That's what I was thinking... any idiot can buy these things, and many of them have more money than sense. Who's to know they aren't going to send their drone up over people in the park when it's low on battery?
How about an expectation of not having a drone fall out of the sky and land on my head? I don't have anything against drones, just against the many idiots in this world who could easily buy one.
What's wrong with flying your drone in a place where nobody'll be annoyed by it? I don't drive my motorcycle through the park, so keep your drones out too.
You know they sell additional "power bricks", right? I carry a small one for my Thinkpad in my messenger bag and it adds something like 200g to my loadout. The ones for the Broadwell Thinkpads are even smaller...
As for 6 hours of battery life: That's roughly where we're at for modern machines (say since Sandy Bridge) with ~100Wh of battery power at medium-high load with network connectivity and high display brightness. A W550s would fit the bill... and it's not really that heavy.
Many laptops these days can only fit 7mm high drives. This has been the case for years now... even my Thinkpad X220 only has a 7mm slot (you can get a 9.5mm high drive in there, but it's a squeeze and you need to remove the keyboard and palmrest assembly IIRC).
What? Of course not. The laptop formfactor was never comfortable nor desirable to use from the lap. It was a screen with a keyboard.
I disagree with that... completely. Crappy laptops have never been comfortable or desirable for actual lap usage (trackpads too close to the edge making you have to hold your hand way crooked when the thing's in your lap, too much heat dissipation over the bottom of a full-metal chassis/casing, crappy battery life), but well-designed ones take this stuff into account and are awesome for this. Take classic Thinkpads for instance - well-proportioned cooling systems, long battery life, and the trackpoint is far enough away from the bottom edge of the machine that you can very comfortably use it with the device on your lap.
The ideal part of that is that it could stand on a table and type long narratives with.... kind of like I'm doing now from my Surface, something I completely wouldn't bother with when using a phone or an iPad.
Why is that? My mom has had an iPad since the first one came out, and soon added a flip-style keyboard case - pretty much the same as the Surface series. She types up thousand-page documents on that thing (mostly translations of books), and the keyboard is no worse than the Surface type covers.
One man's unusable is another man's killer feature
I suppose so. I still use the Ethernet and VGA ports on my laptop regularly:D
It is a hybrid that takes the best of the laptop and tablet form-factors and combines them. It is called and sold as a tablet.
And the best of the laptop form factor somehow doesn't include the ability for the screen to, well, stand on its own at any angle you want?
I completely disagree with this statement. Surface-style devices are at best, as you've stated yourself, tablets with bolt-on keyboards to make them less useless. As tablets, they're fine - I can't think of any better device for viewing a PDF and taking notes at the same time... hell, I'm doing exactly that on my Win8.1 tablet right now.
But anything that requires a keyboard, well, I'm grabbing a proper laptop.
Yeah, I've tried one. And multiple clones. And you know what the biggest problem is when compared to a traditional laptop? The fucking hinge.
I mostly use my laptop (currently an X220 - until Lenovo releases new devices with a decent keyboard layout, I'll probably be sticking with this, too...) without a table - in the back yard, on the train, on the couch, in bed... the #1 most important component is the hinge that keeps the screen from falling over - it's what separates the laptop form factor from tablet + kickstand + keyboard.
And after using a Surface Pro 3 for a week (I was trying to replace the X220 and my note-taking Win8.1 ATIV Smart PC tablet with a single SP3), I've come to the conclusion that the SP3 is completely useless out-and-about unless you use it without the keyboard - and then, well, you don't have a keyboard. I found myself carrying a 3 pound book (seriously, a big atlas from my high school days) around my appartment just so I'd have something to put the damned SP3 on without having to worry about it falling over every time I move even one muscle.
It's a LAPtop. Don't take away the functionality that makes it so.
Traditional tablet PCs with WACOM styluses have existed for ages - over 10 years. They use an active digitizer (built into the screen) combined with an inductive stylus, which has a pressure-sensitive tip and does not require a battery. It's the same technology WACOM uses for its separate graphics tablets, which is why the pens are, in many cases, interchangeable - I can use the pen from my graphics tablet for my tablet PC (in this case, a Samsung ATIV Smart PC tablet), for instance. This technology is highly accurate, works across the entire system (due to presenting as a [PS2 or similar] pointing device) and is highly compatible with all existing software. Many Windows and Android devices come with this hardware built in... others (such as Microsoft for their Surface line) have switched to WACOM's main competitor for these products, N-Trig - even more accurate, but require batteries in the pens AFAIK.
iOS devices such as iPads have no such hardware built in - they have a "fat finger" capacitive touch display and no native palm rejection due to the fact that if you turn off the capacitive touchscreen, well, you lose all input - WACOM systems automatically turn off the capacitive touch when the stylus comes within a few centimeters of the digitizer screen, which incidentally also allows hovering over the screen with the stylus as a pointing device. The workaround palm rejection algorithms in these "let's use capacitive touch as a crutch for a stylus" devices and apps are almost always universally horrible. I'm hoping WACOM figured out something better for the product you mentioned, but I kinda doubt it.
