Ask me in a year how sturdy the construction is. It is so far much better than the other devices I tried (no flexing under its own weight like the PD-N, and it doesn't feel like off-brand tupperware like the Nook). My kids so far haven't broken it, and I feel perfectly fine letting my 2 and 3 year old kids play with it (I do have a screen protector on it).
My school's IT dept. says that the iPad is fine for their private student/faculty internet access. As a note, they make all Apple laptops (regardless of OS version) and any XP/Vista/Windows 7 or Linux machine needs to go through a personal vetting process where they make sure your machine is clean and up to date with all software on it. If it doesn't pass their scrubbing process (which is repeated anywhere from every 3 business days to a maximum of 2 weeks depending on a risk assessment) no school internet for you _period_.
I am well aware of the risks of malware, and I looked into Jailbreaking mine (at the moment I have no need to; only reason I would have was for divx playback but there is a VLC port/app for it). I do wish it had a built in USB or SD card slot for offloading or quickly sharing some files, but frankly I've not seen much practical need for these. I like the fact that it does not have a camera, part of my lab classes involves working in a cadaver laboratory and we aren't allowed with any camera devices in there. So my phone and my laptop end up staying in a locker; but I can bring the iPad in to work as a dissection recorder. I'm going to look into voice controls (over a BT headset would be nice) for it in these cases but in the meantime I bought a cheap stylus for it off of Amazon.
I will never make any pretenses that this is a PC replacement. It can do a lot of task-offloading for a PC, but it feels extremely limited in some ways - for example a lot of websites just don't work right (or they kick you to their featureless mobile versions). I despise using iTunes to back it up but I'm not all that interested in searching for alternative software to give me the same functionality - rather I just sand-boxed iTunes to its own VM with nothing else on it.
Exactly. I picked up a 32gb iPad last weekend for this reason alone.
I'd tried out the newest Kindle, Nook, Sony E-Reader, Pandigital Novel, Velocity Micro Cruz Reader over about a month. I've returned each of them (other than the VMCR, that one I borrowed for a day from someone who bought it off of NewEgg). I've been waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for the Notion Adam to come out (or at least make some progress that is noteworthy) but I got fed up with them - if they were (or are) serious about their business, they'd fix their website.
Kindle, Sony and Nook had refresh rates that were far below what I felt I needed to use my textbooks adequately - each page flip was like hitting a wall. The Pandigital was a piece of crap with a crappy UI that was easily the slowest implementation of Android I've ever seen. When you removed their stock UI and put a better one on it, it was massively improved but still just slow and difficult to use. The VMCR felt the same way, just... sort of slapped together with left over bits of phones that were old when they were created.
So I bought an iPad. I felt dirty; I've been entirely Apple free since I got out of elementary school in the late 80s and I despise most of their products - for example; it is my opinion that the iPhone is a toy (give me a BB any day), the hardware is ridiculously over priced (or their software is 'valued' outside of sanity's grasp). With the iPad though... I'd played with my brother in law's iPad on a flight for a few hours and thought it was neat, but not a great gadget. I still feel this way but its got one massive element above the others mentioned that is damned impressive for school.
If you scan the textbook in as nice HQ jpeg's and put them into a.CBR format - it's like working with the actual textbook, and in addition to the iPad/iTouch it works on any computer I've come across (with the free readers available). Fast refresh rates; great color on the images. No, it's not completely word-indexed in this format - you can't just search for a specific term and have the program find it for you - but what you can do is use the textbook like its meant to be used. I took 100+lbs of textbooks (medical textbooks for one semester) and scanned them after cutting off the bindings. Total file size is something like 4gb for all of them in color and decent resolution. If you buy used textbooks, it's even cheaper. I literally go to most classes with just my iPad and a 25 cent college-ruled notebook.
The $5-600 for the iPad is a much better expense (again, in my opinion) than the cost of pretty much any medical treatment for a destroyed back.
I was in Yosemite for the last week, and my blackberry had no connection (T-Mobile). My friends had the rest of the big carriers. AT&T (iPhone) had antenna coverage but dropped almost every call within the first minute after connection. Verizon (Razr2) would show no connectivity but we could still make calls out and have them stay connected for 10-15 minutes (we ended up calling our wives/families in shifts on the verizon phone). The Sprint (Samsung flip) phone had data and sms/mms but couldn't make a call - even though it was showing full connectivity.
