I disagree with the premise of the question. It seems the poster is asking for a tablet, in which case Microsoft, Apple, and Google all have entrants in the field. It sounds like the poster wants a device that is Kindle priced (the Kindle Paperwhite is $90) but with the power of a tablet. I think the reason no one has already made such a device is because they can't make money doing it. It isn't an opportunity.
Speaking as a librarian, the single best thing you can do is budget for a librarian after you recreate the library as an technology explorer and innovation space, or whatever it is you have in mind.
You can stuff the room full of computers, but if there isn't someone there with the special expertise in dealing with this user population, all that will happen is the space will be wasted.
I'm with you. If anything watches are dying out, except as a piece of jewelry. I don't see watches as a product category ripe for massive technological innovation, especially when the trend in "smart" devices (like phones) seems to be toward LARGER screens, not smaller.
I have had this happen. Eventually I was able to gather enough information about the person to contact them in real life. Nothing will freak out a person more than to be told by someone "stop using my email". Especially if you also prove that you know their home address, phone number, names of personal friends, etc.
I started getting multiple "you have reached the maximum number of login attempts" from my bank. I changed the account name, and it ended.
Create a new email address, and switch iTunes over to that account. Keep in mind that when hackers got into Mat Honan's life, they did it by exploiting weaknesses in Apple and Google's authentication schemes. Neither weakness was enough on its own, but when combined hackers were able to get full access.
I think you need to stop trying for a technical solution. Ultimately, if you keep putting up roadblocks (and it sounds like you've tried) all you're going to do is make your network more attractive because it will be a challenge.
If you can figure out the house where the person is doing it, you should confront them, in person. Be polite, but be firm - tell them to stop using your connection. If they continue, then file a complaint with the police, but don't expect them to do anything about it. At that point, you're just making sure that if someone does come to your door accusing you of piracy, you can say "it isn't me, and I told the police about the problem."
Alternately, you could take a neighborhood watch approach. Distribute flyers indicating the someone in the neighborhood is borrowing wifi, and that you and your neighbors need to be vigilant. It may shame your borrower into cleaning up his act.
Gaben's looking at trends. He isn't a cable TV operator, or NetFlix, and outside of those two groups the largest provider of Internet video on demand is Apple, by a very wide margin - almost more than Amazon, Vudu, and Zune combined. It is a small part of overall VOD pie (pay-TV operators have 72% of the revenue share), but it's a growing share.
At least, that's what NPD says. They don't compare Netflix to iTunes directly, which I would find interesting, but I don't think Gaben sees Netflix as a direct competitor - they're not providing a platform. Not yet, anyway.
If you like what you do (i.e. develop in.Net), getting up to speed isn't that hard. The differences between.Net 2.0 and 4.0 aren't all that great. If you're worried that doing it on your own won't be enough, take a class. There are tons.
But your tone suggests that really the problem is you don't want to make the effort. I understand that. I'm 43, and often when confronted with the need to learn some new technology, I feel loathing rather than excitement. If that's your problem, then maybe it is time to switch careers. Congratulations on deciding you're not a good manager. Now find something else.
Yes, set up a test environment. And implement some kind of versioning system, even if it's just "cp current_code old_code". You should always be able to fall back if you have a botched deployment.
But one of the best things you can do is to start writing documentation. I like to write my documentation assuming it will be my replacement reading it, and so I try to include everything. Justify every unusual implementation detail, explain why each task was down the way it was. List bugs, and any code you had to write to work around it. The best part of documenting your project will be that as you work through it, you'll find things that no longer make sense and make them better.
I spent a lot of time looking into this, and went with the new Lumix GX1. For several years I've had a small point and shoot, and found that I simply didn't want the bulk of an SLR. Smaller camera bodies and smaller lenses was the big selling point, especially now that the Micro Four Thirds cameras generally have the same picture quality as entry-level SLRs. For me it came down to the Lumix G3 and the GX1; I decided I didn't need a viewfinder and tilt-and-swivel screen, and so went with the GX1. I used to be a big SLR fan when I took pictures with film, but I find now that I have to wear glasses having a viewfinder is a nuisance.
