You're just trolling now saying the known fucking sync issue (that every single one of my coworkers has had as well, as well as my wife) is my fault for being incompetent.
Not very productive to any reasonable conversation.
You can't just drop an iPad on your desk and record a teacher at distance. Again, I suspect you research the iPad microphone.
I'm not complaining about the weight of a keyboard. I'm saying it is silly to carry two devices to replicate the functionality of one, that does more and costs less. But if you really think the best solution then go right ahead. As an individual you're entitled to. But I'd prefer my federal tax dollars didn't.
I just argued above that it isn't the choice I'd make as a school administrator. It does less than a laptop, is difficult to take notes on, and is more expensive.
That being said, I can see two reasons why schools might go this route.
1 - They assume a shiny, popular toy will get used more by students than a netbook/notebook. 2 - This is the same as the Pennsylvania school that issued Mac laptops and used them to spy on students. If the school has MobileMe accounts on the iPads, they can track the physical locations of them. And who says they can't monitor over the camera with special software the way the Pennsylvania school board was with the Macs.
1. They gathered data, even if it was subjective data. Some would call that research. 2. You're suggesting that as the professor/teacher is talking, every student should be simultaneously talking into their microphones. I think you should research that. 3. I've had an iPhone for a little over two years. I very rarely sync it, but still I've had 3 instances where iTunes said it didn't recognize my phone and wiped it. There went my data. If you were going to use a tablet for notes/work, I'd recommend instant saving in the cloud. Then it isn't a concern. 4. Carrying a keyboard around with you in addition to a tablet doesn't make much sense. Take a $500-$800 tablet and add a $99 accessory that now has less functionality, is more cumbersome, and is considerably more expensive than a $400 notebook. How does that make sense?
I bought a Xoom for myself even though I didn't need one. So I'm not one to talk, but sometimes I think IT professionals encourage businesses to make large hardware investments because they want to play with new, shiny toys, even if it is a waste of the company's money.
In this case, I believe it is.
I'm not opposed to putting computers in the hands of students. I just don't believe this is the most financially responsible way to do that.
You miss the point. The issue isn't that someone suggested something to PayPal so they made a decision on a whim.
WikiLeaks does clearly violate the terms of service. Having a set policy ahead of time, and enforcing that policy consistently is the very opposite of a whim.
The decision wasn't political. PayPal didn't say they there were taking a political side. Their statement was they were upholding their terms of service. That is the very opposite of arbitrary. I think it is your bias showing actually.
They aren't taking a political stance of saying they endorse one view point or another. But EVERY business is subject to the laws in the nations they operate in. Again, PayPal is being singled out here for one action. And frankly, I believe that if people knew all the details they'd feel a bit differently on the matter.
PayPal (like any company) has the right to refuse to do business. They don't need to prove Wikileaks broke a law. Nor have they claimed Wikileaks broke a law.
It would only be libel if PayPal were a member of the press, and published in the media that Wikileaks broke a law. I believe you're thinking of slander, but no slander has occurred because they haven't accused Wikileaks of anything other than violating their terms of service.
Wikileaks encourages people to submit material to them that is stolen. They are encouraging people to break US laws.
Please provide me one single example where PayPal took someone's money, wasn't transparent about the process, wouldn't say why they froze assets, and refused to allow any form of dispute resolution. Since I started working at PayPal, I've asked the same thing of several people who tell me they hate PayPal. I've never once been provided with a single example.
And again, you seem to miss that pretty much any bank in the world can seize your assets as well. Swiss banks were famous for being the exception, and that doesn't even hold true today as Swiss banks have been freezing accounts and seizing assets. You're attributing an evil to PayPal alone that is actual a shared trait of pretty much every financial institution in the world.
Banks also have the right to freeze accounts. Wells Fargo has in their terms that they can freeze any transaction for 10 days without notice, and without reason. They froze a deposit I made as being "suspicious" for being extremely large, even though it was smaller than one of my paychecks. They held it for 30 days without notifying me.
Honestly, I think you'll find that PayPal is more lenient in these cases than most banks.
