The current version costs $178.50, with the usual Amazon discount. It's not unreasonable to expect a publisher to be able to print something for far, far less than you can get a single item printed -- when that's not the case, there's something drastically wrong.
But why not an electronic version? The replication costs are nothing... in fact, really nothing, since in selling via Amazon, it's Amazon paying the very tiny cost of maintaining the web site, distributing the book copy, etc. And yet many publishers don't offer electronic versions (including this one). They're milking the perception that a physical item is worth more, and in most cases, maintaining their higher profits.
Obviously, a textbook doesn't sell in the same volume as a bestseller. But there's not necessarily all that much money spent on it. Most of the books in use were written long ago, and updated every couple of years, but in many cases, the update is minimal, just another way to de-value used editions. So the shelf life of a textbook is many times that of a bestseller.
While all true, it's not sustainable. If the college costs keep rising and the middle class keeps shrinking, many colleges are going to find themselves without any students. And enterprising students won't simply be deciding to just skip college and go pump gas somewhere, they'll find other ways to lean the same things... which is really what smart employers care about, more than that diploma on the wall.
Already, alternatives are on the rise. Various online learning systems are free or cheap, but still make a quality education possible. Perhaps some of these are more useful for continuing education than as a replacement for undergraduate college, but eventually, maybe not. Things can only get squeezed so hard before there's a means around that damage. A rapid decline in qualified graduates is going to cause all sorts of problems with the US tech industry. And they're likely to figure out a means of fixing it. Hopefully some of us get paid more along the way:-)
It's kind of a generational thing, too... unless you're a geek, like many of us here. I think the current crop of educators are largely not "computer people", so they reject the idea of using an electronic book. There just has to be something wrong with it.
But that's going to change. When I was a kid, I read like crazy, pretty much anything I could get my hands on. My Daughter was like that, not by Son. Not until he got a Kindle, anyway. Once he had that, that first summer, he was reading a novel or two a week. Totally turned his reading habits around.. and I don't think he'd bother, even today, with a paper book.
Far as retention goes, personally, my brain works fine either way. I have printed texts, tablet texts, online video lectures, etc. All seem perfectly interchangeable, far as what I learn from them. But it's easy to imagine that, for a person uncomfortable with the very notion of using a eBook reader, their retention might be less, as they're in some way fighting the book the whole way though. So even if this so-called study was not rigged from the get-go, it's measuring something, but not necessarily what the test givers believe it to measure.
At my Son's college (Rowan University), the bookstore is actually run by Barnes & Noble. And yet, they have full ISBN available online. You do need to know the course you're taking, and you're safer knowing the precise session (apparently, not all professors teaching the same course always use the same material), but with your generic university ID, you can browse all this stuff online.
For my Daughter's college (Montclair University... yeah, I have two in college this year, ouch!), the bookstore is online, and books are easy enough to find. They publish the author, edition, and titles, but not the ISBN. So it's more difficult to be certain you have the exact book, however, I don't know of a case in which the author/title/edition leads to the wrong book. Yet...
That's not to say online additional content is useless -- it's probably quite useful. But it's also fixed -- you write the book, you write the web site, you're done, or you go onto the next edition of the same book or whatever. This isn't exclusively a textbook thing, either; plenty of books intended for professionals and others have "additional web content" available.
The difference is this: when I buy a book, say, for some hardware or software development thing, aimed at professionals, that web content pretty much just comes with the book. You'll look in an appendix somewhere, it'll tell you the URL, you download or read online or whatever. Logically, just an extension of the book.
The textbook publishers could do the same thing here. They're charging 2x-4x as much for the book in the first place, the web content isn't inherently more expensive, it doesn't need more maintenance, and in fact, once you've developed the framework, it's pretty much just a bit of extra content uploaded for every book. But of course, the whole point of the site is to lower the value of used textbooks, making it difficult or even impossible to use a used (or even rental) book for a course that requires this access. Some publishers will sell you an access code, for a fairly substantial percentage of the cost of the book/code bundle.
Depends... you're basically describing the Jersey Shore. Most New Jersey beaches are not free. In the North, you have Sandy Hook, which is free, being a national recreation area, but you have to pay to park your car, if you're parking in the beach lots. Pretty much everywhere down the cost, the beaches are owned by the towns they're in, and you have to buy a beach tag. This is in part to pay for life guards, in part for beach cleanup, and in a big part for beach maintenance. Left alone, most o of the sand on most of the beaches would wash away. So every so often, each town has to pay the Army Corp of Engineers (usually) to dredge up some sand to re-fill the beaches.
The fees don't stop the tourists. In fact, most of the Northern and Central beaches are absolutely packed with people, on any given day.
Except Wildwood. That's basically where all the sand goes. So they don't have the shrinking beach problem. And they have a very large boardwalk, so local taxes cover the cost of beach cleanup and lifeguards. But this, too, is self-regulating... Wildwood is about the most remote point down the shore. You can go to Wildwood most days and find plenty of open space on the beach (for some weird reason, you'll also find Canadians everywhere, at least in the "official" summer season, which just ended last weekend... haven't figured that part out)
I should point out (before I get smacked down on it) that, yes, there are variable tuning elements... mostly, electrically adjustable capacitors. There are the old school variactors (it's a diode with a bias voltage that varies it's parasitic capacitance based on the bias level), and more recently, some MEMS devices. They're not very good. You don't really get to re-tune an entire circuit in arbitrary ways. It's far more like bending, on a harmonica reed or guitar string. You have a fundamental tuned circuit, and you can vary the tuning over a range, but as you move off the fundamental, the quality goes down. So this is not the best solution.
There are also digital modulation schemes that are pretty frequency independent, but you still need the analog front-end. At very low power (Wi-fi in the office sort of stuff), no one cares about the inefficiencies of Class A amplifiers. On mobile devices, you better care.
