer technology.
there are few, if any, well written, let alone well designed curricula for education.
There is an amazing book on this topic -- it's a fairly dense (ironic) read, but hits on lots of these points, and offers research, and real life descriptions where computers were and were not effective. As one might guess after some thought, the positive "effect" of computers in the classroom has/had little to do with the fact that there were computers, and much more to do with well-rounded and caring staff dedicated to the education goals. I don't have the link or book name readily available, but if there are enough responses, or interest, I will reply to my post with the link....
I know this is cliche, but Grapes of Wrath is a classic, and one
of my alltime favorites. I've read it four or five times, and it gets
better each read. Yeah, it's always in the "list", but it deserves to be.
Another favorite of mine is more related to what/.-ers are about. Read
Player Piano by Vonnegut. It's not his most well know work, but it
is, I think, maybe one of his best, certainly one of his most perceptive.
Just my $.02.
admittedly "go to the theater" was a bad choice/example, especially under your examination (I had my own second thoughts after clicking "publish".... sigh).
I stand by my thesis in any regard... don't underestimate the ability of the entertainment industry to introduce increasingly annoying, confusing, and eventually prohibitive (which will be by then too late) obstacles delaying and even sometimes preventing consumers the product they thought/assumed they'd paid for. (I've already posted about a CD I had recently purchased that would not play on my car CD player... and its replacement (exchange) from the store failed in exactly the same places in exactly the same ways.)
I think ultimately the entertainment would do best for "itself" (just what IS that?) and its consumers by making nice.... A little trust goes a heck of a long way.
(And, yes I've been to a movie theatre lately... admittedly I no longer have to spring for four, (only two now), and admittedly that still is a bit more expensive, but sometimes it is just nice to do that... especially with the increasingly poorly maintained dvd's we're seeing when we DO rent.... I don't know what most people experience, but anecdotally we've been seeing failure rates of dvd's bad enough to be unwatchable at about one out of every five (and don't blame our dvd player, it is brand new, and the other dvd players in the house are equally unable to play these dvd's). Granted our "provider" has ALWAYS graciously exchanged or refunded, but an evening ruined... and now we're getting WAY off topic...)
this is your perception of "hassle". I try to use the prism of what I consider to be a typical user. For example, the people I mentioned in my original post... that run the local grocery store... to them, DL, burn, re-rip, (not to mention re-entering lost tag info...) are more than too many hoops to jump through, they're too many hoops to understand. And, I believe their world-view of technology is more common than a typical/.'er.
..., most of us, most of the time, will pay a reasonable amount for good quality material ,...
Absolutely... as a matter of fact I think it's more than most, it's close to ALL. Human nature is to take the path of least resistance, and while some take to the challenge of stealing... most don't. So, while some in the past would make illegal copies and share "illegally" (downloading, etc.), the record companies' response by tightening the screws eventually I think will have an unintended effect. At some point the extra onus on the customer to "unlock", and jump through all of the drm hoops just to use something they already paid for and thought they were just going to sit down and enjoy will push them to their path of least resistance... e.g., not bother with buying cd's anymore, not bother with dvd's anymore, not bother with iTunes anymore...
Instead they'll just use the radio, go to the movie theater, whatever. What a wasted amount of time and effort to "trust" we the consumers.
Okay, so I've asked this before... I'll ask again... (refer to my
previous post... )
I had hoped for definitive answers to these questions, but if you'll
re-read some of the responses to my post, while thoughtful, they were
divergent and inconsistent among themselves. Again I am concerned what the
"trusted computing" platform truly means... mostly because it appears to me
it is mostly negative for the linux community.
A scenario played out last summer for me with... a local Mom and Pop
grocery store kept EVERYTHING on their Windows XP PC, and one day it went
toes-up. They were understandably distraught -- all of their business
spreadsheets and wedding pictures (over 1G) were on the hard drive and they
couldn't get to them. They were prepping the machine to be sent in to be
re-imaged. I asked them if they knew that meant they were likely to lose
their data. She was almost in tears. I went home, got my Knoppix CD, and
with their permission, played... and, recovered ALL of their data and burned
it redundantly to CD's.
