... it goes into the world oil market just like oil from every where else and is sold to who so ever has the paper for it...
I seriously question your understanding of economics.
You see, if the highest demand for a product is local (which is the US), the greatest profit can be had by selling locally. Texas Oil is not sold anywhere outside the US except in the form of plastics and other goods manufactured from oil. Period. The US is the #1 world consumer of oil by a vast margin, and is only capable of producing about 1/4 of its needs. Far and away the most profitable place to sell oil produced in the US is in the US. There is no economic situation that can change that fact unless the US suddenly stops buying oil.
Nobody is that stupid. Sure they'll be happy to fuck up your shit, but they'll make sure theirs is nice and pretty, which means the last tree will never be cut down, the last river will never be poisoned, the last fish will never be caught, and we already know money cannot be eaten.
The problem isn't sucking it up, for an oil company that is a no-brainer.
The problem is you have hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil in a solution that is 90% water. To suck up 100,000 barrels of oil, you need to suck up 1 million barrels of oil/water mix. One of these tankers, with a 62 million gallon capacity, can basically only handle about 120,000 barrels of oil total, and it's going to take it a very long time to pump up 1.4 million barrels of solution, be it near the surface or a thousand feet down, it doesn't matter. It's going to take a lot of time.
To get a picture, a very prolific well under high pressure just shooting oil through an oil pipe won't produce more than 40,000-50,000 barrels of oil per day, and that's a very, very good well. A well that has to be pumped produces more like 1,000 barrels a day, which is what you'll see with your suction rig.
It would take four years to reclaim 120,000 barrels. By then the light stuff will have evaporated away and the heavy stuff will have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and anything left over will have been consumed by bacteria, solving the problem for you.
The problem is, your milkshake is 90% water, and you need to drink a full cup of milkshake, excluding the water. That means you have to drink 10 of these milkshake/water mixes, and your stomach is nowhere big enough.
The "leak" is spewing over 210 million gallons a day
What the fuck, a couple days ago it was a million barrels a day, now it's 5 million barrels a day? How do people come up with these numbers? It's not fucking possible!. The well would bleed out in a day or two and the problem would have been over a month and a half ago. The peak production of the Gulf of Mexico, for every rig in operation combined was 1.7 million barrels a day, and it happened eight years ago. The entire Gulf of Mexico output has been declining for years, and as of last year was about 1.3 million barrels a day. That's with about 800 wells currently active.
How the fuck can a single well produce almost four times the total daily output of 800 fucking wells (an average of 1600 barrels a day per well)? What planet do you live on? What bullshit have you been reading? It's not fucking possible.
Seeing these bullshit wildly inflated numbers that are not just exaggerated, but completely outside the realm of possibility.
This well is pumping out somewhere between 5,000 and 20,000 barrels of oil a day, and you can double that to be extra conservative. It's not physically possible for it to hit the 100,000 barrels a day range, there is nowhere near enough pressure, let alone something in the millions of barrels. Only someone who is completely ignorant of how oil works could believe such a ludicrous idea.
The whole US only produces about 8 million barrels a day, and that's with tens of thousands of active wells. Saudi Arabia only produces 10 million barrels a day, with their thousands of wells. To say a single well could producing half the output of the highest oil producing country in the world is insanity.
BP's total daily oil production is about 650,000 barrels a day. This is the fourth largest company in the world. The idea that a single well could be producing almost ten times the company's entire daily output from thousands of wells is so outside the realm of possibility it is ludicrous.
Please, please, just shut up.
5,000-20,000 barrels a day is already a horrendous amount of oil pumping into the ocean, there is no need to inflate it to absurd, almost comical if the situation weren't so serious, levels.
You've never been to America, have you? We don't all live in obscenely crowded cities over here, where public transport can be made to be efficient and walking somewhere is an actual option.
I imagine you super-fit, super industrious, hard working Europeans (who, in many countries, work a shorter work week by law than the US) would be perfectly ok walking 10 miles to work every day. Why, since reality doesn't apply to you, you could probably make the trip in five minutes!
