I don't actively search for porn anywhere. But more to the point, I do not find anything pornographic or offensive about ladies without blouses, and feel rather sorry for those that do. They've got their values all screwed up. There is nothing shocking or offensive about it. Go to any European beach in the summer, and wake up! Wake up! Welcome to the West in 21C. No, it is not 7th century Arabia. Look around at where you are living.
We have some company deciding that people should not be able to install an application which contains a graphic of ladies with no blouses. You can buy every day at a newstand in the UK two or three newspapers which have, on page 3, pictures of ladies with no blouses. Anyway, Apple does not want you to see these pictures as part of an application on the phone you have just bought.
But then, after you've bought the phone, you can browse the web to the page 3 sites or others, and see those same pictures.
So what on earth are they thinking? Do they really think there is something terrible that people should not be allowed to see in something as commonplace as ladies without blouses? What exactly is so terrible about it? Do they really think that banning this awful stuff from the apps makes any difference at all to what people look at and see on iPhones?
These people are going completely mad in terms of an obsession with interference which they mistake for control. But worse than that, their values about what they want to control are all screwed up.
You have never ridden the London subway system in the rush hour. Daily mail readers are just a cross section of normal British people. It has lots of pages on issues that are important to women, so family, education, health. It is a tabloid, so its not always the greatest journalism, its not always accurate - but what tabloid is? But its just a pretty ordinary British paper, that has been demonized by the British Left.
There are really three levels. The most responsible are Times, Independent, Guardian and Telegraph. So called Broadsheets.
Below that, but not at the bottom, you'd have the Mail and Express.
At the bottom you'd have the out and out tabloids complete with topless girls on page 3. Mirror, Sketch, Record and so on.
There are still decent regional papers. Eastern Daily Press, Scotsman, for instance. The Scotsman is actually a national Scottish paper, and on the same level as the other broadsheets. The Evening Standard is a London afternoon edition paper, also read on the Underground. It might rank about with the Mail.
In terms of political orientation, Mail, Express, Evening Standard are decidedly right wing, mainly anti-Labour and pro Conservative. Guardian and Independent are left of center, the Guardian being the house organ of New Labour. The Telegraph is the house organ of the Conservative Party. The Times endorsed Labour at the last election, but is probably by nature Conservative. You could call it independent, though Guardian readers would choke at that. The Mirror is left and a strong Labour supporter.
Don't knock Mail readers. They are the swing voters who elected New Labour. They are also the swing voters who are about to kick it out.
The way the BBC is funded is magnificent and the envy of the world. You can see this from the awed comments here and in other places. That said, like all magnificent things, it is still capable of improvements, and we in New Labour are always anxious to improve life in Britain. We usually do this by thinking things through.
In the present case, we notice that the way the BBC is funded is that everyone who watches any sort of TV, whether he or she watches the BBC or not, is obliged under penalty of fines and jail to subscribe to the BBC. This as we say is magnificent and the envy of the world. We understand that the US is considering the same way of funding GM. Anyone who buys a car will be obliged to donate a sum, probably 10% or so of the value of their purchase, to GM, whether they buy a GM car or not. But we digress. Well actually the same model is under consideration in Belgium, where Del Haize is to get a contribution from everyone who wants to buy groceries, which will be most people. We must move on though. But first can we just say that everyone is doing this, we lead the world, they are all following our example.
Anyway, great as the BBC and its funding model are, after long thought, we realize that yes, we can do better. How?
Well, the BBC operates web sites. Clearly, anyone who uses any sort of web site should be obliged to subscribe, or at least pay something, to the BBC. Therefore, we are going to have a tax on Internet use, some or all of whose proceeds will go to the BBC, for it to operate its public service web sites.
Do you see now how reasonable this is? That's good, we thought you would.
This is about one of a large number of measures of surveillance, and its part of a program of control of the population with other limitations of civil liberties which used to be taken for granted. The justification given by the present government is usually the threat of terrorism.
The underlying motivation is something quite different. It is a certain cast of mind, and its quite unconscious. It is an unexamined concept of society and what it is for a country to be a community, and how people live in association with each other. The upper ranks of the Labour Party have an instinctive assumption that it is right and appropriate for there to be a surprisingly high degree of social control over individuals by others, in the cause of producing a kind of society that they feel good about. Its hard to put one's finger on it exactly, but it becomes clear in conversations with committed Party members, that they think individuals have or should have a greater say in how other people behave than those on the other parts of the political spectrum. In short, there really is for them such a thing as society, and we have much greater real interest in how others live and relate to each other than most of the general public think.
Once you understand this, you start to realize that many of the very puzzling aspects of recent UK legislation on civil liberties follow from it. Take ASBOS for instance. This is a means whereby a local government organization can get a court order forbidding people to engage in otherwise legal behaviour, because it is deemed 'anti social'. Recently a woman was forbidden by such an order from engaging in noisy sex. It probably disturbed her neighbors. People have been banned from entering or living in certain parts of the country. One young man was forbidden from being sarcastic. Take local government surveillance. People have been subjected to systematic surveillance to prevent them from putting out garbage in the wrong containers. Monitoring devices have been placed in those garbage containers. People have been put under surveillance to verify that they lived in a certain address and so had the right to send their child to a certain school. Just about all journeys in the UK are now recorded by license plate cameras - or on the London public transport system, by records of what trips a given card holder makes. Any public place will be filmed 24/7.
The latest bizarre episode of this sort was the arrest of an opposition MP on the charge that he incited a civil servant to commit misconduct in public office, by accepting information from him that the government wanted to keep confidential. The MP was arrested, actually in his Parliamentary office, then had his computers seized. Guess what was of interest to the arresting officers? His email files, and in particular his correspondence with the head of Liberty, a civil rights organization.
This looks to many people like the former East Germany, in which the country spent half its time spying on each other, but its not how it looks to the leadership of the Labour Party. It looks like East Germany, but it also looks normal. What is normal to them is not a society in which there are well defined legal standards, and you can do what you like as long as you do not violate them. What feels normal to them is a society in which anything you do may be restrained or condemned if it turns out to be undesirable. To who? Well, pretty much to anyone, including anyone in government or the civil services.
Take for instance the question of gender and class. We know that there are over and under representations of men and women, and people from different class backgrounds, in various companies and professions. These may have occurred through unlawful discrimination (though so far, discrimination on grounds of social class has not been made unlawful). The latest initiative from the government seeks to remedy this. Its not simply about equality of opportunity any more. It is about equality of pay levels, and its not just
The chattering classes have been going on about this for at least 10 years. In fact however, people live where they want to live, taking into account of what services are available when they do so, and they spend their money on what they want to spend it on. Some are heavily computerized and networked, others are not. And they are fine with it. Just like some people spend their money on vacations on the Costa Brava, and others spend it on books or motor boats. There is not a boating divide, or a book divide or a holiday divide. There are just people with different priorities.