Hardest thing for me is the payment rates between them. The Verizon phone with 900 minutes and no SMS/MMS was $115 a month. The Sprint phone was $79.99 a month, 400 minutes including an unlimited data plan, AT&T was $100+ and my phone (T-Mobile) is $80 a month for two phones with 700 minutes and unlimited data/mms/sms/email.
Anecdotal evidence, but from my brother at the Grand Canyon, on the surface, everyone had connection (same situation, bunch of carriers) except for the MetroPCS/Cricket users. In the Canyon AT&T showed full connectivity but would not connect, Verizon still connected as did Sprint and T-Mobile, but all 3 dropped consistently.
My biggest concern is El Paso. At any random moment I lose data connectivity as I am randomly connected to an antenna in Mexico that charges roaming data on my plan (I have my phone setup to disconnect data if it detects it will be roaming for data). Also, there are periods of no signal for all 4 carriers across parts of Texas from El Paso into San Antonio, but getting outside of Houston towards Louisiana and it is actually worse.
I was on Verizon for years as all of my family and majority of friends were also on it (the in-network calling was nice). It took me about 10 minutes on the phone with them to block all SMS. I still got one or two a month at cost from Verizon themselves; their official line was that they were allowed to bill me for their advertising. After 3 years of this and timed conveniently with my wife's phone going out of contract, we dumped them.
With T-Mobile, when I was setting up service with them the blackberry support group asked if I wanted SMS blocking. I agreed. An hour after the phone was setup, we got a text message on my wife's phone from some pizza place in NY advertising a deal. I called T-Mobile, and they halved my first months bill because of it ($40 off for one message). Since then, no text messaging at all, not even advertisements from T-Mobile.
I was honestly surprised they went to that extent as we had ordered the phones through Amazon, and got two phones for free + a $50 Visa pre-paid card.
I once worked where we had to wear environmental hazard suits, and we had a few keyboards that were meant for the fat-fingers of the gloved hands - so I could see at least one instance where this would be nice (assuming you needed to operate a touchscreen while in a hazard suit).
I am sure there are others besides the self-checkout aisle of your local Wal-Mart.
I own and drive a retired police cruiser. It's a new enough model that it has the same profile as the cruisers in California where I bought it. I've noticed people slow down around me, let me in when I signal, etc. Keeping the spots and push-bar on it keeps the profile as close as legal to the PD's active units, but I painted it a nice dark blue. At first this was great. After a while it got to be really annoying, as people who were going to the speed limit exactly would slow down when I'd be behind them.
However, after moving to a podunky town in Texas however I was relieved when I saw the police cars out here were predominantly compact FWD cars (Toyota Corollas for the most part, but a few Dodge Neons and some Ford Focus for the parking enforcement people). But then one day I noticed even the cops were slowing down around me when I drove my CV. Apparently, the watch commander, county supervisors, sheriff, constable, and other ranking Texas law enforcement all drive the same car as mine. In the same color.
The best part is, I get saluted driving past any police action. My 18 month old in her car seat loves that - she waves back and yells "HI!" to them. Sometimes I even let her yell it over the PA.
I bought an Inspiron 1530 in July of 07. Within 6 months it had suffered a lot of 'terminal' overheating (system lockups, crashes, shutdowns).
I went through the laughably bad Dell support to replace parts one at a time; starting with the keyboard because the system got so hot the keyboard warped itself out of the tray.
When the new keyboard came in I did a full teardown and rebuild, replacing the fans with brand new items, putting thermal paste on the processors, cleaning everything for dust buildup. I put it back together and that night the laptop got so hot I could boil water on the touch-pad (i8Kfangui showing temps in the 110c range).
I sent Dell some pictures of the temp probes (screenshots and photographs) and they adamantly denied that the laptop was at fault; one of their service reps even accused me of "over-using" the equipment (whatever that means). I finally got them to send me a replacement video card, and that solved the problem for about 3 weeks, but then the heat issue came back.