Really though, I think all your bullshit stems from bitterness and jealousy. The fact that your economies are such shit that they are so dependent on ours such that a bubble in our fucking housing market causes whole countries to go bankrupt in Europe has just got to eat you the fuck up.
One, you're a dumbass, and two, BP is getting their ass reamed in the media over here. Granted, we care less about the deep ocean than we do about the coastline, but harm to the environment is far and away the chief concern, and in that regard we've been pretty fortunate that very little oil has touched ground, but your anti-American bullshit isn't grounded in any sort of reality.
BP is a European based company, by the way, fucking up our environment, you asshole.
BP's corporate headquarters are still firmly rooted in the UK, and all major corporate decisions come out of corporate home base. Trust me, I work for them.
Jobs clearly says that if you are more accomplished and successful than he is, you have the right to complain about something he has done. Of course, Jobs himself reserves the right to be the final judge of who is accomplished and successful, and of course Jobs knows nobody could possibly be as accomplished or successful as he is. So in practice, you are absolutely right.
In theory though, there may be somebody somewhere who is someday found who would be deemed worthy of criticizing His Holiness, Steve Jobs.
Well, you certainly missed the part in the summary where Jobs said the "PC folks' world is slipping away" in an argument about the iPad. You might want to look again, since it's in the title of the story and all.
I think that counts as intending to be "the only thing you would ever need", else PC's would not be "slipping away" according to Jobs.
I found this interesting, it's part of the article in the summary about Jobs's reality distortion field, it was written in 1981 by a new Apple employee:
I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.
I pray to god you never have to do anything for any substantial length of time on your shiny new iPad that you're assuming you can replace a PC with it.
The ergonomics of the iPad, and all keyboard-less tablets, suck monkey balls. They are only good for carrying around and using as a note-pad, holding for short periods of time while sitting, or resting in your lap while sitting on the floor and leaning against a wall with your knees up for moderate lengths of time.
For anything that requires extensive typing, like email, writing papers, chatting online, etc. the iPad sucks except in cases where a desktop is impossible or a laptop is impractical (which are few and far between).
If you can't tell what that makes the iPad, I'll spell it out for you: it's a n-i-c-h-e product. It will never replace desktops or laptops because of its serious ergonomic drawbacks. That's why Apple decided the iPhone OS would be fine for the iPad, because you can't use it like a real computer anyway, so why treat it like one? It's a pretty smart move, but at the same time it relegates it to little more than a high-tech notepad with built-in gaming and video.
You should let them know that there are several Android devices that offer the same functionality as the iPad, but without the restrictions placed upon them by Apple.
It seems to be the only thing the EU was able to get out of the whole situation, so with their absurd handling of the fallout it's hard not to think the only thing Microsoft did was bundle the Browser. It's all they are apparently being punished for now.
In truth bundling the browser wasn't even the crime, it was strong arming OEM's into not bundling Netscape. All you need to do is punish them for that, and make sure the consequences for a repeat offense are significantly more dire, and the problem is solved. Instead they're doing strange browser selection bullshit. It's weird.
I don't know if you know this, but corporations don't use computers.
People in corporations use computers.
Their concerns are identical to your concerns, they simply have some more concerns in addition to yours. Besides, why is it better that Steve Jobs locks your system down such that you can only use exactly what he tells you you can use, as opposed to another corporate overlord doing exactly the same thing? I really don't get that part of your implied reasoning.
For example, you don't think Windows 7 was about the average consumer, do you? Vista worked just fine for 99% of them. What it didn't work for is business users. Software broke on a massive scale, and when faced with the prospect of almost all of their corporate customers looking at alternatives if their current software wasn't going to be compatible with Windows any more anyway, Microsoft scrambled to fix the usability problems and backwards compatibility problems with Vista.