I used to track down the people who were using my address and set them right. I took a certain delight in contacting people and saying "You don't know me, but you're using my email address and you should stop." In fact, I have an amusing story about it.
Years ago, my home email address was [my first name]@[big isp].net. This was around 10 years ago, and fairly often someone with the same first name as me would sign up and merrily start handing out my email address.
One day I logged in and check my email, and find several email messages clearly meant for someone else. Included in the messages were receipts from online shops, which included the other man's home address, though not his phone number. At first I wasn't going to do anything about it, but then I found a message from a gentleman that this other person had met at a gay bar.
I didn't mind that someone was giving my email address to various vendors online, but now it was a little more personal, so I took action.
Having the person's street address, I tried the phone directory, but found that his home number was unlisted. So I called a friend of mine who worked at a law firm, and asked them if they could do any searches on scary privacy-invading databases and get the man's home phone number. My friend couldn't promise anything, saying "unlisted phone numbers can be pretty hard to get".
A couple hours later my friend called me back. "His number is unlisted, and I couldn't get it. But his wife's number was pretty easy to find."
I called the number and left a message "This message is for [first name]; you've been using my email address, and given the sensitive nature of the email messages I've been getting, you probably don't want to do that."
Lawyers do take a test. It's called the bar exam. In California (where I live) it's a notoriously difficult 3 day grind with a 50% fail rate. Accountants also have an exam, the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination.
These professions also generally (though not always) require school beyond college. For attorneys its called a "Juris Doctor". And they often have continuing education requirements, although this varies from state to state. In California, attorneys are required to attend 40 hours of continuing education every three years, and if they don't they can lose their license to practice law.
You're right about sales and HR, but I would say those aren't really professions. Like programming, people can learn these things on their own, and reach high levels of competence and skill without ever taking.
You say you've got training and certification. You certainly have professional level qualifications. If you don't want to take a test, don't. But I would - I've got mouths to feed.
That article is so full of inaccuracies it's astounding.
First: with the exception of the Building Code, California's laws (regulations, specifically) are not copyrighted. They're also free on the Internet, and can be downloaded for free, and saved on your local computer for free. A Google Search for "california regulations" will give you a variety of free sources, including the state's own Office of Administrative Law.
Except for the Building Code. Here the article's alarmist tone (and Malamud's apocalyptic stance) are entirely justified. The California Building Code was written by the International Conference of Building Officials, and the ICBO owns the copyright. It's stupid, and probably illegal, but that's the way things stand.
The 5th Circuit case someone mentioned is a similar circumstance. But unfortunately (for those of us in California) California is in the 9th Circuit, so the 5th Circuit's decision doesn't apply.
OTA broadcasts have no DRM. If you have a digital TV tuner in your PC, you can save the stream to a hard disk and do whatever you want with it. EyeTV has a product for the Mac that will save streams, and then reformat for your iPod, AppleTV, or iPhone.
If you want time shifting without having to get cable or satellite, there are a few options: MythTV, Tivo 3 (which works with OTA broadcasts), the Sony DHG-HDD250 or DHG-HDD500 (no longer in production, does the same thing as a Tivo 3), and the LG LST-3410a (ditto).
For the most part, either you get a digital OTA signal or you don't. If the signal isn't strong enough, the TV won't display the channel, period. On my TV, if I force it to use a weak station, the picture is perfect but occasionally freezes and there are odd digital artifacts. Or the sound will drop out. It's not unlike watching a scratched DVD.
Overall the article was ok, but this line bothers me:
Consumers' rights are based on the general idea of "fair use," which isn't a right defined in law. Instead, it's a general defense against claims of copyright infringement. This is wrong, at least in the U.S. Heck, a quick look at Wikipedia's article on Fair Use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use will point you to 17 U.S.C. s 107, and cites relevant Supreme Court cases.
