I don't think the parent poster was talking about centralized computing. Rather, he's saying there will be a common platform instead of the plethora of different OS variations for different uses. I don't necessarily agree with that ideal though - for most servers there's no need for a heavyweight UI, for phones there's no need for an IMAP server, etc.

"Jim! I'm on the Lynooks now, and I printed off 500 envelopes for the newsletter, but they're all rotated! I put the envelopes in this way, but they come out all wrong!"

You seriously overestimate the ability of a standard plebe to adjust to any change.

If you fucking switch out their pen from a twisty pen to a clicky pen, it's not a difference, it's not a preference, it's a problem, and the new way is wrong, and it's your job to get them the damned pen they like.

Humans are great at adapting, but only when forced. Then they'll never stop bitching about how good it was in the past.

Games don't need a lot of bandwidth. A service like Gaikai might, but in reality they aren't serving "game data", instead they serve a video stream. If a game saturated current bandwidth lines you would feel the slowdown outside of the game in your web browser. In reality what games crave is low latency. Latency isn't necessarily tied to bandwidth. Once your data gets out of your personal net link it won't feel the possible slowdown of a high traffic LAN. For those who are missing the point, bandwidth refers, as you might guess, to the width of the band. Or, in more casual terms, the total amount of traffic that can traverse a network at any given amount of time. Consider a packet of game data the size of a peanut. If you drop it down a 1/2" PVC pipe 100 feet and then again down a 4' corrugated tube the same distance. The peanut will probably reach the end in the same time since that added "width" doesn't really increase the rate of acceleration. Now, streaming video and rich media may be a valid argument for higher bandwidth requirements, but certainly not gaming. If anything, gaming should be the pressing factor in requiring lower latency on bandwidth networks.

It all depends on how rabid the idealists are (and most of them are quite rabid) and how influential they are.

Opposition to ATI and nVidia distributing binary drivers for Linux is just the most obvious ideological move that seriously hurt it on the desktop.

I read a sociology paper recently. It was very clear about what answers it was trying to find and whether or not each point was or was not significant. Many points were significant; many were not. Even if every point had come back as not being statistically significant, that doesn't mean it has nothing useful to say. It just says that Group X is not very different from the Control group for whatever parameter was being measured. (Although if every point came back negative, something would probably be seriously wrong with either the initial assumptions or the statistical analysis itself...)

Well, that one is understandable. I still hear someone say their OS is Microsoft Office on occasion.

I'm not going to ignore the blatantly wrong assertion that USB2 can transfer data at a 480Mbit/sec (60MB/sec), because it can't.

Clap clap clap.

Only the majority of external hard drives that you can buy right now will give you similar performance whether you use USB 2, firewire, or eSATA. Making a faster interconnect won't do anything for these drives.

People who have performance drives *already* use eSATA (seriously, firewire? Is this 2002? Worse, you then go on to talk about CPU usage, where again the answer is "use eSATA") or SAS.

I suppose, if they were specific enough that you couldn't actually steal Apple's blueprints, that you had to actually design your own...

But there's still the interoperability issue. In this example, should other people be able to make plugs that work with your Macbook? Why not? And wouldn't it be better if this was turned into a standard, so that every laptop used the same plug, so we wouldn't have as much waste, and cables would be cheaper? Wouldn't it be better if cars, planes, etc, just had laptop cables in them, rather than having to buy a special cable for the cigarette lighter, or worse, buy an inverter, so it has to go DC->AC->DC again?

And then there's software patents. Should someone be able to patent an algorithm, or a mathematical function, such that no one else can implement the same file format without licensing the patent?

Not too much, but it'd be nice to know if they exist -- in particular, the ones for manipulating windows. Just as a toy example, fire up a KDE (use a livecd, I don't care) and configure win+leftarrow to "pack left", same for the other four directions. Then open a window, hold the Windows key, and tap the arrows -- watch it fly around the screen.

Not immediately obvious how useful this is until you've got several terminal windows open on a high-resolution monitor...

Yes, I remember that. But is there a shortcut to bring the active window with me?

I'm as likely to have it register as a "tap" if I brush it, so that would bite me no matter what focus model I use. I eventually got to where I just don't brush it.

Interesting -- or, I suppose, it's a start. Of course, there's always the possibility that there's a patent somewhere in there... cheap shot, I know.

Problem: It still requires OS X to develop on (for now), and is mostly focused on targeting Windows (for now), which seems like it would be a much harder target than X11, for any apps that use anything out of the POSIX API.