Just consider amplifiers. There are now dozens of amplifier topologies, or "classes", in use. Some pretty clever ones, like class F, G, and H use techniques only really suited to the computer age -- modulated power supplies, digital pre-distortion to cancel out defects in the driver transistors, etc. Thanks to these, you can get in excess of 95% efficiency (particularly in the case of some of these more advanced digital techniques). The one problem: every one of these amplifier topologies is frequency specific -- you have to tune it to a very specific frequency band to get good performance. With one exception: the Class A amplifier. Which delivers about 20% efficiency in practical use. So basically, you either have a single very, very inefficient amplifier that can transmit just about anywhere, or a bunch of separate amplifiers for specific bands. Guess which one everyone's using?
That's one of several big problems in building radio systems that can just tune anywhere. And you still need rules to decide what frequencies to use, in order to have a conversation. If it weren't the FCC, we'd be just as much as the mercy of some industry standards body. Just like Wi-Fi... there was no mandate that Wi-Fi go on 2.4GHz (though sure, that was one of only a few ISM bands available). But the industry standardized on it anyway, just to get the radios talking to one another. If you want Wi-Fi on another frequency, you basically have to build a frequency transverter system to convert your band of choice to something around 2.4 or 5.8GHz (hint: I designed a frequency transverter device, with PAs and LNAs, to allow Wi-Fi signals, standard and not-so-standard, to be used at frequencies from 50-2000MHz).
There were three software utility patents and three design patents judged to be infringed by some of the original Samsung devices in question. Apple's '381 "bounce-back" patent was one of these -- that's in Samsung's TouchWiz home shell, but not part of normal Android. So it's certainly not an issue on the Galaxy Nexus, not sure if the SIII's version of TouchWiz still does this. And like most of these, it's questionable anyway (http://www.talkandroid.com/127447-technology-expert-claims-apples-bounce-back-patent-is-invalid/).
There was also an issue of pinch-to-zoom as described in their '915 patent. This is definitely not the way pinch-to-zoom works in Android JellyBean, not sure if Google addressed this earlier or not. Apple's patent might well fail against the mountain of prior art on multitouch, but the '915 patent counts on multi-touch operations that use one anchor finger and one moving finger. So if it's done differently on the newer devices, there's not even an issue. '915 isn't specifically about pinch-to-zoom, either, and like the others, is being looked at heavily now (http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoom-patent-myth).
The last software utility patent is Apple's '163 tap-to-zoom patent. But that's not simply [double]tap-to-zoom, it deals with specifics about where the zoom is centered. This, maybe some of the others, may be too subtle in detail for the jury, or maybe they just weren't presented well.
Some of the older Samsung phones pretty much did look like iPhones. Two design patents covered the White ('D087) and Black ('D677) iPhones. It's true that some of the Samsung phones did mysteriously have the one big button on the front, rather than the four-or-five that the G1 and others ripped off from Palm:-)
The final design patent ('D305) is about the look of the rounded boxy icons on the iPhone home screen. Samsung went out of their way to change Android into this look -- Android from the early days had more "normal" icons, no bounding box displays, transparency, etc... going well back into the 80s if not earlier. Now, I think there have been others to use that look -- some of the early SymbianOS UIs did. And given this is a design patent, it's for the look, not any mechanism in the OS that enforces this or not, just what you get out of the box. So that ought to have been shown as prior art. Again, I'm not used to design patents, and they really don't say much about what's important in the design, just, "here's thing, give patent".
Clearly, the new devices don't look like iPhones. The Galaxy Nexus doesn't have any front-button, and it's got a curved screen, not the flat screen of the iPhone. Backside is contoured and pebbly, not flat and smooth (designed to slip out of your hands, but that's another Apple patent not asserted here, since GN's don't usually attempt to eject themselves from your grip, as do iOS devices). And the SIII is even more different... kind of the opposite. The iPhone is all 1960s Deiter Rams industrial looking, the SIII is kind of organic looking, smooth and pebbly, closer if anything to a gigantic Palm Pre than a slightly less gigantic iPhone 4. And one would hope Samsung's fixed their issues with TouchWiz, maybe just stayed with stock Android, to avoid trouble with Apple in these other areas.
Taking other ideas, and adding to them, improving them, using them in different ways, etc. is progress. Making something as exactly like someone else's thing without any improvement (and in this case, basically uglifying Android to make it look more like iOS) is not advancing things.
I don't know all the rules surrounding design patents (the patents Apple had on their rounded-square icons, and separate patents for the "black" and "white" iPhones), but yes, I agree, patents should be very specific. I have written many utility patents, analyzed probably hundreds over the years. Some are well written and really do describe an "oh, that's pretty cool" invention. Others get me angry, patenting things I had figured out, on my own, in High School (which, if nothing else, should automatically fail the "test of obviousness" on that patent).
On the other hand, Samsung's not entirely blameless, and some of their hacks to Android really did make it look more like iPhone OS. For example, the rows of icons has been around since the Palm and the Newton, but Android doesn't force icons into rounded squares. Though I think some early releases of SymbianOS did, so there's probably prior art enough to invalidate this as a patent. The also did the skeuomorphic "scroll bounce back" thing in their home screen shell, which is also not part of Android stock, but has been a very well known Apple patent. Samsung was at the least ignoring Apple's patents, maybe even baiting them. Even if the patents themselves all get struck down, Samsung might still be guilty of imitating the "trade dress" of the iPhone, which is really copying the gestalt of the whole thing, not any single individual element (eg, it stands as a thing aside from copyrights, trademarks, and patents).
Actually, it's been obvious to Apple followers (not fanbois, but those actually watching closely) that they'd have been a whole lot more evil than Microsoft. Part of that's Apple's desire to really run everything... Microsoft had largely been happy just doing software. Apple was usually better at things than Microsoft, too -- MS tried very hard to be evil, and there did ok here and there, but they weren't always very good at it (though I think they'll redeem themselves with Windows 8, that's a work of profound evil). It's only now, that Apple's been really successful, rather than just on the fringe of things, that it's clear that they're capable of being so much worse than Microsoft.
