So are they going to sue everyone that opens their laptop and gets a list of all the SSID's around them? Or just those that happen to record the information? Does it count if I close my laptop without clearing the information?
Idiots. It's about the same as bitching because someone goes down the street writing down the house numbers they pass.
When they make an Android device with non-crap hardware and an interface that doesn't look like it was made by blind geeks on pot then I'll give Android a serious try. I'd be willing to pay just as much for a good Android device so I don't know why they just put out cheap crap. Guess that's what they think their market is.
Only half kidding here.. they should look into adding a goggles interface with some sort of hand tracking. I love the IPad but it doesn't fit in a pocket - at least not without a winter coat - but would be willing to try something that gave me a a iPhone sized touch screen and an optional AR mode. I wouldn't even bother trying for a cheesy 3D thing - just overlay a normal looking iPhone-like screen on my vision.
Which is why I'd rather they let me tether to my iPad. More data for less money. I can anyway but THAT is really the only reason to jailbreak IMO so if they'd just let me do it it'd simplify my life. Or they could just let my buy a USB device for accessing their network via my laptop (or rather my wife's net book) for $15/mo without a contract and I'd be just as happy. Or hey offer Mifi for the same price.
So far with the iPad 3G I've only used about half my $15/mo plan in the couple weeks I've had it and I use it every day. What the heck are you people doing that use more than 5GB anyway? Don't you have wifi at home and work?
Yeah and when I was a kid I remember people laughing that people would own their own computer in their home. Obviously computers are room sized devices that only businesses need. Of course the PC isn't going to die but if you haven't noticed everyone and their dog owns one or more mobile devices and the Network is everywhere. It's only a matter of time before the mobile device and the networks are powerful enough to make cloud computing the new king. Only a few geeks would rather be planted in front of a screen looking at a clunky outdated interface that does a billion things than out doing whatever they do with a nice mobile device that can do whatever they need with a simple interface. Eventually even your PC will be just another component of the cloud as applications all integrate the Network for storage and extra processing power. There is to much benefit to being able to access your data from any device that can connect to the network and being able to have smaller, more efficient systems that can get extra processing power on demand from more efficient cloud servers. There will be bumps, like privacy concerns, but the change is happening and will continue to become the dominate model.
I've asked that they port Xcode (with hooks to compile on your own servers or a cloud server) to iPad and allow free developing for your own use, educational use, and opensource/free apps. I think that'd be a good compromise because it provides some filter to keep idiots from accidentally hurting themselves and giving Apple support headaches. Pay $10 for this app and compile the code yourself and you can run whatever but you can't distribute it in the App Store. Anything you compile yourself would of course be unsupported.
If they really want the iPad to reach it's potential it has to be usable for producing and not just consuming. Porting iWork indicates they do realize this. Supporting coding directly on the platform is just a small but important step further. The $100/yr developer fee should only be for distributing your app for profit. Of course it should be easy to upgrade to full-developer status if you see your app moving well.
Holding your finger in one place is difficult to figure out? Maybe they need to create an add-on for people that aren't capable of using a touch screen as well as my 2 year old. (To be fair she has over a year of practice.)
Actually I do think they should open up the dock to more developers. I'm sure a case with a few extra buttons, such as a dedicated cut and paste button, would be a hot seller. Some people just feel better with a real clickable button.
When I was a teenager I taught myself about everything from religion and witchcraft to bombs, computer hacking, and chemical weapons. Guess that means I'm a terrorist.
I'm for barriers to higher education so long as we provide a means for people to improve themselves and try again and again until they can qualify. I think the demise of the community college is a mistake because high school often does not prepare students for full college which leaves us with the choice of excluding them, and effectively having to fund and babysit them for their entire life, or just passing them along anyway where we lower our standards, put fluff classes in, etc which lowers the quality of education for the other students.
I don't think college is always the right path either. In fact I think our higher education system is a giant mess that is inadequate for almost everyone. It needs a major overhaul to better fulfill the needs of modern students and should have both more practical knowledge and more theory. My experience is that most of the classes I've been to were almost without purpose and were put there just to fill space rather than to give the student a stronger understanding of their field of study. Many of those in charge of deciding the curriculum haven't been active in the field recently if at all. I went to school in electrical engineering and computer science and my wife in science and education - maybe other programs are different.
I certainly agree that how much money you have should not be a barrier. I really feel that if I had been given better financial support so that I could have finished school sooner I would have been more of a win for society. A lot of years were wasted dealing with money and red tape. The system was needlessly complex too. Back when I first went to school just registering for classes was a confusing nightmare and when there were other issues OMG what a pain. It's much better now, largely due to web based documentation and services, but still would be quite confusing to a kid I think.