According to Symantec (who else?), Inqtana is a proof of concept worm that never left the lab, described here. Symantec describes Leap as a worm (described here), though frankly I would call it a Trojan horse - it delivers itself as an attachment to an iChat message, and must be locally saved and executed.
Although the words are often used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. A behavior is ethical because it follows a set of rules that have been rationally determined and (usually) written down. A popular reason for defining a behavior as ethically good or ethically bad is that society as a whole benefits when its individuals follow that behavior. Driving safely is a good example of ethical behavior.
A behavior is moral because God said it was. Or, in the case of the pope's 10 commandments for drivers, because His messager said so. Driving safely is now also a good example of moral behavior, thanks to the recently minted 3rd commandment of driving.
But either way, copying people's private files for your personal use is wrong.
OTOH, Office succeeded more because it was a bundle for less than the cost of WP plus 1-2-3.
I know this is the conventional wisdom (enshrined in Wikipedia and everything http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office), but there was another significant factor: Word was available for Windows long before WordPerfect. Non-technical users saw upgrading to Word as part of the Windows upgrade. Yes, you could run WordPerfect in DOS mode, but it looked like crap next to Word. And even though WordPerfect was arguably a better word processor, delaying the switch to Windows killed its dominant position.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your college paper doesn't pre-date Cecil Adams, who published the same answer in 1984:
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Many years ago I worked at a dot com. We needed some bogus email addresses with a valid looking domain name, and the developer working on that project just picked one at random. However, he didn't both to see if the domain name was valid, and a little later we got a call from the owner wondering why our systems were flooding his mail server, trying to send messages to bogus addresses.
It was a stupid mistake, but it looks like one that others have made as well. I would bet the reason he started getting messages from OnStar was simply because developer somewhere needed an email address and didn't bother to check whether or not the address was valid - a stupid mistake. But an honest one.
...and it didn't really become particularly useful until the 512ke, with four times the RAM and a SCSI port, came out...
Almost. The 512ke had the 512k RAM, but no SCSI. It had the Plus ROMs, however, and so could support a SCSI if one was added. There were a few companies that made upgrades; I remember installing one that clipped directly to the CPU and added 6 SIMM slots and a SCSI port.
Many years ago I was a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. One day I was reading in the school newspaper about how the parking enforcement office had started impounding cars with excessive parking fines.
I was outraged, and continued reading. The article had a short interview with the head of parking, who discussed the reasons for it (which I don't remember). It then had an interview with a student whose car had been impounded, and he was complaining about how with rising tuition and other costs he couldn't afford to get his car out of the yard, and how was he going to get to school, and so on.
The article then noted that the student had over $1500 in delinquent parking fines, which at the time was almost the full tuition for a single quarter. I stopped being sympathetic at that point, and started cheering for the parking enforcement people.
Apple is a monopoly, tying it's OS and computers together, tying its iPod's in with its own service.
Can't resist feeding the troll here. The only sense in which Apple OS and computer business can be considered a monopoly is if you define the market as computers and operating systems sold by Apple; in which case you are are begin meaninglessly tautological. Most people define Apple's market a little bigger - the personal computer market, in which they have between 2 and 5 percent of the market, depending on whose numbers you want to believe. Hardly monopoly numbers.
As for the iPod, where they have between 60 and 90% of the market (again, depending on who you read), you might have an argument. Except that so many facts just get in the way. First, there's the fact that if you don't want an iPod, there are tons of other players out there. And there are lots of online stores out there, besides the iTunes music store. And if you want to want to play your iTunes songs on a player other than the iPod, you can (although it is not particularly easy). And, if the store meets certain requirements (i.e. in unprotected MP3 format), you can play them on your iPod.
Hillary is just using talking points here. We shouldn't be angry at her; she's been absolved of independent thought for most of her career; the habit simply hasn't died. However, what's the AC's excuse?