Yup... that's correct. It isn't that there are so many Slashdotters buying products themselves. But really, when you're a well known "computer nerd", people do ask you about computers and related technology. I'd be surprised if recommending Apple were a common thing for most folks here anyway, particularly when you can at least get some satisfaction that the leading smartphone platform is Linux-based, and consumers are actually happy to use it. Google has walked a fairly clean road between keeping the OS FOSS and still allowing developers to have the workable development and distribution model they largely can't get out of the mainstream Linux community.
If you're getting worse connections on a 4G phone than your 3G phone, in the same places, etc... it's not 4G, it's your phone. After all, if the 4G connection can't be kept, you'll drop back to the same 3G connection you had previously. In fact, there are Android apps that force 4G off, entirely.
Sure sounds like you just got a crappy Galaxy Nexus. I have a GN too, and it replaced an O.G. Droid. I'm certain the O.G. Droid did a slightly better job of pulling in the 3G signals... I get slightly less performance in 3G areas that I did on the Droid. Nothing all that profound, usually insignificant.
On 4G, at least some places I could really measure, day to day (since daily traffic, weather, and other interference factors make it impossible to judge a system like this on a single day's testing), in areas with 4G towers, particularly indoors, I had far better success with 4G than 3G. Can't say how much of that might be due to less contention, but with my new phone at my old job, I was in Philadelphia, in a building that should have been RF trouble. Given that I design RF systems, I knew from first-hand experience the issues with this building. But 4G was a dramatic improvement over 3G, on signal strength and daily battery life.
I do agree about coverage. Verizon did claim they'd have LTE on every cell sometime in 2013. I have been seeing it in unexpected places more, lately. But nowhere near home. Of course, I can't get any wired internet to my house, either... to far into the boonies. I figure, if they were honest about this, we're getting our upgrade that last week they're doing the upgrades:-(
It's not just firms consolidating, but technological evolution leading to different barriers to entry.
It was relatively simple to set up a POTS ISP. We had this great phone system, the product of the government-approved AT&T monopoly. So the infrastructure existed, all you needed was to set up your bridge network from the phone to the internet, and virtually everyone was already wired in. Back in the 90s, an old buddy of mine started an ISP... it didn't need a huge company.
To build a competitive ISP now, you need to lay cable or fiber. Or, as a fill-in, launch satellites. This changes the game entirely.
It's curious that, if things had gone differently in the 60s and 70s, it might have once again been the public/private phone system wires carrying the load. The analog infrastructure needed back then for PicturePhone would have been ideally suited to fairly modern broadband.. the video needed a reliable 1MHz channel, plus the extra channel for voice, closer spaced amplifiers, bridges to T2 lines for longer hauls, etc. Better than 3x what you got over POTS, and with the digital infrastructure as well already routed.
Sure, there wasn't that much compelling about the PicturePhone itself, and the price was relatively insane. But the trail blazed by that technology would have been crazy. Until the Internet, there was no driving force for higher bandwidth at the consumer leaf, only for trunk traffic. And for most other purposes, the problems had been solved... consider that the T1 was developed in 1961 -- that's why you can get a T1 anywhere you can get POTS.
The problem with spectrum allocation is a technical one, too. You can't simply dial in the arbitrary frequencies you'd like to use in a place. Even with modern cognitive radio, this is limited, and leads to hardware that's much more expensive and less efficient than it would be otherwise. Your pocket cellphone, for example, would use on the order of 4x-5x more power if it had to cover arbitrary frequencies... and you'd have a big, ugly antenna to swap on/off, depending on the "wild west" assigned frequency used for the current stretch of road you're on. And a different one in another 20 miles, etc.
Current technology is already struggling a bit with the need for 5-6 frequencies and 3-4 antennas per cellphone. And that's still few enough bands to use much higher efficient, lower voltage PAs and LNAs and all. Once you have to tune in one 2.5MHz-10MHz channel anywhere in 2GHz+ of spectrum, practical radio is set 30 years behind.
Indeed if someone were to be sold a true range of frequency,
To sell something, you have to have a legitimate owner. Unless the government is the default owner of everything, there is no right in the first place to sell some range of frequencies.
We the People are the default owner of everything. That ownership is administered though our representative government. At least, that's the theory. And in these cases, the government does function as the best neutral party available. It would function better if our elected representatives weren't so easy for large business to bribe. But there is a very limited spectrum, and radios need near continuous and realtime access to this, particularly for longer distance communications, particularly for broadcast.
The new White Space rules should be an interesting case of a "polite free-for-all". This is going to attempt to let much of the normally unused broadcast TV spectrum be used for other things, like point to point fixed wireless. The initial rules were very difficult to comply with, and have been made somewhat better, but it's still throwing additional technology at the problem, to prevent the whole system from collapsing under interference.
Maybe. There is no guarantee that "owners" of various bandwidths would use them in a way which benefits the majority. There is no guarantee that one single firm doesn't end up buying them all up. A natural monopoly cannot be overcome by simply having some other guy create a competing good/service.
Right. Or even use them at all. If you can just grab spectrum, like land, there's no guarantee it'll be developed. Or used for something beneficial to the People, ultimately the actual owners of the spectrum. That's a key thing -- spectrum isn't owned, it's licensed. For a specific purpose. If the company holding that license violates the terms, they lose the license. These licenses have to be renewed regularly, so the FCC can ensure they're being used properly. Particularly for new technology, there's a grace period after a spectrum auction, but if any of the winners of that auction don't develop the intended technology, they lose the license. Period.
And there's the rub. Certainly Verizon and AT&T want more spectrum -- they have a working business model, and know how to turn that spectrum into 40%+ profits. Good for them. But a number of the winners of recent auctions haven't done anything with it yet, and they've been selling off licences to some of the big guys, in order to get some cash back on that investment, rather than lose it all. AT&T also had the unfortunate issue of T-Mobile -- their buyout failed, AT&T owed T-Mobile a big chunk of money. T-Mobile was hurting for spectrum -- they really didn't have any available for real 4G (and what they have for 3G is higher frequency AWS band slots). So AT&T's paying off some of their debt to T-Mobile with spectrum.