Nothing says they have to adapt their OS to the PC at all, or provide support to people who do so, or really provide any drivers at all.

However, once I buy some software, I tend to think of it as "mine", and I find it distasteful that Apple actively takes steps to prevent me from installing it on non-Apple hardware. A big warning is fine -- actually forcing me to crack my own software isn't.

It's the difference between putting a "warranty void if removed" sticker on top of some screws, and welding the screws to the case.

Compare this to any other software -- yes, I would consider it DRM if a game I bought said "designed for Dell" and would only run on Dell hardware. I do consider it DRM (and annoying DRM, at that) when an application decides to lock itself to a particular machine, and refuse to activate on any others, or in a virtual machine -- so Windows isn't much better in that regard.

Granted -- also distasteful. In what other industry is it considered reasonable to purchase a "license to use" something, rather than the item itself?

This wouldn't be complete without an automotive analogy -- if I buy a car, it's mine. If I were renting it, I can understand conditions. I can also understand that some things would void my warranty. But I don't consider it acceptable to weld the hood shut to keep me out of the engine, nor would I consider any legal equivalent acceptable.

Now, yes, open source does the same thing -- but the licenses are far less restrictive, and I'm getting the product for free. That would be like my parents giving me a free car, so long as I drive it to college. And yes, Apple has the right to do business this way, and people have a right to buy into it...

But that's like saying, I have a first-amendment right to say the word "fuck" whenever I want to. It doesn't make it the decent thing to do. And while I can see others thinking it's a fair trade, it's one reason I avoid Apple.

Stupid example of some of the consequences of this: If this laptop dies, I can probably take the hard drive out, plug a SATA cable into it, connect it to any decently-modern desktop, and retrieve my files (both Windows and Linux) -- if not run the installed Linux on that desktop, as if nothing was wrong.

If a Macbook dies, I'm either going to have to use incomplete Linux drivers, or plug it into another Mac.

I'm confused. Why are we discussing depictions of education in Star Trek as though they actually indicate anything?

I used it as a single example and people replied. I guess I struck a nerve. The point is that imaginative fiction like Star Trek speculates wildly on all sorts of aspects of human civilization. Star Trek in particular isn't about what the future is going to be like, but about issues current since the 60's. They speculate on all sorts of transformative technology like universal translators, subspace communicators, transporters and on and on - and yet from the original series up through the recent movie they never considered any style of education aside from the academy. For instance, why not create a school on the holodeck? One answer might be that all the creative individuals associated with Star Trek over the years recognize that students benefit from actual human contact.

Regarding the rest of your comments, there are increasingly more alternative college options, e.g.: http://www.evergreen.edu/, http://www.pitzer.edu/ or http://hampshire.edu/ There's nothing wrong with appropriate use of technology, but one has reason to be skeptical of corporate motivations when discussing the future of educational institutions.

Most of your response does not address my original posts at all.

A rather limited point of view to assign "original" thoughts to one's own post, and to rate everybody else's as derivative.

Me: How does one discern the goodness of a community?

Arbitrarily. Here's one metric: where can I go to get a physics question answered? Who will answer my physics question fastest and in most detail? I don't think I will find the fastest answer at a university [online or not].

No, you'll simply learn how to answer the question for yourself.

But by all means blog about it after class.

That's some smug attitude you got there

Thanks for demonstrating my point. I wasn't attempting to be smug. Lots of good blogs out there. It would be best if these weren't written during class, and you'll have more to say after class than before. One can infer other's motivations much better in person than online.

I've replied to this thread a few too many times already. I guess I'm taking umbrage at Scott McNealy attempting to undermine the universities - already under severe attack from the lunatic fringe.

Are the best communities the product of local universities or the global village?

How does one discern the goodness of a community? Obviously most here (excluding trolls) value online communities for a range of purposes and filling various niches. The universities have been engaged with network issues since long before there was a network. One of the first uses of the Trans-Atlantic cable in the 19th century was to transmit astronomical telegrams between academic colleagues on either side of the ocean. Online community building has an entire academic cottage industry. I'm chair of an international working group that uses mailing lists, wikis, web sites, skype, etc. to coordinate our activites - but we still meet face-to-face every few months.