So I ask, if theirs were a "trusted computing" machine, and I had tried
to do the same thing for them with my Knoppix CD, would I have been able to?
I'd hate to think this is one (of many) of the things we lose in this
"better" world. Help!
(I honestly can't believe the computing world will stand for this, but maybe it's like boiling frogs in water... by the time we realize what's happening it's too late?)
still got my return on the CD.... found a similar/comparable rate at another bank with a Netscape compatible browser (Firefox didn't exist at the time).
Slashdot Mirror
I looked at the article, but the screenshots caught my eye... took a look. Gave up trying to figure out exactly what the interfaces are presenting. I don't think the interface will be popular. The interface is noisy, way too much going on in the screen and it's all over the place (this is a trend begun in XP... I pretty much have all of any windows screens I used toggled back to "classic" (ick) windows).
The interface, to me, is confusing... again another trend I see/saw in the XP UI.
Can't wait to see in addition to the "glitz" how many flickering, spinning, etc. graphics become part of the "presentation"... Also, guess I can't wait to get my hands on a 10Ghz CPU machine to keep from choking to death on the chaff.
I'll be fine as soon as I get my cygwin up and running. Sigh.
It may be an ad, but it is disingenuously presented as information... Microsoft does this masterfully... their web site is a source for knowledge base articles, a source for patches and updates, AND it is a kiosk for all their wares. But the lines blur here when compared to an ad in a normal context, e.g., a magazine (granted, some play fancy tricks to make magazine ads look like news but apparently there's a requirement they MUST put a disclaimer), a TV ad, etc.
To the ad-unaware, this looks like a "howto" on purchasing mp3 players, not a shill for Microsoft.
(Still, all of your points are valid... good post.)
My guess is fine print isn't even necessary at a university, assuming it's a public university (and even assuming it isn't). They pretty much own everything they've made available for the students' environments. Even paid for, the university makes the policy oh how and why things are allocated. I don't think it's a good thing what they're doing here, but if I felt myself in the crosshairs of possible litigation I'd probably consider the same restrictions. Stinks, doesn't it?
Yes, but doesn't that only prove he (she) was doing SOME legal downloading.... producing evidence of legal doings doesn't disprove illegal doings. Unless the user can produce logs accounting for every single byte, the university prolly takes the conservative stance (and prolly does anyway) all BitTorrent is inherently not okay until proven otherwise (funny, what a topsy-turvy world this has become).
We disagree on whether it should be easily readable. Sure there's the mechanism for including unreadable "stuff", but I submit Microsoft could make their formats a whole lot more "open" and usable in xml than they have. And I suspect their approach is not accidental.
And, being easy to machine parse is another "huh?". As far as I can tell, anything in reasonably defined canonical form should be easy to machine parse -- xml holds no monopoly in that arena. I'd have to say I find some of the mechanisms to parse xml with code MORE obtuse than other approaches (where xml gets used inappropriately, people end up doing a LOT more work than necessary to use, move, modify, etc. data).
Anyway, my main point is Microsoft could be friendlier but isn't... but then, they don't have to be.
I have enough to do without spending every waking moment making sure I'm totally fair to Microsoft -- they've certainly not done that with the rest of the world.
I apologize for the inaccuracy -- I really do have a recollection that there was obfuscation in their xml DOC implementation. (and, yes, I KNOW they've published their formats "publicly" since way before xml...)
The problem with the MS implementation as I have understood it is Microsoft has used xml as transport for their proprietary DOC format, not defined their DOC structure in xml. There's a difference here. The former being the case, yes, you can get to the xml and "see" the DOC, but it is just an ascii encoded binary... so, you really get nothing more than the old proprietary stuff, AND an extra layer of obfuscation! Hardly what xml was supposed to be about.