Dell refused to service the laptop anymore, and refused to do an exchange. I eventually managed to private party exchange it for a Precision M90, and I've had no problems whatsoever with this model which has the Quadro 1500 (7900? I think) chip in it.
No real moral to the story, just lamenting. I really wanted to like that laptop, but I couldn't run the risk of it burning down my house.
Speaking as a sometime-photographer, the business model most photography businesses use is an archaic dying form from when the studio/photographer needed to store the exposed film element because most people didn't know how to archive them correctly. Now, for most people an archive is a couple prints and a cd to store the original digital image on, and truth be told you can charge a lot for the simple burning process involved in making the disk.
This doesn't matter anymore because storage is cheap because the photos have a much smaller physical footprint (my small 2 gig CF card holds ~300 raw files from a Digital Rebel) but the people you deal with when you go into these places don't realize know why they used to keep the negatives. Photos are also cheap now because we've removed the paper element, as most people do not treat a digital camera like they did their film cameras, so its not unusual to shoot 200 pictures of a single subject when doing portraits; then discarding 198 of them (poor digital landfill).
If you are serious about finding a photographer that does provide a disc, look on your local craigslist (usually someone is offering exactly the service you want) or go to a Wal-Mart portrait center, a lot of them will provide you with a disc for a nominal fee after the initial print charge.
Or if you're in Austin I charge a flat 50 for an hours worth of pictures. My camera takes 5 pictures per 2 minutes, so it works out to 300 pictures for you to play with!:)
there was also (in that same issue I'm pretty sure) a regular NES that got impaled on the leg a dining-room style chair. Hole straight through the unit, and it still worked.
I had to give mine fellatio for the last 5 years I owned it to get any cartridge to boot correctly though.
Following the Nintendo pronunciation of Wii (as Wee), would this not be sound like ViiDi would be pronounced "Vee Die"
I'd check to see if they are scandinavian and suicidal.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask me in a year how sturdy the construction is. It is so far much better than the other devices I tried (no flexing under its own weight like the PD-N, and it doesn't feel like off-brand tupperware like the Nook). My kids so far haven't broken it, and I feel perfectly fine letting my 2 and 3 year old kids play with it (I do have a screen protector on it).
My school's IT dept. says that the iPad is fine for their private student/faculty internet access. As a note, they make all Apple laptops (regardless of OS version) and any XP/Vista/Windows 7 or Linux machine needs to go through a personal vetting process where they make sure your machine is clean and up to date with all software on it. If it doesn't pass their scrubbing process (which is repeated anywhere from every 3 business days to a maximum of 2 weeks depending on a risk assessment) no school internet for you _period_.
I am well aware of the risks of malware, and I looked into Jailbreaking mine (at the moment I have no need to; only reason I would have was for divx playback but there is a VLC port/app for it). I do wish it had a built in USB or SD card slot for offloading or quickly sharing some files, but frankly I've not seen much practical need for these. I like the fact that it does not have a camera, part of my lab classes involves working in a cadaver laboratory and we aren't allowed with any camera devices in there. So my phone and my laptop end up staying in a locker; but I can bring the iPad in to work as a dissection recorder. I'm going to look into voice controls (over a BT headset would be nice) for it in these cases but in the meantime I bought a cheap stylus for it off of Amazon.
I will never make any pretenses that this is a PC replacement. It can do a lot of task-offloading for a PC, but it feels extremely limited in some ways - for example a lot of websites just don't work right (or they kick you to their featureless mobile versions). I despise using iTunes to back it up but I'm not all that interested in searching for alternative software to give me the same functionality - rather I just sand-boxed iTunes to its own VM with nothing else on it.
Exactly. I picked up a 32gb iPad last weekend for this reason alone.
I'd tried out the newest Kindle, Nook, Sony E-Reader, Pandigital Novel, Velocity Micro Cruz Reader over about a month. I've returned each of them (other than the VMCR, that one I borrowed for a day from someone who bought it off of NewEgg). I've been waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for the Notion Adam to come out (or at least make some progress that is noteworthy) but I got fed up with them - if they were (or are) serious about their business, they'd fix their website.