The accuracy is also quite horrendous - with most iPad styluses, you wouldn't be much worse off using a hot-dog instead.
Hence the complicated workaround for iOS with Bluetooth (for the pressure sensitivity) and the very slow performance - take a look here for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I dunno about you, but while the reviewer keeps talking about fast performance, I'd pretty much be pulling my hair out. That might be because of that Bamboo drawing app on the iPad though, and not because the Bluetooth connection is lagging (although that's a possibility too!).
That's an edge case - a special product that doesn't work system-wide - and not a traditional WACOM stylus - the latter requires an active digitizer panel integrated in the screen, which iOS devices simply do not have. There's an entirely different level of accuracy involved, and the iOS version of the product only works with certain apps.
Traditional "real" WACOM styli work system-wide... everywhere you can use a pointing device. And they have absolute positioning on screen.
I am intrigued though - I wonder how the iOS version of the product works, since they're missing an elementary part of the system they usually use (the digitizer in the screen).
>Which have also been available for iOS for years.
Ummm... what? I haven't seen any iOS devices with WACOM or N-Trig... everything available for iOS devices has been the high-tech equivalent of fingerpainting.
Even if I had HGST drives it wouldn't change much - I'd still have the same backup system in place and if a drive fails, well, it's swapped out and I can go about my day. So meh.
I'm gonna have to start doing the "Oooooh Barracuda!" thing...
Ehhh, I have like 3 of them and they're still going strong. All backed up nightly though, of course, with manual ~monthly additional off-site backups of the more important stuff (pretty much everything other than movies, TV and music).
While this does sound interesting (thank you for the tip, by the way - I may use this for other purposes), I'm not looking to move out of the Skype ecosystem because so many people I communicate with are already in it.
I just want to get rid of the Skype desktop application because it *sucks*. A webapp would be a welcome change.
The problem with having a single such tool is that the ISPs will prioritize traffic generated by it, just like they do with speedtest.net etc.
How would you work around that without implementing measures that make the measurement of net neutrality related parameters impossible? VPN, for instance, would stop the ISP from prioritizing the measurement tool's data, but it would also prevent any of the potentially Net Neutrality threatening QoS/Blocking you're trying to measure in the first place. Any ideas?
Let me preface this by saying I'm typing this on a custom-built Win7 (& Win8.1/Win10/Ubuntu/ARCH/Debian if you include the dual boot and VMs) PC, I have a Win8.1 tablet on my nightstand and run Windows 7 and Debian on my laptop... but I kinda doubt that.
The MBPs have far far far (~100Wh vs. ~50Wh) Battery life, PCIe-based SSDs vs. (m)SATA, MagSafe... oh and they work OOTB in regards to a POSIX system. The only thing I'd consider genuinely *better* on the M3800 is the screen, and maye the non-backspace delete button:D
Huh... and here I've been hearing that CoreAudio makes everything pro audio so much better on Macs. I can't really complain on Win7, but I suppose the ASIO drivers for a lot of interfaces could be more stable...
Have you ever been at the store and wondered if there was anything else you needed to replenish in your fridge? Wouldn't it be great to pull up a webcam view of the interior right at that moment? Or how about making sure your oven and stove and iron are off? Or getting a video call on your smartphone when someone rings your doorbell while you're not home?
These are just a few of the things that I personally would find useful or at least interesting - I'm sure other people have entirely different lists of things that would be useful or interesting to them. However, in order to allow all of us to do the things we want, we need to first connect, well, pretty much everything to the internet.
It needs to be well-planned and secure, of course... which is why I won't be installing any of this stuff unless I've vetted it myself first.
I can't help but wonder how many others there are like me though. If there's a ton, dropping the free w/ ads tier and setting the premium price to $5/5€ would probably quadruple the number of subscribers over night... It's the carrot and the stick:p
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I'd like a wireless charger in, well, pretty much every surface everywhere at work and at home and in my car.
That's what I was thinking... any idiot can buy these things, and many of them have more money than sense. Who's to know they aren't going to send their drone up over people in the park when it's low on battery?
Kudos on being a responsible flier (pilot?)...
How about an expectation of not having a drone fall out of the sky and land on my head? I don't have anything against drones, just against the many idiots in this world who could easily buy one.