Crikey, Kamapuaa, you're right!.... I should've distilled the e-mail for /., I was in a hurry... Mark already thinks I'm crazy. I correspond with him on occasion... so he knows my bent. I'll be more careful in the future. (btw, I AM a crazy.)
yeah, I correspond with this guy... so, it was way wordy, and way folksy, and way undistilled.... I held my breath and cut and pasted... I normally would pare it WAY down for /........ Sorry about that, but thanks for the feedback. You're absolutely dead on.
I just read about this in the Seattle Times, and wrote a letter to the columnist (the article is: PlayStation Portable: Sony's new handheld does a lot more than play games):
Hi Mark,
Long time Seattle Times reader here....
Liked your article on Sony's new playstation... a few thoughts though...
I too have long considered Sony to be a great innovator but here is what has frustrated me for sooooo long and here is why I probably will NEVER buy a Sony product again unless and until they change some of their practices.... I'll illustrate by example:
Come to think of it... I'm not so surprised, or maybe it's a lucky thing Sony's Beta never became the standard, while I wasn't really there to be part of that decision in my purchasing power... but maybe VHS was the better choice after all (even though it wasn't quite as good technically).
Just my $.02
Anyway, thanks for the article, a good read....
I owned a cell phone capable of web 7 years ago, I believe it was called a Duetto, or something like that. Of course there were very limited sites available, but at the time there was (don't know if it exists anymore) an effort to write for handheld devices with something called HDML. The phone's display was character based, and the surfing was painfully slow, painfully limited, and not worth any money paid for the service subscription.
It kind of became (and today becomes) the chicken and the egg.... which comes first? Enough users to make the extra design and coding worthwhile (especially retro-fitting existing web sites)?, or enough web sites small-device-ready to entice a reasonable demographic?
My personal feelings are web experience on tiny devices is abysmal.... can't imagine there's really any pent up demand nor any huge future demand for something like this. (I actually am a bit from the old school of really liking a phone to be a phone, a camera to be a camera, etc.)
This is a placeholder.... I'll include more details of why you shouldn't believe the NEXT slashdot article.... Let me get this posted.... and I'll follow up! (Hey, if the other guy can get modded informative for that.... this, since it's for a future article ought to be insightful). And, no, I'm NOT a GoogleGuy.
I can NEVER accept DRM, but not on any grounds that there shouldn't be SOME control over distribution, etc., of media, but more on the premise of the absolute certainty DRM can NEVER be implemented perfectly, i.e., there are always going to be those who can circumvent DRM.... and THOSE are the people the DRM folks are going after.
On the other hand, the honest, trusting OTHER customers are the ones who, in addition to now having to understand how DRM works, and how to use it, will fall prey to the unexpected glitches.... (family gathering to watch digital home videos.... uh-oh... for whatever reason, the DRM mechanism on the player won't let them watch THEIR OWN VIDEO! (I know some would argue that a good thing... :-))
The hapless unsuspecting users now don't know if their equipment is broken, or they've broken some law.... so next they turn to:.....
The NEXT victims of all of the DRM craze, the technical support people! (i.e., lots of slashdotters....). Now I'll be getting calls from my neighbors because they can't figure out how to get their dvd to play because of some glitch with DRM? Give me a break..
And, don't underestimate for a moment that these glitches aren't going to come up -- they always do -- and we are always left as the ones to provide solutions and support.
Meanwhile, the thieves and crooks will continue with their sport. Go figure.
I wish... (hope we're far enough to be out of the modding radar....). I actually have had a recent very bad experience with amazon.... so this took a bit of a swallow to recommend this way, but the "Mastering..." is SUCH a great book... I think any professional should have at LEAST "Mastering..." as part of their library (like I said in original post, can't vouch for that book... the general reviews I've seen lead me to think it isn't nearly as good).