And in reality, sure, they act like they own it, because in practice they do -- you have to something terribly heinous, once granted a license, to lose it. But that can change over time, too, if there's a reason for it.
Higher frequencies also suffer from increased free air loss. Some higher frequencies are subject to rain fade. They drop off very quickly through foliage, and lose more through man-made structures.
Despite the worries about the extra power needed for 4G (only in terms of battery power, the LTE chips not being mature enough to make the digital processing layer basically not matter, as with 3G), my old office in Philadelphia was a good example. This is an old stone and brick building, which usually saw decent (2-3 bar) 3G service. Going to 4G, I typically saw full scale reception in the outer parts of the building, 2 bars or better deep into the building, and got overall better battery life with my new phone, even though all of the suggestions said it would be worse.
The choice is clear: one candidate drinks beer (like all the Founding Fathers) and now even has it brewed in the White House. The other is in a weird religious cult that doesn't even allow beer drinking.
MacOS X is a taste, that's all -- neither better nor worse for everyone. Your preference.
My 18 year old daughter has had full exposure to both Windows and MacOS X; the Windows PC on her desktop, the MacBook Pro was a loaner for the last two years at High School, part of a Communications specialty program.
When it came time for a laptop for college, she wanted Windows. She's no computer expert, just a regular user, doing everyday stuff: games, word processing, photos, internet. And video... she liked video editing on the PC better. Largely because her Mac was just terrible at it. It didn't handle native video editing from her AVCHD camcorder, while her Windows PC did, easily. She did all her editing on the Mac in either DV (which worked dandy in any Windows editor back in the 90s) or in Apple's "iFrame" format, which is basically a chopped down qHD (960x540), I-Frame only. This is the format Apple actually "invented", since they couldn't deal with actual HD video, other than to transcode to ProRes, which they only support in Final Cut Pro (she ran Final Cut Express on the Mac).
Tragically, the school she just went off to (Montclair University) is still using Final Cut Pro in their Broadcasting department, so they strongly recommended a Mac PC. I had found a great 3rd generation i7-based laptop from Asus: metal casework, four USB 3.0, 8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, 1920x1080 display, separate graphics, etc. for $1100. Having to switch to a Mac, I manged to find a slower 2nd generation i7, only two USB 2.0 + Thunderbolt (good idea, but currently fairly useless), 4GB RAM, 1600x900 display, slower separate graphics, 750GB HDD, etc. for "only" $1800. That was a factory-refurbished model (this the "discount" price), and they screwed up and delivered an 8GB unit. But seriously -- you're paying twice as much just to get MacOS. Plus, add-in the $100 extra to put Windows on the system, and, well... have to wait on that new electric guitar.
Apple makes decent hardware. But so do many other companies -- after all, cool casework has been about the only innovation in personal computers for the last 10 years; everything else has been predictable, incremental growth. Apple's well known to be making 5x as much profit per PC shipped as just about anyone else. If you must have MacOS, it's the price you pay, but there's no basis for any technical belief Apple's making a superior product, HW or OS.
The increase of old Samsung products in the used market says absolutely nothing about what they're being replaced with. In short, it's entirely consistent with this article that a rise in sales of new Samsung products could very easily be accompanied by a rise in sales of old Samsung products to used-device buyers. In short, this isn't a completely different phenomena, it may be the very same effect.
I wouldn't say that. The Nexus, certainly, doesn't have any of the "Touch Wizzz" stuff on it. That's the very blatant "let's copy Apple" layer that I probably would have nailed Samsung on, if I had felt those design patents held up. None of those rounded-square icons are in stock Android. No scroll bounce-back. Much less for Apple to complain about, but sure, they'd be silly not to try to continue any momentum from the first trial onto devices that are still shipping.
The Nexus IS black, but only on the front -- grey on the back. Apple has not yet demonstrated the technology of delivering two different colors on the same device -- they're either black or white (in fact, they have two different design patents, one for black, one for white, so clearly, that matters), with some bare metal or metal-colored bits. No bare metal on the Nexus. Curved screen, Apple's is flat. Curved back, Apple's is flat. No big ugly button on the front. It doesn't look like an iPhone, it looks like the thing that comes to replace the iPhone.
It's a great, wonderful, amazing replacement limb. Does everything your old limb did, twice as powerful, never gets tired, need a charge only once a day, and even charges your other iOS devices. Only problem -- Apple gets to decide what you're allowed to lift with the iArm, and where you're allowed to walk with the iLeg. But hey, it's such a great experience, in time you'll start to realize that Apple really does make better decisions about these things than you do.
Nope. Or only when you ignore inflation. Once you do account for the change in the value of money over the years, Microsoft peaked higher than Apple is, currently. In 2012 dollars, they hit over $850 billion in 1999. When it debuted in 2007 on the Shanghai stock exchange, PetroChina hit a market cap of $1.32 trillion, in 2012 dollars... and that's even with China's artificially undervalued currency exchange rate.
And then there's the East India company. It was worth something on the order of 78 million Dutch guilders at its peak, which would be about 752,466kg of fine silver (9.647g silver per guilder), or 6,767,998 pounds sterling... other sources suggest it was more like 10M pounds sterling. Using a couple of other calculators (and given that dollars hadn't been invented yet), I get about 1.7-2.5 trillion. Maybe there was a higher peak, but this should establish a bottom line.
Keep in mind, the East India company was crazy by today's standards. It had a virtual monopoly on trade between the UK and India and the East Indies, including opium, tea, saltpeter, dye, fabrics, and others. It had a standing army of 200,000 men, largely than many European nations. It basically won control of Bengal in a war, giving the company direct control of 70 million acres and 90 million people. It had its own currency.
Perhaps this is Apple's model for the future, but while they may exert similar control over your iOS devices, and they're moving in that direction for MacOS, they have to exercise it directly on humans. And while Microsoft did try out their own currency, it failed.