One of the main reasons corporations stopped using Macs 15 years ago (and Macs used to be a big player in the corporate world) is because Apple doesn't give a shit about backwards compatibility. When a company spends $10 million on a custom piece of software, they don't want to have to re-write it every three years for another $10 million just because Apple doesn't deign to consider their backwards compatibility issue important.
The corporate world is what drives most large-scale innovation in computer technology. It was the corporate world that created a large market for PC's (the hobby market created by Apple was dwarfed by the business market created by IBM and other manufacturers), it was the corporate world that created the market for smart-phones (Blackberries still hold almost three times the market share of the iPhone, and the iPhone's market share is fairly stagnant), and if tablets go anywhere beyond "neat toy" status it will because corporations see a need for them. My intuition is that this will not happen, because tablets have been around for a very long time and have always been a niche product, mainly for ergonomic reasons.
For one thing, anybody who has ever used a tablet knows they are very limited ergonomically. They are made to be lifted, manipulated for short periods, and then set back down. The only way to type on one is to have a stand and a desk that lets you type reasonably comfortably while still viewing the screen somewhat comfortably. The other option is to sit on the floor with your back against a wall and your knees up and the tablet resting on your legs that way. This still limits you to very short periods of use. They are good for walking around with and operating, but otherwise the format sucks.
The iPad does nothing to change this, in fact it makes it worse, because most pre-iPad tablet devices come with a built-in keyboard that allows you to use it for moderately long times by resting it on a desk or in your lap and tilting the screen to a viewable angle.
It's more like an extremely fancy remote control or PDA than an actual computer, and the form factor will never be able to compensate for its ergonomic limitations.
It frankly cannot be used in similar situations as a desktop computer.
Also, in case you haven't noticed, the size of computers hasn't really changed much in the last 20 years. Sure, we've gotten laptops, and now tablets and smartphones, but desktops are still more popular than all three and they are still pretty big. Why is that? I mean, they pack thousands of times the computing power of the old computers, right? Shouldn't they be teeny tiny by now?
The answer is, why make it smaller than it needs to be? For what you use a desktop for you don't move it around much, and miniaturization is expensive. You can make a more powerful system for less by leaving it relatively large.
For example, that $500 iPad is maybe 1/4 as powerful as a cheap, $300 e-machines desktop, which has none of the ergonomic problems of the iPad at the expense of not being portable.The only way the iPad, or any tablet device for that matter, replaces computers is if that power/price gap is closed. The difference in power needs to be negligible, and the difference in price needs to be small.
So far, that isn't the way it works. Even as phones and tablets get more powerful, desktops and laptops get even more powerful still - it is going to take a long time and quite a few technical advances before that gap closes in any significant way.
Not to mention the fact that the iPhone only has 20% of the smartphone market, and is currently declining (it will probably spike back up with the next gen of iPhone, at least for a while). For the overall cell phone market it's something like 2%, and I think I'm overestimating.
If you are going to go after anybody for malware you're either going after Rim's Blackberry, which has over 50% of the smartphone market, or Nokia's Symbian, which has 50% of the overall cell phone market.
As popular as the iPhone is, it's chump change when you put things in perspective.
Honestly, I think Apple is making the exact same mistake they made with PC's in the 80's. They had the potential to rule the market then, but their lack of a willingness to license to other manufacturers allowed Microsoft to pull the rug out from under them and nearly drive them out of business. As big as Apple is, relative to what they could have become they are tiny. Google is doing the same thing to them with Android, which already has half the market share of the iPhone OS. The App Store still has a lot more apps than the Android Market, but already key developers are dropping the iPhone platform completely in favor of Android, for no reason other than Apple's insane approval process. Pretty soon it will be just another "it's nice, but I can't get my on it" Apple device.
Frankly, Steve Jobs is backing himself into another technology hole, and just like the first time he did it, he can't see it coming at all. He's right that smartphones at least, and maybe small tablets, are the platform of the future, but I think he's wrong that Apple will ultimately play a dominant role on the platform. Just like with Apple and the PC, you can already see the sun starting to set on Apple's glory days with the smartphone and tablet. He is gloating now, but he is making the exact same mistakes he made before, which should be plain to see.