This whole thing consists of people who are technologically illiterate proclaiming loudly that other people should get connected and computered, for reasons that feel like they make sense to them, but which make no sense to the objects of their attention. The same technical illiterates are demanding ever increasing use of computers in libraries and education, without having the slightest idea why this would improve either, and without ever having used a spreadsheet or IDE in anger or a computer as a learning tool. It is, to put it at its most absurd, people whose knowledge of computers is limited to writing memos in Word, telling the rest of us how important computer literacy is.
And making up ridiculous expressions like 'digital divide' to cover the fact that they are talking about absolutely nothing.
the use of excessive access restrictions placed by IP rights holders
Will this, one wonders, apply to the case of PearC, who are installing OSX on x86 machines in Germany? Will it have a bearing on any reaction Apple may make to EFI-X?
It will be thought provocative to suggest this, but what you need is a hackintosh.
Just go over to macintouch, make a note of the spec of the efi-x machine from their review, and either put it together yourself or get someone to put it together. Then, if you've a little spare money and just want a machine that works, buy efi-x, a retail copy of OSX, and do the installation. Otherwise get a copy of the open source efi boot package and do it yourself, without efi-x.
This is probably the most cost effective and performant way to go, and gets you an absolutely standard system, configured however you want, able to use the standard updates. If you read the review, it simply works. The Psystar systems appear to work well also, but the nice thing about efi-x is that it really is a totally standard installation from a standard DVD.
People will object that its not legal or moral. As to the morality, you are just buying a product Apple sells and using it. Admittedly not how they want or expect you to use it, but so what? If I use a chisel as a screwdriver in a moment of desperation, is that immoral? You will, to do the install, have to agree to the EULA, which means you agree to a contract forbidding what you are doing. Is that immoral? Personal question. The counterargument would be that Apple has no moral right to tell you what to do with what you have bought.
Is it illegal? No, you are breaching a EULA clause the enforceability of which has yet to be decided by the courts. It is certainly not illegal to do it in the sense of, its not against the law. It might, conceivably, expose you to civil suit from Apple. If they ever found you had done it. If they then started to sue end users. Not very likely. Go do it!
The problem for some vendors is that their powers strictly under the law of copyright are very limited. You cannot simply by copyright limit what hardware someone installs software on. So Apple could say goodbye to its prohibition on installing OSX on only Apple hardware. MS could say goodbye to its prohibition on installing Office on any OS other than Windows.
The reason vendors need click through EULAs is that they consititue a different contract from the contract of purchase of a copy of the software, they are independent of copyright rights, and they permit civil suits for breach of contract if some or all of the terms are broken.
Apple, for instance, sells you a copy at retail. The only thing you are now forbidden to do by copyright is make unauthorized copies - and the copies you make in the course of installation are specifically authorized in the legislation. So if Apple wants to restrict what you install on, it must persuade you to enter into a separate contract where you agree to be so restricted. This it does by click-through. It has every right to do that of course - it is selling you a copy under certain conditions which you agree to. In the same way, a company could sell you a book and as a condition, ask you to consent to not taking it to the park to read. You do not have to buy it, but if you buy it, and if you sign up to that agreement, you really have agreed not to read it in the park. The contractual clause may not be enforceable, but that's a different issue.
Copyright alone will not give them any rights to stop you reading it wherever you want. It just prohibits unauthorized copying.
This click through contract still may not be enforceable, but it is at least a contract which you have signed up to by the click through, and it does actually prohibit what Apple is seeking to stop.
So, we are not going to see software companies give up EULAs. And if they should be legislated against, you can be sure that Apple among others will be up there lobbying. The argument will be, that the power to restrict what brand of hardware people install stuff on is vital to the future of the software industry. You do want a software industry, don't you? I thought so. Oh, while we are talking, do you need any help with re-election?
"Why do you bring that ancient version back, Apple!?"
You fail to grasp the essence of the situation. It is not your copy of OSX, it belongs to Apple. You did not buy it. You merely paid some money, and got a license to use it. Well, the same thing is true of the hardware - has to be in fact, because of course OSX and its hardware are seamlessly connected and integrated.
So, what went wrong was that you did not get your copy of Perl from the app store. Your copy of Perl was not approved for use with the new version of OSX. This is your fault, not Apple's. You should have checked and got permission before you installed it. It is not like you were installing it on your own property, after all. If you go and plant a cabbage in someone else's garden without permission, don't be surprised if they spray it with weedkiller.
Its exactly the same thing. Its completely weird how many people think they somehow bought a copy of the software, or bought a computer, and now they for some reason think they have the right to install whatever they want on it, and Apple has to somehow protect whatever silly thing they did to it.
Idiots! Next thing, they will be wanting to buy retail copies of OSX and install them on hardware made by any Tom Dick or Harry.
No, this is quite mistaken. There are three possibilities here, not two.
First, you buy the copyright. This is what authors sell and publishers buy.
Second, you license the use of something. This is what happens if I license the use of a trademark, if I rent a machine, if I lease a software service which allows me to use a particular program to access it.
Third, I buy a copy. BUY A COPY!! Yes, this is different. There is such a thing as buying a copy, and this is what happens when I buy a book or CD. I then have various rights to do things with this copy which I do not have had I licensed something. Like, to resell it, to burn or destroy it, and so on.
Now, although people keep saying over and over again in regards to Apple that when I buy a copy at retail, I have not bought but licensed. this is NOT WHAT THE COURTS HAVE SAID. What the courts said, in the Softman case, is that they understand why software makers WANT to construe their retail sales as licenses and not as sales, but in fact, they really are sales and not licenses.
"The Court agrees that a single payment for a perpetual transfer of possession is, in reality, a sale of personal proper and therefore transfers ownership of that property, the copy of the software."
"The Court understands fully why licensing has many advantages for software publishers. However, this preference does not alter the Court's analysis that the substance of the transaction at issue here is a sale and not a license."
There's no ifs ands or buts about this. Just read the case, its here:
People really need to get their heads around this in regard to Apple. There is absolutely no doubt that when you buy a copy of the software, you really do buy a copy in law, you don't license it.
You then go on, when you install it, to click through and enter into another contract, the EULA. But that is another story....
"Alternatively, license out your DRM tech so Sony can build a reader compatible with your service"
Yes, this is the point. As long as Amazon has the aim of only allowing its ebooks to be purchased by its own proprietary software, and only readable on its own proprietary device, we should not want it, and we should boycott the whole idea.
What is wanted from ebooks is something that preserves the rights we now have with CDs. The ability to play it or read it on terminals from multiple vendors. The ability to give or sell it to others. The ability to download it and make backup copies on a hard drive. The ability to buy it using the credit card of my choice and nothing more proprietary than a web browser.
Anything less, its not good enough, have nothing to do with it.
And no, the ability to load pdfs on it or texts on it is not an answer to that. Not even close!