While I can't vouch for the quality of the reviewed book,if you want something definitive on regular expressions, Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl is an absolute must for your professional library. Jeffrey breaks down and then builds back up what regular expressions are and how they work, and offers an entire matrix breakout of the slightly different implementations among the most common utilities (grep, sed, awk, perl...). Not to shill for amazon, but if you select the reviewed book, the "buy this book too, and you get this great price" deal actually includes the Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition. . Get 'em both, you won't be sorry.
And the DRM and MPAA and the.... are the ones instigating. Only time will tell, but I've always felt PC's are mostly a novelty and the ONLY thing that has kept the buying public in lockstep so far has been the ongoing promise of "This time we really really mean it when we say we've vastly improved it (Microsoft, especially), and it is MUCH easier to use...", with the implicit eventual promise PC's will become sublime. If you've ever read the Peanuts cartoon, and remember the ongoing relationship between Lucy and Charlie Brown with Lucy promising "this time" she won't pull the football away when Charlie Brown tries to kick it, you may have a feeling for whay I think the PC industry is pulling off (away?).
The only way PC's will become sublime is when they've sublimated into the background as os's tend more and more to be implemented as embedded technology, thus making other ordinary items and appliances more efficient, more effective, easier to use, more powerful, etc.
Let's face it (IMO)... computers are amazingly complex machines, and it's close to a miracle they can be navigated at all, but I'm not seeing any evidence they are becoming easier to use, just more confusing. But I AM seeing evidence of people throwing up their hands and giving up... (my neighbors have gotten rid of their computer, my parents only keep theirs because I PROMISE to continue to help them and support them with it.... many others I know never use their computers and say they really don't have a need for further purchases...) Maybe the marketing machine can continue to sustain the PC marketplace, but I doubt it...
from my parent (previous) post: There is an amazing book on this topic -- it's a fairly dense (ironic) read, but hits on lots of these points, and offers research, and real life descriptions where computers were and were not effective. As one might guess after some thought, the positive "effect" of computers in the classroom has/had little to do with the fact that there were computers, and much more to do with well-rounded and caring staff dedicated to the education goals. I don't have the link or book name readily available, but if there are enough responses, or interest, I will reply to my post with the link....
As promised... here is the book and link: The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved
from the post: ..., Worth noting that it took almost 20 years for PCs in the corporate environment to actually have a positive impact on productivity; might the same be true in education? ...,
First I would probably be happy to argue the thesis of "positive" impact as questionable, or at least unproveable. (How many times have you watched in pain as someone wrings their hands in angst trying to decide on a font?) I actually walked the entire floor once (this was in 1991) asking ANYONE how I inserted a "new page" in a FrameMaker document... I knew there was a way, but could NOT find the option ANYWHERE. Most interesting for me walking the floor wasn't that NOONE knew how to insert a page break was the myriad ways people dealt with the issue (most common behavior was to insert CR's until the page "broke".... sheesh). (And, for the record, even our team "documentarian" (what the heck is THAT?) didn't know how to do the page break either.)
Ah, but back to the topic at hand. There really are 2 different contexts (at least) between the workplace and the education system. The education system's first and foremost goal is to educate, not necessarily how to use a computer. There are many reasons schools can't make productive use of computers to advance "educational productivity", I'll mention a couple:
There is an amazing book on this topic -- it's a fairly dense (ironic) read, but hits on lots of these points, and offers research, and real life descriptions where computers were and were not effective. As one might guess after some thought, the positive "effect" of computers in the classroom has/had little to do with the fact that there were computers, and much more to do with well-rounded and caring staff dedicated to the education goals. I don't have the link or book name readily available, but if there are enough responses, or interest, I will reply to my post with the link....
Seems like my reply was in order, and I get modded down twice for offtopic?!? For answering a direct question in the post?!?
Fsck off and Byte me!!!!!
Okay, NOW mod me troll or flamebait!, slashholes!
