What's that got to do with the iPad? There's no law against jailbreaking it.
Apple claims that jailbreaking is a DMCA violation. I don't know how they think that's supposed to work, but you're wholeheartedly welcome to invite being sued by them so that we all can find out.
That's absurd. Apple can claim anything they want. That doesn't mean they have either the grounds to sue, or the desire to sue. I did jailbreak my original iPhone, but reverted it back not too much later, and haven't done so since. Not for fear of the DMCA or Apple, just no need/desire to do so.
Your warning, however, is not in earnest, and you damned well know it. There have been countless confessions of people jailbreaking their iPhones all over the Internet. If Apple was going to sue, they could easily gather enough evidence to file lawsuits. Since that's both never happened, and Apple has never even warned that they intend to ever start doing this, there's no way your warning can be truly honest.
My point is you just can't equate a PC and an iPad like that. If it can't do everything a PC can, then it's not a PC. Period.
That's a stupid point. Not all PCs can do everything other PCs can do. Is a netbook not a PC because it can't take regular PCI cards? Is it not a PC because it can't play blu-ray discs (or even 1080p rips)?
By any definition a PC can do much more than "access to the net, type emails etc", including things an iPad can't do.
No, by definition a PC is a Personal Computer. Anything more is either common parlance (i.e., a Windows PC) or bullshit (i.e. "that doesn't fit my definition of a 'PC'").
Maybe that's all you need to do on the go. But I may want to tidy up and debug my code; somebody else might want to do some lightweight video cutting or finish off a.ppt.
You can do all three of those things on an iPad.
Not that it matters, but as a funny side note, judging by some of Apple's site content, it looks like they finally admitted [apple.com] a Mac desktop is also a PC ("Why your next PC should be a Mac").
If you had an ounce of sense, you'd realize Apple basically invented the PC. This is boiler-plate from every Apple press release since forever:
"Apple ignited the personal computer revolution with the Apple II, then reinvented the personal computer with the Macintosh."
Not illegal as in punishable, but against Apple's policy and voids your warranty. If you don't mind that, fine.
In other words, not illegal. Got it.
You're not fucking Humpty Dumpty, you don't get to make up definitions for words.
Jailbreaking gives write access to the iPhone (and iPad) file system, including write access to Apple's Fair Play libraries. It is not difficult, once you can write to the root, to replace this with dummy versions that let you play DRM'd songs that you didn't purchase. Similar things can be done with applications.
I have write access to my MacBook Pro, but I cannot simply alter the FairPlay libraries to play songs from other people.
Regardless, even if such a maneuver is possible, that doesn't make jailbreaking illegal. It only makes it illegal if the primary reason to do so is to circumvent FairPlay.
This is obviously not the primary reason people jailbreak
QED
but it is covered under the DMCA because write protection can be necessary for copyright protection.
The growth of netbook sales has slowed, but it's still positive growth. That means that netbook sales are still increasing. Not at all a "freefall".
It's not your reading comprehension skills that failed you since you understood exactly what the previous article intended for you to understand (read: you were misled). Instead, it was your critical thinking skills that failed you when you didn't pick up on the deception.
No, I understood exactly what the numbers stated, and I wrote what I wrote deliberately. The numbers are in freefall.
But don't worry, your basic arithmetic skills did not fail you, instead it was your grasp of basic calculus when you didn't pick up on how rates of change works.
Seems like a worthy market to be in. Isn't that actually the stated purpose of netbooks... providing a PC operating system in an ultraportable form factor?
No, it's a crappy market to be in. Very few people actually want an ultraportable PC. What they want is an ultraportable device. The fact that the most capable solution at the time was a miniature PC notebook doesn't mean that that is specifically what most people wanted. It's just all they had available.
Aside from that... the iPod Touch was really just Apple's (2nd) attempt at a Palm Pilot.
Newton predates Palm. So, Apple's first attempt was made years before the US Robotics Pilot?