We started out with the view, based on historical anecdote, that there had been a Roman Warming and Medieval Warming, that were roughly as large as today's warming. There had also been coolings, notably in between the warmings, and in the late 17th century when the Thames froze, and during the early 19C during Napoleon's famous retreat.
The Hockey Stick proxy work appeared to refute this. It seemed to show that temperatures had not varied a whole lot until the 1980's, at which they took off in an unprecedented way. However, the HS work was exploded, primarily not because of misuse of PCA (though that happened) but because the key proxies it depended on were the Bristlecone Pines, which no-one seriously thinks are temperature proxies. This has been gone through ad nauseam, and you will often find people arguing that the results have been replicated independently, but if you look at the proxies used, and the people doing the studies, you'll find they are not independent.
So this leaves us with a reinstated RWP and MWP and the cooling periods, in short, greater natural variability than the HS alleged. To the extent that the IPCC does not accept this, it is just wrong.
We now get the interesting counter argument, which has become more popular as the HS has been discredited, which goes: Ah yes, but if the MWP existed, it proves that the climate is more sensitive than we have thought, and so we should be more worried rather than less about CO2. The attempt is now to make the existence of the MWP into an argument for higher climate sensitivity. This replaces the previous argument that its supposed absence was an argument for alarm, because it proved today's uniqueness. It is logically fallacious of course, since by hypothesis, we do not know what caused it, and so we cannot say anything about its magnitude, and so cannot reach any conclusions about sensitivity based on it.
Where do we end up? We end up having to argue that todays warming is unique in having been caused by CO2. But this is now much harder to prove, since the problem is we have had two other comparably sized warming periods not caused by rising CO2. How do we exclude the cause of them from operating now, especially if we have no idea what it was?
We also have another difficulty rarely alluded to. It is not just the warming due to CO2 that is problematic, it is the independent assertion that lowering CO2 would produce cooling. This has never happened before. Cooling has always preceded falls in CO2 in paleo times. In modern times it has always happened independently of CO2 levels. If we were to do it, at vast expense, how do we know it would work?
And finally, there is the issue of feedbacks. That would take us too far afield, but its agreed that what warms the planet is not primarily the CO2. It is the feedbacks that supposedly amplify the initial warming, from CO2 in the modern case, but could be from anything. The existence of these feedbacks, and whether they are positive or negative, is heavily disputed.
Its a mess. The best advice one can give is, the science is not settled. But another five years of cooling measured by satellite, that will settle it, if it happens.
It isn't quite the same, is it? You buy your copy typically from a retailer. You do walk out the store with it and the retailer has no further claims. The conditions on use in the click through are being imposed by the maker. The traditional way of getting around your point that the maker cannot impose additional conditions after the sale, is that he can only do that if he provides some simple way of getting a refund if you do not assent to them. Eulas seem to have been generally upheld on account of this.
I agree it is odd, and that analogies are quite disturbing. Lets say I buy a packet of pancake mix, take it home, and find it is shrink wrapped. The label on the outside says, by opening this package you agree only to mix this with Brand X milk. Are you really bound? I think that the law on shrink wrap and click through is that in principle, there is nothing to make the contract which you enter into by opening it unenforceable. The question will be what the clauses are, and whether they are generally enforceable in contracts however entered into.
But yes, it does not seem right that having bought, for example a book, you can then find yourself subject by opening its packaging, to a clause which says you may not read it in the bath. Or that when you take home a drill, you will find you have assented to a contract where you undertake not to use it in way of trade.
But doesn't the general history of click throughs being upheld by the courts suggest that the principle is right - that it is, despite what I agree is a disturbing point you make - a valid contract. The issue is the clauses and whether they are lawful in the jurisdiction and not unconscionable?
Your point might apply very powerfully to Apple and Hackintoshes. Having sold you a retail copy of OSX, can they really then later demand you enter into a contract which limits your use of it? Same regarding copies of Office running on something other than Windows. Is the offer of a refund if you don't accept enough? Are you then obliged either to accept the contract or return for a refund? But I think this is what the law says, subject to the clauses being valid and enforceable. Do you agree?
You need to put it much more precisely. Here is an attemnpt.
Clauses in contracts entered into by click through may be binding and enforceable. You have, by clicking through, entered into the contract. So the question is, whether there is anything special about such contracts, and also, which clauses, even if they occur in contracts validly entered into, may not be enforceable.
All click through contracts are contracts of adhesion. That is they are take it or leave it contracts. You will mostly consent to them as an essential preliminary to using something you have bought and paid for. Clauses in it may be unenforceable for a number of reasons, including that they are unconscionable. Or they may conflict with the law of the jurisdiction in which the product is sold.
To diverge for a moment, sometimes people argue that when you buy a retail copy, you are in fact not buying but licensing, in law, and they draw various conclusions from this about the enforceability of clauses such as the OSX-only-on-Macs clause. This is certainly not true, following Softman. You have bought a copy in law. Whether it is OSX, Windows, Office, makes no difference. However, that does not affect the validity of the click through contract, which is independent of the fact that you have bought your copy. You may have bought your copy, and you will have various rights which are consequent on that, including the right to resell it, but it does not follow that when you subsequently entered into a different contract by clicking through, none of the provisions in that second contract were binding. So, to take the OSX case, you did buy your copy of OSX, it was a sale not a license, but it may still be that the click through contract you later entered into to only install on Macs is binding.
So, taking up the thread of the click through contract again, any clause in such a contract meets the first of two necessary tests for unconscionability, that of being a contract of adhesion. The question of its enforceability will depend on whether it meets other conditions in respect of its substance. The starting point for this is Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co. Its also part of the Uniform Commercial Code. It might be that the condition meets the criterion because it is simply unreasonable. It is not realistically possible for any business now to take the risk that would be involved in not using firewalls and anti viruses, so any EULA which forbids one to do that cannot be enforceable.
The effect of this would be, if it is correct, that you would have bought the software, not licensed it. You would have validly entered into a contract, by click through. But that contract would contain one clause which was not enforceable, so if the supplier tried to sue you for breach of contract, they would fail. However, the rest of the contract would still be in force.
The situation is very similar to the OSX issue. The difference is whether the very different clause is enforceable in the OSX case. Or in the case where MS proceeds against you because, contrary to the UELA, you are running your copy of Office under Wine. Or perhaps you are supplying PCs with Office preconfigured with Office running under Wine. You'd still have entered into a contract by clicking through. The question would be whether there is some reason why this particular clause is not enforceable. As an example, in the EU, it probably would not be, but for very different reasons to do with consumer protection legislation and post sale restraints on use. As another example, in some jurisdictions the iTunes DRM, whereby tunes were locked to a particular player, was in conflict with consumer protection legislation. You can be sure that a EULA which bound you to not trying to play your iTune on a non-Apple player would not have been enforceable. Its a very different reason for unenforceability, but it illustrates the principle.