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree with the premise of the question. It seems the poster is asking for a tablet, in which case Microsoft, Apple, and Google all have entrants in the field. It sounds like the poster wants a device that is Kindle priced (the Kindle Paperwhite is $90) but with the power of a tablet. I think the reason no one has already made such a device is because they can't make money doing it. It isn't an opportunity.
Speaking as a librarian, the single best thing you can do is budget for a librarian after you recreate the library as an technology explorer and innovation space, or whatever it is you have in mind.
You can stuff the room full of computers, but if there isn't someone there with the special expertise in dealing with this user population, all that will happen is the space will be wasted.
I'm with you. If anything watches are dying out, except as a piece of jewelry. I don't see watches as a product category ripe for massive technological innovation, especially when the trend in "smart" devices (like phones) seems to be toward LARGER screens, not smaller.
I have had this happen. Eventually I was able to gather enough information about the person to contact them in real life. Nothing will freak out a person more than to be told by someone "stop using my email". Especially if you also prove that you know their home address, phone number, names of personal friends, etc.
I started getting multiple "you have reached the maximum number of login attempts" from my bank. I changed the account name, and it ended.
Create a new email address, and switch iTunes over to that account. Keep in mind that when hackers got into Mat Honan's life, they did it by exploiting weaknesses in Apple and Google's authentication schemes. Neither weakness was enough on its own, but when combined hackers were able to get full access.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/
It's annoying, but be a little proactive and you'll be fine.
I think you need to stop trying for a technical solution. Ultimately, if you keep putting up roadblocks (and it sounds like you've tried) all you're going to do is make your network more attractive because it will be a challenge.
If you can figure out the house where the person is doing it, you should confront them, in person. Be polite, but be firm - tell them to stop using your connection. If they continue, then file a complaint with the police, but don't expect them to do anything about it. At that point, you're just making sure that if someone does come to your door accusing you of piracy, you can say "it isn't me, and I told the police about the problem."
Alternately, you could take a neighborhood watch approach. Distribute flyers indicating the someone in the neighborhood is borrowing wifi, and that you and your neighbors need to be vigilant. It may shame your borrower into cleaning up his act.
Gaben's looking at trends. He isn't a cable TV operator, or NetFlix, and outside of those two groups the largest provider of Internet video on demand is Apple, by a very wide margin - almost more than Amazon, Vudu, and Zune combined. It is a small part of overall VOD pie (pay-TV operators have 72% of the revenue share), but it's a growing share.
At least, that's what NPD says. They don't compare Netflix to iTunes directly, which I would find interesting, but I don't think Gaben sees Netflix as a direct competitor - they're not providing a platform. Not yet, anyway.
If you like what you do (i.e. develop in .Net), getting up to speed isn't that hard. The differences between .Net 2.0 and 4.0 aren't all that great. If you're worried that doing it on your own won't be enough, take a class. There are tons.
But your tone suggests that really the problem is you don't want to make the effort. I understand that. I'm 43, and often when confronted with the need to learn some new technology, I feel loathing rather than excitement. If that's your problem, then maybe it is time to switch careers. Congratulations on deciding you're not a good manager. Now find something else.
Yes, set up a test environment. And implement some kind of versioning system, even if it's just "cp current_code old_code". You should always be able to fall back if you have a botched deployment.
But one of the best things you can do is to start writing documentation. I like to write my documentation assuming it will be my replacement reading it, and so I try to include everything. Justify every unusual implementation detail, explain why each task was down the way it was. List bugs, and any code you had to write to work around it. The best part of documenting your project will be that as you work through it, you'll find things that no longer make sense and make them better.
I spent a lot of time looking into this, and went with the new Lumix GX1. For several years I've had a small point and shoot, and found that I simply didn't want the bulk of an SLR. Smaller camera bodies and smaller lenses was the big selling point, especially now that the Micro Four Thirds cameras generally have the same picture quality as entry-level SLRs. For me it came down to the Lumix G3 and the GX1; I decided I didn't need a viewfinder and tilt-and-swivel screen, and so went with the GX1. I used to be a big SLR fan when I took pictures with film, but I find now that I have to wear glasses having a viewfinder is a nuisance.