It did pretty well
You could just stop there, because your "why" is just that "people are stupid". While I don't agree with your assessment, either way, nothing's changed in that regard between the iPod Touch launch and the iPad launch.
The iPad is a jumbo-sized Touch with a few nifty extras.
The same way a swimming pool is just a jumbo-sized bath tub.
Through the magic of advertising, Apple has made them seem attractive to a huge number of people, but the success so far has been pretty stunning, and there's a good chance the lustre will fade once early buyers realize it's too big to fit in a pocket and doesn't offer much that a smaller, less expensive, but otherwise virtually identical product with equal or greater sex appeal has had all along.
Again, you're projecting stupidity on other people's choices, and (regardless of the correctness of your opinion) somehow expect them to change. Ain't gonna happen.
Personally, I'm looking to see what the next generation of netbooks brings to the table. I'd much rather have the keyboard, and if somebody sells a model with 1080p HDMI out and an SSD at $500 I'm going to be a very happy camper.
Good for you. I hope they make what you want. But most people do not want what you want. You're a geek (or a nerd, or whatever you want to call it), and your intelligence appears (based on your surely unbiased assessment) to far exceed that of the average person. On what bizzaro world do you think that the needs of someone like you, technologically speaking, would be the norm?
Netbooks may not have a large keyboard, but it is physical, and it has keys.
He didn't say "physical", he said "real".
720p is considered HD on a smaller screen, and most netbooks have an HDMI port to spit HD in 1080p, if needed
Bullshit. Some do, and very few can do 1080p at all, and most even have difficulty with 720p.
Flash runs fine on every netbook I've tested it on. FUD.
Which letter are you thinking of? Fear? Uncertainty? Doubt?
If you don't think Flash runs like shit, load up YouTube on a netbook. Maybe you just have low standards?
Obviously every machine has limitations, but the iPad's are stupid limitations that don't serve much of a purpose other than vendor lockin or stupid pricing strategies. You can buy a $400 netbook and a $50 Sprint 4G card if you want to replace that $600 3G iPad,
Nobody wants an external USB card, PC cards are rare on netbooks, and internal 3G/4G cards are not the standard default.
As far as price goes, people have no problem spending the extra hundred or so dollars for something that's better. The netbook price issue is silly for that very reason. I mean, why buy a $400 netbook when you can buy nothing? Obviously the $400 for a netbook is for something of value. Then a little bit more something even better still? It's a no brainer.
and you can do all sorts of cool things,
You mean nerd things. Sorry, but there's pretty much nothing about the netbook that is "cool". iPad, on the other hand, has cool covered across the board.
such as type like a normal person, video chat, do things in Flash
Both of which are crap on netbooks.
listen to music in stereo, use a browser of my choice
You can do those on the iPad.
connect to my TV to watch Netflix
Talk to Netflix, the iPad supports output to TV.
and install software from anywhere on the internet without voiding my warranty.
Nobody cares.
Oh, and netbooks have more processing power than my cell phone, but the iPad doesn't. Oh.
CPU power going to waste trying to run desktop apps. x86 is an awful handheld architecture.
>>and a crap web browser with no plugin or extension support. > >Flash runs like shit on netbooks.
Your only criteria for web browsers is that they run flash well????
Reading comprehension is still taught in schools, is it not? I've bolded part of the quote to assist you here.
The built in browser in the iPad is *horrible* for casual browser. It's basically unusable for me. I do like the iPad for some things, but those are very specific & constrained uses, and web browsing is certainly not one of them.
Absurd. Web browsing is great on the iPad. I often prefer it to using my notebook.
Heck, Apple are the ones playing with semantics as they usually avoid sticking the "PC" label to anything but Wintel
They're just using the common parlance. People call what used to be IBM compatible PCs just PCs these days, and since the ads are aimed at people...
- or Linux/Intel, to a much lesser extent.
By "lesser extent", you surely mean "not at all". The ads are aimed squarely at Windows PCs.
And the question whether jailbreaking is legal or not is in a murky state of the law as agrif explained.