Slashdot Mirror
The current version costs $178.50, with the usual Amazon discount. It's not unreasonable to expect a publisher to be able to print something for far, far less than you can get a single item printed -- when that's not the case, there's something drastically wrong.
But why not an electronic version? The replication costs are nothing... in fact, really nothing, since in selling via Amazon, it's Amazon paying the very tiny cost of maintaining the web site, distributing the book copy, etc. And yet many publishers don't offer electronic versions (including this one). They're milking the perception that a physical item is worth more, and in most cases, maintaining their higher profits.
Obviously, a textbook doesn't sell in the same volume as a bestseller. But there's not necessarily all that much money spent on it. Most of the books in use were written long ago, and updated every couple of years, but in many cases, the update is minimal, just another way to de-value used editions. So the shelf life of a textbook is many times that of a bestseller.
While all true, it's not sustainable. If the college costs keep rising and the middle class keeps shrinking, many colleges are going to find themselves without any students. And enterprising students won't simply be deciding to just skip college and go pump gas somewhere, they'll find other ways to lean the same things... which is really what smart employers care about, more than that diploma on the wall.
Already, alternatives are on the rise. Various online learning systems are free or cheap, but still make a quality education possible. Perhaps some of these are more useful for continuing education than as a replacement for undergraduate college, but eventually, maybe not. Things can only get squeezed so hard before there's a means around that damage. A rapid decline in qualified graduates is going to cause all sorts of problems with the US tech industry. And they're likely to figure out a means of fixing it. Hopefully some of us get paid more along the way :-)
It's kind of a generational thing, too... unless you're a geek, like many of us here. I think the current crop of educators are largely not "computer people", so they reject the idea of using an electronic book. There just has to be something wrong with it.
But that's going to change. When I was a kid, I read like crazy, pretty much anything I could get my hands on. My Daughter was like that, not by Son. Not until he got a Kindle, anyway. Once he had that, that first summer, he was reading a novel or two a week. Totally turned his reading habits around.. and I don't think he'd bother, even today, with a paper book.
Far as retention goes, personally, my brain works fine either way. I have printed texts, tablet texts, online video lectures, etc. All seem perfectly interchangeable, far as what I learn from them. But it's easy to imagine that, for a person uncomfortable with the very notion of using a eBook reader, their retention might be less, as they're in some way fighting the book the whole way though. So even if this so-called study was not rigged from the get-go, it's measuring something, but not necessarily what the test givers believe it to measure.
Hadn't heard of that one.
At my Son's college (Rowan University), the bookstore is actually run by Barnes & Noble. And yet, they have full ISBN available online. You do need to know the course you're taking, and you're safer knowing the precise session (apparently, not all professors teaching the same course always use the same material), but with your generic university ID, you can browse all this stuff online.
For my Daughter's college (Montclair University... yeah, I have two in college this year, ouch!), the bookstore is online, and books are easy enough to find. They publish the author, edition, and titles, but not the ISBN. So it's more difficult to be certain you have the exact book, however, I don't know of a case in which the author/title/edition leads to the wrong book. Yet...
That's not to say online additional content is useless -- it's probably quite useful. But it's also fixed -- you write the book, you write the web site, you're done, or you go onto the next edition of the same book or whatever. This isn't exclusively a textbook thing, either; plenty of books intended for professionals and others have "additional web content" available.
The difference is this: when I buy a book, say, for some hardware or software development thing, aimed at professionals, that web content pretty much just comes with the book. You'll look in an appendix somewhere, it'll tell you the URL, you download or read online or whatever. Logically, just an extension of the book.
The textbook publishers could do the same thing here. They're charging 2x-4x as much for the book in the first place, the web content isn't inherently more expensive, it doesn't need more maintenance, and in fact, once you've developed the framework, it's pretty much just a bit of extra content uploaded for every book. But of course, the whole point of the site is to lower the value of used textbooks, making it difficult or even impossible to use a used (or even rental) book for a course that requires this access. Some publishers will sell you an access code, for a fairly substantial percentage of the cost of the book/code bundle.
Depends... you're basically describing the Jersey Shore. Most New Jersey beaches are not free. In the North, you have Sandy Hook, which is free, being a national recreation area, but you have to pay to park your car, if you're parking in the beach lots. Pretty much everywhere down the cost, the beaches are owned by the towns they're in, and you have to buy a beach tag. This is in part to pay for life guards, in part for beach cleanup, and in a big part for beach maintenance. Left alone, most o of the sand on most of the beaches would wash away. So every so often, each town has to pay the Army Corp of Engineers (usually) to dredge up some sand to re-fill the beaches.
The fees don't stop the tourists. In fact, most of the Northern and Central beaches are absolutely packed with people, on any given day.
Except Wildwood. That's basically where all the sand goes. So they don't have the shrinking beach problem. And they have a very large boardwalk, so local taxes cover the cost of beach cleanup and lifeguards. But this, too, is self-regulating ... Wildwood is about the most remote point down the shore. You can go to Wildwood most days and find plenty of open space on the beach (for some weird reason, you'll also find Canadians everywhere, at least in the "official" summer season, which just ended last weekend... haven't figured that part out)
I should point out (before I get smacked down on it) that, yes, there are variable tuning elements... mostly, electrically adjustable capacitors. There are the old school variactors (it's a diode with a bias voltage that varies it's parasitic capacitance based on the bias level), and more recently, some MEMS devices. They're not very good. You don't really get to re-tune an entire circuit in arbitrary ways. It's far more like bending, on a harmonica reed or guitar string. You have a fundamental tuned circuit, and you can vary the tuning over a range, but as you move off the fundamental, the quality goes down. So this is not the best solution.
There are also digital modulation schemes that are pretty frequency independent, but you still need the analog front-end. At very low power (Wi-fi in the office sort of stuff), no one cares about the inefficiencies of Class A amplifiers. On mobile devices, you better care.
