You've already got Asimov and Clarke and all the big classics. Of these, I personally recommend The Edge of Tomorrow, a collection of Asimov essays and short stories, before you get them started on the full-length novels. It was my first Asimov book, back in middle school, and it has all of the best short stories that you'll want to include. "The Last Question" in particular can spawn a number of discussions, on religion, on human nature, and even on Asimov's projection of the development of technology.
Because this class is suppose to be educational, Harry Turtledove's alternate histories are a great option- they require the students to learn the details of our own history before they can understand what makes the alternate realities in these books tick. It also challenges them to view actual history as something more than a series of names and dates; a concept my teachers in high school never bothered with.
Well, there are a couple of things that you got wrong here. First, overpriced or not, unlimited MMS is included as a part of the data plan you have to buy from AT&T when you have an iPhone. So cost won't matter.
No, actually, it's not. It was, back when the first iPhone came out, but now you're required to get a $30 data plan that includes no SMS or MMS messages. I pay for those at the a la carte rate of $.20 and $.30 each, respectively. If I sent more than 5 a month, I might consider an Messaging plan at an additional $5 to $30 a month, depending on which plan. But it's certainly NOT included in the price of the iPhone data plan.
MMS would have caught on with my friends a long time ago if it weren't so crippled by the phones that use it.
When I received an MMS on my old phone, I couldn't do anything with it but view it. I couldn't save it to my photo library, or set it as the wallpaper, forward the message, or anything, really. It was permanently attached to the SMS it came with, to either clog my inbox or be deleted. Thus, the useful functions of an MMS image are reduced to a) sending pictures of your drunk friends to other drunk friends and b) sending pictures penises to, well, anyone. With the ability of the iPhone to save an MMS photo to my photo roll, and from there send it by MMS or email to someone else, or edit it in an app, or later save it to my computer, I might actually use the MMS feature on occasion.
So, I feel that the crippled firmware of most phones is to blame for MMSes not catching on. Many of you will claim that the iPhone OS is likewise hobbled by Apple's tight controls, but if you think that the iPhone OS has it's hands tied by software/firmware, than normal phones are wrapped head to toe in duct tape, placed in cast iron sarcophaguses which are then welded shut, buried under several tons of concrete, and placed under armed guard for the rest of eternity.
Your mileage on phone OSes may vary. Prior to the iPhone, I used a Nokia flip phone that ran the default Cingular OS, whatever the hell that's called.
The UI is just another part of the mock-up. It looks to be very dependent on handwriting recognition for character input, like entering the URL, which is very, very difficult to do right. (Has anyone done this well enough to be useful yet?)
There's no evidence that the UI in general is any more developed than the hardware side of the device- and until someone actually gets their hands on one, we won't know if the UI is any good or not. Remember, this is the same company that produced Vista's shutdown menu.
At this point, it's still some designers throwing around ideas with some fancy CG mockups.
The iPhone and the Kindle were both introduced to the world as working physical devices on a stage. This is just awesome-looking vaporware, much like the following:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vBb3_aZN7g (first 30 seconds or so of the video are blank, for some reason)
There are LOTS of public domain books that are very hard to get a hold of in paper form. No publisher is going to reprint 200 year old books on obscure topics for which there is a market of 20 people. This makes those books accessible to those that need them, without the economies of scale that publishers rely on.
And pending the much-debated acquisition by Google of orphan books, they'll be a lot more obscure out-of-print books seeing life again.
I've got an iPhone, which has that convenient iPod function. I have many, many gigs of music that I downloaded from Napster in it's heyday/ripped off of CDs, purchased by me or by friends/purchased off iTunes.
I also have the Pandora App.
Honestly, Pandora wins most of the time. I use the music in the iPod app when Pandora is unavailable, like when I don't have 3G coverage (metro tunnels), when using other apps (Turn-by-turn navigation), or when I want to pick and choose tracks. So, while Pandora is my first choice, I still do use and enjoy the music I have actually downloaded, not streamed.
