That's what I was thinking. I was a sysadmin at a small EE firm building testing stations. All the CNC systems we built that had to be extremely precise and relied on the high end microcontrollers and actuators invariably ran QNX. The systems that could be cheaper and less robust overall tended to run National Instruments controllers with LabView applications on Windows XP, which were cheaper both to develop and to deploy.
Laptops are bulky and heavy. Netbooks offer a terrible user experience (mostly thanks to Microsoft forcing lousy specs on vendors as a prerequisite for Windows Starter licensing).
I've taken my iPad with me on my last few business trips. It was light and with a big enough display for comfortable use without being too big (or too small like smartphone displays). (Although I'm not happy Apple has already abandoned updates on my not-even-3-years-old iPad 1 -- might have to consider an Android tablet next time.)
I, too have taken my iPad to meetings and on business trips. It's an iPad 2 with a nice sliding Logitech stand and Bluetooth keyboard.
Generally, it was not worth the suitcase space. I took it to all my seminars and was able to take notes on it, but several of the websites I needed to go to did not work correctly (and sometimes not at all). Our VPN doesn't support iPad, our database tools, development tools, and system management tools don't support iPad, and connecting to my workplace workstation with RDP or VNC is a complete joke due to the hilariously cramped screen.
Thus, I came to this conclusion: iPad is great for notes (with a keyboard) since it lasts all day, quasi-adequate for web browsing, and useless for computing. It made me question whether or not I should just use a plain notepad and pen -- which were provided at the seminar for free. Next time I'm debating taking a laptop, even though it will chain me to seats near outlets.
Pinball was killed by video arcade games. Video arcade games were killed by home consoles and home computers (which included things like video pinball). Home consoles and computers moved to Internet-based distribution or multi-player systems. Now TV is becaming Internet-based, too, and livestreaming games is taking off like a rocket. Now people have begun livestreaming pinball, and it's popularity increases as new people are exposed to the games and they see how people really play them.
Pinball died because of the computer made it obsolete. Now it lives because the computer lets people see why it's not obsolete.
Sorry, you've grown too attached to your computer. You're no longer anything remotely respectful like customer. You're a consumer. You exist to have your time sold to other companies.
The tablet isn't "automobile vs horse". Neither smartphones nor laptops could be considered "horses" and those are what bookend the tablet market.
The basic issue is that people want something small and easy to carry with a lot of on-the-go features like telephone, texting, and GPS like a smartphone. However, they also want something they can sit down and compose documents or browse the web on for long periods of time. They also want something that can replace a book, an MP3 player, and a television. This is all possible because all of these tasks involve using the Internet in today's world (with true 4G LTE cellular networks become a true IP-based network that is connected to and routable by the Internet), and tablets take advantage of this.
Tablets, like netbooks before them, are an attempt to merge semi-portable laptop computers and semi-multipurpose smartphones into a single superdevice. I would continue to argue that tablets are still shitty devices, however. They're only slightly less shitty than netbooks, and that's why they're doing well. Apple may have understood that tablets are shitty smartphone-laptops, however, and instead positioned the iPad as a third device primarily for media consumption (music/movies/limited games/books/web/web-like apps) which is really all the device does well. This has turned out to be a new market, which is why the segment has seen such explosive growth. One of the mistake market analysts make is that they think tablets replace laptops or smartphones, when, in reality, they merely provide feature subsets of both. Certainly, some users will find they no longer need a laptop with a tablet, but I don't think this is that significant.
The other mistake is that the market analysts have forgotten the difference between developing and developed markets. Established markets like laptop computers and cellphones (smartphones are overtaking and replacing regular phones, rather than being an emerging market) have shown stagnant growth because they're developed and saturated markets. The majority of sales are for replacement devices rather than new owners. Tablets, OTOH, represent an emerging market, with many people purchasing their first tablet. It's difficult to speculate how long it will take for the tablet market to saturate, but it's clear that what was once thought to be just a segment of the computer market is instead a completely different market altogether.
What may happen is that families that currently own multiple laptops will instead own a single laptop and multiple tablets instead. I could see that, particularly if tablets stop being so strictly linked to a single person as if they're a smartphone or internal organ.
Let's say this is how things are now. Assume a family of two adults and two or more children: Each adult owns a single-user smartphone. Children share one to two plain cellphones (or hand-me-down smartphones). Each adult owns one single-user laptop. Each family owns one multi-user desktop. Each family owns one large screen TV, and two or more modest screen TVs.