"...[A] four-layered structure"?!?
Seriously?
Everyone knows a Big Mac has five layers. What they created was a McDouble. Or, if you're in California and parts of Arizona, a Double Double.
I used to track down the people who were using my address and set them right. I took a certain delight in contacting people and saying "You don't know me, but you're using my email address and you should stop." In fact, I have an amusing story about it.
Years ago, my home email address was [my first name]@[big isp].net. This was around 10 years ago, and fairly often someone with the same first name as me would sign up and merrily start handing out my email address.
One day I logged in and check my email, and find several email messages clearly meant for someone else. Included in the messages were receipts from online shops, which included the other man's home address, though not his phone number. At first I wasn't going to do anything about it, but then I found a message from a gentleman that this other person had met at a gay bar.
I didn't mind that someone was giving my email address to various vendors online, but now it was a little more personal, so I took action.
Having the person's street address, I tried the phone directory, but found that his home number was unlisted. So I called a friend of mine who worked at a law firm, and asked them if they could do any searches on scary privacy-invading databases and get the man's home phone number. My friend couldn't promise anything, saying "unlisted phone numbers can be pretty hard to get".
A couple hours later my friend called me back. "His number is unlisted, and I couldn't get it. But his wife's number was pretty easy to find."
I called the number and left a message "This message is for [first name]; you've been using my email address, and given the sensitive nature of the email messages I've been getting, you probably don't want to do that."
The misdirected emails stopped immediately.
Lawyers do take a test. It's called the bar exam. In California (where I live) it's a notoriously difficult 3 day grind with a 50% fail rate. Accountants also have an exam, the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination.
These professions also generally (though not always) require school beyond college. For attorneys its called a "Juris Doctor". And they often have continuing education requirements, although this varies from state to state. In California, attorneys are required to attend 40 hours of continuing education every three years, and if they don't they can lose their license to practice law.
You're right about sales and HR, but I would say those aren't really professions. Like programming, people can learn these things on their own, and reach high levels of competence and skill without ever taking.
You say you've got training and certification. You certainly have professional level qualifications. If you don't want to take a test, don't. But I would - I've got mouths to feed.
That article is so full of inaccuracies it's astounding.
First: with the exception of the Building Code, California's laws (regulations, specifically) are not copyrighted. They're also free on the Internet, and can be downloaded for free, and saved on your local computer for free. A Google Search for "california regulations" will give you a variety of free sources, including the state's own Office of Administrative Law.
Except for the Building Code. Here the article's alarmist tone (and Malamud's apocalyptic stance) are entirely justified. The California Building Code was written by the International Conference of Building Officials, and the ICBO owns the copyright. It's stupid, and probably illegal, but that's the way things stand.
The 5th Circuit case someone mentioned is a similar circumstance. But unfortunately (for those of us in California) California is in the 9th Circuit, so the 5th Circuit's decision doesn't apply.
OTA broadcasts have no DRM. If you have a digital TV tuner in your PC, you can save the stream to a hard disk and do whatever you want with it. EyeTV has a product for the Mac that will save streams, and then reformat for your iPod, AppleTV, or iPhone.
If you want time shifting without having to get cable or satellite, there are a few options: MythTV, Tivo 3 (which works with OTA broadcasts), the Sony DHG-HDD250 or DHG-HDD500 (no longer in production, does the same thing as a Tivo 3), and the LG LST-3410a (ditto).
For the most part, either you get a digital OTA signal or you don't. If the signal isn't strong enough, the TV won't display the channel, period. On my TV, if I force it to use a weak station, the picture is perfect but occasionally freezes and there are odd digital artifacts. Or the sound will drop out. It's not unlike watching a scratched DVD.
