Or maybe *you* weren't around when Mac OS X came out and "hackers" by the droves switched to them, including CmdrTaco himself. Even Linus Torvalds used a PowerMac G5 (running Linux, obviously) for a while.
It got to a point where that glowing Apple was no longer out of place even at Open Source conferences.
No, Apple is not seen as a joke, and haven't been for a decade now. There *is* a more prominent backlash now, mostly due to ignorance of how the iPhone works. It's OK though. There's plenty of room for people to use Windows and Linux and Macs and iPhones.
No it's not, it's competing with netbooks. And, aside from the geek-crowd, it thoroughly trounces the netbook.
I understand the appeal of the netbook, and don't look down upon anyone choosing a netbook because it fits their needs and desires. But I do find absurd this notion that the iPad is going to fail or is underpowered or overpriced, etc.
The Kindle has E-ink which is going to make for a better reading experience.
What makes you think that? There is nothing inherent in the photons reflected by e-ink that make then better on the eyes than those emitted by an LCD.
In fact, the e-ink display, like those on the Kindle are hard on the eyes due to low contrast and poor low-light visibility, while with a high-quality LED-backlit IPS display like the iPad has is superior to that of the Kindle's in every way *except* battery life, and given the iPad's 10-hour plus battery life with the screen on, that's really not much of an issue.
Ignoring the obvious flaw in that argument (which Wovel has already pointed out), there are two other items of significant import.
First (just to get it out of the way) Jobs axed the Newton, and it's very much not clear that the Newton would have failed otherwise. Apple needed to narrow its focus, so dropping the Newton was arguably correct, it wasn't due to failure of the product itself.
But more to the point, if the other tablet makers did follow in Palm's footsteps, that would at least be a step in the right direction. What I specifically have in mind is shipping with an OS designed around the touch interface. One of the biggest nerd-oriented dings against the iPad is that it doesn't run Mac OS X. This is the single-most important factor in why the iPad will succeed.
They've been around for 10 years and yet they all failed in the consumer market. I wonder if there's some reason for that.....
And as long as the geeks who keep making them are the same types of geeks who go on about how much the iPad sucks and other tablets are so much better, they will remain a losing product.
Here's the clue: nobody, outside of an extremely small niche of geeks, want the type of tablet that slashdotters seem to want. Why companies like HP and ASUS continue down the same failing path again and again baffles me.
That's why there are only five elements, Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Quintessence, instead of the hundreds those wrong-headed "scientists" seem to think must exist. They claim there exist so many that they have to lay them out in a table to even make any sense of them! What's worse, they don't even know how many more there can be.
And Newtonian physics is far simpler than quantum theory, as well as simpler even than relativity. Aether is simpler than space-time. Creation is simpler than evolution. Homeopathy is simpler than medicine.
Let's say your goal is to have a video format in the HTML spec that will be usable on handheld devices all the way up to desktop computers and TVs. With that in mind, do you think you'll have better chances of achieving that goal by railing against patents? Or by adopting a standard that already works on all of those devices with hardware acceleration, is top notch in terms of video and audio quality, and is already the predominant web format?
I'm all for abolishing software patents. And I'm all for working towards that goal. But as far as addressing the problem at hand, h.264 is the right choice, and it's far more likely to be accomplished. I mean, really, it's a fait accompli. Only Mozilla[*] is standing in its way, and Mozilla stands zero chance in defeating h.264. The only things they might accomplish are bringing the issue of patents to light, and muddying up the HTML5 standard by not having a universally supported format.
But in no way whatsoever will Mozilla stop h.264. If they don't ship with it, or without supporting a plugin that will play h.264 directly (without the overhead of Flash, but as a native HTML5 tag), then it's not h.264 that will fail, but Firefox. It will be a hockey stick downwards in the popularity of Firefox.
The biggest problem is that Mozilla's argument isn't technical. It's political. If their stance at the very least had the quality of being technically superior, it'd be worth defending. But to support the inferior technology? WTF? "Use us, we suck most, but are ideologically pure!" is not a compelling rallying cry.
[*] There's also Opera, but in terms of impact on web development, their contribution is negligible.
files, and bandwidth transfer stuff to and from MEMORY. A doc that occupies one gig in ram should occupy one gig in the disk. That's convenient.
It does. Just because you call one a GiB and the other a GB, doesn't change how much memory it actually takes up.
It is convenient to have memory chips that cover the addressable space exactly.
This was my point when I mentioned the exception for RAM.
It is convenient to map those to same units on disk.
Why? It's just a displayed value. The mapping is still done in binary.
I'd say that network band should also follow.
Why? It's just a displayed value. The data is still sent in binary.
Who is it more convenient for to use GiB for both RAM and disk (and then networking)? Embedded programmers, sure. Console programmers, perhaps.