We should just add college to the public education system. You really need at least a Bachelors degree for most decent jobs anyway so it fills the spot that high school previously filled. No dealing with complex rules and jumping through hoops and running up debt. Just educate people at the tax payers expense so they can become tax payers too. Our system should be geared to not just educate people to a minimal level but to educate them to as high a level as they can handle and to use them well.
The problem with economists in general is that most of them think in terms of dollars and completely forget that money is an imaginary system that exists only to make managing rare resources easier. There is little long term benefit to playing tricks with numbers to create more money but there are huge benefits to using money to create, and better distribute, rare resources. Highly educated and intelligent people are still, and always will be, a rare resource that when used well are what makes everything else that humanity strives for possible. Bob at Burger King with a 7th grade education is not improving much the quality of life for future generations. Dr. Bob at Bioengineering Inc on the other hand may very well be creating new medicines and various other things that will help us all. A huge difference.
Sure you'll always get some people that are leeches but the majority just want to do their time in school and move out into the real world and make money. Trying to weed out every possible fail point is probably the biggest reason any project fails. Most people will do their part just for that paycheck and quite a few will go beyond because they are driven. Give these driven people the resources they need with less struggle and they'll go further and do more and in general they are the ones that are our greatest resources. I'd lean more towards investing in science, engineering, and art but of course we need doctors, teachers, and even lawyers too. Even subjects such as history have a value although some of the more liberal arts type degrees I have more doubt about.
Someone like your friend probably needs direction. I'll assume that with multiple masters degrees that they are intelligent and not horribly lazy so I wonder what the problem is. Fear of the real world? Unrealistic expectations of how things should be? I think periodic 'hands on' periods should be part of education to make sure that students not only learn the facts and methods but also how to apply them in real life. On the job experience can be very useful.
I'd already had a net presence for several years thanks to friends from the BBS scene getting me an Internet connection way before they became generally available and was good at adding things to established sites. Besides online dictionaries often have a lot more words than the $10 one a high school teacher keeps in their desk. Not as if they're going to put up a big fight over it. When given the choice I'd write on geeky topics anyway which are rife with words not in standard dictionaries. To this day they still probably think all my words were real since so many strange words I used, Internet jargon, have become common.
Way back when the Net was new to most people I'd do this to teachers. Simply make up words, add them to a couple online dictionaries, and sprinkle them around the web. Then i could include nonsense words in papers and when teachers called me on it I'd challenge them to go look it up. Lots of fun and soon I was credited with having an excellent vocabulary.
It was better than Android. I like iPhone OS better though. Part of the problem I had with webOS was the actual device though so I'd be interested on seeing it on an actual tablet.
I'm sure somebody will say it and mean it. It's pretty funny that geeks think that way. It just shows how disconnected they are from what the average consumer wants. With all the bitching about the iPad I've decided that what the average geek wants is a Model M keyboard with a green on black screen that sticks awkwardly from the top so everyone can see they are running Linux. It'd probably have a separate battery that hung from their belt and connected by a thick rubber cord. Half of them wouldn't know how to do anything useful but they could feel proud that the device is fully opensource and be happy that everyone could see how uber elite they are. They'd try to get their grandma to switch to their nerdpad because she wouldn't have to use any nasty user-friendly multi-touch interfaces controlled by the man. And they'd probably wank to ascii porn.
Yeah - so I think the rest of us will avoid the nerdpad and stick to nice devices based off user-friendly designs such as iPhone OS and maybe even webOS and Android (although they, especially Android, has a touch of the nerdpad still there).
Without a lot of work I just don't see Android or WebOS as a competitor against the iPad. About the most they can hope for is to be a cheaper alternative which may get sales but will still leave them as also-rans. People that buy a Visio tv from Walmart would buy them but would lust for an iPad.
The iPad is buggy and the available software is mostly inflated iPhone apps and buggy, if you can find it at all, just released stuff and I still love the darn thing. You can just feel the potential radiating from the thing. I've yet to see any other brand of slate anywhere near as sexy and half of that is the well thought out interface.
I'd love to see Android and WebOS kick up the competition but they need their own Steve Jobs to throw out all the garbage and force them to take real shape. Someone with some sense of style and usability that is okay with being a jerk and telling people to go do it again over and over and over again. (That is what most software projects need.) I always liked id's "When it's ready." motto. Make me wait but make it worth waiting for.
My 23 month old has been looking at both real and iTouch/iPad based books since she could sit up. I don't think it's caused any damage at all. She recognizes some letters, words, numbers, and shapes and a lot of random items, can sing much of the ABC song and other kids songs, etc. If anything I'd say she is slightly advanced compared to a lot of other kids. I even let her watch tv and it's hardly destroyed her mind. She especially like Signing Time, Monkey Time, and Dora the Explorer. Along with reading and speaking at least as well as most kids her age she has a good understanding of technology. She uses the iTouch/iPad by herself better than many adults, understands how buttons on her DVD player control play, stop, next, etc, can use the Roku remote to select and play her own Netflix show, she loves using a keyboard and mouse or joystick, etc.