Education is a deeply human activity. Even - perhaps especially - tech-oriented subjects benefit from the immediate and committed engagement with other minds. Online forums can imitate this interaction, but can't realize it completely. The article's premise that convenience will win out over fidelity is exactly backwards. It is far more convenient to commit to learning in a classroom with a competent teacher and serious (enough) fellow students - especially if the class size is appropriate to the discussion at hand. Simulating this with poorly placed camera angles and microphones that cut out or with (God forbid) expert systems on the web so degrades the experience as to turn it into an entirely different activity.

But by all means blog about it after class.

This rather tepid article is likely not worth much attention, but it's good for some Sunday morning philosophizing. The premise is that 1) access to content is either high fidelity or high convenience, and that 2) there is an unfilled niche at the high convenience end of the spectrum. This is coming from a purveyor of high cost "enabling" technology.

The first point is rather blatantly obvious. The second appears to be out of touch with current trends. There already are multiple channels to access higher education. In fact, if you don't care about the degree this is the golden age of access to inexpensive and high quality educational opportunities. If you do care about a degree, consider a local community college before corporate vendors like the University of Phoenix. The latter is by no means a cheap degree, BTW.

But the article doesn't address the real question of accreditation. How is a degree from such a "high convenience" vendor going to be worth any more than the same degree from an online diploma factory? It is also naive to think that free curriculum will just appear in a usable form. The internet is full of free access to certain documents - and is completely devoid of free access to other content. A highly skilled practitioner of whatever field is necessary to organize both free and proprietary information into a usable curriculum. What will their motivation be to do this work for free?

The biggest problem is the suggestion that a college campus is "inconvenient". Rather a campus experience is orthogonal to the notion of convenience or inconvenience. Spending four years sequestered with a laptop on your parents' couch is not more convenient - it is merely creepy. College is about experiencing the world and encountering new people, places, ideas and opportunities. You won't find these at home with Judge Judy haranguing a dead-beat dad in the background.

try to find a localized group that can compete with Undernet's #math for opportunities to talk about advanced math. I doubt one exists in the world; I certainly wouldn't expect to find one at arbitrary university.

The internet is at every university already. Campus denizens are overrepresented in many/most/all online forums. It isn't a question of one or the other, but rather of maximizing the benefit from both styles of communication.

Regarding further examples of subjects difficult to convey over the internet, a friend and I taught each other to juggle in grad school. Not only would it be hard to learn such a skill from even the best juggling website (there are many), but the soul of juggling is in passing balls and clubs between partners. This is an example where internet forums are a supplement to local expertise, e.g., http://www.juggling.org/ which evolved out of a pre-web resource. To tie this to academia, I even met Claude Shannon at a campus juggling event: http://www.juggle.org/history/archives/jugmags/34-2/34-2,p20.htm

I'm proctoring a test a week from now. We will check every student's ID. [...] Other people have mentioned actual in-class instruction being useless. As my students are getting ready to take their test, one of the main things I'm noticing is that I can't provide enough one-on-one instruction.

Exactly. Distance learning is most appropriate for those courses that are viable as huge lecture sections where IDs matter. Small classes allow the teacher to get to know the students as individuals. Of course, large lecture classes suffer from their own abrupt shortcomings.

Most of my meetings these days are telecons with South America. Even though the team knows each other well, and even though we have well-assigned roles in the larger project, a telecon is a peculiarly limited medium for communication. Some of this can be improved via better technology, but the human factors would make even a Star Wars quality hologram less than ideal. Of most note a remote meeting or class immediately terminates at the end of the hour. No benefit is realized from follow-on conversations or arguments or trips to the library or gym or lab.

Returning to the business context, David Packard (and others) preached "management by walking around". Imagine translating this to a remote paradigm. Not only would the telepresence technology delete all the positive human contact available through such an approach, it would add a severe whiff of big brother to each cubical into which the boss could suddenly appear remotely.

Starfleet Academy is just the US Naval Academy, adapted for space. Hogwart's is an idealized version of a British school for upper-class pinheads. I don't know how you draw a connection between these and real life.

The authors of such books and the directors of such movies are neither spacemen nor sorcerers. It is an explicit decision to model such dramatic schools against familiar analogues. Each of these fictional universes demonstrates vast imaginative variances from reality in other regards. It is perhaps even more significant what the creators of those universes chose not to embroider. In one way or another this says something about the limits of imagination.

There will never be a real Hogwarts. There already is an Astronauts Academy, whether known by that name or not - in fact, there are several. I would be surprised to find if any of these - now or in the future - were to be conducted remotely. Some education warrants physical travel.