Not murky at all. Unless you have an example of someone going to jail for jailbreaking? Or even a logical explanation for how the process involves the DMCA at all in the first place?
The DMCA prohibits circumvention of copy and write protection on a broad range of devices, which includes the iPhone and iPad.
Copy and write protection? Don't you mean copyright protection? Regardless, the DMCA doesn't apply to jailbreaking. It's about copyright circumvention. Jailbreaking does not involve copyright.
Well, do you honestly think that iPad will sell 40 millions units a year and keep it up?
Why not?
I don't. Besides, iPad has been out over a month now and is still only at 1 million units, and half of those are preorders.
iPad hit over 1 million in less than a month. Supplies have been constrained, and sales are US-only. The iPad is on its way to being the fastest consumer product to sell $1 billion worth of units. How blind to reality do you have to be to not realize that the iPad's sales are nothing short of stellar?
If iPad would be killing netbooks sales, it has some catching up to do.
And what makes you think this won't be happening? Netbooks sales are in freefall, iPad sales are stellar. Once the iPad becomes reasonably easy to buy around the world, there's no way the netbook is going to be able to compete.
I doubt it. The tablet market is going to become a very crowded space very shortly
HAHAHA.
Oh, you were serious? Two things. First, the "tablet market" was going to become very crowded months ago. Apple is the only company to actually deliver, which is key. MS Courier was just a concept rendering, and HP's Slate has hit a huge roadblock that was so bad that they ditched Windows 7 and bought Palm.
The second thing is that, yes, there will be plenty of tablets available, but how are they going to compete with the iPad? The tablet market that the iPad is going to be facing will be similar to the PMP market that the iPod faces. Yes, there will be plenty of other products, but it's highly unlikely they are going to do better than the iPad.
Of course, only time will tell, but to count on the usual suspects to somehow outdo Apple? Not a sound bet.
with several potential competitors who have been developing their products for much longer than Apple has.
Which makes it all the more pathetic that they have been caught with their pants down yet again.. iPod, iPhone, and now iPad.
Why do people buy laptops when they already own desktops? the answer: portability, portability and portability.
And the iPad doesn't offer that?
Different third-party apps, all non-free (and not only in the FSF)
There are both free gratis and free libre software on the App Store.
and wholly unsupported by the device manufacturer
I wasn't aware Toshiba supported Photoshop (as an example)?
And your 'adapter' solutions all fail at the single thing the iPad has for it: portability!
What? How big do you think these adapters are?
Unlike an iPad, you *can* run applications meant for PCs on a portable device.
Yeah, poorly.
And I guarantee you, every single game that runs slowly on a netbook won't run at all on an iPad, with many that'd run perfectly fine (ie, most Flash and indie games) *also* won't run at all on an iPad.
You can guarantee, for example, that Plants vs Zombies won't run on an iPad?
You're trying to twist "is wholly uncompatible with the software most people want to run" in an advantage of the iPad, and that's simply idiotic, sorry.
No, you're trying to pretend that if you can't run the same binary on an iPad as you can on your PC, then you can't perform the same task. That's simply idiotic, sorry.
Not many people are going to not buy a netbook because of an iPad, because they satisfy different markets.
That's because the netbook doesn't serve any market particularly well, while the iPad does. The only market that the netbook serves moderately well is if you need a PC operating system in an ultraportable form factor. Other than that, the netbook is either a shitty notebook, or a clunky handheld.
Up until the iPad, the netbook was the best solution for a powerful, large screen handheld. Apple just pwned that market, and it's those people who are going to "not buy a netbook because of an iPad", and believe me they far outnumber the people who need an actual PC OS (Windows or Linux) on their handheld device.
I am not able to legally install whatever software I want to and use its computing abilities to its fullest just because their manufacturer decided to intentionally cripple it.
What's that got to do with the iPad? There's no law against jailbreaking it.
Regardless, you're playing semantics. Whether you want to call it a "PC" or not is entirely irrelevant to the issue of the iPad's functionality. It serves as a computer you can toss into a bag to check your email, browse the web, etc. What you prefer to label it does not alter the actual functionality of the device in any way whatsoever.
and a crap web browser with no plugin or extension support.