As far as being vague, I'd ask you to point to a public example where they frooze an account and wouldn't say why.
If you won't give your money to anyone who can "take" it, then I assume you don't have a single credit card, debit card, checking account, etc. You must operate entirely on cash. In turn, I guess you've decided not to purchase anything online ever, and not to support anyone who requires online transactions.
PayPal is an American company and must comply with American laws. It must also comply with laws in any country it operates in, such as privacy laws in Germany, or EU money laundering reporting laws.
I didn't make the decision, and I don't speak for PayPal in any official capacity on this, but it has been suggested that Wikileaks actively encourages people to steal and illegally leak data. While the US government has no jurisdiction over Wikileaks, wherever there servers are held, it is against the terms of PayPal's service for Wikileaks to encourage people to break US law. The terms of service are pretty clear in this regard. That isn't a whim, or something they made up on the spot.
You insist these terms are enacted on a whim. There are over 230 million accounts. Do you truly believe PayPal as a company is just randomly suspending accounts on a whim?
Who do you believe is sitting around sifting through these accounts and randomly making these decisions?
I ask people on a regular basis if they hate PayPal why they hate PayPal, and in every cited example I've been given so far it has been a misunderstanding. The last time I asked on Slashdot the person told me it was because PayPal doesn't offer Fraud Protection, they have no Dispute Resolution department, and their privacy policy wasn't publicly listed.
Guess what? PayPal offers Fraud Protection, they have a Dispute Resolution department, and a Google search showed their privacy policy on the first result.
I've seen sites like paypalsucks.com and such. I've seen a lot of the complaints.
PayPal doesn't randomly freeze account or randomly hold money. They don't do things on a whim. I can say that internally we have a huge focus on customer service levels. As a financial institution, you're going to have people that aren't happy. But if they randomly froze accounts with no justification just because they felt like it, they wouldn't have much of a sustainable business model.
I'm a single employee who works in IT and doesn't make those decisions, but I can say that in some of the cases I've seen (such as when Xorg's account was frozen for a while) it was because PayPal was forced to do so by the government. After the Patriot Act, a whole slew of new oversight was put in to try and stop money laundering. And if you're a non-profit, you need to submit paperwork to PayPal to prove you're a non-profit. If you don't have that paperwork on file, and current, PayPal is legally required to freeze and account and report it.
Sadly these cases get reported as PayPal arbitrarily shutting down accounts because they have open source, and when the accounts are reinstanted that isn't reported on.
Working at PayPal, I'm exposed to our disputes department and how much policy is involved there. Nothing is done on a whim. Buyers and sellers have disputes all the time. There is tons of legislation involved. And if you side too much protecting buyers, then sellers get pissed and vice-versa.
"PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action."
If you violate the terms of service with any institution, they're likely not going to do business with you.
Software developers and charities need ways to accept payment. That is a necessary evil that isn't going to go away. The parent AC apparently felt that evil meant they weren't going to pay more than 90 cents for the bundle. But I think most people will find that whether you go through PayPal, Amazon, Google, or some merchant bank, the transactions are handled in roughly the same fashion. They're all heavily regulated and operate in a fairly standard fashion.
Out of curiosity, why do you feel that PayPal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout are all so evil, that putting $10 into them is unthinkable, even if it means supporting charities like Child's Play, the EFF, and Indie Developers porting their games to Linux and offering source code?
The last two bundles did make it on torrent sites. Wolffire Blog tried to estimate how many people were pirating a bundle they could have had legally for a penny.
I'm curious if anything has really happened with community development of titles open sourced in the previous two bundles. I'd be interested in checking out community builds.
And while Jack Claw is Windows only in this release, I wonder how long it will take to get ported since the source is being released.
I don't have the time to play the bigs games I want to play right now (Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age 2) and I still haven't played most of the games from the first two bundles. But I'm still buying this just on principle.
My last job was for a newspaper. Some of the art staff insisted on Macs, and when I pressed them for answers, I heard the usual about wanting to use Photoshop, and proper color management.