But for everyone else? It will just absolutely never matter. Ever.
Now, if you're programming a Mars Rover, and each byte must be accounted for, it may be more convenient to use KiB/MiB/GiB. And guess what? Computers can do that just fine. Set your development machine to show file sizes in base-2 notation. The data still takes up the same amount of space, regardless of the notation you use to display file sizes. The displayed information is there for the human users, not for the computer. Human users deal better with base 10 (not innately, but by the fact that it's what we deal with most). If you live in a culture with a different base, by all means, use that. The computer will not get confused.
We're on a base 2 scale, and we're not strictly following SI, so lets be clear about that.
Only for memory does that really matter. For disks, files, bandwidth, etc., base 10 is superior because people do better in base 10 than base 2. Most people don't give a fuck what the computer does internally. If we did, we'd not have windows and fonts and crap like that, but just a hex display with a hex keyboard.
The computer already abstracts a bunch of stuff to make them more usable by humans. Abstracting units by displaying them in the more humanly natural base 10 is the way to go. RAM is the only reasonably common, user-facing situation where base 2 is more fundamentally important. Just use MiB and GiB for RAM. Or even use decimal approximations, since it's not if you buy a 1.074GB DIMM, you're going to get the wrong one, since they don't come in exactly that size, and it'll really be 1073741824 bytes. You could also call it 2 to the 30 bytes. Or whatever.
But giga is incorrect. I'm glad Ubuntu (as well as Apple) are using proper units.
I'd give it a try if Apple 'blessed' it (which I doubt they will considering how 'fair' they are) but I don't know if it will ever match the speed of Safari considering they don't have access to the private API's that Apple does (and forbids everyone else from using).
What API's would those be? Safari uses WebKit, just like any other app on the iPhone that wants to serve up web pages.
As far as WebKit goes, what do you suppose it can do that some other rendering engine won't be able to do? It can be written in C, can use OpenGL (as well as things like CoreAnimation)...
So, really, what super-secret APIs are you thinking of here?
Apple keeps APIs private for only two reasons:
1. They aren't finished yet. 2. Security/Privacy.
As for the "fairness" of Apple, and whether they'll approve Opera, they probably won't. It's not because (like so many people think) that they don't want the competition, it's because they believe Safari is the best browser out there, and want to keep the iPhone experience fairly consistent in terms of core functionality.
Ever tried to surf the web with pen input only? Or just an on-screen keyboard and your finger? It sucks balls and no optimization is going to change that fact.
It's called Palm, and before that, Newton. Both did just fine. The Palm OS suffered from limited technology, but the pen aspect was just fine.
the reason pen computing has not taken off is simple: 1. People prefer the keyboard to handwriting
Exactly! You finally get it!
2. Tablets are not cost competitive.
That's not the reason. People buy Macs, which cost more than the average PC. They do so because they want a Mac. If they wanted a pen, they'd buy that.
But they're not buying that. Not in numbers that agree with your assertion.
The reason people haven't want tablet computing is that pen input is a lame add-on to a WIMPs OS. If Palm or Newton were available in a more modern form, on more modern hardware, they definitely would have done better than Tablet PC. That's what I mean when I say for tablet computing to really take off, it needs an OS designed around it.
This current Windows kludge is not enough, and exactly why it hasn't taken off over all these years. Tablet PC has been around in various forms for a decade now, and has remained a miniscule niche product this entire time. This is because people just don't want it. In order for people to want it, there will have to be a device for which pen computing works well, and for that to happen, it has to be designed around the stylus, like Palm and Newton were.
You keep saying how great the stylus works for you. NO SHIT! That's because you live in that niche. Hooray for you! But you're delusional if you think a major factor in keeping people from joining you is price. The factor is that people don't want pens, not the way they exist now.
The question wasn't, "why should your CPU have to wait", it was, "why should *you* have to wait". At speeds approaching 3Gb/s, I think it's fair to say, at the person you replied to actually did say, "well, with the rise of the SSD, that's no longer as much of a problem."
The trick to understanding computing is that all computing really *is* at its heart a throughput problem.
The trick to understanding computers is to realize that all computing really is, at its heart, a human problem. It really doesn't matter if the CPU has to wait a trillion cycles in between receiving each byte of data, if the computer responds in an apparently instantaneous manner for the person using it, everything is working just fine.
I only care abstractly about how long my CPU has to wait. I do care directly about how much I have to wait.
Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is not some magic bullet that "deals with the cores", as you put it.
No, that's exactly what it does. It keeps track of the system resources, and shuffles threads around to where they are most optimal. A simple demonstration of this is to run Task Manager on Windows, and Activity Monitor on a Mac, and watch how the cores (and hyperthreading cores) are used. You'll see Mac OS X does a much better job of this. It can also, using OpenCL, push tasks across the cores on your GPU.