Flash runs like shit on netbooks.
It's like using a 1994 Linux machine with a membrane keyboard.
Um... It's got significantly more storage, more RAM, faster CPU, faster graphics, longer battery life, better pretty much everything than a Linux machine from 1994. But don't let any of that stop you from being a jackass.
The iPad has limitations, and if those limitations are something that bother you, then sure, a netbook can be a better choice, but if those limitations don't bother you (which is going to be true for most people), then the iPad utterly dominates the netbook.
There's pretty much zero chance of that research reaching the public.
There's no doubt that MS Research gets into some interesting stuff, but very little of it ever sees the light of day.
Actually, quite a lot of their stuff sees the light of the day - it's just not often credited as such, and usually vastly reworked from the original prototypes.
Not really. This Willy Wonka stuff they show off never makes it out, and that's what I'm referring to. The "vastly reworked" stuff you are referring to is a tame version of the "oh, this is cool" stuff.
That's what I thought was so funny about this part:
Since one of the charters of Microsoft Research is that the work should eventually be moved to product teams, there's a good chance that the prototypes will eventually be made available to the public at large.
There's pretty much zero chance of that research reaching the public.
There's no doubt that MS Research gets into some interesting stuff, but very little of it ever sees the light of day. The main reason for this is precisely because they do get into some interesting stuff. It's really difficult to make a product out of something that uses one hand for coarse actions and the other for fine actions, or to build an actual, working universal translator.
5 bucks says you immediately follow this with an unbacked up statement of your own.
All the actual comparisons I've seen convinced me that I cannot make out any significant difference between a shitty Theora and a shitty H.264.
Easiest $5 ever.
You are just talking out of your ass, just like every other H.264 apologist here.
It's not apology if it's actually better.
You completely skirt the real issue with the codec: it's not free
I don't give a shit if it's not free if it's better. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with paying for H.264. If you're in the US, the government gives away free cheese. Why do you still pay for food that's better, when you can have free cheese?
and you justify it by saying that it's "better quality", an assertion you can hardly prove.
You base this assertion on...? Oh, I see. You're talking out of your ass. Clever of you to make that claim against me preemptively, as you knew you'd be engaging in just that.
Worse yet, you say that "Theora just doesn't have it". Doesn't have what?
In English, when you have a pronoun, you look for context. For example, it often refers to a noun previously mentioned. In this case, it's actually the word, in fact the entire sentence, directly preceding it. Quality. Theora just doesn't have it.
Theora is only marginally inferior, if at all. If Theora sucks, then so does H.264.
No, Theora is vastly inferior. It's based on an outdated codec, and the only reason it's being used at all is because it was the best "free" codec out there. Maybe VP8 will end up changing things a bit.
No, it is not free. It's available without paying money from certain manufacturers, but it's not free.
Translation: It's not free, it's only free...
It's jail time if you distribute it.
No it's not. But regardless, I didn't say anything about redistributing it, I talked about non-commercial web transmission. In other words, you can put your family videos up online in H.264 without paying a cent. If, instead, you provide video commercially (e.g. Hulu), then you pay something around a cent.
It's fundamentally insane to be philosophically opposed to paying for products and services that you use in the process of making money.
If it were free we wouldn't be having this conversation.
It's free, but somehow we're still having this conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
What's that got to do with the iPad? There's no law against jailbreaking it.
Apple claims that jailbreaking is a DMCA violation. I don't know how they think that's supposed to work, but you're wholeheartedly welcome to invite being sued by them so that we all can find out.
That's absurd. Apple can claim anything they want. That doesn't mean they have either the grounds to sue, or the desire to sue. I did jailbreak my original iPhone, but reverted it back not too much later, and haven't done so since. Not for fear of the DMCA or Apple, just no need/desire to do so.