When I was in high school (not all that long ago), we had to write and perform skits on occasion. Now, I am watching (and occasionally being an extra in) videos my younger brother is putting together on the same subjects.
Where my classmates and I acted out a commercial for a breakfast cereal in Spanish, my brother and his friends borrow a video camera from an unwitting parent, create props and costumes (99 cent store!), and drive around town to film at the beach or in the park or whereever. They made a commerical for a Spanish-language car dealership, complete with LLAME AHORA in huge letters across the bottom of the screen. They also filmed a music video based on the Vietnam war that made several of our relatives cry.
They're not just learning Spanish and History and how to write a script, they're learning how to use a video camera, how to use video editing software, how to do special effects with strings and miniatures and perspective shots, and even some basic CG work.
Unfortunately, none of them have yet learned to act.
The built-in Google Maps does automatically display the next direction when you reach a turn, it does not reroute when you go off course, and it does not do anything aloud- everything is displayed in small text.
I have been using the Google Maps in the iPhone for about a year, and it is definitely useful, but it's not a TomTom equivalent. It requires a navigator to be used effectively. Someone other than the driver needs to press the next button and read the directions aloud- otherwise it's like trying to text while driving.
The app isn't available in the US yet, for whatever reason. While you could go and run the exchange rate to get the price in USD, it's likely that they'll set a different price point for US customers. I'm gonna guess $100.
The timing on this is just lovely- I just picked up the Navigon turn-by-turn app yesterday for $70, since I got tired of waiting for TomTom. I haven't even had a chance to use it yet.
I bought a used book once only to find out that you needed one of these activation codes to access the online content... meh. It didn't look like the online content was anything more than the text content in PDF.
Well, it turns out that all homework for that course was turned in via the website+activation code. And that the program it wanted me to use to do the homework didn't run on Macs.
I dropped that section of the course and enrolled with a teacher who had better taste in textbooks.
I'm 23 and I learned to write cursive. For a couple years there, they actually required everything we turned in to be written in cursive.
Then high school happened and everything had to be typed, so no one used cursive for anything, and the skill deteriorated quickly.
Then college happened, and even foreign language homework has to be typed after the third year (which is understandable for a latin-based language, but this was Japanese and Arabic)
I don't need fancy graphics and awesome special effects. They're nice, but I don't need them. I DO need readable text-- for everything. Non-voiced dialog, menu options, etc.
I don't have the money to buy an HDTV, nor the desire to bring one into a house so likely to see a wiimote thrown straight through it. So, I'm stuck squinting and getting real close to the TV to try and figure out what menu option I'm about to select.
They're between a rock and a hard place: Either they violate their EULA with customers, or they violate US copyright law and get sued by Orwell's estate.
A) The wireless access has to be turned on by you before they can do anything. It is NOT always online.
B) This is a case of selling content they didn't have a licence to sell. This "recall" of sorts was legally covering their ass, since they were selling a pirated copy of the book.
You can back up your Kindle books to your computer hard drive. In two clicks, from a web browser.
So, the amount of Kindle books you can back up is limited to your hard drive space + removable media.
There's no thing so horrifying in the world as hearing your 12 year old cousin plot a potentially dangerous experiment and when confronted about it say, "It's ok, we watch Mythbusters!"
I will be shocked if that child survives to adulthood.
Slashdot Mirror
You've already got Asimov and Clarke and all the big classics. Of these, I personally recommend The Edge of Tomorrow, a collection of Asimov essays and short stories, before you get them started on the full-length novels. It was my first Asimov book, back in middle school, and it has all of the best short stories that you'll want to include. "The Last Question" in particular can spawn a number of discussions, on religion, on human nature, and even on Asimov's projection of the development of technology.