Now, of course, like you said, you can't just magically spread a single-threaded app across multiple cores. But that's not what this story is about.
What is worse about it, seriously dude how many times do I need to ask? *What* about it is worse? A tablet is worse than a screen? How? It does more things.
You keep missing my point. The notebook itself, ignoring ignoring the mechanical differences, is essentially the same in notebook mode as a non-tablet PC notebook.
You keep saying, "but it does more things!" I'm saying, yes, it does. The notebook side of things is pretty much the same.
But, and here's the part you keep missing in my posts, so read carefully...
The tablet mode is not well suited for tablet use. This is what I've been saying since my very first post in this thread. It's absurd to believe that Windows 7 pen mode is equivalent to an OS designed entirely and specifically around the pen. For pen computing to take off, such an OS absolutely must be involved.
Tablets are great for note taking, drawing, and painting. For everything else, for most people, either the traditional keyboard and mouse (or trackpad) for notebooks and larger, or multitouch for netbooks and smaller, is superior.
iPhone OS is a multitouch friendly OS X. But the interface is completely redone. What I'm referring to is the interface. Keeping the kernel and the vast amount of underlying libraries and such can certainly be done with Windows and Linux as well, but they will need to be so fundamentally altered as to be incompatible with their traditional counterparts. At the very least, a traditional GUI app from Windows or Linux wold have to look horrifically out of place on a multitouch version of those systems before one could reasonably consider them altered enough to be suited for multitouch.
There's nothing stopping Windows and Linux from having their UI completely redone, and in fact, that's what Android is (although I think Android is far more different from a traditional Linux than iPhone OS is from Mac OS X).
so, when I say that Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux are not suited for stylus or multitouch, it's, as I've stated many times already, the interface, stupid.
For multitouch specifically, if you can run a traditional GUI app on it, then it's not altered enough. If it has a menu bar, it's not well suited. If it has traditional style overlapping windows and traditional close, maximize, minimize buttons, it's not well suited.
And the annoying thing is that's exactly what the slashdot geek-types are clamoring for! They want the very thing that would absolutely destroy the iPad.
In terms of stylus-based input, I can't say with as much confidence, because that problem hasn't really been solved. The closest I've experienced is Palm, and the problem with Palm OS is that it's not a fully functional OS the way iPhone OS is.
A stylus, in my experience, is a vastly more accurate and speedy primary input device than a trackpad. I'm talking about generic OS interaction. It is easily comparable to a mouse for a small screen, oftentimes superior, but sometimes not.
You are an aberration and your experience atypical. I'm not denying that your opinion is dishonest in invalid. But I am saying that the stylus is not a good match for the WIMPs interface. Good for you that you have experienced success with it.
Using the OS without a keyboard is a clumsy experience, tablets which include the keyboard are vastly more popular in my experience
That's exactly what I stated. Tablet PCs require a keyboard.
Everyone I know who owns a tablet (a few people, but significant in my small sample), owns a convertible, not a slate. So anecdotally your claim that convertibles sell worse is completely false.
No, the evidence for what I stated is in the fact that only a few people that you know actually even have tablet PCs. That's my point. For those that can make sufficient use of it to justify the decreased usability, or for those like you who are a good match for stylus as a universal mouse replacement, convertible tablets are a perfectly fine product. However, for most people, they absolutely are not.
And what's more, an OS designed explicitly around the stylus would be even better for you than just tacking stylus support onto Windows is. But like I've stated, that problem has yet to be solved, so the product you are using is already the best that exists. The issue is that the best is still not good enough to draw users.
A convertible tablet pc is just a laptop that can take pen input through the screen. How this translates to doing thing worse than other laptops I don't understand, it has everything a normal laptop has, plus a stylus. What has been taken away?
I didn't say they were worse, I said that the stylus interface itself is worse. If someone buys a tablet PC, but never uses it in tablet mode, then they really haven't lost much (a bit of frustration with the hinge, some extra money, and probably a bit of irritation of having a prominent feature that isn't used). But if they want to make use of the tablet functionality, aside from note taking and drawing, there's very little benefit, and quite a load of detriment, in the tablet mode.
However, devices and OS's designed explicitly around the stylus (like Palm or perhaps Symbian) provide a superior pen-based interface, but lack in far too many other areas. And on to the specific topic, devices designed around multitouch, like those running iPhone OS and Android, will provide a superior interface to tablets running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. It's a common sentiment on Slashdot that the iPad (for example) would be much better had it been based on Mac OS X, and had a stylus option, but truthfully, except for a unique niche of users, it would make the iPad worse. So much so that the iPad would not be the success it's going to be, but instead relegate it to the failure heap upon which all other tablets have been piled.