Your warning, however, is not in earnest, and you damned well know it. There have been countless confessions of people jailbreaking their iPhones all over the Internet. If Apple was going to sue, they could easily gather enough evidence to file lawsuits. Since that's both never happened, and Apple has never even warned that they intend to ever start doing this, there's no way your warning can be truly honest.
My point is you just can't equate a PC and an iPad like that. If it can't do everything a PC can, then it's not a PC. Period.
That's a stupid point. Not all PCs can do everything other PCs can do. Is a netbook not a PC because it can't take regular PCI cards? Is it not a PC because it can't play blu-ray discs (or even 1080p rips)?
By any definition a PC can do much more than "access to the net, type emails etc", including things an iPad can't do.
No, by definition a PC is a Personal Computer. Anything more is either common parlance (i.e., a Windows PC) or bullshit (i.e. "that doesn't fit my definition of a 'PC'").
Maybe that's all you need to do on the go. But I may want to tidy up and debug my code; somebody else might want to do some lightweight video cutting or finish off a .ppt.
You can do all three of those things on an iPad.
Not that it matters, but as a funny side note, judging by some of Apple's site content, it looks like they finally admitted [apple.com] a Mac desktop is also a PC ("Why your next PC should be a Mac").
If you had an ounce of sense, you'd realize Apple basically invented the PC. This is boiler-plate from every Apple press release since forever:
"Apple ignited the personal computer revolution with the Apple II, then reinvented the personal computer with the Macintosh."
Not illegal as in punishable, but against Apple's policy and voids your warranty. If you don't mind that, fine.
In other words, not illegal. Got it.
You're not fucking Humpty Dumpty, you don't get to make up definitions for words.
Jailbreaking gives write access to the iPhone (and iPad) file system, including write access to Apple's Fair Play libraries. It is not difficult, once you can write to the root, to replace this with dummy versions that let you play DRM'd songs that you didn't purchase. Similar things can be done with applications.
I have write access to my MacBook Pro, but I cannot simply alter the FairPlay libraries to play songs from other people.
Regardless, even if such a maneuver is possible, that doesn't make jailbreaking illegal. It only makes it illegal if the primary reason to do so is to circumvent FairPlay.
This is obviously not the primary reason people jailbreak
QED
but it is covered under the DMCA because write protection can be necessary for copyright protection.
Rubbish.
Netbooks sales are in freefall
The growth of netbook sales has slowed, but it's still positive growth. That means that netbook sales are still increasing. Not at all a "freefall".
It's not your reading comprehension skills that failed you since you understood exactly what the previous article intended for you to understand (read: you were misled). Instead, it was your critical thinking skills that failed you when you didn't pick up on the deception.
No, I understood exactly what the numbers stated, and I wrote what I wrote deliberately. The numbers are in freefall.
But don't worry, your basic arithmetic skills did not fail you, instead it was your grasp of basic calculus when you didn't pick up on how rates of change works.
Seems like a worthy market to be in. Isn't that actually the stated purpose of netbooks... providing a PC operating system in an ultraportable form factor?
No, it's a crappy market to be in. Very few people actually want an ultraportable PC. What they want is an ultraportable device. The fact that the most capable solution at the time was a miniature PC notebook doesn't mean that that is specifically what most people wanted. It's just all they had available.
Aside from that... the iPod Touch was really just Apple's (2nd) attempt at a Palm Pilot.
Newton predates Palm. So, Apple's first attempt was made years before the US Robotics Pilot?
It did pretty well
You could just stop there, because your "why" is just that "people are stupid". While I don't agree with your assessment, either way, nothing's changed in that regard between the iPod Touch launch and the iPad launch.
The iPad is a jumbo-sized Touch with a few nifty extras.
The same way a swimming pool is just a jumbo-sized bath tub.
Through the magic of advertising, Apple has made them seem attractive to a huge number of people, but the success so far has been pretty stunning, and there's a good chance the lustre will fade once early buyers realize it's too big to fit in a pocket and doesn't offer much that a smaller, less expensive, but otherwise virtually identical product with equal or greater sex appeal has had all along.