Oddly at the time, Apple was switching to Intel processors, but Photoshop hadn't been ported yet, so it ran like ass on a Mac, and ran great on Windows. And they were using Adobe's color management, which was the same on Windows and Mac.
Apple does make good displays, but they are ridiculously expensive, and good monitors aren't platform specific.
But my original point is that the public seems to think the Apple is better for graphics in general, to the point that they think they need Apple products, even though they aren't professionals.
Two of the four points are that Honeycomb isn't ready, and Flash isn't ready.
I'm not sure those are fair statements. Honeycomb seems plenty polished to me, and they have a working 10.2 Flash implementation today on the Xoom that just works.
The SD card sucks. I really don't understand how they shipped that without a driver. They've been testing it internally for some time. Linux has a driver for it, and they could have gone with another SD card reader as well.
As for 4G, that is a bit of a moot point as most of the country doesn't have much in the way of 4G coverage yet.
The analyst says no one will want a 7" tablet, and that you need to tether for any connection.
Whether or not there is a market for 7" tablets is to be seen. I prefer a 10" tablet, but some people may want something smaller. Who knows?
As for tethering, that simply isn't true. It is true that on day 1, there won't be a dedicated mail client shipping with the tablet. So you'll need to point your browser to Gmail or whatever provider you use.
So one person expressed an opinion based on faulty information. Clearly that means it is doomed.
I switched her over to Linux after she kept getting her computer infected. I've tried showing her apps like Scribus, but she hears from friends that Macs are the way to go for graphics. Why listen to her son who works in IT as an engineer when random people on Facebook are more trustworthy?
In case you missed it, more and more developers have been jumping ship to Android.
The market is easier to get into. The rules aren't as draconian. Google doesn't take as much off the top. For subscription services, Google is going to take 10% where as Apple takes 30%.
And for developers, going after the Android tablet market in particular makes a lot of sense. In App Stores, essentially the rich get richer because the stores feature the most popular apps. New apps have a hard time getting the visibility they need, where as the most popular apps get more visibility. Since there are so few native Honeycomb/Xoom apps right now, it would be easy to get that popularity early and ride it.
As for your statement that no one are making apps, Android is a full year or two behind iOS, and yet there are 250,000+ apps. It has a faster growth curve right now.
I recall the days when people were saying there was no need to record HD for home movies, or a 2 megapixel camera was more than anyone needed because most users just crop the photo and save it as a lossy, low-res JPG anyway. Those arguments still hold true. I wouldn't carry around a tablet as a camera, but the Xoom cameras are good enough to replace a standard camera in most uses, where as the iPad camera pretty much sucks.
Storage expansion is important, even to the average user. My iPhone 4 is basically filled will apps to the point I can't use it for MP3 storage.
Flash is important. My mother bought an iPad because she heard so much about them. Her primary purpose was to surf the web, and she won't use the iPad because it won't run Flash. It basically made the device worthless to her.
And Android 3 is a completely different user experience. So you're making assumptions the experience is exactly the same, when it isn't.
And now you're insisting Android will fail miserably, when Android had to play catch-up and already has become the #1 mobile OS shipped in the world. History suggests that while the first Android phone came out a full year after the iPhone, and initially did poorly (as a single device on T-Mobile) it has had great growth in the past 18 months.
Likewise, it has to play catch-up in the tablet market, but it has already proven it can win at that game.
Slashdot Mirror
You're just trolling now saying the known fucking sync issue (that every single one of my coworkers has had as well, as well as my wife) is my fault for being incompetent.
Not very productive to any reasonable conversation.
You can't just drop an iPad on your desk and record a teacher at distance. Again, I suspect you research the iPad microphone.
I'm not complaining about the weight of a keyboard. I'm saying it is silly to carry two devices to replicate the functionality of one, that does more and costs less. But if you really think the best solution then go right ahead. As an individual you're entitled to. But I'd prefer my federal tax dollars didn't.
I don't own an iPad, but if the microphone is anything like the iPhone microphone, it doesn't pick up noise at a distance.