You completely miss the point. The whole problem with Amazon/BN vs Apple, is that Amazon/BN make their money from books, whereas Apple will make their money from the hardware. Apple is not looking for much of a profit on books, just like it doesn't make much of a profit from Music or Apps. They are in the hardware game.
That's exactly the reason that Apple's iPad is having such an effect on Amazon. The publishers got a taste of the agency model and want to take it to Amazon, and Amazon is playing hardball to tell them "no".
From what I've read here on/., I'm not alone, so I really can't see why people are so dismissive of the differences between ePaper and active displays.
Because most people do not have any problem with LCDs.
For the specific topic on hand, the iPad's LCD is a higher quality LCD than most people have on their computers and laptops at home. IPS with LED backlighting. Maybe you'll still have a problem with it, I don't know. But what I do know is that I don't have any problem with LCDs as it is (except for some really poor ones, which seem to flicker which does cause eyestrain). And most people don't. A handful of posters on Slashdot doesn't imply the opposite. Some people complain that WiFi access points cause headaches (via radiation, not technical complexities).
No, it's the same OS. You can't background GUI apps due to the iPhone OS's security model (hence the need to jailbreak), but iPhone OS is a fully multitasking and multithreading OS (and it makes extensive use of that ability).
Yes, the N95 is so amazing that it's selling like hotcakes.../sarcasm
The things you state that make the iPad a non-starter are clearly things that most people don't value as much as you do. Plus, you've got a few facts wrong.
1. The iPad has an SD card adapter. The dock connector is the I/O connector, and the SD card adapter users that, as it should 2. The iPad (and iPhone) has GPS. A-GPS is GPS. Saying it's not is silly. But it allowed you to get this next one wrong: 3. The iPad can be used as a map. There's even a damned app built into it to do just that. 4. You can type on it. Did you not see the onscreen keyboard? 5. The only part of the Internet that is fundamentally tied to the mouse is Flash, and we all know how that story is going. 6. As for games, this is nonsensical. You can't play games there weren't designed for specific form factors on those form factors. It's like saying the problem with shoes vs hats is that shoes can only go on your feet.
But, and I mean this sincerely, stick with your N95, if it does the things you want from it. And if the iPad doesn't do what you want, don't buy it. But as an interface (and this was entirely my point), Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are all *piss poor* for use on a tablet type device. The hardware isn't the problem, it doesn't matter if you have an SD card slot, full stand-alone GPS, a 10 MP full motion camera, 500 hour battery life and a GeForce 9800, if the OS isn't designed to be used as a tablet, it's not going to be generally appealing.
It's easy to blame popularity of the iPhone on people ignorantly flocking to Apple logos, but that's just an excuse for other companies being unable or unwilling to develop an OS as great as the iPhone OS.
IT guys tend not to 'get it' when it comes to tablets, you need to have a real need for handwriting before it makes sense.
There are only two cases where stylus-based input works on tablet PCs. One is handwriting input. The other is drawing/painting. That doesn't correct the fact that Windows itself is not well suited for stylus based input, regardless of the enhancements provided by Windows 7.
Stylus on Windows (and Mac OS X and Linux) is an auxiliary, not a primary input. Using it as such is a kludge that degrades the overall user experience, and is only done because switching between tablet mode and notebook mode is too cumbersome a thing to do in order to switch between interacting with the WIMPs interface and going into note-taking mode.
To me a tablet sans stylus makes absolutely no sense, and I'll take my eeepc (5 hrs battery life) over this kind of device anyday.
Yeah, that's *so* much better than then iPad's 10 hour battery life...
I do agree with you that note-taking is a viable task that hasn't really been tackled the way the standard WIMPs model has, and the current multitouch model has. There's no single device, other than a pad of paper and a pen or pencil, that is as well suited for writing as the WIMPs interface is for a mouse and multitouch is for the fingers.
But please don't try to pretend that stylus input on Windows is natural and fully replaces the mouse. It's almost as much of an unsolved problem as having multitouch on a standard PC is. The problem with multitouch on a PC is the OS (take your pick) isn't suited, and the form factor isn't suited for holding your hands out up to a desktop display to interact with it (researchers knew this 50 years ago). The tablet at least has the right form factor (well, those tablets without a keyboard and mouse/trackpad anyway). But the OS support isn't there. All you're doing is using a pen as though it were a mouse. That's *why* those tablets all have keyboards and trackpads, and it's also why they don't sell well. They do one thing most every does pretty damned good (take notes) and do everything else quite poorly.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe *you* weren't around when Mac OS X came out and "hackers" by the droves switched to them, including CmdrTaco himself. Even Linus Torvalds used a PowerMac G5 (running Linux, obviously) for a while.
It got to a point where that glowing Apple was no longer out of place even at Open Source conferences.