Here's what I can see happening in the future: Each adult will own a single-user smartphone. Each child will own a cheap single-user smartphone. Each family will have one multi-user laptop. Each family will have one or two large screen displays (either TVs or computers primarily for video capabilities). Each family will have two or three multi-user tablets.
See how the tablets provide coverage between televisions and laptops?
Personally, I think it's equally as likely that this happens: Each adult will own a single-user smartphone. Each child will own a cheap single-user smartphone. Each family will have two or more multi-user or single-user laptops. Each family will have one or two large screen displays (either TVs or computers primarily for video capabilities). Each family will have one multi-user tablet.
That's more expensive, but also far more useful for many people.
I always thought it was telling that we remember this speech, but not what happens next.
Col. Jessup confesses to ordering the murder of one of his subordinates. He is then immediately told he need say nothing more and that "the witness has rights". He is arrested, and removed from his "post" at the "wall". This is because we should and do question the manner in which we are provided security. In a country where the rule of law is used to provide protection of rights against those who would abuse or usurp them, honor, code, and loyalty are subordinate to rights, duty, and law.
If Col. Jessup's speech was right, he would've gotten away with his action. Instead, he was removed and court martialed. Col. Jessup put himself, his command, and the Marine Corp ahead of his country, his people, and his men. LCpl Dawson understood this after being dishonorably discharged when he said, "We were supposed to fight for people who couldn't fight for themselves. We were supposed to fight for Willie."
At least, that's the ideal. I'm sure cynics and pessimists eat that for breakfast. Idealism is fairly anachronistic these days.
That's beside the point. I was responding to his statement "The only thing that keeps MySQL popular is people who don't know what they are doing, which it does fine for."
A number of developers familiar with MySQL fire up PostgreSQL or MS SQL Server or Oracle, try it out for awhile, find that they get a ton of errors that they don't understand because MySQL let them get away with egregious idiocy, and then retreat back to MySQL.
The reason COBOL required indention originally (and the reason it generally no longer does) is because it was necessary for punch cards. The indention moved the holes to where the card parser could identify codes correctly.
Open letters aren't designed to change the addressee's mind. They're designed to open the minds of people that neglected to think about the addressee's opinion or choice.
Using words I recognize as nonsense isn't the sole problem. It's vocabulary collisions. What if I meant the exact same thing you did, but write it like this:
There is also a benefit to having people share a common vocabulary, such as communication in broader languages like English, Spanish, etc. I have a hard enough time communicating with people in the same language!
You're overstating the power of sharing a common rudder. As long as the mast is forestayed, the central keel doesn't need to be the same.
Now you: a) can't use the context of the message you responded to (which is where we as the reader got the meaning), and b) you have no idea what I'm actually trying to say. Am I really talking about the construction of language, or the construction of a ship? If it's the former, well, I don't really understand what's being said, and if it's the latter, well, what was said still doesn't entirely make any sense. Yes, you can arrange words like that, and it's possible that might mean something in the correct conversation, but you've no idea what.
Languages do work without strict oversight. English, for example, has no regulation at all. This is somewhat unusual, especially considering English's popularity. However, English is also notoriously difficult to learn and notoriously difficult to use correctly. The rules are contradictory and inconsistent, partially because it bastardizes so many words from other languages. English, but like the country it comes from, is part Scottish/Gaelic, part Welsh/Gaelic, part Norse, part Germanic, part French, and part Latin.
Come to think of it, English is just as badly abused as web design: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, JSON, XML plus all the media content types, plus back end technologies for dynamic sites like PHP, ASP, Ruby, Python, Perl, XSLT running on lighttpd, apache, IIS, nginx and databases like SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle and so on. The web is made up of 10,000 different technologies all doing different things toward the same end. It's a huge pain in the ass already, to be honest. Making it worse by removing the base stability of HTML seems like people deciding that directly verbing nouns should replace more appropriate verbs.
Crap forgot to add the important part. Sorry about that:
Because the money supply is limited, just as the quantity of goods and services are limited, so, too, must net profits be a zero-sum game. If someone doesn't give you their money, they're going to give it to someone else or keep it for themselves. You can't get that profit back. You have to get profits elsewhere, but the fact that you lost a sale to A doesn't mean you can make a sale to B. It just means you can't make a sale to A and B both.
Profits are not finite, or more precisely, bound in such a manner that forces someone's win to match someone's losses.