I just argued above that it isn't the choice I'd make as a school administrator. It does less than a laptop, is difficult to take notes on, and is more expensive.
That being said, I can see two reasons why schools might go this route.
1 - They assume a shiny, popular toy will get used more by students than a netbook/notebook.
2 - This is the same as the Pennsylvania school that issued Mac laptops and used them to spy on students. If the school has MobileMe accounts on the iPads, they can track the physical locations of them. And who says they can't monitor over the camera with special software the way the Pennsylvania school board was with the Macs.
1. They gathered data, even if it was subjective data. Some would call that research.
2. You're suggesting that as the professor/teacher is talking, every student should be simultaneously talking into their microphones. I think you should research that.
3. I've had an iPhone for a little over two years. I very rarely sync it, but still I've had 3 instances where iTunes said it didn't recognize my phone and wiped it. There went my data. If you were going to use a tablet for notes/work, I'd recommend instant saving in the cloud. Then it isn't a concern.
4. Carrying a keyboard around with you in addition to a tablet doesn't make much sense. Take a $500-$800 tablet and add a $99 accessory that now has less functionality, is more cumbersome, and is considerably more expensive than a $400 notebook. How does that make sense?
I bought a Xoom for myself even though I didn't need one. So I'm not one to talk, but sometimes I think IT professionals encourage businesses to make large hardware investments because they want to play with new, shiny toys, even if it is a waste of the company's money.
In this case, I believe it is.
I'm not opposed to putting computers in the hands of students. I just don't believe this is the most financially responsible way to do that.
You miss the point. The issue isn't that someone suggested something to PayPal so they made a decision on a whim.
WikiLeaks does clearly violate the terms of service. Having a set policy ahead of time, and enforcing that policy consistently is the very opposite of a whim.
The decision wasn't political. PayPal didn't say they there were taking a political side. Their statement was they were upholding their terms of service. That is the very opposite of arbitrary. I think it is your bias showing actually.
They aren't taking a political stance of saying they endorse one view point or another. But EVERY business is subject to the laws in the nations they operate in. Again, PayPal is being singled out here for one action. And frankly, I believe that if people knew all the details they'd feel a bit differently on the matter.
PayPal (like any company) has the right to refuse to do business. They don't need to prove Wikileaks broke a law. Nor have they claimed Wikileaks broke a law.
It would only be libel if PayPal were a member of the press, and published in the media that Wikileaks broke a law. I believe you're thinking of slander, but no slander has occurred because they haven't accused Wikileaks of anything other than violating their terms of service.
Wikileaks encourages people to submit material to them that is stolen. They are encouraging people to break US laws.
Please provide me one single example where PayPal took someone's money, wasn't transparent about the process, wouldn't say why they froze assets, and refused to allow any form of dispute resolution. Since I started working at PayPal, I've asked the same thing of several people who tell me they hate PayPal. I've never once been provided with a single example.
And again, you seem to miss that pretty much any bank in the world can seize your assets as well. Swiss banks were famous for being the exception, and that doesn't even hold true today as Swiss banks have been freezing accounts and seizing assets. You're attributing an evil to PayPal alone that is actual a shared trait of pretty much every financial institution in the world.
Banks also have the right to freeze accounts. Wells Fargo has in their terms that they can freeze any transaction for 10 days without notice, and without reason. They froze a deposit I made as being "suspicious" for being extremely large, even though it was smaller than one of my paychecks. They held it for 30 days without notifying me.
Honestly, I think you'll find that PayPal is more lenient in these cases than most banks.
As far as being vague, I'd ask you to point to a public example where they frooze an account and wouldn't say why.
If you won't give your money to anyone who can "take" it, then I assume you don't have a single credit card, debit card, checking account, etc. You must operate entirely on cash. In turn, I guess you've decided not to purchase anything online ever, and not to support anyone who requires online transactions.
PayPal is an American company and must comply with American laws. It must also comply with laws in any country it operates in, such as privacy laws in Germany, or EU money laundering reporting laws.