No, Apple is not seen as a joke, and haven't been for a decade now. There *is* a more prominent backlash now, mostly due to ignorance of how the iPhone works. It's OK though. There's plenty of room for people to use Windows and Linux and Macs and iPhones.
No it's not, it's competing with netbooks. And, aside from the geek-crowd, it thoroughly trounces the netbook.
I understand the appeal of the netbook, and don't look down upon anyone choosing a netbook because it fits their needs and desires. But I do find absurd this notion that the iPad is going to fail or is underpowered or overpriced, etc.
N.B. The iPad is fully legible in full sunlight.
Good luck, however, reading your Kindle in the dark.
The Kindle has E-ink which is going to make for a better reading experience.
What makes you think that? There is nothing inherent in the photons reflected by e-ink that make then better on the eyes than those emitted by an LCD.
In fact, the e-ink display, like those on the Kindle are hard on the eyes due to low contrast and poor low-light visibility, while with a high-quality LED-backlit IPS display like the iPad has is superior to that of the Kindle's in every way *except* battery life, and given the iPad's 10-hour plus battery life with the screen on, that's really not much of an issue.
Come back in 1 year with total Linux netbook sales vs total iPad sales.
And, ironically enough, the iPad is almost exactly what you stated:
+ Cheap
+ Compact
+ Portable
+ Long battery life
- Linux (iPhone OS actually *is* UNIX, though)
- laptop
Ignoring the obvious flaw in that argument (which Wovel has already pointed out), there are two other items of significant import.
First (just to get it out of the way) Jobs axed the Newton, and it's very much not clear that the Newton would have failed otherwise. Apple needed to narrow its focus, so dropping the Newton was arguably correct, it wasn't due to failure of the product itself.
But more to the point, if the other tablet makers did follow in Palm's footsteps, that would at least be a step in the right direction. What I specifically have in mind is shipping with an OS designed around the touch interface. One of the biggest nerd-oriented dings against the iPad is that it doesn't run Mac OS X. This is the single-most important factor in why the iPad will succeed.
They've been around for 10 years and yet they all failed in the consumer market. I wonder if there's some reason for that.....
And as long as the geeks who keep making them are the same types of geeks who go on about how much the iPad sucks and other tablets are so much better, they will remain a losing product.
Here's the clue: nobody, outside of an extremely small niche of geeks, want the type of tablet that slashdotters seem to want. Why companies like HP and ASUS continue down the same failing path again and again baffles me.
That's why there are only five elements, Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Quintessence, instead of the hundreds those wrong-headed "scientists" seem to think must exist. They claim there exist so many that they have to lay them out in a table to even make any sense of them! What's worse, they don't even know how many more there can be.
And Newtonian physics is far simpler than quantum theory, as well as simpler even than relativity. Aether is simpler than space-time. Creation is simpler than evolution. Homeopathy is simpler than medicine.
And don't even get me started on chaos theory!
Let's say your goal is to have a video format in the HTML spec that will be usable on handheld devices all the way up to desktop computers and TVs. With that in mind, do you think you'll have better chances of achieving that goal by railing against patents? Or by adopting a standard that already works on all of those devices with hardware acceleration, is top notch in terms of video and audio quality, and is already the predominant web format?
I'm all for abolishing software patents. And I'm all for working towards that goal. But as far as addressing the problem at hand, h.264 is the right choice, and it's far more likely to be accomplished. I mean, really, it's a fait accompli. Only Mozilla[*] is standing in its way, and Mozilla stands zero chance in defeating h.264. The only things they might accomplish are bringing the issue of patents to light, and muddying up the HTML5 standard by not having a universally supported format.
But in no way whatsoever will Mozilla stop h.264. If they don't ship with it, or without supporting a plugin that will play h.264 directly (without the overhead of Flash, but as a native HTML5 tag), then it's not h.264 that will fail, but Firefox. It will be a hockey stick downwards in the popularity of Firefox.
The biggest problem is that Mozilla's argument isn't technical. It's political. If their stance at the very least had the quality of being technically superior, it'd be worth defending. But to support the inferior technology? WTF? "Use us, we suck most, but are ideologically pure!" is not a compelling rallying cry.
[*] There's also Opera, but in terms of impact on web development, their contribution is negligible.
files, and bandwidth transfer stuff to and from MEMORY. A doc that occupies one gig in ram should occupy one gig in the disk. That's convenient.
It does. Just because you call one a GiB and the other a GB, doesn't change how much memory it actually takes up.
It is convenient to have memory chips that cover the addressable space exactly.
This was my point when I mentioned the exception for RAM.
It is convenient to map those to same units on disk.
Why? It's just a displayed value. The mapping is still done in binary.
I'd say that network band should also follow.
Why? It's just a displayed value. The data is still sent in binary.