Don't be silly. Profits are bounded by the value of good and services produced. That is to say, they're bounded by the economy. The value of goods and services produced is finite -- you can only produce so much in one day -- so is the gross revenue, and therefore so are the net profits. Even in the digital world where you could theoretically produce quadrillions of digital licenses of valuable software at the same price, the money supply limits you. You couldn't sell 5 quadrillion licenses for WinRAR simply because $150 quadrillion USD does not exist. The money supply isn't that big.
It's precisely this kind of magical thinking about stocks and commodities that makes the stock market so volatile and ridiculously destructive when the illusion disappears.
If you don't want them using that information, don't give it to them. It's your choice. The government should not get involved.
These businesses can still get info about you even if you don't directly deal with them. So you're arguing froma false premise from the start.
Not at all. You gave your information to the business freely and made no requests that your information not be freely disclosed. That means they are free to do with your information whatever they wish (within the bounds of the law, of course, and subject to any potential consequences). If you did not want your information used by the business or sold to others by them, you should have specified that before agreeing to the business arrangement that required you to give them your information in the first place.
The fact that web services offer no room for negotiation on these terms is precisely why Americans now find it necessary to impose government regulations. What was once a business contract handled in person between two people is not now a automated process with an agreement written by several dozen lawyers on one side and absolutely no negotiations accepted. You can't negotiate with a static contract with an "I agree to these terms" checkbox.
It's precisely this kind of abuse that caused consumer protection agencies to come into existence. Once a business has a significant portion of a market, they lose any incentive to negotiate. Once every business in the market is like this, those who were once valuable clients and customers suddenly become mere consumers. So, Americans turn to government regulation because they are unable to get consumer-oriented businesses to stop being gigantic, selfish assholes.
Keep in mind that if we're talking about Kindergartners that "a couple of months" is a significant amount of time, and at this age brain development is almost exactly a function of age. They're only 60-70 months old. It shouldn't be surprising that those that are 70 months old do better than those who are only 60. They've been alive 20% longer! Certainly, there are outliers, but they're going to score exceptionally either way (good or bad). Additionally, knowing the age of your subjects allows for basic test feedback to verify that nothing is wrong (older students should generally outscore younger ones). I'd agree that differences less than one month are unlikely to be significant, but since there's no significant cost to using the actual birthdate instead of just the birth month (there would have been prior to computerized data processing) then there's no reason at all to not use the complete birth date.
Here's another thing to keep in mind: "Even before the error, the number of students qualifying for gifted seats — 9,020 — was far higher than the number of seats. The new number is more than 11,700. The competition is most acute for the citywide programs, where only several hundred seats are available."
So, yeah, 2,000 more students qualify, but the programs were apparently already full. Congratulations, Timmy! We made a mistake and you qualify for advanced schoolwork! Now go back to your regular classroom.
That said, I work in education IT. The fact that this mistake was made by Pearson doesn't shock or surprise me in the slightest. As soon as I saw their name I thought, "Oh, Pearson did it? No wonder it was wrong." Their software is shit and the fact that they're "industry leaders" should be a tremendous mark of shame upon the education assessment industry as a whole. Pearson is like your local cable company or wireless provider. They're the not a good choice, but they're often the best choice available.
Actually, you're not "giving up" any rights at all when you adopt a license, regardless of what it is. You're simply offering an agreement that allows others to do what you explicitly mention. It just so happens that the BSD license lets you do pretty much everything. That is, everything that doesn't violate one of the clauses of the license (copyright notice and copy of license must be retained with source and binary distribtions, and potentially that the author's name may not be used to promote derivative software). The only reason someone as a programmer can offer such an agreement and not be ignored is because you retain your rights.
No, that's Alabama. This is Mike Rogers (R-MI). Michigan's state motto is "Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice". "If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you".
Having lived in Michigan almost my entire life, I've never met anyone looking for a pleasant peninsula. There are plenty of phallus-shaped objects such as the distinguished representative in the story, but nobody looking for a pleasant peninsula. Most people are looking for jobs now that so many of the manufacturing jobs have left the state.
MSE started off well, but has been in steady decline since its release.
Of course it has. The last thing any virus or malware author does before releasing their program is check to make sure that the most popular anti-virus and anti-malware products of the day don't detect it. MSE was excellent when nobody used it. Now that it's a de facto standard, it's probably the first thing they check against. It's a basic selection pressure.
So, you want to trade in application that everybody is familiar with and has access to (in direct form or clone form) whose primary disadvantage is the proprietary data format -- which, albiet de jure proprietary is not de facto proprietary since every spreadsheet program made in the last 10 years can read the format. You want to trade this application in for another application that nobody has and nobody is familiar with, which not only suffers from the same proprietary data format problem (and a de facto one in this case) but also only functions on Apple hardware.