Just consider amplifiers. There are now dozens of amplifier topologies, or "classes", in use. Some pretty clever ones, like class F, G, and H use techniques only really suited to the computer age -- modulated power supplies, digital pre-distortion to cancel out defects in the driver transistors, etc. Thanks to these, you can get in excess of 95% efficiency (particularly in the case of some of these more advanced digital techniques). The one problem: every one of these amplifier topologies is frequency specific -- you have to tune it to a very specific frequency band to get good performance. With one exception: the Class A amplifier. Which delivers about 20% efficiency in practical use. So basically, you either have a single very, very inefficient amplifier that can transmit just about anywhere, or a bunch of separate amplifiers for specific bands. Guess which one everyone's using?
That's one of several big problems in building radio systems that can just tune anywhere. And you still need rules to decide what frequencies to use, in order to have a conversation. If it weren't the FCC, we'd be just as much as the mercy of some industry standards body. Just like Wi-Fi... there was no mandate that Wi-Fi go on 2.4GHz (though sure, that was one of only a few ISM bands available). But the industry standardized on it anyway, just to get the radios talking to one another. If you want Wi-Fi on another frequency, you basically have to build a frequency transverter system to convert your band of choice to something around 2.4 or 5.8GHz (hint: I designed a frequency transverter device, with PAs and LNAs, to allow Wi-Fi signals, standard and not-so-standard, to be used at frequencies from 50-2000MHz).
There were three software utility patents and three design patents judged to be infringed by some of the original Samsung devices in question. Apple's '381 "bounce-back" patent was one of these -- that's in Samsung's TouchWiz home shell, but not part of normal Android. So it's certainly not an issue on the Galaxy Nexus, not sure if the SIII's version of TouchWiz still does this. And like most of these, it's questionable anyway (http://www.talkandroid.com/127447-technology-expert-claims-apples-bounce-back-patent-is-invalid/).
There was also an issue of pinch-to-zoom as described in their '915 patent. This is definitely not the way pinch-to-zoom works in Android JellyBean, not sure if Google addressed this earlier or not. Apple's patent might well fail against the mountain of prior art on multitouch, but the '915 patent counts on multi-touch operations that use one anchor finger and one moving finger. So if it's done differently on the newer devices, there's not even an issue. '915 isn't specifically about pinch-to-zoom, either, and like the others, is being looked at heavily now (http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoom-patent-myth).
The last software utility patent is Apple's '163 tap-to-zoom patent. But that's not simply [double]tap-to-zoom, it deals with specifics about where the zoom is centered. This, maybe some of the others, may be too subtle in detail for the jury, or maybe they just weren't presented well.
Some of the older Samsung phones pretty much did look like iPhones. Two design patents covered the White ('D087) and Black ('D677) iPhones. It's true that some of the Samsung phones did mysteriously have the one big button on the front, rather than the four-or-five that the G1 and others ripped off from Palm :-)
The final design patent ('D305) is about the look of the rounded boxy icons on the iPhone home screen. Samsung went out of their way to change Android into this look -- Android from the early days had more "normal" icons, no bounding box displays, transparency, etc... going well back into the 80s if not earlier. Now, I think there have been others to use that look -- some of the early SymbianOS UIs did. And given this is a design patent, it's for the look, not any mechanism in the OS that enforces this or not, just what you get out of the box. So that ought to have been shown as prior art. Again, I'm not used to design patents, and they really don't say much about what's important in the design, just, "here's thing, give patent".
Clearly, the new devices don't look like iPhones. The Galaxy Nexus doesn't have any front-button, and it's got a curved screen, not the flat screen of the iPhone. Backside is contoured and pebbly, not flat and smooth (designed to slip out of your hands, but that's another Apple patent not asserted here, since GN's don't usually attempt to eject themselves from your grip, as do iOS devices). And the SIII is even more different... kind of the opposite. The iPhone is all 1960s Deiter Rams industrial looking, the SIII is kind of organic looking, smooth and pebbly, closer if anything to a gigantic Palm Pre than a slightly less gigantic iPhone 4. And one would hope Samsung's fixed their issues with TouchWiz, maybe just stayed with stock Android, to avoid trouble with Apple in these other areas.
Taking other ideas, and adding to them, improving them, using them in different ways, etc. is progress. Making something as exactly like someone else's thing without any improvement (and in this case, basically uglifying Android to make it look more like iOS) is not advancing things.
I don't know all the rules surrounding design patents (the patents Apple had on their rounded-square icons, and separate patents for the "black" and "white" iPhones), but yes, I agree, patents should be very specific. I have written many utility patents, analyzed probably hundreds over the years. Some are well written and really do describe an "oh, that's pretty cool" invention. Others get me angry, patenting things I had figured out, on my own, in High School (which, if nothing else, should automatically fail the "test of obviousness" on that patent).
On the other hand, Samsung's not entirely blameless, and some of their hacks to Android really did make it look more like iPhone OS. For example, the rows of icons has been around since the Palm and the Newton, but Android doesn't force icons into rounded squares. Though I think some early releases of SymbianOS did, so there's probably prior art enough to invalidate this as a patent. The also did the skeuomorphic "scroll bounce back" thing in their home screen shell, which is also not part of Android stock, but has been a very well known Apple patent. Samsung was at the least ignoring Apple's patents, maybe even baiting them. Even if the patents themselves all get struck down, Samsung might still be guilty of imitating the "trade dress" of the iPhone, which is really copying the gestalt of the whole thing, not any single individual element (eg, it stands as a thing aside from copyrights, trademarks, and patents).
Actually, it's been obvious to Apple followers (not fanbois, but those actually watching closely) that they'd have been a whole lot more evil than Microsoft. Part of that's Apple's desire to really run everything... Microsoft had largely been happy just doing software. Apple was usually better at things than Microsoft, too -- MS tried very hard to be evil, and there did ok here and there, but they weren't always very good at it (though I think they'll redeem themselves with Windows 8, that's a work of profound evil). It's only now, that Apple's been really successful, rather than just on the fringe of things, that it's clear that they're capable of being so much worse than Microsoft.