I didn't make the decision, and I don't speak for PayPal in any official capacity on this, but it has been suggested that Wikileaks actively encourages people to steal and illegally leak data. While the US government has no jurisdiction over Wikileaks, wherever there servers are held, it is against the terms of PayPal's service for Wikileaks to encourage people to break US law. The terms of service are pretty clear in this regard. That isn't a whim, or something they made up on the spot.
You insist these terms are enacted on a whim. There are over 230 million accounts. Do you truly believe PayPal as a company is just randomly suspending accounts on a whim?
Who do you believe is sitting around sifting through these accounts and randomly making these decisions?
Do you have any examples?
The openSUSE build service will take your source code and compile out distro-specific and version-specific packages for all kinds of stuff.
It will spit out .rpm and .deb packages for 27 different distro/version combinations. And they'll do 32-bit and 64-bit on top of that.
I ask people on a regular basis if they hate PayPal why they hate PayPal, and in every cited example I've been given so far it has been a misunderstanding. The last time I asked on Slashdot the person told me it was because PayPal doesn't offer Fraud Protection, they have no Dispute Resolution department, and their privacy policy wasn't publicly listed.
Guess what? PayPal offers Fraud Protection, they have a Dispute Resolution department, and a Google search showed their privacy policy on the first result.
I've seen sites like paypalsucks.com and such. I've seen a lot of the complaints.
PayPal doesn't randomly freeze account or randomly hold money. They don't do things on a whim. I can say that internally we have a huge focus on customer service levels. As a financial institution, you're going to have people that aren't happy. But if they randomly froze accounts with no justification just because they felt like it, they wouldn't have much of a sustainable business model.
I'm a single employee who works in IT and doesn't make those decisions, but I can say that in some of the cases I've seen (such as when Xorg's account was frozen for a while) it was because PayPal was forced to do so by the government. After the Patriot Act, a whole slew of new oversight was put in to try and stop money laundering. And if you're a non-profit, you need to submit paperwork to PayPal to prove you're a non-profit. If you don't have that paperwork on file, and current, PayPal is legally required to freeze and account and report it.
Sadly these cases get reported as PayPal arbitrarily shutting down accounts because they have open source, and when the accounts are reinstanted that isn't reported on.
Working at PayPal, I'm exposed to our disputes department and how much policy is involved there. Nothing is done on a whim. Buyers and sellers have disputes all the time. There is tons of legislation involved. And if you side too much protecting buyers, then sellers get pissed and vice-versa.
As for Wikileaks, PayPal doesn't take political stances. From the official statement: - https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2010/12/paypal-statement-regarding-wikileaks/
"PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action."
If you violate the terms of service with any institution, they're likely not going to do business with you.
Software developers and charities need ways to accept payment. That is a necessary evil that isn't going to go away. The parent AC apparently felt that evil meant they weren't going to pay more than 90 cents for the bundle. But I think most people will find that whether you go through PayPal, Amazon, Google, or some merchant bank, the transactions are handled in roughly the same fashion. They're all heavily regulated and operate in a fairly standard fashion.
Out of curiosity, why do you feel that PayPal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout are all so evil, that putting $10 into them is unthinkable, even if it means supporting charities like Child's Play, the EFF, and Indie Developers porting their games to Linux and offering source code?
Full disclaimer, I work for PayPal.
Bundle 2 offered a single torrent download legally if I recall. Bundle 3 might as well.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/12/Download-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle-2-using-BitTorrent
The last two bundles did make it on torrent sites. Wolffire Blog tried to estimate how many people were pirating a bundle they could have had legally for a penny.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle
I'm curious if anything has really happened with community development of titles open sourced in the previous two bundles. I'd be interested in checking out community builds.
And while Jack Claw is Windows only in this release, I wonder how long it will take to get ported since the source is being released.
These bundles raise money for Child's Play, they challenge the conventional release model, and they're DRM-free Linux games.
If that isn't "News For Nerds", then I don't know what is.
I don't have the time to play the bigs games I want to play right now (Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age 2) and I still haven't played most of the games from the first two bundles. But I'm still buying this just on principle.