What's wrong with flying your drone in a place where nobody'll be annoyed by it? I don't drive my motorcycle through the park, so keep your drones out too.
>Chrome is the only application I use that ever, ever has memory leaks now in 2015.
Have you tried Firefox with Adblock Plus lately? Very fun.
You know they sell additional "power bricks", right? I carry a small one for my Thinkpad in my messenger bag and it adds something like 200g to my loadout. The ones for the Broadwell Thinkpads are even smaller...
As for 6 hours of battery life: That's roughly where we're at for modern machines (say since Sandy Bridge) with ~100Wh of battery power at medium-high load with network connectivity and high display brightness. A W550s would fit the bill... and it's not really that heavy.
Many laptops these days can only fit 7mm high drives. This has been the case for years now... even my Thinkpad X220 only has a 7mm slot (you can get a 9.5mm high drive in there, but it's a squeeze and you need to remove the keyboard and palmrest assembly IIRC).
What? Of course not. The laptop formfactor was never comfortable nor desirable to use from the lap. It was a screen with a keyboard.
I disagree with that... completely. Crappy laptops have never been comfortable or desirable for actual lap usage (trackpads too close to the edge making you have to hold your hand way crooked when the thing's in your lap, too much heat dissipation over the bottom of a full-metal chassis/casing, crappy battery life), but well-designed ones take this stuff into account and are awesome for this. Take classic Thinkpads for instance - well-proportioned cooling systems, long battery life, and the trackpoint is far enough away from the bottom edge of the machine that you can very comfortably use it with the device on your lap.
The ideal part of that is that it could stand on a table and type long narratives with. ... kind of like I'm doing now from my Surface, something I completely wouldn't bother with when using a phone or an iPad.
Why is that? My mom has had an iPad since the first one came out, and soon added a flip-style keyboard case - pretty much the same as the Surface series. She types up thousand-page documents on that thing (mostly translations of books), and the keyboard is no worse than the Surface type covers.
One man's unusable is another man's killer feature
I suppose so. I still use the Ethernet and VGA ports on my laptop regularly :D
It is a hybrid that takes the best of the laptop and tablet form-factors and combines them. It is called and sold as a tablet.
And the best of the laptop form factor somehow doesn't include the ability for the screen to, well, stand on its own at any angle you want?
I completely disagree with this statement. Surface-style devices are at best, as you've stated yourself, tablets with bolt-on keyboards to make them less useless. As tablets, they're fine - I can't think of any better device for viewing a PDF and taking notes at the same time... hell, I'm doing exactly that on my Win8.1 tablet right now.
But anything that requires a keyboard, well, I'm grabbing a proper laptop.
I differ ... typing this on a surface pro.
Have you tried one?
Yeah, I've tried one. And multiple clones. And you know what the biggest problem is when compared to a traditional laptop? The fucking hinge.
I mostly use my laptop (currently an X220 - until Lenovo releases new devices with a decent keyboard layout, I'll probably be sticking with this, too...) without a table - in the back yard, on the train, on the couch, in bed... the #1 most important component is the hinge that keeps the screen from falling over - it's what separates the laptop form factor from tablet + kickstand + keyboard.
And after using a Surface Pro 3 for a week (I was trying to replace the X220 and my note-taking Win8.1 ATIV Smart PC tablet with a single SP3), I've come to the conclusion that the SP3 is completely useless out-and-about unless you use it without the keyboard - and then, well, you don't have a keyboard. I found myself carrying a 3 pound book (seriously, a big atlas from my high school days) around my appartment just so I'd have something to put the damned SP3 on without having to worry about it falling over every time I move even one muscle.
It's a LAPtop. Don't take away the functionality that makes it so.
Have you looked at a smartphone lately? How about the ~100Wh battery I have in my 1.5kg laptop? A Tesla S?
OK, from the top then :D
Traditional tablet PCs with WACOM styluses have existed for ages - over 10 years. They use an active digitizer (built into the screen) combined with an inductive stylus, which has a pressure-sensitive tip and does not require a battery. It's the same technology WACOM uses for its separate graphics tablets, which is why the pens are, in many cases, interchangeable - I can use the pen from my graphics tablet for my tablet PC (in this case, a Samsung ATIV Smart PC tablet), for instance. This technology is highly accurate, works across the entire system (due to presenting as a [PS2 or similar] pointing device) and is highly compatible with all existing software. Many Windows and Android devices come with this hardware built in... others (such as Microsoft for their Surface line) have switched to WACOM's main competitor for these products, N-Trig - even more accurate, but require batteries in the pens AFAIK.
iOS devices such as iPads have no such hardware built in - they have a "fat finger" capacitive touch display and no native palm rejection due to the fact that if you turn off the capacitive touchscreen, well, you lose all input - WACOM systems automatically turn off the capacitive touch when the stylus comes within a few centimeters of the digitizer screen, which incidentally also allows hovering over the screen with the stylus as a pointing device. The workaround palm rejection algorithms in these "let's use capacitive touch as a crutch for a stylus" devices and apps are almost always universally horrible. I'm hoping WACOM figured out something better for the product you mentioned, but I kinda doubt it.