As always it's about finding a balance and about parent interaction. You shouldn't drop your kid in front of a machine and ignore them but so long as you're reading along and participating the machine just enhances the experience. Games and books on the iPad have especially been awesome, even better than the iTouch, and she just loves them. The screen is beautiful, the audio vibrant, and the touch and tilt interface is fantastic for kids.
I think touch is a better replacement for most things but for certain tasks a mouse or joystick or real keyboard is better. It's not quite the situation of voice input though where it is useful but much less so than a keyboard and mouse.
You've been able to do most of what Flash is used for for at least a decade. People are just to lazy to do it without their brainless click-and-point design tools and there is evidently no money in making tools that don't lock you in to crappy proprietary solutions.
It's been fairly recently that we've even seen sites that really used Flash in such a way that was hard to duplicate without it. (Mostly because of crappy incompatible browsers that people use - IE.)
I don't think this is really true. Apple has specifically said tools that allow programming in other languages are allowed. It's more that you can't completely abstract away the programming interfaces or compile a binary directly because you're app is likely to stop working in a future version of iPhone OS and Apple will have no way to correct the problem.
BS. The only benefit Apple gets by not allowing Flash is to not have to deal with a million slow poorly written apps that make the iPhone/iPad suck. There is almost no benefit to using Flash and the vast majority of Flash apps suck and would create customer service issues for Apple.
I've never seen a good Flash app. What has everybody so in a boner that they must have Flash? 90% of Flash could have been written with HTML/CSS/Javascript and 99.99% with HTML5. That extra tiny percentage probably would be better off as a real app anyway.
There are already to many suck apps for iPhone. If you're to lazy or stupid to learn a new language then don't try to push your crap on me. I just wish Apple would block more apps from the App Store so i didn't have to sort through alpha quality crap. Customers are paying a premium NOT to have to look at badly made crap.
Not only can it run apps but it offers a selection of viruses and a genuine blue screen of death too! Brings back the memories but if it can't run http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game) then forget it!
Anyway I'll stick to my iPad. The idea of a hinged book-style tablet is horrible. It's not a 'real computer' as everyone bitches about the iPad but you have to hold it with both hands and it has a moving part to break. That and it'd run some gawd-awful OS from Microsoft. Why do that? If you want extreme geekness go for Android and if you want the damn thing to actually work go for iPhone OS. I've tried many others and they just sucked.
Slashdot Mirror
So are they going to sue everyone that opens their laptop and gets a list of all the SSID's around them? Or just those that happen to record the information? Does it count if I close my laptop without clearing the information? Idiots. It's about the same as bitching because someone goes down the street writing down the house numbers they pass.
Only half kidding here.. they should look into adding a goggles interface with some sort of hand tracking. I love the IPad but it doesn't fit in a pocket - at least not without a winter coat - but would be willing to try something that gave me a a iPhone sized touch screen and an optional AR mode. I wouldn't even bother trying for a cheesy 3D thing - just overlay a normal looking iPhone-like screen on my vision.
Which is why I'd rather they let me tether to my iPad. More data for less money. I can anyway but THAT is really the only reason to jailbreak IMO so if they'd just let me do it it'd simplify my life. Or they could just let my buy a USB device for accessing their network via my laptop (or rather my wife's net book) for $15/mo without a contract and I'd be just as happy. Or hey offer Mifi for the same price. So far with the iPad 3G I've only used about half my $15/mo plan in the couple weeks I've had it and I use it every day. What the heck are you people doing that use more than 5GB anyway? Don't you have wifi at home and work?
Yeah and when I was a kid I remember people laughing that people would own their own computer in their home. Obviously computers are room sized devices that only businesses need. Of course the PC isn't going to die but if you haven't noticed everyone and their dog owns one or more mobile devices and the Network is everywhere. It's only a matter of time before the mobile device and the networks are powerful enough to make cloud computing the new king. Only a few geeks would rather be planted in front of a screen looking at a clunky outdated interface that does a billion things than out doing whatever they do with a nice mobile device that can do whatever they need with a simple interface. Eventually even your PC will be just another component of the cloud as applications all integrate the Network for storage and extra processing power. There is to much benefit to being able to access your data from any device that can connect to the network and being able to have smaller, more efficient systems that can get extra processing power on demand from more efficient cloud servers. There will be bumps, like privacy concerns, but the change is happening and will continue to become the dominate model.