My last job was for a newspaper. Some of the art staff insisted on Macs, and when I pressed them for answers, I heard the usual about wanting to use Photoshop, and proper color management.
Oddly at the time, Apple was switching to Intel processors, but Photoshop hadn't been ported yet, so it ran like ass on a Mac, and ran great on Windows. And they were using Adobe's color management, which was the same on Windows and Mac.
Apple does make good displays, but they are ridiculously expensive, and good monitors aren't platform specific.
But my original point is that the public seems to think the Apple is better for graphics in general, to the point that they think they need Apple products, even though they aren't professionals.
What is worse for an average consumer?
Flash works, but drains your battery, or Flash doesn't work at all, will never work, and you're screwed?
Two of the four points are that Honeycomb isn't ready, and Flash isn't ready.
I'm not sure those are fair statements. Honeycomb seems plenty polished to me, and they have a working 10.2 Flash implementation today on the Xoom that just works.
The SD card sucks. I really don't understand how they shipped that without a driver. They've been testing it internally for some time. Linux has a driver for it, and they could have gone with another SD card reader as well.
As for 4G, that is a bit of a moot point as most of the country doesn't have much in the way of 4G coverage yet.
The analyst says no one will want a 7" tablet, and that you need to tether for any connection.
Whether or not there is a market for 7" tablets is to be seen. I prefer a 10" tablet, but some people may want something smaller. Who knows?
As for tethering, that simply isn't true. It is true that on day 1, there won't be a dedicated mail client shipping with the tablet. So you'll need to point your browser to Gmail or whatever provider you use.
So one person expressed an opinion based on faulty information. Clearly that means it is doomed.
I switched her over to Linux after she kept getting her computer infected. I've tried showing her apps like Scribus, but she hears from friends that Macs are the way to go for graphics. Why listen to her son who works in IT as an engineer when random people on Facebook are more trustworthy?
Getting a free 4G upgrade beats not having the option of not having 4G at all.
Getting a SD card beats not having one at all.
I haven't noticed any issues with Honeycomb where it needs polishing.
Flash sucks on all platforms, but it beats not having Flash at all.
I will agree that the Xoom launch seems arbitrarily rushed, and it they launched a month later, many of these things could have been resolved.
In case you missed it, more and more developers have been jumping ship to Android.
The market is easier to get into. The rules aren't as draconian. Google doesn't take as much off the top. For subscription services, Google is going to take 10% where as Apple takes 30%.
And for developers, going after the Android tablet market in particular makes a lot of sense. In App Stores, essentially the rich get richer because the stores feature the most popular apps. New apps have a hard time getting the visibility they need, where as the most popular apps get more visibility. Since there are so few native Honeycomb/Xoom apps right now, it would be easy to get that popularity early and ride it.
As for your statement that no one are making apps, Android is a full year or two behind iOS, and yet there are 250,000+ apps. It has a faster growth curve right now.
I recall the days when people were saying there was no need to record HD for home movies, or a 2 megapixel camera was more than anyone needed because most users just crop the photo and save it as a lossy, low-res JPG anyway. Those arguments still hold true. I wouldn't carry around a tablet as a camera, but the Xoom cameras are good enough to replace a standard camera in most uses, where as the iPad camera pretty much sucks.
Storage expansion is important, even to the average user. My iPhone 4 is basically filled will apps to the point I can't use it for MP3 storage.
Flash is important. My mother bought an iPad because she heard so much about them. Her primary purpose was to surf the web, and she won't use the iPad because it won't run Flash. It basically made the device worthless to her.
And Android 3 is a completely different user experience. So you're making assumptions the experience is exactly the same, when it isn't.
And now you're insisting Android will fail miserably, when Android had to play catch-up and already has become the #1 mobile OS shipped in the world. History suggests that while the first Android phone came out a full year after the iPhone, and initially did poorly (as a single device on T-Mobile) it has had great growth in the past 18 months.
Likewise, it has to play catch-up in the tablet market, but it has already proven it can win at that game.