-- As a side note, I also believe smartphones will ultimately destroy the music player market, just like they destroyed the pda market. Seriously, my phone can already hold more music than my ipod nano (not super impressive, I know, but it holds more music than I own) with a simple SD card upgrade, and I can listen to Pandora radio on it anywhere - it kicks ass.
Nah, it really just depends on which fanboy modded you first. Since even fewer people use Linux than Apple products, the Apple fanboy mods have reversed the troll rating.
It would be nice if mods would mod people for being, you know, trolls. If you don't like it, you can mod it "overrated" without resorting to calling an opposing view a troll.
An equals sign and the word "is" are different things and work in slightly different ways.
Actually they work in exactly the same way, you changed the format of your example in a subtle way that makes a huge difference. If you notice your example of Mickey is a mouse, you've said Mickey is equal to only one of many mice. You can do the same thing with an equals sign: Mickey = a mouse. This means Mickey is equal to only one mouse, not all mice. Thus, all mice are not Mickeys, but Mickey is a mouse. Mice != Mickeys, Mickey = a mouse. In this particular example, you cannot reverse the two because of the rules of logic - a mouse = Mickey does not work, because you need to know which mouse is Mickey, you can't take just any mouse and know it is Mickey.
The word "is" means the two statements on either side are equivalent. So when we say "Freedom is Slavery" with no qualifier that would make freedom a subset of slavery, it also means that "Slavery is Freedom". The two are equivalent. It's the way basic logic functions. Now, if the phrase were "Freedom is a form of Slavery", you can't make the reverse statement without including the qualifiers, because "Freedom" is equal to everything after the "is". The equivalent statement is "A form of Slavery is Freedom" in that case.
Get it? "Is" and "equals" are synonyms. You can replace one with the other in every case.
However, claims that Xerox single handedly invented the WIMP interface [wikipedia.org] (Windows, Icons, Pointer, Menus) and that Apple copied that interface exactly as created by Xerox are simply incorrect.
I think you're the only one who has said that so far, everyone else just stuck to the GUI (which is the first implementation of WIMP as an interface). Xerox invented the GUI, but not the mouse. They were the ones who came up with point-and-click as well as a menu and icon driven user interface. NLS had windows, but all commands were text based, like a classic CLI. The mouse existed to click on hyperlinks, which were another NLS first, along with windows.
The only addition made by Xerox PARC was the addition of Icons. NLS had bitmapped WYSIWYG graphics, but did not come up with the idea of using Icons to represent commands, using text based menus instead.
That's not quite correct - NLS was not WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get means everything you can access on the system is available on-screen. Most of what you did with NLS was done with complicated CHORD commands or punch cards (in off-line mode).
It had some very neat things, including multiple windows and editable 2d graphics, but a graphical user interface it was not, it was very much still a command driven interface with occasional graphical components. Sort of a transition OS between a CLI and a GUI. Windows and menus in NLS were more like the windows and menus available in DOS. Yeah, they existed, and they were probably more heavily used than those in DOS (and more feature rich, by the look of things), but they still were not GUIs.
Actually a good comparison of how the NLS UI worked is the Hyperwords addon for Firefox. It's built around text hyperlinks and such. Like all great text-based interfaces, it had a steep learning curve but allowed for great productivity once mastered.
In any case, the Alto was the first OS with an actual GUI. NLS was a text based UI with some graphics to make it pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
... it goes into the world oil market just like oil from every where else and is sold to who so ever has the paper for it...
I seriously question your understanding of economics.
You see, if the highest demand for a product is local (which is the US), the greatest profit can be had by selling locally. Texas Oil is not sold anywhere outside the US except in the form of plastics and other goods manufactured from oil. Period. The US is the #1 world consumer of oil by a vast margin, and is only capable of producing about 1/4 of its needs. Far and away the most profitable place to sell oil produced in the US is in the US. There is no economic situation that can change that fact unless the US suddenly stops buying oil.