I would disagree. I would bet that most of the examples you point out were due to fraud, greed, or manias. These are human conditions that exist without the profit motive. Or, another way to put it, capitalism (either in it's left wing “socialism light” or your hard right liberation form) is like democracy – a horrible system whose only saving grace is that it is better then any other system.
Doesn't that suggest the system should "be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants"? I, for one, would like to see what color blood comes out of an investment banker's heart.
Improv is dead (18 years dead), FlexiSheet is in early Alpha (no binaries available for download). Neither would be appropriate for this situation. It would be like suggesting Hurd over Linux. Quantrix or similar financial modeling software would be more appropriate, but a) they're expensive, b) they're limited in scope.
SPSS and R are very good at statistical analysis. Quantrix, MapleSoft, IBM Algorithmics, and other software is for financial data modeling. None of those is particularly appropriate for sharing data in a useful format with peers. Excel is.
Most places I've worked that deploy MS Office either a) don't support Access, or b) don't deploy Access at all.
Considering how trivial it generally is to transform an Access DB into a web application, only an extremely limited number of places I've worked still had Access DBs that were IT-supported. Unfortunately, they were also all Access 97 DBs that didn't work in Access 2000 even. I can't imagine they still use them today... God, I hope not.
A $200 pocket phone can do a lot of things a full desktop PC couldn't do a decade ago.
A $200 pocket phone still cannot do a lot of things a full desktop PC could do a decade ago.
I would say it depends if you mean a $200 pocket phone, or a $1000 pocket phone "discounted" to $200 with a 2 year contract. If the local ISP sold a $1000 laptop for $200 with the caveat that I use their network for 2 years, they'd sell a shitload of computers. However, since the ISP telecom market is an oligopoly full of non-competition agreements and price fixing (in the US at least) there's no incentive for them to do this like there is for wireless companies.
Hm. I wonder how well Verizon would sell tablets if they offered them for $50 with a 2-3 year contract?
Most people have very minimal needs.
I would say "Most people's needs are minimal." The distinction is very important. Most people have some computing needs that cannot be met by touch-only input and a slow processor (i.e. smartphone and/or tablet).
Agreed. At some point almost everybody misses a mouse and keyboard. Or at least misses having a typewriter. I can't imagine doing one's taxes on an iPad or smartphone would be particularly enjoyable. However, I'm sure someone here on SlashDot is jonesing to reply and tell me I'm wrong and that their iTax experience was orgasmic.
There are even some people who have many computing needs that cannot be met by devices like that.
I think the percentage of people who can meet all of their computing needs with a smartphone and/or tablet, and who will not ever need a notebook or desktop computer, is still low enough that calling Microsoft Windows dead is just silly.
Also agreed. The tech business media can't tell the difference between a mature market (PCs) and an emerging one (smartphones and tablets). The PC market is stagnant due in part to Windows 8 not being what people want (compared to Windows 7, which was exactly what most people wanted). Office 2013 is fantastic, outside of the shoehorned cloud BS, but the major benefit I see over office 2010 is that MDI is finally dead. That matters to me since I use a lot of Excel on multiple monitors, but it won't matter to most people. Office 2010 is largely good enough, and Office 2013 can be seen as just adding bloated cloud nonsense.
The existence and popularity of Windows 8 Start Menu applications like Start8 and Pokki should be telling MS designers that not an insignificant number of their desktop users want the functionality they spent the last 15 years building in to the Start button, even if it doesn't make sense for touch users. Overall, I think Windows 8 should be teaching Microsoft that designing a desktop to be a desktop is what traditional PC users want. People jumped on the GUI and mouse because the DOS command line was shit for getting work done for 95% of the users. Unfortunately, the next big interface innovation, touch, is also shit for getting work done for many users.
Of course, MS might not learn these abject lessons. Ubuntu didn't, and if DistroWatch is any indication users have abandoned it for better, more traditional interfaces in Mint and Mageia (of all distros). Heck, even classic Debian is making a comeback thanks to Unity. Fortunately for Linux, users can more easily control what their desktop looks like. Unfortunately, most regular people don't understand what "OS" even means, so they're going to think that Windows 8 is just the end of the desktop. Until the next version of Windows that doesn't suck comes out.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I was thinking. I was a sysadmin at a small EE firm building testing stations. All the CNC systems we built that had to be extremely precise and relied on the high end microcontrollers and actuators invariably ran QNX. The systems that could be cheaper and less robust overall tended to run National Instruments controllers with LabView applications on Windows XP, which were cheaper both to develop and to deploy.