According to Symantec (who else?), Inqtana is a proof of concept worm that never left the lab, described here. Symantec describes Leap as a worm (described here), though frankly I would call it a Trojan horse - it delivers itself as an attachment to an iChat message, and must be locally saved and executed.
Never seen either of them, myself.
No.
Although the words are often used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. A behavior is ethical because it follows a set of rules that have been rationally determined and (usually) written down. A popular reason for defining a behavior as ethically good or ethically bad is that society as a whole benefits when its individuals follow that behavior. Driving safely is a good example of ethical behavior.
A behavior is moral because God said it was. Or, in the case of the pope's 10 commandments for drivers, because His messager said so. Driving safely is now also a good example of moral behavior, thanks to the recently minted 3rd commandment of driving.
But either way, copying people's private files for your personal use is wrong.
OTOH, Office succeeded more because it was a bundle for less than the cost of WP plus 1-2-3.
I know this is the conventional wisdom (enshrined in Wikipedia and everything http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office), but there was another significant factor: Word was available for Windows long before WordPerfect. Non-technical users saw upgrading to Word as part of the Windows upgrade. Yes, you could run WordPerfect in DOS mode, but it looked like crap next to Word. And even though WordPerfect was arguably a better word processor, delaying the switch to Windows killed its dominant position.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your college paper doesn't pre-date Cecil Adams, who published the same answer in 1984: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Many years ago I worked at a dot com. We needed some bogus email addresses with a valid looking domain name, and the developer working on that project just picked one at random. However, he didn't both to see if the domain name was valid, and a little later we got a call from the owner wondering why our systems were flooding his mail server, trying to send messages to bogus addresses.
It was a stupid mistake, but it looks like one that others have made as well. I would bet the reason he started getting messages from OnStar was simply because developer somewhere needed an email address and didn't bother to check whether or not the address was valid - a stupid mistake. But an honest one.
...and it didn't really become particularly useful until the 512ke, with four times the RAM and a SCSI port, came out...
Almost. The 512ke had the 512k RAM, but no SCSI. It had the Plus ROMs, however, and so could support a SCSI if one was added. There were a few companies that made upgrades; I remember installing one that clipped directly to the CPU and added 6 SIMM slots and a SCSI port.
I have a parking story.
Many years ago I was a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. One day I was reading in the school newspaper about how the parking enforcement office had started impounding cars with excessive parking fines.
I was outraged, and continued reading. The article had a short interview with the head of parking, who discussed the reasons for it (which I don't remember). It then had an interview with a student whose car had been impounded, and he was complaining about how with rising tuition and other costs he couldn't afford to get his car out of the yard, and how was he going to get to school, and so on.
The article then noted that the student had over $1500 in delinquent parking fines, which at the time was almost the full tuition for a single quarter. I stopped being sympathetic at that point, and started cheering for the parking enforcement people.
Apple is a monopoly, tying it's OS and computers together, tying its iPod's in with its own service.
Can't resist feeding the troll here. The only sense in which Apple OS and computer business can be considered a monopoly is if you define the market as computers and operating systems sold by Apple; in which case you are are begin meaninglessly tautological. Most people define Apple's market a little bigger - the personal computer market, in which they have between 2 and 5 percent of the market, depending on whose numbers you want to believe. Hardly monopoly numbers.
As for the iPod, where they have between 60 and 90% of the market (again, depending on who you read), you might have an argument. Except that so many facts just get in the way. First, there's the fact that if you don't want an iPod, there are tons of other players out there. And there are lots of online stores out there, besides the iTunes music store. And if you want to want to play your iTunes songs on a player other than the iPod, you can (although it is not particularly easy). And, if the store meets certain requirements (i.e. in unprotected MP3 format), you can play them on your iPod.
Hillary is just using talking points here. We shouldn't be angry at her; she's been absolved of independent thought for most of her career; the habit simply hasn't died. However, what's the AC's excuse?