Period.
And it's total bullshit.
Nobody is that stupid. Sure they'll be happy to fuck up your shit, but they'll make sure theirs is nice and pretty, which means the last tree will never be cut down, the last river will never be poisoned, the last fish will never be caught, and we already know money cannot be eaten.
The problem isn't sucking it up, for an oil company that is a no-brainer.
The problem is you have hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil in a solution that is 90% water. To suck up 100,000 barrels of oil, you need to suck up 1 million barrels of oil/water mix. One of these tankers, with a 62 million gallon capacity, can basically only handle about 120,000 barrels of oil total, and it's going to take it a very long time to pump up 1.4 million barrels of solution, be it near the surface or a thousand feet down, it doesn't matter. It's going to take a lot of time.
To get a picture, a very prolific well under high pressure just shooting oil through an oil pipe won't produce more than 40,000-50,000 barrels of oil per day, and that's a very, very good well. A well that has to be pumped produces more like 1,000 barrels a day, which is what you'll see with your suction rig.
It would take four years to reclaim 120,000 barrels. By then the light stuff will have evaporated away and the heavy stuff will have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and anything left over will have been consumed by bacteria, solving the problem for you.
The problem is, your milkshake is 90% water, and you need to drink a full cup of milkshake, excluding the water. That means you have to drink 10 of these milkshake/water mixes, and your stomach is nowhere big enough.
See the problem?
The "leak" is spewing over 210 million gallons a day
What the fuck, a couple days ago it was a million barrels a day, now it's 5 million barrels a day? How do people come up with these numbers? It's not fucking possible!. The well would bleed out in a day or two and the problem would have been over a month and a half ago. The peak production of the Gulf of Mexico, for every rig in operation combined was 1.7 million barrels a day, and it happened eight years ago. The entire Gulf of Mexico output has been declining for years, and as of last year was about 1.3 million barrels a day. That's with about 800 wells currently active.
How the fuck can a single well produce almost four times the total daily output of 800 fucking wells (an average of 1600 barrels a day per well)? What planet do you live on? What bullshit have you been reading? It's not fucking possible.
Seeing these bullshit wildly inflated numbers that are not just exaggerated, but completely outside the realm of possibility.
This well is pumping out somewhere between 5,000 and 20,000 barrels of oil a day, and you can double that to be extra conservative. It's not physically possible for it to hit the 100,000 barrels a day range, there is nowhere near enough pressure, let alone something in the millions of barrels. Only someone who is completely ignorant of how oil works could believe such a ludicrous idea.
The whole US only produces about 8 million barrels a day, and that's with tens of thousands of active wells. Saudi Arabia only produces 10 million barrels a day, with their thousands of wells. To say a single well could producing half the output of the highest oil producing country in the world is insanity.
BP's total daily oil production is about 650,000 barrels a day. This is the fourth largest company in the world. The idea that a single well could be producing almost ten times the company's entire daily output from thousands of wells is so outside the realm of possibility it is ludicrous.
Please, please, just shut up.
5,000-20,000 barrels a day is already a horrendous amount of oil pumping into the ocean, there is no need to inflate it to absurd, almost comical if the situation weren't so serious, levels.
And who owns BP and TransOcean?
A clue, look closer to home.
If this spill is America's fault, those spills are Europe's, dumbass.
You've never been to America, have you? We don't all live in obscenely crowded cities over here, where public transport can be made to be efficient and walking somewhere is an actual option.
I imagine you super-fit, super industrious, hard working Europeans (who, in many countries, work a shorter work week by law than the US) would be perfectly ok walking 10 miles to work every day. Why, since reality doesn't apply to you, you could probably make the trip in five minutes!
Really though, I think all your bullshit stems from bitterness and jealousy. The fact that your economies are such shit that they are so dependent on ours such that a bubble in our fucking housing market causes whole countries to go bankrupt in Europe has just got to eat you the fuck up.