Laptops are bulky and heavy. Netbooks offer a terrible user experience (mostly thanks to Microsoft forcing lousy specs on vendors as a prerequisite for Windows Starter licensing).
I've taken my iPad with me on my last few business trips. It was light and with a big enough display for comfortable use without being too big (or too small like smartphone displays). (Although I'm not happy Apple has already abandoned updates on my not-even-3-years-old iPad 1 -- might have to consider an Android tablet next time.)
I, too have taken my iPad to meetings and on business trips. It's an iPad 2 with a nice sliding Logitech stand and Bluetooth keyboard.
Generally, it was not worth the suitcase space. I took it to all my seminars and was able to take notes on it, but several of the websites I needed to go to did not work correctly (and sometimes not at all). Our VPN doesn't support iPad, our database tools, development tools, and system management tools don't support iPad, and connecting to my workplace workstation with RDP or VNC is a complete joke due to the hilariously cramped screen.
Thus, I came to this conclusion: iPad is great for notes (with a keyboard) since it lasts all day, quasi-adequate for web browsing, and useless for computing. It made me question whether or not I should just use a plain notepad and pen -- which were provided at the seminar for free. Next time I'm debating taking a laptop, even though it will chain me to seats near outlets.
TLDR: The big boys saturated and mismanaged the market, then when they closed down all the talent went to the small houses.
Sounds like normal business to me. Hopefully the talent can pass on what they know to the next generation and foster a real industry.
Um...what's the "unlikely place"?
The Internet.
Pinball was killed by video arcade games. Video arcade games were killed by home consoles and home computers (which included things like video pinball). Home consoles and computers moved to Internet-based distribution or multi-player systems. Now TV is becaming Internet-based, too, and livestreaming games is taking off like a rocket. Now people have begun livestreaming pinball, and it's popularity increases as new people are exposed to the games and they see how people really play them.
Pinball died because of the computer made it obsolete. Now it lives because the computer lets people see why it's not obsolete.
Sorry, you've grown too attached to your computer. You're no longer anything remotely respectful like customer. You're a consumer. You exist to have your time sold to other companies.
The tablet isn't "automobile vs horse". Neither smartphones nor laptops could be considered "horses" and those are what bookend the tablet market.
The basic issue is that people want something small and easy to carry with a lot of on-the-go features like telephone, texting, and GPS like a smartphone. However, they also want something they can sit down and compose documents or browse the web on for long periods of time. They also want something that can replace a book, an MP3 player, and a television. This is all possible because all of these tasks involve using the Internet in today's world (with true 4G LTE cellular networks become a true IP-based network that is connected to and routable by the Internet), and tablets take advantage of this.
Tablets, like netbooks before them, are an attempt to merge semi-portable laptop computers and semi-multipurpose smartphones into a single superdevice. I would continue to argue that tablets are still shitty devices, however. They're only slightly less shitty than netbooks, and that's why they're doing well. Apple may have understood that tablets are shitty smartphone-laptops, however, and instead positioned the iPad as a third device primarily for media consumption (music/movies/limited games/books/web/web-like apps) which is really all the device does well. This has turned out to be a new market, which is why the segment has seen such explosive growth. One of the mistake market analysts make is that they think tablets replace laptops or smartphones, when, in reality, they merely provide feature subsets of both. Certainly, some users will find they no longer need a laptop with a tablet, but I don't think this is that significant.
The other mistake is that the market analysts have forgotten the difference between developing and developed markets. Established markets like laptop computers and cellphones (smartphones are overtaking and replacing regular phones, rather than being an emerging market) have shown stagnant growth because they're developed and saturated markets. The majority of sales are for replacement devices rather than new owners. Tablets, OTOH, represent an emerging market, with many people purchasing their first tablet. It's difficult to speculate how long it will take for the tablet market to saturate, but it's clear that what was once thought to be just a segment of the computer market is instead a completely different market altogether.
What may happen is that families that currently own multiple laptops will instead own a single laptop and multiple tablets instead. I could see that, particularly if tablets stop being so strictly linked to a single person as if they're a smartphone or internal organ.
Let's say this is how things are now. Assume a family of two adults and two or more children:
Each adult owns a single-user smartphone.
Children share one to two plain cellphones (or hand-me-down smartphones).