Who is it more convenient for to use GiB for both RAM and disk (and then networking)? Embedded programmers, sure. Console programmers, perhaps.
But for everyone else? It will just absolutely never matter. Ever.
Now, if you're programming a Mars Rover, and each byte must be accounted for, it may be more convenient to use KiB/MiB/GiB. And guess what? Computers can do that just fine. Set your development machine to show file sizes in base-2 notation. The data still takes up the same amount of space, regardless of the notation you use to display file sizes. The displayed information is there for the human users, not for the computer. Human users deal better with base 10 (not innately, but by the fact that it's what we deal with most). If you live in a culture with a different base, by all means, use that. The computer will not get confused.
We're on a base 2 scale, and we're not strictly following SI, so lets be clear about that.
Only for memory does that really matter. For disks, files, bandwidth, etc., base 10 is superior because people do better in base 10 than base 2. Most people don't give a fuck what the computer does internally. If we did, we'd not have windows and fonts and crap like that, but just a hex display with a hex keyboard.
The computer already abstracts a bunch of stuff to make them more usable by humans. Abstracting units by displaying them in the more humanly natural base 10 is the way to go. RAM is the only reasonably common, user-facing situation where base 2 is more fundamentally important. Just use MiB and GiB for RAM. Or even use decimal approximations, since it's not if you buy a 1.074GB DIMM, you're going to get the wrong one, since they don't come in exactly that size, and it'll really be 1073741824 bytes. You could also call it 2 to the 30 bytes. Or whatever.
But giga is incorrect. I'm glad Ubuntu (as well as Apple) are using proper units.
Incorrect. OS X is close/minimize/zoom :)
I'd give it a try if Apple 'blessed' it (which I doubt they will considering how 'fair' they are) but I don't know if it will ever match the speed of Safari considering they don't have access to the private API's that Apple does (and forbids everyone else from using).
What API's would those be? Safari uses WebKit, just like any other app on the iPhone that wants to serve up web pages.
As far as WebKit goes, what do you suppose it can do that some other rendering engine won't be able to do? It can be written in C, can use OpenGL (as well as things like CoreAnimation)...
So, really, what super-secret APIs are you thinking of here?
Apple keeps APIs private for only two reasons:
1. They aren't finished yet.
2. Security/Privacy.
As for the "fairness" of Apple, and whether they'll approve Opera, they probably won't. It's not because (like so many people think) that they don't want the competition, it's because they believe Safari is the best browser out there, and want to keep the iPhone experience fairly consistent in terms of core functionality.
Ever tried to surf the web with pen input only? Or just an on-screen keyboard and your finger? It sucks balls and no optimization is going to change that fact.
It's called Palm, and before that, Newton. Both did just fine. The Palm OS suffered from limited technology, but the pen aspect was just fine.
the reason pen computing has not taken off is simple: 1. People prefer the keyboard to handwriting
Exactly! You finally get it!
2. Tablets are not cost competitive.
That's not the reason. People buy Macs, which cost more than the average PC. They do so because they want a Mac. If they wanted a pen, they'd buy that.
But they're not buying that. Not in numbers that agree with your assertion.
The reason people haven't want tablet computing is that pen input is a lame add-on to a WIMPs OS. If Palm or Newton were available in a more modern form, on more modern hardware, they definitely would have done better than Tablet PC. That's what I mean when I say for tablet computing to really take off, it needs an OS designed around it.
This current Windows kludge is not enough, and exactly why it hasn't taken off over all these years. Tablet PC has been around in various forms for a decade now, and has remained a miniscule niche product this entire time. This is because people just don't want it. In order for people to want it, there will have to be a device for which pen computing works well, and for that to happen, it has to be designed around the stylus, like Palm and Newton were.
You keep saying how great the stylus works for you. NO SHIT! That's because you live in that niche. Hooray for you! But you're delusional if you think a major factor in keeping people from joining you is price. The factor is that people don't want pens, not the way they exist now.
The question wasn't, "why should your CPU have to wait", it was, "why should *you* have to wait". At speeds approaching 3Gb/s, I think it's fair to say, at the person you replied to actually did say, "well, with the rise of the SSD, that's no longer as much of a problem."
The trick to understanding computing is that all computing really *is* at its heart a throughput problem.
The trick to understanding computers is to realize that all computing really is, at its heart, a human problem. It really doesn't matter if the CPU has to wait a trillion cycles in between receiving each byte of data, if the computer responds in an apparently instantaneous manner for the person using it, everything is working just fine.
I only care abstractly about how long my CPU has to wait. I do care directly about how much I have to wait.
Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is not some magic bullet that "deals with the cores", as you put it.