Kindle, Sony and Nook had refresh rates that were far below what I felt I needed to use my textbooks adequately - each page flip was like hitting a wall. The Pandigital was a piece of crap with a crappy UI that was easily the slowest implementation of Android I've ever seen. When you removed their stock UI and put a better one on it, it was massively improved but still just slow and difficult to use. The VMCR felt the same way, just... sort of slapped together with left over bits of phones that were old when they were created.
So I bought an iPad. I felt dirty; I've been entirely Apple free since I got out of elementary school in the late 80s and I despise most of their products - for example; it is my opinion that the iPhone is a toy (give me a BB any day), the hardware is ridiculously over priced (or their software is 'valued' outside of sanity's grasp). With the iPad though... I'd played with my brother in law's iPad on a flight for a few hours and thought it was neat, but not a great gadget. I still feel this way but its got one massive element above the others mentioned that is damned impressive for school.
If you scan the textbook in as nice HQ jpeg's and put them into a .CBR format - it's like working with the actual textbook, and in addition to the iPad/iTouch it works on any computer I've come across (with the free readers available). Fast refresh rates; great color on the images. No, it's not completely word-indexed in this format - you can't just search for a specific term and have the program find it for you - but what you can do is use the textbook like its meant to be used. I took 100+lbs of textbooks (medical textbooks for one semester) and scanned them after cutting off the bindings. Total file size is something like 4gb for all of them in color and decent resolution. If you buy used textbooks, it's even cheaper. I literally go to most classes with just my iPad and a 25 cent college-ruled notebook.
The $5-600 for the iPad is a much better expense (again, in my opinion) than the cost of pretty much any medical treatment for a destroyed back.
I was in Yosemite for the last week, and my blackberry had no connection (T-Mobile). My friends had the rest of the big carriers. AT&T (iPhone) had antenna coverage but dropped almost every call within the first minute after connection. Verizon (Razr2) would show no connectivity but we could still make calls out and have them stay connected for 10-15 minutes (we ended up calling our wives/families in shifts on the verizon phone). The Sprint (Samsung flip) phone had data and sms/mms but couldn't make a call - even though it was showing full connectivity.
Hardest thing for me is the payment rates between them. The Verizon phone with 900 minutes and no SMS/MMS was $115 a month. The Sprint phone was $79.99 a month, 400 minutes including an unlimited data plan, AT&T was $100+ and my phone (T-Mobile) is $80 a month for two phones with 700 minutes and unlimited data/mms/sms/email.
Anecdotal evidence, but from my brother at the Grand Canyon, on the surface, everyone had connection (same situation, bunch of carriers) except for the MetroPCS/Cricket users. In the Canyon AT&T showed full connectivity but would not connect, Verizon still connected as did Sprint and T-Mobile, but all 3 dropped consistently.
My biggest concern is El Paso. At any random moment I lose data connectivity as I am randomly connected to an antenna in Mexico that charges roaming data on my plan (I have my phone setup to disconnect data if it detects it will be roaming for data). Also, there are periods of no signal for all 4 carriers across parts of Texas from El Paso into San Antonio, but getting outside of Houston towards Louisiana and it is actually worse.
I was on Verizon for years as all of my family and majority of friends were also on it (the in-network calling was nice). It took me about 10 minutes on the phone with them to block all SMS. I still got one or two a month at cost from Verizon themselves; their official line was that they were allowed to bill me for their advertising. After 3 years of this and timed conveniently with my wife's phone going out of contract, we dumped them.
With T-Mobile, when I was setting up service with them the blackberry support group asked if I wanted SMS blocking. I agreed. An hour after the phone was setup, we got a text message on my wife's phone from some pizza place in NY advertising a deal. I called T-Mobile, and they halved my first months bill because of it ($40 off for one message). Since then, no text messaging at all, not even advertisements from T-Mobile.
I was honestly surprised they went to that extent as we had ordered the phones through Amazon, and got two phones for free + a $50 Visa pre-paid card.
I once worked where we had to wear environmental hazard suits, and we had a few keyboards that were meant for the fat-fingers of the gloved hands - so I could see at least one instance where this would be nice (assuming you needed to operate a touchscreen while in a hazard suit).