Each adult owns one single-user laptop.
Each family owns one multi-user desktop.
Each family owns one large screen TV, and two or more modest screen TVs.
Here's what I can see happening in the future:
Each adult will own a single-user smartphone.
Each child will own a cheap single-user smartphone.
Each family will have one multi-user laptop.
Each family will have one or two large screen displays (either TVs or computers primarily for video capabilities).
Each family will have two or three multi-user tablets.
See how the tablets provide coverage between televisions and laptops?
Personally, I think it's equally as likely that this happens:
Each adult will own a single-user smartphone.
Each child will own a cheap single-user smartphone.
Each family will have two or more multi-user or single-user laptops.
Each family will have one or two large screen displays (either TVs or computers primarily for video capabilities).
Each family will have one multi-user tablet.
That's more expensive, but also far more useful for many people.
Perhap
I always thought it was telling that we remember this speech, but not what happens next.
Col. Jessup confesses to ordering the murder of one of his subordinates. He is then immediately told he need say nothing more and that "the witness has rights". He is arrested, and removed from his "post" at the "wall". This is because we should and do question the manner in which we are provided security. In a country where the rule of law is used to provide protection of rights against those who would abuse or usurp them, honor, code, and loyalty are subordinate to rights, duty, and law.
If Col. Jessup's speech was right, he would've gotten away with his action. Instead, he was removed and court martialed. Col. Jessup put himself, his command, and the Marine Corp ahead of his country, his people, and his men. LCpl Dawson understood this after being dishonorably discharged when he said, "We were supposed to fight for people who couldn't fight for themselves. We were supposed to fight for Willie."
At least, that's the ideal. I'm sure cynics and pessimists eat that for breakfast. Idealism is fairly anachronistic these days.
That's beside the point. I was responding to his statement "The only thing that keeps MySQL popular is people who don't know what they are doing, which it does fine for."
A number of developers familiar with MySQL fire up PostgreSQL or MS SQL Server or Oracle, try it out for awhile, find that they get a ton of errors that they don't understand because MySQL let them get away with egregious idiocy, and then retreat back to MySQL.
Source: used to be me.
It did originally.
The reason COBOL required indention originally (and the reason it generally no longer does) is because it was necessary for punch cards. The indention moved the holes to where the card parser could identify codes correctly.
Open letters aren't designed to change the addressee's mind. They're designed to open the minds of people that neglected to think about the addressee's opinion or choice.
Using words I recognize as nonsense isn't the sole problem. It's vocabulary collisions. What if I meant the exact same thing you did, but write it like this:
Now you: a) can't use the context of the message you responded to (which is where we as the reader got the meaning), and b) you have no idea what I'm actually trying to say. Am I really talking about the construction of language, or the construction of a ship? If it's the former, well, I don't really understand what's being said, and if it's the latter, well, what was said still doesn't entirely make any sense. Yes, you can arrange words like that, and it's possible that might mean something in the correct conversation, but you've no idea what.
Languages do work without strict oversight. English, for example, has no regulation at all. This is somewhat unusual, especially considering English's popularity. However, English is also notoriously difficult to learn and notoriously difficult to use correctly. The rules are contradictory and inconsistent, partially because it bastardizes so many words from other languages. English, but like the country it comes from, is part Scottish/Gaelic, part Welsh/Gaelic, part Norse, part Germanic, part French, and part Latin.
Come to think of it, English is just as badly abused as web design: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, JSON, XML plus all the media content types, plus back end technologies for dynamic sites like PHP, ASP, Ruby, Python, Perl, XSLT running on lighttpd, apache, IIS, nginx and databases like SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle and so on. The web is made up of 10,000 different technologies all doing different things toward the same end. It's a huge pain in the ass already, to be honest. Making it worse by removing the base stability of HTML seems like people deciding that directly verbing nouns should replace more appropriate verbs.
Crap forgot to add the important part. Sorry about that:
Because the money supply is limited, just as the quantity of goods and services are limited, so, too, must net profits be a zero-sum game. If someone doesn't give you their money, they're going to give it to someone else or keep it for themselves. You can't get that profit back. You have to get profits elsewhere, but the fact that you lost a sale to A doesn't mean you can make a sale to B. It just means you can't make a sale to A and B both.
Profits are not finite, or more precisely, bound in such a manner that forces someone's win to match someone's losses.