No, that's exactly what it does. It keeps track of the system resources, and shuffles threads around to where they are most optimal. A simple demonstration of this is to run Task Manager on Windows, and Activity Monitor on a Mac, and watch how the cores (and hyperthreading cores) are used. You'll see Mac OS X does a much better job of this. It can also, using OpenCL, push tasks across the cores on your GPU.
Now, of course, like you said, you can't just magically spread a single-threaded app across multiple cores. But that's not what this story is about.
What is worse about it, seriously dude how many times do I need to ask? *What* about it is worse? A tablet is worse than a screen? How? It does more things.
You keep missing my point. The notebook itself, ignoring ignoring the mechanical differences, is essentially the same in notebook mode as a non-tablet PC notebook.
You keep saying, "but it does more things!" I'm saying, yes, it does. The notebook side of things is pretty much the same.
But, and here's the part you keep missing in my posts, so read carefully...
The tablet mode is not well suited for tablet use. This is what I've been saying since my very first post in this thread. It's absurd to believe that Windows 7 pen mode is equivalent to an OS designed entirely and specifically around the pen. For pen computing to take off, such an OS absolutely must be involved.
Tablets are great for note taking, drawing, and painting. For everything else, for most people, either the traditional keyboard and mouse (or trackpad) for notebooks and larger, or multitouch for netbooks and smaller, is superior.
iPhone OS is a multitouch friendly OS X. But the interface is completely redone. What I'm referring to is the interface. Keeping the kernel and the vast amount of underlying libraries and such can certainly be done with Windows and Linux as well, but they will need to be so fundamentally altered as to be incompatible with their traditional counterparts. At the very least, a traditional GUI app from Windows or Linux wold have to look horrifically out of place on a multitouch version of those systems before one could reasonably consider them altered enough to be suited for multitouch.
There's nothing stopping Windows and Linux from having their UI completely redone, and in fact, that's what Android is (although I think Android is far more different from a traditional Linux than iPhone OS is from Mac OS X).
so, when I say that Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux are not suited for stylus or multitouch, it's, as I've stated many times already, the interface, stupid.
For multitouch specifically, if you can run a traditional GUI app on it, then it's not altered enough. If it has a menu bar, it's not well suited. If it has traditional style overlapping windows and traditional close, maximize, minimize buttons, it's not well suited.
And the annoying thing is that's exactly what the slashdot geek-types are clamoring for! They want the very thing that would absolutely destroy the iPad.
In terms of stylus-based input, I can't say with as much confidence, because that problem hasn't really been solved. The closest I've experienced is Palm, and the problem with Palm OS is that it's not a fully functional OS the way iPhone OS is.
You're not understanding what I've written. The non-tablet part isn't worse. The tablet part is what's worse.
A stylus, in my experience, is a vastly more accurate and speedy primary input device than a trackpad. I'm talking about generic OS interaction. It is easily comparable to a mouse for a small screen, oftentimes superior, but sometimes not.
You are an aberration and your experience atypical. I'm not denying that your opinion is dishonest in invalid. But I am saying that the stylus is not a good match for the WIMPs interface. Good for you that you have experienced success with it.
Using the OS without a keyboard is a clumsy experience, tablets which include the keyboard are vastly more popular in my experience
That's exactly what I stated. Tablet PCs require a keyboard.
Everyone I know who owns a tablet (a few people, but significant in my small sample), owns a convertible, not a slate. So anecdotally your claim that convertibles sell worse is completely false.
No, the evidence for what I stated is in the fact that only a few people that you know actually even have tablet PCs. That's my point. For those that can make sufficient use of it to justify the decreased usability, or for those like you who are a good match for stylus as a universal mouse replacement, convertible tablets are a perfectly fine product. However, for most people, they absolutely are not.
And what's more, an OS designed explicitly around the stylus would be even better for you than just tacking stylus support onto Windows is. But like I've stated, that problem has yet to be solved, so the product you are using is already the best that exists. The issue is that the best is still not good enough to draw users.
A convertible tablet pc is just a laptop that can take pen input through the screen. How this translates to doing thing worse than other laptops I don't understand, it has everything a normal laptop has, plus a stylus. What has been taken away?
I didn't say they were worse, I said that the stylus interface itself is worse. If someone buys a tablet PC, but never uses it in tablet mode, then they really haven't lost much (a bit of frustration with the hinge, some extra money, and probably a bit of irritation of having a prominent feature that isn't used). But if they want to make use of the tablet functionality, aside from note taking and drawing, there's very little benefit, and quite a load of detriment, in the tablet mode.
However, devices and OS's designed explicitly around the stylus (like Palm or perhaps Symbian) provide a superior pen-based interface, but lack in far too many other areas. And on to the specific topic, devices designed around multitouch, like those running iPhone OS and Android, will provide a superior interface to tablets running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. It's a common sentiment on Slashdot that the iPad (for example) would be much better had it been based on Mac OS X, and had a stylus option, but truthfully, except for a unique niche of users, it would make the iPad worse. So much so that the iPad would not be the success it's going to be, but instead relegate it to the failure heap upon which all other tablets have been piled.