Again, you're projecting stupidity on other people's choices, and (regardless of the correctness of your opinion) somehow expect them to change. Ain't gonna happen.
Personally, I'm looking to see what the next generation of netbooks brings to the table. I'd much rather have the keyboard, and if somebody sells a model with 1080p HDMI out and an SSD at $500 I'm going to be a very happy camper.
Good for you. I hope they make what you want. But most people do not want what you want. You're a geek (or a nerd, or whatever you want to call it), and your intelligence appears (based on your surely unbiased assessment) to far exceed that of the average person. On what bizzaro world do you think that the needs of someone like you, technologically speaking, would be the norm?
Netbooks may not have a large keyboard, but it is physical, and it has keys.
He didn't say "physical", he said "real".
720p is considered HD on a smaller screen, and most netbooks have an HDMI port to spit HD in 1080p, if needed
Bullshit. Some do, and very few can do 1080p at all, and most even have difficulty with 720p.
Flash runs fine on every netbook I've tested it on. FUD.
Which letter are you thinking of? Fear? Uncertainty? Doubt?
If you don't think Flash runs like shit, load up YouTube on a netbook. Maybe you just have low standards?
Obviously every machine has limitations, but the iPad's are stupid limitations that don't serve much of a purpose other than vendor lockin or stupid pricing strategies. You can buy a $400 netbook and a $50 Sprint 4G card if you want to replace that $600 3G iPad,
Nobody wants an external USB card, PC cards are rare on netbooks, and internal 3G/4G cards are not the standard default.
As far as price goes, people have no problem spending the extra hundred or so dollars for something that's better. The netbook price issue is silly for that very reason. I mean, why buy a $400 netbook when you can buy nothing? Obviously the $400 for a netbook is for something of value. Then a little bit more something even better still? It's a no brainer.
and you can do all sorts of cool things,
You mean nerd things. Sorry, but there's pretty much nothing about the netbook that is "cool". iPad, on the other hand, has cool covered across the board.
such as type like a normal person, video chat, do things in Flash
Both of which are crap on netbooks.
listen to music in stereo, use a browser of my choice
You can do those on the iPad.
connect to my TV to watch Netflix
Talk to Netflix, the iPad supports output to TV.
and install software from anywhere on the internet without voiding my warranty.
Nobody cares.
Oh, and netbooks have more processing power than my cell phone, but the iPad doesn't. Oh.
CPU power going to waste trying to run desktop apps. x86 is an awful handheld architecture.
>>and a crap web browser with no plugin or extension support.
>
>Flash runs like shit on netbooks.
Your only criteria for web browsers is that they run flash well????
Reading comprehension is still taught in schools, is it not? I've bolded part of the quote to assist you here.
The built in browser in the iPad is *horrible* for casual browser. It's basically unusable for me. I do like the iPad for some things, but those are very specific & constrained uses, and web browsing is certainly not one of them.
Absurd. Web browsing is great on the iPad. I often prefer it to using my notebook.
Heck, Apple are the ones playing with semantics as they usually avoid sticking the "PC" label to anything but Wintel
They're just using the common parlance. People call what used to be IBM compatible PCs just PCs these days, and since the ads are aimed at people...
- or Linux/Intel, to a much lesser extent.
By "lesser extent", you surely mean "not at all". The ads are aimed squarely at Windows PCs.
And the question whether jailbreaking is legal or not is in a murky state of the law as agrif explained.
Not murky at all. Unless you have an example of someone going to jail for jailbreaking? Or even a logical explanation for how the process involves the DMCA at all in the first place?
There is a law against jailbreaking, it's called the DMCA. Moreover, you violate Apples TOS and invalidate your warranty.
How does jailbreaking violate copyright? You know, the 'C' in DMCA. And voiding your warranty is not illegal.
The DMCA prohibits circumvention of copy and write protection on a broad range of devices, which includes the iPhone and iPad.