You are right its entirely reasonable. Its really no different from us all having to pay Tesco, whether we shop there or at Morrisons. A small percentage of every shopping trip anywhere in the UK goes to Tesco, of course. And also, a small percentage of every car purchase goes to Nissan, and a small percentage of ever newspaper purchase goes, actually, to the Times. This is true all over the world, and it accounts for the longevity of many great American consumer goods companies.
Just like a small percentage of every Dell purchased goes to Apple, and a small percentage of every ATT phone call used to go to MCI. Del Haize is the same way in Belgium. That's how Faber and Faber can afford to keep TS Eliot in print - no-one buys them of course, but its public service printing.
"BBC is worth every penny paid for it, and then some..."
Quite so. And that is why everyone has to be compelled to pay for it, whether they want to watch it or not, whether they agree with you or not, and why they must be forbidden to watch any TV at all unless they pay for it. Not just make it available for a fee, no, force everyone to buy it by law if they want TV.
It must be very, very important to keep people like you happy, if the price of doing it is to ban the whole population from watching TV unless they also pay to support what you personally want.
Personally, since we are speaking personally, I think the BBC is such good value, and so important to our national culture, that we should ban people from buying food if they do not subscribe to it. That would really teach them how hard it is to live by bread alone, would it not?
The problem always was, Company A complaining about person P to Company B, who then has to refuse P service. If you think about it from B's point of view, do they check or not? If not, what if they get it wrong and get sued - does A indemnify them? Further, from the Government's point of view. There are some services which are reasonably considered essential, and which, if you are denied them, may be more damaging to your quality of life than some criminal sentences. Yet in the case of the criminal law sanctions, the Human Rights legislation (entered into by this Government) demands due process and open hearings of the evidence. Where would that be in the present case?
To see the absurdity of it, and why it would not fly, consider the following case. The country is in the grip of smoking hysteria. Suppose we pass a law that on three accusations of buying tobacco for minors, a person must be denied access to his local supermarket. Suppose there is only one. His ability to buy food at a reasonable price and selection is being abridged solely on an unsupported allegation, the evidence for which does not even to have to be presented to him. No judge is involved.
In the UK we have anti social behaviour orders. These enable magistrates to order almost anything - like barring people from certain streets, certain associations or meetings, some behaviour. But even these, you do have to get an order from a magistrate. When you think about it, the proposal would be giving the record industry the power to disconnect anyone they chose from the internet with no reason given, no hearing, no comeback, not even a magistrate being informed.
It was never going to fly. The EC Charter guarantees access to information. This sort of measure is totally incompatible with it. It is going to be down to old fashioned policing and prosecution if they want to stamp out file sharing in violation of copyright. Yes, it will be expensive and time consuming. And yes, it may not work, or may not be worth working. And yes, maybe they would be better off revising their business model. But if they don't want to revise, that's the only way. Very glad the government has seen the cliff in time, and stopped. Not that you could really miss it, it was pretty obvious. The only people who would have enjoyed it would have been the lawyers, blowing up case after case with unconcealed glee!
What is interesting about the preoccupations material (and about Naughton's column in the Observer about Old People's ICT, which is linked to, is the total absence of any acknowlegment that two things even exist:
-- writing programs
-- doing what you might call computer administration
It's all about using different programs and services. Now, it may be that the standard sorts of IT courses which just lead English students to leave with a vague knowledge of how to start up Windows and use Office and Explorer and Outlook are fairly limited. They are basically just like DIY courses around one particular tool maker's product line.
However, these new model courses are no different. They just take the current fashion, make a lot of vague remarks about creativity, but also teach students how to use the slightly different tools and services now in fashion. And these are worse in one way: you end up teaching things the students will find out for themselves anyway. At least if you are teaching Excel you have the opportunity, not necessarily taken, to teach the student about the perils of spreadsheets, loops and jumps and macros and so forth. The perils of writing and formatting at the same time. We seem to be moving to teaching them how to twitter, which they will look back on with amused disbelief when they are 25, and wonder why they didn't get taught something useful about computers and networks.
The problem is, we have a world in which the education profession doesn't grasp what a liberating knowledge of computing and networking is, because they do not have it. As far as they are concerned, its a black box which does things.
It is perfectly legitimate to teach students how to drive. What is going wrong is that this is getting confused with teaching them about cars, car maintenance, car specifications. And its getting confused by people who really think all there is is getting inside and adjusting the seat back angle.
The other thing that's happening in these new model courses is that use is being restricted to the applications that are fashionable. You will not, in one of these courses, find out that there are packages like Mathematica or Octave. You won't find out about writing tools, different kinds of IDE and editors. You won't get any insight into HIG and its wonders and follies. Why anyone would ever want to use Vim or Emacs will be a closed book to you. Because Twitter or whatever is the latest teenage fashion, the adults are now deciding that Twitter is the important thing computers are to be used for.
I guess that is what happens when we lose the sense that education is the teaching of important information and skills which the teacher really has, to students who need to know them. Instead we make sure the students are having a good time doing what they would do anyway. Its like we assume the important use of the internal combustion machine is powering cars which go to drive-ins and the mall.
There were two things going on with QWERTY and not one.
The first thing was to design a keyboard where commonly used letter combinations were struck by levers as far apart as possible. This, far from slowing down the typist, actually speeded him/her up. Because it was possible to type common pairs of letters faster without jamming.
The second thing was to reconcile this with the placement of the keys. Because typewriter keyboards are mechanical devices, you did not have unlimited freedom about where the keys were placed, while keeping to the first criterion. Once you had separated the levers, and placed a few keys to match, you were then quite constrained about where to put the remaining ones.
So, you end up with a compromise. But not a bad one for speed even without those constraints.
The objective was never to slow down the typist (contrary to what some DVORAK advocates say). It always was to enable the fastest possible typing, consistent with the constraints of a mechanical system. It is therefore not surprising that it is very fast, and that studies have never shown any significant speed advantage for DVORAK. Its true that it was not optimized for speed of hand movement. But it was certainly not designed to slow it, just that speed of hand movement was a secondary objective, since it was no use to maximize that, if the result was slower output due to jamming.
All in all, there are more important things to think about in keyboard design than key layouts and the trivial speed increases you can get from non-QWERTY layouts. If you really want speed, you have to go radically different - chorded keyboards. Court stenographers have been using these for the longest time.
In market terms, what it shows is that for a change to be effected, the costs of changing have to be less than the gains from making it. No-one has ever convinced people with real budgets that its worthwhile for the population as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't actively search for porn anywhere. But more to the point, I do not find anything pornographic or offensive about ladies without blouses, and feel rather sorry for those that do. They've got their values all screwed up. There is nothing shocking or offensive about it. Go to any European beach in the summer, and wake up! Wake up! Welcome to the West in 21C. No, it is not 7th century Arabia. Look around at where you are living.