Did I mention that you're all jealous assholes?
One, you're a dumbass, and two, BP is getting their ass reamed in the media over here. Granted, we care less about the deep ocean than we do about the coastline, but harm to the environment is far and away the chief concern, and in that regard we've been pretty fortunate that very little oil has touched ground, but your anti-American bullshit isn't grounded in any sort of reality.
BP is a European based company, by the way, fucking up our environment, you asshole.
BP's corporate headquarters are still firmly rooted in the UK, and all major corporate decisions come out of corporate home base. Trust me, I work for them.
That's not true.
Jobs clearly says that if you are more accomplished and successful than he is, you have the right to complain about something he has done. Of course, Jobs himself reserves the right to be the final judge of who is accomplished and successful, and of course Jobs knows nobody could possibly be as accomplished or successful as he is. So in practice, you are absolutely right.
In theory though, there may be somebody somewhere who is someday found who would be deemed worthy of criticizing His Holiness, Steve Jobs.
You should read the link about Jobs's "reality distortion field", it's a very old article, from before Jobs was fired from Apple the first time.
You'll go from "How can Jobs maintain these absurd positions?" To "Oh, I see, he's just a charismatic delusional douchebag. Makes sense now."
Well, you certainly missed the part in the summary where Jobs said the "PC folks' world is slipping away" in an argument about the iPad. You might want to look again, since it's in the title of the story and all.
I think that counts as intending to be "the only thing you would ever need", else PC's would not be "slipping away" according to Jobs.
I found this interesting, it's part of the article in the summary about Jobs's reality distortion field, it was written in 1981 by a new Apple employee:
I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.
I pray to god you never have to do anything for any substantial length of time on your shiny new iPad that you're assuming you can replace a PC with it.
The ergonomics of the iPad, and all keyboard-less tablets, suck monkey balls. They are only good for carrying around and using as a note-pad, holding for short periods of time while sitting, or resting in your lap while sitting on the floor and leaning against a wall with your knees up for moderate lengths of time.
For anything that requires extensive typing, like email, writing papers, chatting online, etc. the iPad sucks except in cases where a desktop is impossible or a laptop is impractical (which are few and far between).
If you can't tell what that makes the iPad, I'll spell it out for you: it's a n-i-c-h-e product. It will never replace desktops or laptops because of its serious ergonomic drawbacks. That's why Apple decided the iPhone OS would be fine for the iPad, because you can't use it like a real computer anyway, so why treat it like one? It's a pretty smart move, but at the same time it relegates it to little more than a high-tech notepad with built-in gaming and video.
I think you've managed to miss the entire point of this thread, while perfectly illustrating exactly the OP's point.
You should let them know that there are several Android devices that offer the same functionality as the iPad, but without the restrictions placed upon them by Apple.
Mass deployments should be a breeze.
It seems to be the only thing the EU was able to get out of the whole situation, so with their absurd handling of the fallout it's hard not to think the only thing Microsoft did was bundle the Browser. It's all they are apparently being punished for now.
In truth bundling the browser wasn't even the crime, it was strong arming OEM's into not bundling Netscape. All you need to do is punish them for that, and make sure the consequences for a repeat offense are significantly more dire, and the problem is solved. Instead they're doing strange browser selection bullshit. It's weird.
I don't know if you know this, but corporations don't use computers.
People in corporations use computers.
Their concerns are identical to your concerns, they simply have some more concerns in addition to yours. Besides, why is it better that Steve Jobs locks your system down such that you can only use exactly what he tells you you can use, as opposed to another corporate overlord doing exactly the same thing? I really don't get that part of your implied reasoning.
For example, you don't think Windows 7 was about the average consumer, do you? Vista worked just fine for 99% of them. What it didn't work for is business users. Software broke on a massive scale, and when faced with the prospect of almost all of their corporate customers looking at alternatives if their current software wasn't going to be compatible with Windows any more anyway, Microsoft scrambled to fix the usability problems and backwards compatibility problems with Vista.