You completely miss the point. The whole problem with Amazon/BN vs Apple, is that Amazon/BN make their money from books, whereas Apple will make their money from the hardware. Apple is not looking for much of a profit on books, just like it doesn't make much of a profit from Music or Apps. They are in the hardware game.
That's exactly the reason that Apple's iPad is having such an effect on Amazon. The publishers got a taste of the agency model and want to take it to Amazon, and Amazon is playing hardball to tell them "no".
From what I've read here on /., I'm not alone, so I really can't see why people are so dismissive of the differences between ePaper and active displays.
Because most people do not have any problem with LCDs.
For the specific topic on hand, the iPad's LCD is a higher quality LCD than most people have on their computers and laptops at home. IPS with LED backlighting. Maybe you'll still have a problem with it, I don't know. But what I do know is that I don't have any problem with LCDs as it is (except for some really poor ones, which seem to flicker which does cause eyestrain). And most people don't. A handful of posters on Slashdot doesn't imply the opposite. Some people complain that WiFi access points cause headaches (via radiation, not technical complexities).
No, it's the same OS. You can't background GUI apps due to the iPhone OS's security model (hence the need to jailbreak), but iPhone OS is a fully multitasking and multithreading OS (and it makes extensive use of that ability).
Yes, the N95 is so amazing that it's selling like hotcakes... /sarcasm
The things you state that make the iPad a non-starter are clearly things that most people don't value as much as you do. Plus, you've got a few facts wrong.
1. The iPad has an SD card adapter. The dock connector is the I/O connector, and the SD card adapter users that, as it should
2. The iPad (and iPhone) has GPS. A-GPS is GPS. Saying it's not is silly. But it allowed you to get this next one wrong:
3. The iPad can be used as a map. There's even a damned app built into it to do just that.
4. You can type on it. Did you not see the onscreen keyboard?
5. The only part of the Internet that is fundamentally tied to the mouse is Flash, and we all know how that story is going.
6. As for games, this is nonsensical. You can't play games there weren't designed for specific form factors on those form factors. It's like saying the problem with shoes vs hats is that shoes can only go on your feet.
But, and I mean this sincerely, stick with your N95, if it does the things you want from it. And if the iPad doesn't do what you want, don't buy it. But as an interface (and this was entirely my point), Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are all *piss poor* for use on a tablet type device. The hardware isn't the problem, it doesn't matter if you have an SD card slot, full stand-alone GPS, a 10 MP full motion camera, 500 hour battery life and a GeForce 9800, if the OS isn't designed to be used as a tablet, it's not going to be generally appealing.
It's easy to blame popularity of the iPhone on people ignorantly flocking to Apple logos, but that's just an excuse for other companies being unable or unwilling to develop an OS as great as the iPhone OS.
Which brings me back to my original point:
It's the interface, stupid.
IT guys tend not to 'get it' when it comes to tablets, you need to have a real need for handwriting before it makes sense.
There are only two cases where stylus-based input works on tablet PCs. One is handwriting input. The other is drawing/painting. That doesn't correct the fact that Windows itself is not well suited for stylus based input, regardless of the enhancements provided by Windows 7.
Stylus on Windows (and Mac OS X and Linux) is an auxiliary, not a primary input. Using it as such is a kludge that degrades the overall user experience, and is only done because switching between tablet mode and notebook mode is too cumbersome a thing to do in order to switch between interacting with the WIMPs interface and going into note-taking mode.
To me a tablet sans stylus makes absolutely no sense, and I'll take my eeepc (5 hrs battery life) over this kind of device anyday.
Yeah, that's *so* much better than then iPad's 10 hour battery life...
I do agree with you that note-taking is a viable task that hasn't really been tackled the way the standard WIMPs model has, and the current multitouch model has. There's no single device, other than a pad of paper and a pen or pencil, that is as well suited for writing as the WIMPs interface is for a mouse and multitouch is for the fingers.
But please don't try to pretend that stylus input on Windows is natural and fully replaces the mouse. It's almost as much of an unsolved problem as having multitouch on a standard PC is. The problem with multitouch on a PC is the OS (take your pick) isn't suited, and the form factor isn't suited for holding your hands out up to a desktop display to interact with it (researchers knew this 50 years ago). The tablet at least has the right form factor (well, those tablets without a keyboard and mouse/trackpad anyway). But the OS support isn't there. All you're doing is using a pen as though it were a mouse. That's *why* those tablets all have keyboards and trackpads, and it's also why they don't sell well. They do one thing most every does pretty damned good (take notes) and do everything else quite poorly.