We have some company deciding that people should not be able to install an application which contains a graphic of ladies with no blouses. You can buy every day at a newstand in the UK two or three newspapers which have, on page 3, pictures of ladies with no blouses. Anyway, Apple does not want you to see these pictures as part of an application on the phone you have just bought.
But then, after you've bought the phone, you can browse the web to the page 3 sites or others, and see those same pictures.
So what on earth are they thinking? Do they really think there is something terrible that people should not be allowed to see in something as commonplace as ladies without blouses? What exactly is so terrible about it? Do they really think that banning this awful stuff from the apps makes any difference at all to what people look at and see on iPhones?
These people are going completely mad in terms of an obsession with interference which they mistake for control. But worse than that, their values about what they want to control are all screwed up.
Do you all still think this is "cool"?
You have never ridden the London subway system in the rush hour. Daily mail readers are just a cross section of normal British people. It has lots of pages on issues that are important to women, so family, education, health. It is a tabloid, so its not always the greatest journalism, its not always accurate - but what tabloid is? But its just a pretty ordinary British paper, that has been demonized by the British Left.
There are really three levels. The most responsible are Times, Independent, Guardian and Telegraph. So called Broadsheets.
Below that, but not at the bottom, you'd have the Mail and Express.
At the bottom you'd have the out and out tabloids complete with topless girls on page 3. Mirror, Sketch, Record and so on.
There are still decent regional papers. Eastern Daily Press, Scotsman, for instance. The Scotsman is actually a national Scottish paper, and on the same level as the other broadsheets. The Evening Standard is a London afternoon edition paper, also read on the Underground. It might rank about with the Mail.
In terms of political orientation, Mail, Express, Evening Standard are decidedly right wing, mainly anti-Labour and pro Conservative. Guardian and Independent are left of center, the Guardian being the house organ of New Labour. The Telegraph is the house organ of the Conservative Party. The Times endorsed Labour at the last election, but is probably by nature Conservative. You could call it independent, though Guardian readers would choke at that. The Mirror is left and a strong Labour supporter.
Don't knock Mail readers. They are the swing voters who elected New Labour. They are also the swing voters who are about to kick it out.
The way the BBC is funded is magnificent and the envy of the world. You can see this from the awed comments here and in other places. That said, like all magnificent things, it is still capable of improvements, and we in New Labour are always anxious to improve life in Britain. We usually do this by thinking things through.
In the present case, we notice that the way the BBC is funded is that everyone who watches any sort of TV, whether he or she watches the BBC or not, is obliged under penalty of fines and jail to subscribe to the BBC. This as we say is magnificent and the envy of the world. We understand that the US is considering the same way of funding GM. Anyone who buys a car will be obliged to donate a sum, probably 10% or so of the value of their purchase, to GM, whether they buy a GM car or not. But we digress. Well actually the same model is under consideration in Belgium, where Del Haize is to get a contribution from everyone who wants to buy groceries, which will be most people. We must move on though. But first can we just say that everyone is doing this, we lead the world, they are all following our example.
Anyway, great as the BBC and its funding model are, after long thought, we realize that yes, we can do better. How?
Well, the BBC operates web sites. Clearly, anyone who uses any sort of web site should be obliged to subscribe, or at least pay something, to the BBC. Therefore, we are going to have a tax on Internet use, some or all of whose proceeds will go to the BBC, for it to operate its public service web sites.
Do you see now how reasonable this is? That's good, we thought you would.
This is about one of a large number of measures of surveillance, and its part of a program of control of the population with other limitations of civil liberties which used to be taken for granted. The justification given by the present government is usually the threat of terrorism.
The underlying motivation is something quite different. It is a certain cast of mind, and its quite unconscious. It is an unexamined concept of society and what it is for a country to be a community, and how people live in association with each other. The upper ranks of the Labour Party have an instinctive assumption that it is right and appropriate for there to be a surprisingly high degree of social control over individuals by others, in the cause of producing a kind of society that they feel good about. Its hard to put one's finger on it exactly, but it becomes clear in conversations with committed Party members, that they think individuals have or should have a greater say in how other people behave than those on the other parts of the political spectrum. In short, there really is for them such a thing as society, and we have much greater real interest in how others live and relate to each other than most of the general public think.
Once you understand this, you start to realize that many of the very puzzling aspects of recent UK legislation on civil liberties follow from it. Take ASBOS for instance. This is a means whereby a local government organization can get a court order forbidding people to engage in otherwise legal behaviour, because it is deemed 'anti social'. Recently a woman was forbidden by such an order from engaging in noisy sex. It probably disturbed her neighbors. People have been banned from entering or living in certain parts of the country. One young man was forbidden from being sarcastic. Take local government surveillance. People have been subjected to systematic surveillance to prevent them from putting out garbage in the wrong containers. Monitoring devices have been placed in those garbage containers. People have been put under surveillance to verify that they lived in a certain address and so had the right to send their child to a certain school. Just about all journeys in the UK are now recorded by license plate cameras - or on the London public transport system, by records of what trips a given card holder makes. Any public place will be filmed 24/7.
The latest bizarre episode of this sort was the arrest of an opposition MP on the charge that he incited a civil servant to commit misconduct in public office, by accepting information from him that the government wanted to keep confidential. The MP was arrested, actually in his Parliamentary office, then had his computers seized. Guess what was of interest to the arresting officers? His email files, and in particular his correspondence with the head of Liberty, a civil rights organization.
This looks to many people like the former East Germany, in which the country spent half its time spying on each other, but its not how it looks to the leadership of the Labour Party. It looks like East Germany, but it also looks normal. What is normal to them is not a society in which there are well defined legal standards, and you can do what you like as long as you do not violate them. What feels normal to them is a society in which anything you do may be restrained or condemned if it turns out to be undesirable. To who? Well, pretty much to anyone, including anyone in government or the civil services.
Take for instance the question of gender and class. We know that there are over and under representations of men and women, and people from different class backgrounds, in various companies and professions. These may have occurred through unlawful discrimination (though so far, discrimination on grounds of social class has not been made unlawful). The latest initiative from the government seeks to remedy this. Its not simply about equality of opportunity any more. It is about equality of pay levels, and its not just
http://www.literarynorfolk.co.uk/normal_for_norfolk.htm
That hent got no front wheels, that hent.
The chattering classes have been going on about this for at least 10 years. In fact however, people live where they want to live, taking into account of what services are available when they do so, and they spend their money on what they want to spend it on. Some are heavily computerized and networked, others are not. And they are fine with it. Just like some people spend their money on vacations on the Costa Brava, and others spend it on books or motor boats. There is not a boating divide, or a book divide or a holiday divide. There are just people with different priorities.