The accuracy is also quite horrendous - with most iPad styluses, you wouldn't be much worse off using a hot-dog instead.
Hence the complicated workaround for iOS with Bluetooth (for the pressure sensitivity) and the very slow performance - take a look here for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I dunno about you, but while the reviewer keeps talking about fast performance, I'd pretty much be pulling my hair out. That might be because of that Bamboo drawing app on the iPad though, and not because the Bluetooth connection is lagging (although that's a possibility too!).
That's an edge case - a special product that doesn't work system-wide - and not a traditional WACOM stylus - the latter requires an active digitizer panel integrated in the screen, which iOS devices simply do not have. There's an entirely different level of accuracy involved, and the iOS version of the product only works with certain apps.
Traditional "real" WACOM styli work system-wide... everywhere you can use a pointing device. And they have absolute positioning on screen.
I am intrigued though - I wonder how the iOS version of the product works, since they're missing an elementary part of the system they usually use (the digitizer in the screen).
>Which have also been available for iOS for years.
Ummm... what? I haven't seen any iOS devices with WACOM or N-Trig... everything available for iOS devices has been the high-tech equivalent of fingerpainting.
It's not bad to have a viewer app that'll render Word/Excel/Powerpoint properly though...
Even if I had HGST drives it wouldn't change much - I'd still have the same backup system in place and if a drive fails, well, it's swapped out and I can go about my day. So meh.
I'm gonna have to start doing the "Oooooh Barracuda!" thing...
Ehhh, I have like 3 of them and they're still going strong. All backed up nightly though, of course, with manual ~monthly additional off-site backups of the more important stuff (pretty much everything other than movies, TV and music).
While this does sound interesting (thank you for the tip, by the way - I may use this for other purposes), I'm not looking to move out of the Skype ecosystem because so many people I communicate with are already in it.
I just want to get rid of the Skype desktop application because it *sucks*. A webapp would be a welcome change.
I do want to be able to talk to my parents and other people who use Skype ;)
If I want screen sharing I'll use fucking TeamViewer. Give me basic IM, voice and maybe video support without a plugin or GTFO.
... so WTF is the point? The whole reason I want a webapp is so I have to install *less* shit on my computers.
The problem with having a single such tool is that the ISPs will prioritize traffic generated by it, just like they do with speedtest.net etc.
How would you work around that without implementing measures that make the measurement of net neutrality related parameters impossible? VPN, for instance, would stop the ISP from prioritizing the measurement tool's data, but it would also prevent any of the potentially Net Neutrality threatening QoS/Blocking you're trying to measure in the first place. Any ideas?
Better than a Macbook Retina? Yes, yes it is.
Let me preface this by saying I'm typing this on a custom-built Win7 (& Win8.1/Win10/Ubuntu/ARCH/Debian if you include the dual boot and VMs) PC, I have a Win8.1 tablet on my nightstand and run Windows 7 and Debian on my laptop... but I kinda doubt that.
The MBPs have far far far (~100Wh vs. ~50Wh) Battery life, PCIe-based SSDs vs. (m)SATA, MagSafe... oh and they work OOTB in regards to a POSIX system. The only thing I'd consider genuinely *better* on the M3800 is the screen, and maye the non-backspace delete button :D
Huh... and here I've been hearing that CoreAudio makes everything pro audio so much better on Macs. I can't really complain on Win7, but I suppose the ASIO drivers for a lot of interfaces could be more stable...
Have you ever been at the store and wondered if there was anything else you needed to replenish in your fridge? Wouldn't it be great to pull up a webcam view of the interior right at that moment? Or how about making sure your oven and stove and iron are off? Or getting a video call on your smartphone when someone rings your doorbell while you're not home?
These are just a few of the things that I personally would find useful or at least interesting - I'm sure other people have entirely different lists of things that would be useful or interesting to them. However, in order to allow all of us to do the things we want, we need to first connect, well, pretty much everything to the internet.
It needs to be well-planned and secure, of course... which is why I won't be installing any of this stuff unless I've vetted it myself first.
I can't help but wonder how many others there are like me though. If there's a ton, dropping the free w/ ads tier and setting the premium price to $5/5€ would probably quadruple the number of subscribers over night... It's the carrot and the stick :p