Because this class is suppose to be educational, Harry Turtledove's alternate histories are a great option- they require the students to learn the details of our own history before they can understand what makes the alternate realities in these books tick. It also challenges them to view actual history as something more than a series of names and dates; a concept my teachers in high school never bothered with.
Well, there are a couple of things that you got wrong here. First, overpriced or not, unlimited MMS is included as a part of the data plan you have to buy from AT&T when you have an iPhone. So cost won't matter.
No, actually, it's not. It was, back when the first iPhone came out, but now you're required to get a $30 data plan that includes no SMS or MMS messages. I pay for those at the a la carte rate of $.20 and $.30 each, respectively. If I sent more than 5 a month, I might consider an Messaging plan at an additional $5 to $30 a month, depending on which plan. But it's certainly NOT included in the price of the iPhone data plan.
MMS would have caught on with my friends a long time ago if it weren't so crippled by the phones that use it.
When I received an MMS on my old phone, I couldn't do anything with it but view it. I couldn't save it to my photo library, or set it as the wallpaper, forward the message, or anything, really. It was permanently attached to the SMS it came with, to either clog my inbox or be deleted. Thus, the useful functions of an MMS image are reduced to a) sending pictures of your drunk friends to other drunk friends and b) sending pictures penises to, well, anyone. With the ability of the iPhone to save an MMS photo to my photo roll, and from there send it by MMS or email to someone else, or edit it in an app, or later save it to my computer, I might actually use the MMS feature on occasion.
So, I feel that the crippled firmware of most phones is to blame for MMSes not catching on. Many of you will claim that the iPhone OS is likewise hobbled by Apple's tight controls, but if you think that the iPhone OS has it's hands tied by software/firmware, than normal phones are wrapped head to toe in duct tape, placed in cast iron sarcophaguses which are then welded shut, buried under several tons of concrete, and placed under armed guard for the rest of eternity.
Your mileage on phone OSes may vary. Prior to the iPhone, I used a Nokia flip phone that ran the default Cingular OS, whatever the hell that's called.
Handwriting for the URL may be tiring, but at least it's not voice recognition.
H T T P colon slash slash W W W dot slash dot dot org
The UI is just another part of the mock-up. It looks to be very dependent on handwriting recognition for character input, like entering the URL, which is very, very difficult to do right. (Has anyone done this well enough to be useful yet?)
There's no evidence that the UI in general is any more developed than the hardware side of the device- and until someone actually gets their hands on one, we won't know if the UI is any good or not. Remember, this is the same company that produced Vista's shutdown menu.
At this point, it's still some designers throwing around ideas with some fancy CG mockups.
The iPhone and the Kindle were both introduced to the world as working physical devices on a stage. This is just awesome-looking vaporware, much like the following:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vBb3_aZN7g (first 30 seconds or so of the video are blank, for some reason)
There are LOTS of public domain books that are very hard to get a hold of in paper form. No publisher is going to reprint 200 year old books on obscure topics for which there is a market of 20 people. This makes those books accessible to those that need them, without the economies of scale that publishers rely on.
And pending the much-debated acquisition by Google of orphan books, they'll be a lot more obscure out-of-print books seeing life again.
I've got an iPhone, which has that convenient iPod function. I have many, many gigs of music that I downloaded from Napster in it's heyday/ripped off of CDs, purchased by me or by friends/purchased off iTunes.
I also have the Pandora App.
Honestly, Pandora wins most of the time. I use the music in the iPod app when Pandora is unavailable, like when I don't have 3G coverage (metro tunnels), when using other apps (Turn-by-turn navigation), or when I want to pick and choose tracks. So, while Pandora is my first choice, I still do use and enjoy the music I have actually downloaded, not streamed.
So... do we really have to choose?
Honestly, this is already happening.
When I was in high school (not all that long ago), we had to write and perform skits on occasion. Now, I am watching (and occasionally being an extra in) videos my younger brother is putting together on the same subjects.