This whole thing consists of people who are technologically illiterate proclaiming loudly that other people should get connected and computered, for reasons that feel like they make sense to them, but which make no sense to the objects of their attention. The same technical illiterates are demanding ever increasing use of computers in libraries and education, without having the slightest idea why this would improve either, and without ever having used a spreadsheet or IDE in anger or a computer as a learning tool. It is, to put it at its most absurd, people whose knowledge of computers is limited to writing memos in Word, telling the rest of us how important computer literacy is.
And making up ridiculous expressions like 'digital divide' to cover the fact that they are talking about absolutely nothing.
Will this, one wonders, apply to the case of PearC, who are installing OSX on x86 machines in Germany? Will it have a bearing on any reaction Apple may make to EFI-X?
Or maybe, what about Apple telling you on what hardware you may install your purchased retail copy of OSX?
That's different of course. Silly. Very silly. Apple is a hardware company, after all.
It will be thought provocative to suggest this, but what you need is a hackintosh.
Just go over to macintouch, make a note of the spec of the efi-x machine from their review, and either put it together yourself or get someone to put it together. Then, if you've a little spare money and just want a machine that works, buy efi-x, a retail copy of OSX, and do the installation. Otherwise get a copy of the open source efi boot package and do it yourself, without efi-x.
This is probably the most cost effective and performant way to go, and gets you an absolutely standard system, configured however you want, able to use the standard updates. If you read the review, it simply works. The Psystar systems appear to work well also, but the nice thing about efi-x is that it really is a totally standard installation from a standard DVD.
People will object that its not legal or moral. As to the morality, you are just buying a product Apple sells and using it. Admittedly not how they want or expect you to use it, but so what? If I use a chisel as a screwdriver in a moment of desperation, is that immoral? You will, to do the install, have to agree to the EULA, which means you agree to a contract forbidding what you are doing. Is that immoral? Personal question. The counterargument would be that Apple has no moral right to tell you what to do with what you have bought.
Is it illegal? No, you are breaching a EULA clause the enforceability of which has yet to be decided by the courts. It is certainly not illegal to do it in the sense of, its not against the law. It might, conceivably, expose you to civil suit from Apple. If they ever found you had done it. If they then started to sue end users. Not very likely. Go do it!
The problem for some vendors is that their powers strictly under the law of copyright are very limited. You cannot simply by copyright limit what hardware someone installs software on. So Apple could say goodbye to its prohibition on installing OSX on only Apple hardware. MS could say goodbye to its prohibition on installing Office on any OS other than Windows.
The reason vendors need click through EULAs is that they consititue a different contract from the contract of purchase of a copy of the software, they are independent of copyright rights, and they permit civil suits for breach of contract if some or all of the terms are broken.
Apple, for instance, sells you a copy at retail. The only thing you are now forbidden to do by copyright is make unauthorized copies - and the copies you make in the course of installation are specifically authorized in the legislation. So if Apple wants to restrict what you install on, it must persuade you to enter into a separate contract where you agree to be so restricted. This it does by click-through. It has every right to do that of course - it is selling you a copy under certain conditions which you agree to. In the same way, a company could sell you a book and as a condition, ask you to consent to not taking it to the park to read. You do not have to buy it, but if you buy it, and if you sign up to that agreement, you really have agreed not to read it in the park. The contractual clause may not be enforceable, but that's a different issue.
Copyright alone will not give them any rights to stop you reading it wherever you want. It just prohibits unauthorized copying.
This click through contract still may not be enforceable, but it is at least a contract which you have signed up to by the click through, and it does actually prohibit what Apple is seeking to stop.
So, we are not going to see software companies give up EULAs. And if they should be legislated against, you can be sure that Apple among others will be up there lobbying. The argument will be, that the power to restrict what brand of hardware people install stuff on is vital to the future of the software industry. You do want a software industry, don't you? I thought so. Oh, while we are talking, do you need any help with re-election?
"Why do you bring that ancient version back, Apple!?"
You fail to grasp the essence of the situation. It is not your copy of OSX, it belongs to Apple. You did not buy it. You merely paid some money, and got a license to use it. Well, the same thing is true of the hardware - has to be in fact, because of course OSX and its hardware are seamlessly connected and integrated.
So, what went wrong was that you did not get your copy of Perl from the app store. Your copy of Perl was not approved for use with the new version of OSX. This is your fault, not Apple's. You should have checked and got permission before you installed it. It is not like you were installing it on your own property, after all. If you go and plant a cabbage in someone else's garden without permission, don't be surprised if they spray it with weedkiller.
Its exactly the same thing. Its completely weird how many people think they somehow bought a copy of the software, or bought a computer, and now they for some reason think they have the right to install whatever they want on it, and Apple has to somehow protect whatever silly thing they did to it.
Idiots! Next thing, they will be wanting to buy retail copies of OSX and install them on hardware made by any Tom Dick or Harry.
No, this is quite mistaken. There are three possibilities here, not two.
First, you buy the copyright. This is what authors sell and publishers buy.
Second, you license the use of something. This is what happens if I license the use of a trademark, if I rent a machine, if I lease a software service which allows me to use a particular program to access it.
Third, I buy a copy. BUY A COPY!! Yes, this is different. There is such a thing as buying a copy, and this is what happens when I buy a book or CD. I then have various rights to do things with this copy which I do not have had I licensed something. Like, to resell it, to burn or destroy it, and so on.
Now, although people keep saying over and over again in regards to Apple that when I buy a copy at retail, I have not bought but licensed. this is NOT WHAT THE COURTS HAVE SAID. What the courts said, in the Softman case, is that they understand why software makers WANT to construe their retail sales as licenses and not as sales, but in fact, they really are sales and not licenses.
"The Court agrees that a single payment for a perpetual transfer of possession is, in reality, a sale of personal proper and therefore transfers ownership of that property, the copy of the software."
"The Court understands fully why licensing has many advantages for software publishers. However, this preference does not alter the Court's analysis that the substance of the transaction at issue here is a sale and not a license."
There's no ifs ands or buts about this. Just read the case, its here:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/xstatic/articles/056/5628/softman-v-adobe.html
People really need to get their heads around this in regard to Apple. There is absolutely no doubt that when you buy a copy of the software, you really do buy a copy in law, you don't license it.
You then go on, when you install it, to click through and enter into another contract, the EULA. But that is another story....
"Alternatively, license out your DRM tech so Sony can build a reader compatible with your service"
Yes, this is the point. As long as Amazon has the aim of only allowing its ebooks to be purchased by its own proprietary software, and only readable on its own proprietary device, we should not want it, and we should boycott the whole idea.
What is wanted from ebooks is something that preserves the rights we now have with CDs. The ability to play it or read it on terminals from multiple vendors. The ability to give or sell it to others. The ability to download it and make backup copies on a hard drive. The ability to buy it using the credit card of my choice and nothing more proprietary than a web browser.
Anything less, its not good enough, have nothing to do with it.
And no, the ability to load pdfs on it or texts on it is not an answer to that. Not even close!