I am sure there are others besides the self-checkout aisle of your local Wal-Mart.
I own and drive a retired police cruiser. It's a new enough model that it has the same profile as the cruisers in California where I bought it. I've noticed people slow down around me, let me in when I signal, etc. Keeping the spots and push-bar on it keeps the profile as close as legal to the PD's active units, but I painted it a nice dark blue. At first this was great. After a while it got to be really annoying, as people who were going to the speed limit exactly would slow down when I'd be behind them.
However, after moving to a podunky town in Texas however I was relieved when I saw the police cars out here were predominantly compact FWD cars (Toyota Corollas for the most part, but a few Dodge Neons and some Ford Focus for the parking enforcement people). But then one day I noticed even the cops were slowing down around me when I drove my CV. Apparently, the watch commander, county supervisors, sheriff, constable, and other ranking Texas law enforcement all drive the same car as mine. In the same color.
The best part is, I get saluted driving past any police action. My 18 month old in her car seat loves that - she waves back and yells "HI!" to them. Sometimes I even let her yell it over the PA.
I neglected to mention but should have stated it had an 8600M in it.
I bought an Inspiron 1530 in July of 07. Within 6 months it had suffered a lot of 'terminal' overheating (system lockups, crashes, shutdowns).
I went through the laughably bad Dell support to replace parts one at a time; starting with the keyboard because the system got so hot the keyboard warped itself out of the tray.
When the new keyboard came in I did a full teardown and rebuild, replacing the fans with brand new items, putting thermal paste on the processors, cleaning everything for dust buildup. I put it back together and that night the laptop got so hot I could boil water on the touch-pad (i8Kfangui showing temps in the 110c range).
I sent Dell some pictures of the temp probes (screenshots and photographs) and they adamantly denied that the laptop was at fault; one of their service reps even accused me of "over-using" the equipment (whatever that means). I finally got them to send me a replacement video card, and that solved the problem for about 3 weeks, but then the heat issue came back.
Dell refused to service the laptop anymore, and refused to do an exchange. I eventually managed to private party exchange it for a Precision M90, and I've had no problems whatsoever with this model which has the Quadro 1500 (7900? I think) chip in it.
No real moral to the story, just lamenting. I really wanted to like that laptop, but I couldn't run the risk of it burning down my house.
Crossfire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Crossfire#Comparisons_to_NVIDIA_SLI
But even the Father of Roleplaying (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gygax) couldn't hit 70.
Speaking as a sometime-photographer, the business model most photography businesses use is an archaic dying form from when the studio/photographer needed to store the exposed film element because most people didn't know how to archive them correctly. Now, for most people an archive is a couple prints and a cd to store the original digital image on, and truth be told you can charge a lot for the simple burning process involved in making the disk.
This doesn't matter anymore because storage is cheap because the photos have a much smaller physical footprint (my small 2 gig CF card holds ~300 raw files from a Digital Rebel) but the people you deal with when you go into these places don't realize know why they used to keep the negatives. Photos are also cheap now because we've removed the paper element, as most people do not treat a digital camera like they did their film cameras, so its not unusual to shoot 200 pictures of a single subject when doing portraits; then discarding 198 of them (poor digital landfill).
If you are serious about finding a photographer that does provide a disc, look on your local craigslist (usually someone is offering exactly the service you want) or go to a Wal-Mart portrait center, a lot of them will provide you with a disc for a nominal fee after the initial print charge.
Or if you're in Austin I charge a flat 50 for an hours worth of pictures. My camera takes 5 pictures per 2 minutes, so it works out to 300 pictures for you to play with! :)
there was also (in that same issue I'm pretty sure) a regular NES that got impaled on the leg a dining-room style chair. Hole straight through the unit, and it still worked. I had to give mine fellatio for the last 5 years I owned it to get any cartridge to boot correctly though.
As someone who has worked on Jaguars... find a better analogy please.
That explains all why after a torrent I get that burning sensation!
Following the Nintendo pronunciation of Wii (as Wee), would this not be sound like ViiDi would be pronounced "Vee Die" I'd check to see if they are scandinavian and suicidal.