Copy and write protection? Don't you mean copyright protection? Regardless, the DMCA doesn't apply to jailbreaking. It's about copyright circumvention. Jailbreaking does not involve copyright.
Well, do you honestly think that iPad will sell 40 millions units a year and keep it up?
Why not?
I don't. Besides, iPad has been out over a month now and is still only at 1 million units, and half of those are preorders.
iPad hit over 1 million in less than a month. Supplies have been constrained, and sales are US-only. The iPad is on its way to being the fastest consumer product to sell $1 billion worth of units. How blind to reality do you have to be to not realize that the iPad's sales are nothing short of stellar?
If iPad would be killing netbooks sales, it has some catching up to do.
And what makes you think this won't be happening? Netbooks sales are in freefall, iPad sales are stellar. Once the iPad becomes reasonably easy to buy around the world, there's no way the netbook is going to be able to compete.
I doubt it. The tablet market is going to become a very crowded space very shortly
HAHAHA.
Oh, you were serious? Two things. First, the "tablet market" was going to become very crowded months ago. Apple is the only company to actually deliver, which is key. MS Courier was just a concept rendering, and HP's Slate has hit a huge roadblock that was so bad that they ditched Windows 7 and bought Palm.
The second thing is that, yes, there will be plenty of tablets available, but how are they going to compete with the iPad? The tablet market that the iPad is going to be facing will be similar to the PMP market that the iPod faces. Yes, there will be plenty of other products, but it's highly unlikely they are going to do better than the iPad.
Of course, only time will tell, but to count on the usual suspects to somehow outdo Apple? Not a sound bet.
with several potential competitors who have been developing their products for much longer than Apple has.
Which makes it all the more pathetic that they have been caught with their pants down yet again.. iPod, iPhone, and now iPad.
Why do people buy laptops when they already own desktops? the answer: portability, portability and portability.
And the iPad doesn't offer that?
Different third-party apps, all non-free (and not only in the FSF)
There are both free gratis and free libre software on the App Store.
and wholly unsupported by the device manufacturer
I wasn't aware Toshiba supported Photoshop (as an example)?
And your 'adapter' solutions all fail at the single thing the iPad has for it: portability!
What? How big do you think these adapters are?
Unlike an iPad, you *can* run applications meant for PCs on a portable device.
Yeah, poorly.
And I guarantee you, every single game that runs slowly on a netbook won't run at all on an iPad, with many that'd run perfectly fine (ie, most Flash and indie games) *also* won't run at all on an iPad.
You can guarantee, for example, that Plants vs Zombies won't run on an iPad?
You're trying to twist "is wholly uncompatible with the software most people want to run" in an advantage of the iPad, and that's simply idiotic, sorry.
No, you're trying to pretend that if you can't run the same binary on an iPad as you can on your PC, then you can't perform the same task. That's simply idiotic, sorry.
Not many people are going to not buy a netbook because of an iPad, because they satisfy different markets.
That's because the netbook doesn't serve any market particularly well, while the iPad does. The only market that the netbook serves moderately well is if you need a PC operating system in an ultraportable form factor. Other than that, the netbook is either a shitty notebook, or a clunky handheld.
Up until the iPad, the netbook was the best solution for a powerful, large screen handheld. Apple just pwned that market, and it's those people who are going to "not buy a netbook because of an iPad", and believe me they far outnumber the people who need an actual PC OS (Windows or Linux) on their handheld device.
I am not able to legally install whatever software I want to and use its computing abilities to its fullest just because their manufacturer decided to intentionally cripple it.
What's that got to do with the iPad? There's no law against jailbreaking it.
Regardless, you're playing semantics. Whether you want to call it a "PC" or not is entirely irrelevant to the issue of the iPad's functionality. It serves as a computer you can toss into a bag to check your email, browse the web, etc. What you prefer to label it does not alter the actual functionality of the device in any way whatsoever.
...except the iPad doesn't have a real keyboard,
Neither do netbooks.
has crap multimedia format support
It supports high def, unlike netbooks generally.
and a crap web browser with no plugin or extension support.