We started out with the view, based on historical anecdote, that there had been a Roman Warming and Medieval Warming, that were roughly as large as today's warming. There had also been coolings, notably in between the warmings, and in the late 17th century when the Thames froze, and during the early 19C during Napoleon's famous retreat.
The Hockey Stick proxy work appeared to refute this. It seemed to show that temperatures had not varied a whole lot until the 1980's, at which they took off in an unprecedented way. However, the HS work was exploded, primarily not because of misuse of PCA (though that happened) but because the key proxies it depended on were the Bristlecone Pines, which no-one seriously thinks are temperature proxies. This has been gone through ad nauseam, and you will often find people arguing that the results have been replicated independently, but if you look at the proxies used, and the people doing the studies, you'll find they are not independent.
So this leaves us with a reinstated RWP and MWP and the cooling periods, in short, greater natural variability than the HS alleged. To the extent that the IPCC does not accept this, it is just wrong.
We now get the interesting counter argument, which has become more popular as the HS has been discredited, which goes: Ah yes, but if the MWP existed, it proves that the climate is more sensitive than we have thought, and so we should be more worried rather than less about CO2. The attempt is now to make the existence of the MWP into an argument for higher climate sensitivity. This replaces the previous argument that its supposed absence was an argument for alarm, because it proved today's uniqueness. It is logically fallacious of course, since by hypothesis, we do not know what caused it, and so we cannot say anything about its magnitude, and so cannot reach any conclusions about sensitivity based on it.
Where do we end up? We end up having to argue that todays warming is unique in having been caused by CO2. But this is now much harder to prove, since the problem is we have had two other comparably sized warming periods not caused by rising CO2. How do we exclude the cause of them from operating now, especially if we have no idea what it was?
We also have another difficulty rarely alluded to. It is not just the warming due to CO2 that is problematic, it is the independent assertion that lowering CO2 would produce cooling. This has never happened before. Cooling has always preceded falls in CO2 in paleo times. In modern times it has always happened independently of CO2 levels. If we were to do it, at vast expense, how do we know it would work?
And finally, there is the issue of feedbacks. That would take us too far afield, but its agreed that what warms the planet is not primarily the CO2. It is the feedbacks that supposedly amplify the initial warming, from CO2 in the modern case, but could be from anything. The existence of these feedbacks, and whether they are positive or negative, is heavily disputed.
Its a mess. The best advice one can give is, the science is not settled. But another five years of cooling measured by satellite, that will settle it, if it happens.
This might be helpful, Becta's Technical Specification, Institutional Infrastructure.
http://industry.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=14615
In particular, pages 38 and following specify what formats Office applications must be able to save their documents in. This is the real problem.
It isn't quite the same, is it? You buy your copy typically from a retailer. You do walk out the store with it and the retailer has no further claims. The conditions on use in the click through are being imposed by the maker. The traditional way of getting around your point that the maker cannot impose additional conditions after the sale, is that he can only do that if he provides some simple way of getting a refund if you do not assent to them. Eulas seem to have been generally upheld on account of this.
I agree it is odd, and that analogies are quite disturbing. Lets say I buy a packet of pancake mix, take it home, and find it is shrink wrapped. The label on the outside says, by opening this package you agree only to mix this with Brand X milk. Are you really bound? I think that the law on shrink wrap and click through is that in principle, there is nothing to make the contract which you enter into by opening it unenforceable. The question will be what the clauses are, and whether they are generally enforceable in contracts however entered into.
But yes, it does not seem right that having bought, for example a book, you can then find yourself subject by opening its packaging, to a clause which says you may not read it in the bath. Or that when you take home a drill, you will find you have assented to a contract where you undertake not to use it in way of trade.
But doesn't the general history of click throughs being upheld by the courts suggest that the principle is right - that it is, despite what I agree is a disturbing point you make - a valid contract. The issue is the clauses and whether they are lawful in the jurisdiction and not unconscionable?
Your point might apply very powerfully to Apple and Hackintoshes. Having sold you a retail copy of OSX, can they really then later demand you enter into a contract which limits your use of it? Same regarding copies of Office running on something other than Windows. Is the offer of a refund if you don't accept enough? Are you then obliged either to accept the contract or return for a refund? But I think this is what the law says, subject to the clauses being valid and enforceable. Do you agree?
You need to put it much more precisely. Here is an attemnpt.
Clauses in contracts entered into by click through may be binding and enforceable. You have, by clicking through, entered into the contract. So the question is, whether there is anything special about such contracts, and also, which clauses, even if they occur in contracts validly entered into, may not be enforceable.
All click through contracts are contracts of adhesion. That is they are take it or leave it contracts. You will mostly consent to them as an essential preliminary to using something you have bought and paid for. Clauses in it may be unenforceable for a number of reasons, including that they are unconscionable. Or they may conflict with the law of the jurisdiction in which the product is sold.
To diverge for a moment, sometimes people argue that when you buy a retail copy, you are in fact not buying but licensing, in law, and they draw various conclusions from this about the enforceability of clauses such as the OSX-only-on-Macs clause. This is certainly not true, following Softman. You have bought a copy in law. Whether it is OSX, Windows, Office, makes no difference. However, that does not affect the validity of the click through contract, which is independent of the fact that you have bought your copy. You may have bought your copy, and you will have various rights which are consequent on that, including the right to resell it, but it does not follow that when you subsequently entered into a different contract by clicking through, none of the provisions in that second contract were binding. So, to take the OSX case, you did buy your copy of OSX, it was a sale not a license, but it may still be that the click through contract you later entered into to only install on Macs is binding.
So, taking up the thread of the click through contract again, any clause in such a contract meets the first of two necessary tests for unconscionability, that of being a contract of adhesion. The question of its enforceability will depend on whether it meets other conditions in respect of its substance. The starting point for this is Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co. Its also part of the Uniform Commercial Code. It might be that the condition meets the criterion because it is simply unreasonable. It is not realistically possible for any business now to take the risk that would be involved in not using firewalls and anti viruses, so any EULA which forbids one to do that cannot be enforceable.
The effect of this would be, if it is correct, that you would have bought the software, not licensed it. You would have validly entered into a contract, by click through. But that contract would contain one clause which was not enforceable, so if the supplier tried to sue you for breach of contract, they would fail. However, the rest of the contract would still be in force.
The situation is very similar to the OSX issue. The difference is whether the very different clause is enforceable in the OSX case. Or in the case where MS proceeds against you because, contrary to the UELA, you are running your copy of Office under Wine. Or perhaps you are supplying PCs with Office preconfigured with Office running under Wine. You'd still have entered into a contract by clicking through. The question would be whether there is some reason why this particular clause is not enforceable. As an example, in the EU, it probably would not be, but for very different reasons to do with consumer protection legislation and post sale restraints on use. As another example, in some jurisdictions the iTunes DRM, whereby tunes were locked to a particular player, was in conflict with consumer protection legislation. You can be sure that a EULA which bound you to not trying to play your iTune on a non-Apple player would not have been enforceable. Its a very different reason for unenforceability, but it illustrates the principle.