I know this is cliche, but Grapes of Wrath is a classic, and one of my alltime favorites. I've read it four or five times, and it gets better each read. Yeah, it's always in the "list", but it deserves to be.
Another favorite of mine is more related to what /.-ers are about. Read
Player Piano by Vonnegut. It's not his most well know work, but it
is, I think, maybe one of his best, certainly one of his most perceptive.
Just my $.02.
I stand by my thesis in any regard... don't underestimate the ability of the entertainment industry to introduce increasingly annoying, confusing, and eventually prohibitive (which will be by then too late) obstacles delaying and even sometimes preventing consumers the product they thought/assumed they'd paid for. (I've already posted about a CD I had recently purchased that would not play on my car CD player... and its replacement (exchange) from the store failed in exactly the same places in exactly the same ways.)
I think ultimately the entertainment would do best for "itself" (just what IS that?) and its consumers by making nice.... A little trust goes a heck of a long way.
(And, yes I've been to a movie theatre lately... admittedly I no longer have to spring for four, (only two now), and admittedly that still is a bit more expensive, but sometimes it is just nice to do that... especially with the increasingly poorly maintained dvd's we're seeing when we DO rent.... I don't know what most people experience, but anecdotally we've been seeing failure rates of dvd's bad enough to be unwatchable at about one out of every five (and don't blame our dvd player, it is brand new, and the other dvd players in the house are equally unable to play these dvd's). Granted our "provider" has ALWAYS graciously exchanged or refunded, but an evening ruined... and now we're getting WAY off topic...)
this is your perception of "hassle". I try to use the prism of what I consider to be a typical user. For example, the people I mentioned in my original post... that run the local grocery store... to them, DL, burn, re-rip, (not to mention re-entering lost tag info...) are more than too many hoops to jump through, they're too many hoops to understand. And, I believe their world-view of technology is more common than a typical /.'er.
Absolutely... as a matter of fact I think it's more than most, it's close to ALL. Human nature is to take the path of least resistance, and while some take to the challenge of stealing... most don't. So, while some in the past would make illegal copies and share "illegally" (downloading, etc.), the record companies' response by tightening the screws eventually I think will have an unintended effect. At some point the extra onus on the customer to "unlock", and jump through all of the drm hoops just to use something they already paid for and thought they were just going to sit down and enjoy will push them to their path of least resistance... e.g., not bother with buying cd's anymore, not bother with dvd's anymore, not bother with iTunes anymore...
Instead they'll just use the radio, go to the movie theater, whatever. What a wasted amount of time and effort to "trust" we the consumers.
Okay, so I've asked this before... I'll ask again... (refer to my previous post... )
I had hoped for definitive answers to these questions, but if you'll re-read some of the responses to my post, while thoughtful, they were divergent and inconsistent among themselves. Again I am concerned what the "trusted computing" platform truly means... mostly because it appears to me it is mostly negative for the linux community.
A scenario played out last summer for me with... a local Mom and Pop grocery store kept EVERYTHING on their Windows XP PC, and one day it went toes-up. They were understandably distraught -- all of their business spreadsheets and wedding pictures (over 1G) were on the hard drive and they couldn't get to them. They were prepping the machine to be sent in to be re-imaged. I asked them if they knew that meant they were likely to lose their data. She was almost in tears. I went home, got my Knoppix CD, and with their permission, played... and, recovered ALL of their data and burned it redundantly to CD's.
So I ask, if theirs were a "trusted computing" machine, and I had tried to do the same thing for them with my Knoppix CD, would I have been able to? I'd hate to think this is one (of many) of the things we lose in this "better" world. Help!
(I honestly can't believe the computing world will stand for this, but maybe it's like boiling frogs in water... by the time we realize what's happening it's too late?)
still got my return on the CD.... found a similar/comparable rate at another bank with a Netscape compatible browser (Firefox didn't exist at the time).