Flash runs like shit on netbooks.
It's like using a 1994 Linux machine with a membrane keyboard.
Um... It's got significantly more storage, more RAM, faster CPU, faster graphics, longer battery life, better pretty much everything than a Linux machine from 1994. But don't let any of that stop you from being a jackass.
The iPad has limitations, and if those limitations are something that bother you, then sure, a netbook can be a better choice, but if those limitations don't bother you (which is going to be true for most people), then the iPad utterly dominates the netbook.
There's pretty much zero chance of that research reaching the public.
There's no doubt that MS Research gets into some interesting stuff, but very little of it ever sees the light of day.
Actually, quite a lot of their stuff sees the light of the day - it's just not often credited as such, and usually vastly reworked from the original prototypes.
Not really. This Willy Wonka stuff they show off never makes it out, and that's what I'm referring to. The "vastly reworked" stuff you are referring to is a tame version of the "oh, this is cool" stuff.
Note: all routers are linux based.
No they aren't. In fact, very few are.
I have yet to see a Windows 7 router, or a OSX router (Linux runs the airport!)
AirPorts are based on BSD.
That's what I thought was so funny about this part:
Since one of the charters of Microsoft Research is that the work should eventually be moved to product teams, there's a good chance that the prototypes will eventually be made available to the public at large.
There's pretty much zero chance of that research reaching the public.
There's no doubt that MS Research gets into some interesting stuff, but very little of it ever sees the light of day. The main reason for this is precisely because they do get into some interesting stuff. It's really difficult to make a product out of something that uses one hand for coarse actions and the other for fine actions, or to build an actual, working universal translator.
Podcaster. Denied distribution for competing with iTunes.
That's not why it was denied. It was denied for replacing core iPhone functionality.
But you cannot really back that up, can you?
5 bucks says you immediately follow this with an unbacked up statement of your own.
All the actual comparisons I've seen convinced me that I cannot make out any significant difference between a shitty Theora and a shitty H.264.
Easiest $5 ever.
You are just talking out of your ass, just like every other H.264 apologist here.
It's not apology if it's actually better.
You completely skirt the real issue with the codec: it's not free
I don't give a shit if it's not free if it's better. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with paying for H.264. If you're in the US, the government gives away free cheese. Why do you still pay for food that's better, when you can have free cheese?
and you justify it by saying that it's "better quality", an assertion you can hardly prove.
You base this assertion on...? Oh, I see. You're talking out of your ass. Clever of you to make that claim against me preemptively, as you knew you'd be engaging in just that.
Worse yet, you say that "Theora just doesn't have it". Doesn't have what?
In English, when you have a pronoun, you look for context. For example, it often refers to a noun previously mentioned. In this case, it's actually the word, in fact the entire sentence, directly preceding it. Quality. Theora just doesn't have it.
Theora is only marginally inferior, if at all. If Theora sucks, then so does H.264.
No, Theora is vastly inferior. It's based on an outdated codec, and the only reason it's being used at all is because it was the best "free" codec out there. Maybe VP8 will end up changing things a bit.
No, it is not free. It's available without paying money from certain manufacturers, but it's not free.
Translation: It's not free, it's only free...
It's jail time if you distribute it.
No it's not. But regardless, I didn't say anything about redistributing it, I talked about non-commercial web transmission. In other words, you can put your family videos up online in H.264 without paying a cent. If, instead, you provide video commercially (e.g. Hulu), then you pay something around a cent.
It's fundamentally insane to be philosophically opposed to paying for products and services that you use in the process of making money.
If it were free we wouldn't be having this conversation.
It's free, but somehow we're still having this conversation.
Repeat, out loud, one hundred times:
Correlation is NOT causation.
Correlation is NOT causation.
Except that in some cases (like this) it is.
No, you would download it from Mozilla, and it would be branded Firefox, just like it is now.
All Mozilla has to do is license the codec. Why is this so hard to understand?
None of which precludes the opportunity for Mozilla to do the exact same thing with Firefox.