You are right its entirely reasonable. Its really no different from us all having to pay Tesco, whether we shop there or at Morrisons. A small percentage of every shopping trip anywhere in the UK goes to Tesco, of course. And also, a small percentage of every car purchase goes to Nissan, and a small percentage of ever newspaper purchase goes, actually, to the Times. This is true all over the world, and it accounts for the longevity of many great American consumer goods companies.
Just like a small percentage of every Dell purchased goes to Apple, and a small percentage of every ATT phone call used to go to MCI. Del Haize is the same way in Belgium. That's how Faber and Faber can afford to keep TS Eliot in print - no-one buys them of course, but its public service printing.
Its great.
PS TS Eliot boring? Are you mad?
"BBC is worth every penny paid for it, and then some..."
Quite so. And that is why everyone has to be compelled to pay for it, whether they want to watch it or not, whether they agree with you or not, and why they must be forbidden to watch any TV at all unless they pay for it. Not just make it available for a fee, no, force everyone to buy it by law if they want TV.
It must be very, very important to keep people like you happy, if the price of doing it is to ban the whole population from watching TV unless they also pay to support what you personally want.
Personally, since we are speaking personally, I think the BBC is such good value, and so important to our national culture, that we should ban people from buying food if they do not subscribe to it. That would really teach them how hard it is to live by bread alone, would it not?
The problem always was, Company A complaining about person P to Company B, who then has to refuse P service. If you think about it from B's point of view, do they check or not? If not, what if they get it wrong and get sued - does A indemnify them? Further, from the Government's point of view. There are some services which are reasonably considered essential, and which, if you are denied them, may be more damaging to your quality of life than some criminal sentences. Yet in the case of the criminal law sanctions, the Human Rights legislation (entered into by this Government) demands due process and open hearings of the evidence. Where would that be in the present case?
To see the absurdity of it, and why it would not fly, consider the following case. The country is in the grip of smoking hysteria. Suppose we pass a law that on three accusations of buying tobacco for minors, a person must be denied access to his local supermarket. Suppose there is only one. His ability to buy food at a reasonable price and selection is being abridged solely on an unsupported allegation, the evidence for which does not even to have to be presented to him. No judge is involved.
In the UK we have anti social behaviour orders. These enable magistrates to order almost anything - like barring people from certain streets, certain associations or meetings, some behaviour. But even these, you do have to get an order from a magistrate. When you think about it, the proposal would be giving the record industry the power to disconnect anyone they chose from the internet with no reason given, no hearing, no comeback, not even a magistrate being informed.
It was never going to fly. The EC Charter guarantees access to information. This sort of measure is totally incompatible with it. It is going to be down to old fashioned policing and prosecution if they want to stamp out file sharing in violation of copyright. Yes, it will be expensive and time consuming. And yes, it may not work, or may not be worth working. And yes, maybe they would be better off revising their business model. But if they don't want to revise, that's the only way. Very glad the government has seen the cliff in time, and stopped. Not that you could really miss it, it was pretty obvious. The only people who would have enjoyed it would have been the lawyers, blowing up case after case with unconcealed glee!
What is interesting about the preoccupations material (and about Naughton's column in the Observer about Old People's ICT, which is linked to, is the total absence of any acknowlegment that two things even exist:
-- writing programs
-- doing what you might call computer administration
It's all about using different programs and services. Now, it may be that the standard sorts of IT courses which just lead English students to leave with a vague knowledge of how to start up Windows and use Office and Explorer and Outlook are fairly limited. They are basically just like DIY courses around one particular tool maker's product line.
However, these new model courses are no different. They just take the current fashion, make a lot of vague remarks about creativity, but also teach students how to use the slightly different tools and services now in fashion. And these are worse in one way: you end up teaching things the students will find out for themselves anyway. At least if you are teaching Excel you have the opportunity, not necessarily taken, to teach the student about the perils of spreadsheets, loops and jumps and macros and so forth. The perils of writing and formatting at the same time. We seem to be moving to teaching them how to twitter, which they will look back on with amused disbelief when they are 25, and wonder why they didn't get taught something useful about computers and networks.
The problem is, we have a world in which the education profession doesn't grasp what a liberating knowledge of computing and networking is, because they do not have it. As far as they are concerned, its a black box which does things.
It is perfectly legitimate to teach students how to drive. What is going wrong is that this is getting confused with teaching them about cars, car maintenance, car specifications. And its getting confused by people who really think all there is is getting inside and adjusting the seat back angle.
The other thing that's happening in these new model courses is that use is being restricted to the applications that are fashionable. You will not, in one of these courses, find out that there are packages like Mathematica or Octave. You won't find out about writing tools, different kinds of IDE and editors. You won't get any insight into HIG and its wonders and follies. Why anyone would ever want to use Vim or Emacs will be a closed book to you. Because Twitter or whatever is the latest teenage fashion, the adults are now deciding that Twitter is the important thing computers are to be used for.
I guess that is what happens when we lose the sense that education is the teaching of important information and skills which the teacher really has, to students who need to know them. Instead we make sure the students are having a good time doing what they would do anyway. Its like we assume the important use of the internal combustion machine is powering cars which go to drive-ins and the mall.
Trucking? What is that?
"The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people,'"
No it did not.
http://www.jeremyreimer.com/total_share.html
There were two things going on with QWERTY and not one.
The first thing was to design a keyboard where commonly used letter combinations were struck by levers as far apart as possible. This, far from slowing down the typist, actually speeded him/her up. Because it was possible to type common pairs of letters faster without jamming.
The second thing was to reconcile this with the placement of the keys. Because typewriter keyboards are mechanical devices, you did not have unlimited freedom about where the keys were placed, while keeping to the first criterion. Once you had separated the levers, and placed a few keys to match, you were then quite constrained about where to put the remaining ones.
So, you end up with a compromise. But not a bad one for speed even without those constraints.
The objective was never to slow down the typist (contrary to what some DVORAK advocates say). It always was to enable the fastest possible typing, consistent with the constraints of a mechanical system. It is therefore not surprising that it is very fast, and that studies have never shown any significant speed advantage for DVORAK. Its true that it was not optimized for speed of hand movement. But it was certainly not designed to slow it, just that speed of hand movement was a secondary objective, since it was no use to maximize that, if the result was slower output due to jamming.
All in all, there are more important things to think about in keyboard design than key layouts and the trivial speed increases you can get from non-QWERTY layouts. If you really want speed, you have to go radically different - chorded keyboards. Court stenographers have been using these for the longest time.
In market terms, what it shows is that for a change to be effected, the costs of changing have to be less than the gains from making it. No-one has ever convinced people with real budgets that its worthwhile for the population as a whole.
Datapoint did this around 1985.