One of the main reasons corporations stopped using Macs 15 years ago (and Macs used to be a big player in the corporate world) is because Apple doesn't give a shit about backwards compatibility. When a company spends $10 million on a custom piece of software, they don't want to have to re-write it every three years for another $10 million just because Apple doesn't deign to consider their backwards compatibility issue important.
The corporate world is what drives most large-scale innovation in computer technology. It was the corporate world that created a large market for PC's (the hobby market created by Apple was dwarfed by the business market created by IBM and other manufacturers), it was the corporate world that created the market for smart-phones (Blackberries still hold almost three times the market share of the iPhone, and the iPhone's market share is fairly stagnant), and if tablets go anywhere beyond "neat toy" status it will because corporations see a need for them. My intuition is that this will not happen, because tablets have been around for a very long time and have always been a niche product, mainly for ergonomic reasons.
For one thing, anybody who has ever used a tablet knows they are very limited ergonomically. They are made to be lifted, manipulated for short periods, and then set back down. The only way to type on one is to have a stand and a desk that lets you type reasonably comfortably while still viewing the screen somewhat comfortably. The other option is to sit on the floor with your back against a wall and your knees up and the tablet resting on your legs that way. This still limits you to very short periods of use. They are good for walking around with and operating, but otherwise the format sucks.
The iPad does nothing to change this, in fact it makes it worse, because most pre-iPad tablet devices come with a built-in keyboard that allows you to use it for moderately long times by resting it on a desk or in your lap and tilting the screen to a viewable angle.
It's more like an extremely fancy remote control or PDA than an actual computer, and the form factor will never be able to compensate for its ergonomic limitations.
It frankly cannot be used in similar situations as a desktop computer.
Also, in case you haven't noticed, the size of computers hasn't really changed much in the last 20 years. Sure, we've gotten laptops, and now tablets and smartphones, but desktops are still more popular than all three and they are still pretty big. Why is that? I mean, they pack thousands of times the computing power of the old computers, right? Shouldn't they be teeny tiny by now?
The answer is, why make it smaller than it needs to be? For what you use a desktop for you don't move it around much, and miniaturization is expensive. You can make a more powerful system for less by leaving it relatively large.
For example, that $500 iPad is maybe 1/4 as powerful as a cheap, $300 e-machines desktop, which has none of the ergonomic problems of the iPad at the expense of not being portable.The only way the iPad, or any tablet device for that matter, replaces computers is if that power/price gap is closed. The difference in power needs to be negligible, and the difference in price needs to be small.
So far, that isn't the way it works. Even as phones and tablets get more powerful, desktops and laptops get even more powerful still - it is going to take a long time and quite a few technical advances before that gap closes in any significant way.
Not to mention the fact that the iPhone only has 20% of the smartphone market, and is currently declining (it will probably spike back up with the next gen of iPhone, at least for a while). For the overall cell phone market it's something like 2%, and I think I'm overestimating.
If you are going to go after anybody for malware you're either going after Rim's Blackberry, which has over 50% of the smartphone market, or Nokia's Symbian, which has 50% of the overall cell phone market.
As popular as the iPhone is, it's chump change when you put things in perspective.
Honestly, I think Apple is making the exact same mistake they made with PC's in the 80's. They had the potential to rule the market then, but their lack of a willingness to license to other manufacturers allowed Microsoft to pull the rug out from under them and nearly drive them out of business. As big as Apple is, relative to what they could have become they are tiny. Google is doing the same thing to them with Android, which already has half the market share of the iPhone OS. The App Store still has a lot more apps than the Android Market, but already key developers are dropping the iPhone platform completely in favor of Android, for no reason other than Apple's insane approval process. Pretty soon it will be just another "it's nice, but I can't get my on it" Apple device.