Don't be silly. Profits are bounded by the value of good and services produced. That is to say, they're bounded by the economy. The value of goods and services produced is finite -- you can only produce so much in one day -- so is the gross revenue, and therefore so are the net profits. Even in the digital world where you could theoretically produce quadrillions of digital licenses of valuable software at the same price, the money supply limits you. You couldn't sell 5 quadrillion licenses for WinRAR simply because $150 quadrillion USD does not exist. The money supply isn't that big.
It's precisely this kind of magical thinking about stocks and commodities that makes the stock market so volatile and ridiculously destructive when the illusion disappears.
If you don't want them using that information, don't give it to them. It's your choice. The government should not get involved.
These businesses can still get info about you even if you don't directly deal with them. So you're arguing froma false premise from the start.
Not at all. You gave your information to the business freely and made no requests that your information not be freely disclosed. That means they are free to do with your information whatever they wish (within the bounds of the law, of course, and subject to any potential consequences). If you did not want your information used by the business or sold to others by them, you should have specified that before agreeing to the business arrangement that required you to give them your information in the first place.
The fact that web services offer no room for negotiation on these terms is precisely why Americans now find it necessary to impose government regulations. What was once a business contract handled in person between two people is not now a automated process with an agreement written by several dozen lawyers on one side and absolutely no negotiations accepted. You can't negotiate with a static contract with an "I agree to these terms" checkbox.
It's precisely this kind of abuse that caused consumer protection agencies to come into existence. Once a business has a significant portion of a market, they lose any incentive to negotiate. Once every business in the market is like this, those who were once valuable clients and customers suddenly become mere consumers. So, Americans turn to government regulation because they are unable to get consumer-oriented businesses to stop being gigantic, selfish assholes.
Keep in mind that if we're talking about Kindergartners that "a couple of months" is a significant amount of time, and at this age brain development is almost exactly a function of age. They're only 60-70 months old. It shouldn't be surprising that those that are 70 months old do better than those who are only 60. They've been alive 20% longer! Certainly, there are outliers, but they're going to score exceptionally either way (good or bad). Additionally, knowing the age of your subjects allows for basic test feedback to verify that nothing is wrong (older students should generally outscore younger ones). I'd agree that differences less than one month are unlikely to be significant, but since there's no significant cost to using the actual birthdate instead of just the birth month (there would have been prior to computerized data processing) then there's no reason at all to not use the complete birth date.
Here's another thing to keep in mind:
"Even before the error, the number of students qualifying for gifted seats — 9,020 — was far higher than the number of seats. The new number is more than 11,700. The competition is most acute for the citywide programs, where only several hundred seats are available."
So, yeah, 2,000 more students qualify, but the programs were apparently already full. Congratulations, Timmy! We made a mistake and you qualify for advanced schoolwork! Now go back to your regular classroom.
That said, I work in education IT. The fact that this mistake was made by Pearson doesn't shock or surprise me in the slightest. As soon as I saw their name I thought, "Oh, Pearson did it? No wonder it was wrong." Their software is shit and the fact that they're "industry leaders" should be a tremendous mark of shame upon the education assessment industry as a whole. Pearson is like your local cable company or wireless provider. They're the not a good choice, but they're often the best choice available.
Actually, you're not "giving up" any rights at all when you adopt a license, regardless of what it is. You're simply offering an agreement that allows others to do what you explicitly mention. It just so happens that the BSD license lets you do pretty much everything. That is, everything that doesn't violate one of the clauses of the license (copyright notice and copy of license must be retained with source and binary distribtions, and potentially that the author's name may not be used to promote derivative software). The only reason someone as a programmer can offer such an agreement and not be ignored is because you retain your rights.
No, that's Alabama. This is Mike Rogers (R-MI). Michigan's state motto is "Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice". "If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you".
Having lived in Michigan almost my entire life, I've never met anyone looking for a pleasant peninsula. There are plenty of phallus-shaped objects such as the distinguished representative in the story, but nobody looking for a pleasant peninsula. Most people are looking for jobs now that so many of the manufacturing jobs have left the state.
MSE started off well, but has been in steady decline since its release.
Of course it has. The last thing any virus or malware author does before releasing their program is check to make sure that the most popular anti-virus and anti-malware products of the day don't detect it. MSE was excellent when nobody used it. Now that it's a de facto standard, it's probably the first thing they check against. It's a basic selection pressure.
So, you want to trade in application that everybody is familiar with and has access to (in direct form or clone form) whose primary disadvantage is the proprietary data format -- which, albiet de jure proprietary is not de facto proprietary since every spreadsheet program made in the last 10 years can read the format. You want to trade this application in for another application that nobody has and nobody is familiar with, which not only suffers from the same proprietary data format problem (and a de facto one in this case) but also only functions on Apple hardware.