Yup... that's correct. It isn't that there are so many Slashdotters buying products themselves. But really, when you're a well known "computer nerd", people do ask you about computers and related technology. I'd be surprised if recommending Apple were a common thing for most folks here anyway, particularly when you can at least get some satisfaction that the leading smartphone platform is Linux-based, and consumers are actually happy to use it. Google has walked a fairly clean road between keeping the OS FOSS and still allowing developers to have the workable development and distribution model they largely can't get out of the mainstream Linux community.
If you're getting worse connections on a 4G phone than your 3G phone, in the same places, etc... it's not 4G, it's your phone. After all, if the 4G connection can't be kept, you'll drop back to the same 3G connection you had previously. In fact, there are Android apps that force 4G off, entirely.
Sure sounds like you just got a crappy Galaxy Nexus. I have a GN too, and it replaced an O.G. Droid. I'm certain the O.G. Droid did a slightly better job of pulling in the 3G signals... I get slightly less performance in 3G areas that I did on the Droid. Nothing all that profound, usually insignificant.
On 4G, at least some places I could really measure, day to day (since daily traffic, weather, and other interference factors make it impossible to judge a system like this on a single day's testing), in areas with 4G towers, particularly indoors, I had far better success with 4G than 3G. Can't say how much of that might be due to less contention, but with my new phone at my old job, I was in Philadelphia, in a building that should have been RF trouble. Given that I design RF systems, I knew from first-hand experience the issues with this building. But 4G was a dramatic improvement over 3G, on signal strength and daily battery life.
I do agree about coverage. Verizon did claim they'd have LTE on every cell sometime in 2013. I have been seeing it in unexpected places more, lately. But nowhere near home. Of course, I can't get any wired internet to my house, either... to far into the boonies. I figure, if they were honest about this, we're getting our upgrade that last week they're doing the upgrades :-(
It's not just firms consolidating, but technological evolution leading to different barriers to entry.
It was relatively simple to set up a POTS ISP. We had this great phone system, the product of the government-approved AT&T monopoly. So the infrastructure existed, all you needed was to set up your bridge network from the phone to the internet, and virtually everyone was already wired in. Back in the 90s, an old buddy of mine started an ISP... it didn't need a huge company.
To build a competitive ISP now, you need to lay cable or fiber. Or, as a fill-in, launch satellites. This changes the game entirely.
It's curious that, if things had gone differently in the 60s and 70s, it might have once again been the public/private phone system wires carrying the load. The analog infrastructure needed back then for PicturePhone would have been ideally suited to fairly modern broadband.. the video needed a reliable 1MHz channel, plus the extra channel for voice, closer spaced amplifiers, bridges to T2 lines for longer hauls, etc. Better than 3x what you got over POTS, and with the digital infrastructure as well already routed.
Sure, there wasn't that much compelling about the PicturePhone itself, and the price was relatively insane. But the trail blazed by that technology would have been crazy. Until the Internet, there was no driving force for higher bandwidth at the consumer leaf, only for trunk traffic. And for most other purposes, the problems had been solved... consider that the T1 was developed in 1961 -- that's why you can get a T1 anywhere you can get POTS.
The problem with spectrum allocation is a technical one, too. You can't simply dial in the arbitrary frequencies you'd like to use in a place. Even with modern cognitive radio, this is limited, and leads to hardware that's much more expensive and less efficient than it would be otherwise. Your pocket cellphone, for example, would use on the order of 4x-5x more power if it had to cover arbitrary frequencies... and you'd have a big, ugly antenna to swap on/off, depending on the "wild west" assigned frequency used for the current stretch of road you're on. And a different one in another 20 miles, etc.
Current technology is already struggling a bit with the need for 5-6 frequencies and 3-4 antennas per cellphone. And that's still few enough bands to use much higher efficient, lower voltage PAs and LNAs and all. Once you have to tune in one 2.5MHz-10MHz channel anywhere in 2GHz+ of spectrum, practical radio is set 30 years behind.
To sell something, you have to have a legitimate owner. Unless the government is the default owner of everything, there is no right in the first place to sell some range of frequencies.
We the People are the default owner of everything. That ownership is administered though our representative government. At least, that's the theory. And in these cases, the government does function as the best neutral party available. It would function better if our elected representatives weren't so easy for large business to bribe. But there is a very limited spectrum, and radios need near continuous and realtime access to this, particularly for longer distance communications, particularly for broadcast.
The new White Space rules should be an interesting case of a "polite free-for-all". This is going to attempt to let much of the normally unused broadcast TV spectrum be used for other things, like point to point fixed wireless. The initial rules were very difficult to comply with, and have been made somewhat better, but it's still throwing additional technology at the problem, to prevent the whole system from collapsing under interference.
Maybe. There is no guarantee that "owners" of various bandwidths would use them in a way which benefits the majority. There is no guarantee that one single firm doesn't end up buying them all up. A natural monopoly cannot be overcome by simply having some other guy create a competing good/service.
Right. Or even use them at all. If you can just grab spectrum, like land, there's no guarantee it'll be developed. Or used for something beneficial to the People, ultimately the actual owners of the spectrum. That's a key thing -- spectrum isn't owned, it's licensed. For a specific purpose. If the company holding that license violates the terms, they lose the license. These licenses have to be renewed regularly, so the FCC can ensure they're being used properly. Particularly for new technology, there's a grace period after a spectrum auction, but if any of the winners of that auction don't develop the intended technology, they lose the license. Period.
And there's the rub. Certainly Verizon and AT&T want more spectrum -- they have a working business model, and know how to turn that spectrum into 40%+ profits. Good for them. But a number of the winners of recent auctions haven't done anything with it yet, and they've been selling off licences to some of the big guys, in order to get some cash back on that investment, rather than lose it all. AT&T also had the unfortunate issue of T-Mobile -- their buyout failed, AT&T owed T-Mobile a big chunk of money. T-Mobile was hurting for spectrum -- they really didn't have any available for real 4G (and what they have for 3G is higher frequency AWS band slots). So AT&T's paying off some of their debt to T-Mobile with spectrum.