Frankly, Steve Jobs is backing himself into another technology hole, and just like the first time he did it, he can't see it coming at all. He's right that smartphones at least, and maybe small tablets, are the platform of the future, but I think he's wrong that Apple will ultimately play a dominant role on the platform. Just like with Apple and the PC, you can already see the sun starting to set on Apple's glory days with the smartphone and tablet. He is gloating now, but he is making the exact same mistakes he made before, which should be plain to see.
-- As a side note, I also believe smartphones will ultimately destroy the music player market, just like they destroyed the pda market. Seriously, my phone can already hold more music than my ipod nano (not super impressive, I know, but it holds more music than I own) with a simple SD card upgrade, and I can listen to Pandora radio on it anywhere - it kicks ass.
Nah, it really just depends on which fanboy modded you first. Since even fewer people use Linux than Apple products, the Apple fanboy mods have reversed the troll rating.
It would be nice if mods would mod people for being, you know, trolls. If you don't like it, you can mod it "overrated" without resorting to calling an opposing view a troll.
Dear artard,
My god, have things gotten this bad, that people cannot even spell RTRD correctly? I mean, it practically spells itself!
An equals sign and the word "is" are different things and work in slightly different ways.
Actually they work in exactly the same way, you changed the format of your example in a subtle way that makes a huge difference. If you notice your example of Mickey is a mouse, you've said Mickey is equal to only one of many mice. You can do the same thing with an equals sign: Mickey = a mouse. This means Mickey is equal to only one mouse, not all mice. Thus, all mice are not Mickeys, but Mickey is a mouse. Mice != Mickeys, Mickey = a mouse. In this particular example, you cannot reverse the two because of the rules of logic - a mouse = Mickey does not work, because you need to know which mouse is Mickey, you can't take just any mouse and know it is Mickey.
The word "is" means the two statements on either side are equivalent. So when we say "Freedom is Slavery" with no qualifier that would make freedom a subset of slavery, it also means that "Slavery is Freedom". The two are equivalent. It's the way basic logic functions. Now, if the phrase were "Freedom is a form of Slavery", you can't make the reverse statement without including the qualifiers, because "Freedom" is equal to everything after the "is". The equivalent statement is "A form of Slavery is Freedom" in that case.
Get it? "Is" and "equals" are synonyms. You can replace one with the other in every case.
What does he lose for forgetting the apostrophe?
porn != sex
Uh, I'm not sure you understand the concept of porn.
See in porn, people have sex, then video tape it. Porn = sex, all packaged up for other people to enjoy by proxy.
Obligatory XKCD.
However, claims that Xerox single handedly invented the WIMP interface [wikipedia.org] (Windows, Icons, Pointer, Menus) and that Apple copied that interface exactly as created by Xerox are simply incorrect.
I think you're the only one who has said that so far, everyone else just stuck to the GUI (which is the first implementation of WIMP as an interface). Xerox invented the GUI, but not the mouse. They were the ones who came up with point-and-click as well as a menu and icon driven user interface. NLS had windows, but all commands were text based, like a classic CLI. The mouse existed to click on hyperlinks, which were another NLS first, along with windows.
The only addition made by Xerox PARC was the addition of Icons. NLS had bitmapped WYSIWYG graphics, but did not come up with the idea of using Icons to represent commands, using text based menus instead.
That's not quite correct - NLS was not WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get means everything you can access on the system is available on-screen. Most of what you did with NLS was done with complicated CHORD commands or punch cards (in off-line mode).
It had some very neat things, including multiple windows and editable 2d graphics, but a graphical user interface it was not, it was very much still a command driven interface with occasional graphical components. Sort of a transition OS between a CLI and a GUI. Windows and menus in NLS were more like the windows and menus available in DOS. Yeah, they existed, and they were probably more heavily used than those in DOS (and more feature rich, by the look of things), but they still were not GUIs.
Actually a good comparison of how the NLS UI worked is the Hyperwords addon for Firefox. It's built around text hyperlinks and such. Like all great text-based interfaces, it had a steep learning curve but allowed for great productivity once mastered.
In any case, the Alto was the first OS with an actual GUI. NLS was a text based UI with some graphics to make it pretty.