Brilliant!
I would disagree. I would bet that most of the examples you point out were due to fraud, greed, or manias. These are human conditions that exist without the profit motive. Or, another way to put it, capitalism (either in it's left wing “socialism light” or your hard right liberation form) is like democracy – a horrible system whose only saving grace is that it is better then any other system.
Doesn't that suggest the system should "be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants"? I, for one, would like to see what color blood comes out of an investment banker's heart.
Oh, so he's a grifter that hides behind the title "investor". We love those in America! He should go far.
Improv is dead (18 years dead), FlexiSheet is in early Alpha (no binaries available for download). Neither would be appropriate for this situation. It would be like suggesting Hurd over Linux. Quantrix or similar financial modeling software would be more appropriate, but a) they're expensive, b) they're limited in scope.
SPSS and R are very good at statistical analysis. Quantrix, MapleSoft, IBM Algorithmics, and other software is for financial data modeling. None of those is particularly appropriate for sharing data in a useful format with peers. Excel is.
Most places I've worked that deploy MS Office either a) don't support Access, or b) don't deploy Access at all.
Considering how trivial it generally is to transform an Access DB into a web application, only an extremely limited number of places I've worked still had Access DBs that were IT-supported. Unfortunately, they were also all Access 97 DBs that didn't work in Access 2000 even. I can't imagine they still use them today... God, I hope not.
A $200 pocket phone can do a lot of things a full desktop PC couldn't do a decade ago.
A $200 pocket phone still cannot do a lot of things a full desktop PC could do a decade ago.
I would say it depends if you mean a $200 pocket phone, or a $1000 pocket phone "discounted" to $200 with a 2 year contract. If the local ISP sold a $1000 laptop for $200 with the caveat that I use their network for 2 years, they'd sell a shitload of computers. However, since the ISP telecom market is an oligopoly full of non-competition agreements and price fixing (in the US at least) there's no incentive for them to do this like there is for wireless companies.
Hm. I wonder how well Verizon would sell tablets if they offered them for $50 with a 2-3 year contract?
Most people have very minimal needs.
I would say "Most people's needs are minimal." The distinction is very important. Most people have some computing needs that cannot be met by touch-only input and a slow processor (i.e. smartphone and/or tablet).
Agreed. At some point almost everybody misses a mouse and keyboard. Or at least misses having a typewriter. I can't imagine doing one's taxes on an iPad or smartphone would be particularly enjoyable. However, I'm sure someone here on SlashDot is jonesing to reply and tell me I'm wrong and that their iTax experience was orgasmic.
There are even some people who have many computing needs that cannot be met by devices like that.
I think the percentage of people who can meet all of their computing needs with a smartphone and/or tablet, and who will not ever need a notebook or desktop computer, is still low enough that calling Microsoft Windows dead is just silly.
Also agreed. The tech business media can't tell the difference between a mature market (PCs) and an emerging one (smartphones and tablets). The PC market is stagnant due in part to Windows 8 not being what people want (compared to Windows 7, which was exactly what most people wanted). Office 2013 is fantastic, outside of the shoehorned cloud BS, but the major benefit I see over office 2010 is that MDI is finally dead. That matters to me since I use a lot of Excel on multiple monitors, but it won't matter to most people. Office 2010 is largely good enough, and Office 2013 can be seen as just adding bloated cloud nonsense.
The existence and popularity of Windows 8 Start Menu applications like Start8 and Pokki should be telling MS designers that not an insignificant number of their desktop users want the functionality they spent the last 15 years building in to the Start button, even if it doesn't make sense for touch users. Overall, I think Windows 8 should be teaching Microsoft that designing a desktop to be a desktop is what traditional PC users want. People jumped on the GUI and mouse because the DOS command line was shit for getting work done for 95% of the users. Unfortunately, the next big interface innovation, touch, is also shit for getting work done for many users.
Of course, MS might not learn these abject lessons. Ubuntu didn't, and if DistroWatch is any indication users have abandoned it for better, more traditional interfaces in Mint and Mageia (of all distros). Heck, even classic Debian is making a comeback thanks to Unity. Fortunately for Linux, users can more easily control what their desktop looks like. Unfortunately, most regular people don't understand what "OS" even means, so they're going to think that Windows 8 is just the end of the desktop. Until the next version of Windows that doesn't suck comes out.