And in reality, sure, they act like they own it, because in practice they do -- you have to something terribly heinous, once granted a license, to lose it. But that can change over time, too, if there's a reason for it.
Higher frequencies also suffer from increased free air loss. Some higher frequencies are subject to rain fade. They drop off very quickly through foliage, and lose more through man-made structures.
Despite the worries about the extra power needed for 4G (only in terms of battery power, the LTE chips not being mature enough to make the digital processing layer basically not matter, as with 3G), my old office in Philadelphia was a good example. This is an old stone and brick building, which usually saw decent (2-3 bar) 3G service. Going to 4G, I typically saw full scale reception in the outer parts of the building, 2 bars or better deep into the building, and got overall better battery life with my new phone, even though all of the suggestions said it would be worse.
The choice is clear: one candidate drinks beer (like all the Founding Fathers) and now even has it brewed in the White House. The other is in a weird religious cult that doesn't even allow beer drinking.
MacOS X is a taste, that's all -- neither better nor worse for everyone. Your preference.
My 18 year old daughter has had full exposure to both Windows and MacOS X; the Windows PC on her desktop, the MacBook Pro was a loaner for the last two years at High School, part of a Communications specialty program.
When it came time for a laptop for college, she wanted Windows. She's no computer expert, just a regular user, doing everyday stuff: games, word processing, photos, internet. And video... she liked video editing on the PC better. Largely because her Mac was just terrible at it. It didn't handle native video editing from her AVCHD camcorder, while her Windows PC did, easily. She did all her editing on the Mac in either DV (which worked dandy in any Windows editor back in the 90s) or in Apple's "iFrame" format, which is basically a chopped down qHD (960x540), I-Frame only. This is the format Apple actually "invented", since they couldn't deal with actual HD video, other than to transcode to ProRes, which they only support in Final Cut Pro (she ran Final Cut Express on the Mac).
Tragically, the school she just went off to (Montclair University) is still using Final Cut Pro in their Broadcasting department, so they strongly recommended a Mac PC. I had found a great 3rd generation i7-based laptop from Asus: metal casework, four USB 3.0, 8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, 1920x1080 display, separate graphics, etc. for $1100. Having to switch to a Mac, I manged to find a slower 2nd generation i7, only two USB 2.0 + Thunderbolt (good idea, but currently fairly useless), 4GB RAM, 1600x900 display, slower separate graphics, 750GB HDD, etc. for "only" $1800. That was a factory-refurbished model (this the "discount" price), and they screwed up and delivered an 8GB unit. But seriously -- you're paying twice as much just to get MacOS. Plus, add-in the $100 extra to put Windows on the system, and, well... have to wait on that new electric guitar.
Apple makes decent hardware. But so do many other companies -- after all, cool casework has been about the only innovation in personal computers for the last 10 years; everything else has been predictable, incremental growth. Apple's well known to be making 5x as much profit per PC shipped as just about anyone else. If you must have MacOS, it's the price you pay, but there's no basis for any technical belief Apple's making a superior product, HW or OS.
The increase of old Samsung products in the used market says absolutely nothing about what they're being replaced with. In short, it's entirely consistent with this article that a rise in sales of new Samsung products could very easily be accompanied by a rise in sales of old Samsung products to used-device buyers. In short, this isn't a completely different phenomena, it may be the very same effect.
I wouldn't say that. The Nexus, certainly, doesn't have any of the "Touch Wizzz" stuff on it. That's the very blatant "let's copy Apple" layer that I probably would have nailed Samsung on, if I had felt those design patents held up. None of those rounded-square icons are in stock Android. No scroll bounce-back. Much less for Apple to complain about, but sure, they'd be silly not to try to continue any momentum from the first trial onto devices that are still shipping.
The Nexus IS black, but only on the front -- grey on the back. Apple has not yet demonstrated the technology of delivering two different colors on the same device -- they're either black or white (in fact, they have two different design patents, one for black, one for white, so clearly, that matters), with some bare metal or metal-colored bits. No bare metal on the Nexus. Curved screen, Apple's is flat. Curved back, Apple's is flat. No big ugly button on the front. It doesn't look like an iPhone, it looks like the thing that comes to replace the iPhone.
It's a great, wonderful, amazing replacement limb. Does everything your old limb did, twice as powerful, never gets tired, need a charge only once a day, and even charges your other iOS devices. Only problem -- Apple gets to decide what you're allowed to lift with the iArm, and where you're allowed to walk with the iLeg. But hey, it's such a great experience, in time you'll start to realize that Apple really does make better decisions about these things than you do.
Nope. Or only when you ignore inflation. Once you do account for the change in the value of money over the years, Microsoft peaked higher than Apple is, currently. In 2012 dollars, they hit over $850 billion in 1999. When it debuted in 2007 on the Shanghai stock exchange, PetroChina hit a market cap of $1.32 trillion, in 2012 dollars... and that's even with China's artificially undervalued currency exchange rate.
And then there's the East India company. It was worth something on the order of 78 million Dutch guilders at its peak, which would be about 752,466kg of fine silver (9.647g silver per guilder), or 6,767,998 pounds sterling... other sources suggest it was more like 10M pounds sterling. Using a couple of other calculators (and given that dollars hadn't been invented yet), I get about 1.7-2.5 trillion. Maybe there was a higher peak, but this should establish a bottom line.
Keep in mind, the East India company was crazy by today's standards. It had a virtual monopoly on trade between the UK and India and the East Indies, including opium, tea, saltpeter, dye, fabrics, and others. It had a standing army of 200,000 men, largely than many European nations. It basically won control of Bengal in a war, giving the company direct control of 70 million acres and 90 million people. It had its own currency.
Perhaps this is Apple's model for the future, but while they may exert similar control over your iOS devices, and they're moving in that direction for MacOS, they have to exercise it directly on humans. And while Microsoft did try out their own currency, it failed.
The Asus Transformer Prime TF700T is particularly drool-worth. I have an older tablet, and two kids in college, but I'm thinkin'... maybe Christmas...