Where my classmates and I acted out a commercial for a breakfast cereal in Spanish, my brother and his friends borrow a video camera from an unwitting parent, create props and costumes (99 cent store!), and drive around town to film at the beach or in the park or whereever. They made a commerical for a Spanish-language car dealership, complete with LLAME AHORA in huge letters across the bottom of the screen. They also filmed a music video based on the Vietnam war that made several of our relatives cry.
They're not just learning Spanish and History and how to write a script, they're learning how to use a video camera, how to use video editing software, how to do special effects with strings and miniatures and perspective shots, and even some basic CG work.
Unfortunately, none of them have yet learned to act.
A comparison of all the mapping software on the iphone, including TomTom and GoogleMaps.
It's showing up on the app store on my phone right now. Make sure you're searching for "tomtom" as "tom tom" returns no results.
It's up on the US app store now:
US & Can $99.99
Western Europe $139.33
Australia $79.99
New Zealand $94.99
The built-in Google Maps does automatically display the next direction when you reach a turn, it does not reroute when you go off course, and it does not do anything aloud- everything is displayed in small text.
I have been using the Google Maps in the iPhone for about a year, and it is definitely useful, but it's not a TomTom equivalent. It requires a navigator to be used effectively. Someone other than the driver needs to press the next button and read the directions aloud- otherwise it's like trying to text while driving.
The app isn't available in the US yet, for whatever reason. While you could go and run the exchange rate to get the price in USD, it's likely that they'll set a different price point for US customers. I'm gonna guess $100.
The timing on this is just lovely- I just picked up the Navigon turn-by-turn app yesterday for $70, since I got tired of waiting for TomTom. I haven't even had a chance to use it yet.
I bought a used book once only to find out that you needed one of these activation codes to access the online content... meh. It didn't look like the online content was anything more than the text content in PDF.
Well, it turns out that all homework for that course was turned in via the website+activation code. And that the program it wanted me to use to do the homework didn't run on Macs.
I dropped that section of the course and enrolled with a teacher who had better taste in textbooks.
I'm 23 and the only time I have ever touched a fountain pen was during a one-day calligraphy lesson in middle school.
It has never even occurred to me before reading this that you might do anything other than type a resume.
Typewriters have been around for ages. Thirty years ago, was it good form to type a resume?
I'm 23 and I learned to write cursive. For a couple years there, they actually required everything we turned in to be written in cursive.
Then high school happened and everything had to be typed, so no one used cursive for anything, and the skill deteriorated quickly.
Then college happened, and even foreign language homework has to be typed after the third year (which is understandable for a latin-based language, but this was Japanese and Arabic)
Mod parent up!
I don't need fancy graphics and awesome special effects. They're nice, but I don't need them. I DO need readable text-- for everything. Non-voiced dialog, menu options, etc.
I don't have the money to buy an HDTV, nor the desire to bring one into a house so likely to see a wiimote thrown straight through it. So, I'm stuck squinting and getting real close to the TV to try and figure out what menu option I'm about to select.
They're between a rock and a hard place: Either they violate their EULA with customers, or they violate US copyright law and get sued by Orwell's estate.
They're stored in a text file on the Kindle itself, in addition to appearing in the book where the annotation is made. It's called MyClippings.txt
A) The wireless access has to be turned on by you before they can do anything. It is NOT always online.
B) This is a case of selling content they didn't have a licence to sell. This "recall" of sorts was legally covering their ass, since they were selling a pirated copy of the book.
You can back up your Kindle books to your computer hard drive. In two clicks, from a web browser. So, the amount of Kindle books you can back up is limited to your hard drive space + removable media.
Actually, you would not, since in this case it would be a stolen book, which would have been confiscated and returned to the rightful owner.
At least the Kindle owners here got a refund.
There's no thing so horrifying in the world as hearing your 12 year old cousin plot a potentially dangerous experiment and when confronted about it say, "It's ok, we watch Mythbusters!"
I will be shocked if that child survives to adulthood.