I've asked that they port Xcode (with hooks to compile on your own servers or a cloud server) to iPad and allow free developing for your own use, educational use, and opensource/free apps. I think that'd be a good compromise because it provides some filter to keep idiots from accidentally hurting themselves and giving Apple support headaches. Pay $10 for this app and compile the code yourself and you can run whatever but you can't distribute it in the App Store. Anything you compile yourself would of course be unsupported. If they really want the iPad to reach it's potential it has to be usable for producing and not just consuming. Porting iWork indicates they do realize this. Supporting coding directly on the platform is just a small but important step further. The $100/yr developer fee should only be for distributing your app for profit. Of course it should be easy to upgrade to full-developer status if you see your app moving well.
Holding your finger in one place is difficult to figure out? Maybe they need to create an add-on for people that aren't capable of using a touch screen as well as my 2 year old. (To be fair she has over a year of practice.) Actually I do think they should open up the dock to more developers. I'm sure a case with a few extra buttons, such as a dedicated cut and paste button, would be a hot seller. Some people just feel better with a real clickable button.
I'm sure what I did would be considered a crime today. In my day it was considered boys being boys.
When I was a teenager I taught myself about everything from religion and witchcraft to bombs, computer hacking, and chemical weapons. Guess that means I'm a terrorist.
I'm for barriers to higher education so long as we provide a means for people to improve themselves and try again and again until they can qualify. I think the demise of the community college is a mistake because high school often does not prepare students for full college which leaves us with the choice of excluding them, and effectively having to fund and babysit them for their entire life, or just passing them along anyway where we lower our standards, put fluff classes in, etc which lowers the quality of education for the other students. I don't think college is always the right path either. In fact I think our higher education system is a giant mess that is inadequate for almost everyone. It needs a major overhaul to better fulfill the needs of modern students and should have both more practical knowledge and more theory. My experience is that most of the classes I've been to were almost without purpose and were put there just to fill space rather than to give the student a stronger understanding of their field of study. Many of those in charge of deciding the curriculum haven't been active in the field recently if at all. I went to school in electrical engineering and computer science and my wife in science and education - maybe other programs are different. I certainly agree that how much money you have should not be a barrier. I really feel that if I had been given better financial support so that I could have finished school sooner I would have been more of a win for society. A lot of years were wasted dealing with money and red tape. The system was needlessly complex too. Back when I first went to school just registering for classes was a confusing nightmare and when there were other issues OMG what a pain. It's much better now, largely due to web based documentation and services, but still would be quite confusing to a kid I think.
We should just add college to the public education system. You really need at least a Bachelors degree for most decent jobs anyway so it fills the spot that high school previously filled. No dealing with complex rules and jumping through hoops and running up debt. Just educate people at the tax payers expense so they can become tax payers too. Our system should be geared to not just educate people to a minimal level but to educate them to as high a level as they can handle and to use them well. The problem with economists in general is that most of them think in terms of dollars and completely forget that money is an imaginary system that exists only to make managing rare resources easier. There is little long term benefit to playing tricks with numbers to create more money but there are huge benefits to using money to create, and better distribute, rare resources. Highly educated and intelligent people are still, and always will be, a rare resource that when used well are what makes everything else that humanity strives for possible. Bob at Burger King with a 7th grade education is not improving much the quality of life for future generations. Dr. Bob at Bioengineering Inc on the other hand may very well be creating new medicines and various other things that will help us all. A huge difference. Sure you'll always get some people that are leeches but the majority just want to do their time in school and move out into the real world and make money. Trying to weed out every possible fail point is probably the biggest reason any project fails. Most people will do their part just for that paycheck and quite a few will go beyond because they are driven. Give these driven people the resources they need with less struggle and they'll go further and do more and in general they are the ones that are our greatest resources. I'd lean more towards investing in science, engineering, and art but of course we need doctors, teachers, and even lawyers too. Even subjects such as history have a value although some of the more liberal arts type degrees I have more doubt about. Someone like your friend probably needs direction. I'll assume that with multiple masters degrees that they are intelligent and not horribly lazy so I wonder what the problem is. Fear of the real world? Unrealistic expectations of how things should be? I think periodic 'hands on' periods should be part of education to make sure that students not only learn the facts and methods but also how to apply them in real life. On the job experience can be very useful.
I'd already had a net presence for several years thanks to friends from the BBS scene getting me an Internet connection way before they became generally available and was good at adding things to established sites. Besides online dictionaries often have a lot more words than the $10 one a high school teacher keeps in their desk. Not as if they're going to put up a big fight over it. When given the choice I'd write on geeky topics anyway which are rife with words not in standard dictionaries. To this day they still probably think all my words were real since so many strange words I used, Internet jargon, have become common.
Way back when the Net was new to most people I'd do this to teachers. Simply make up words, add them to a couple online dictionaries, and sprinkle them around the web. Then i could include nonsense words in papers and when teachers called me on it I'd challenge them to go look it up. Lots of fun and soon I was credited with having an excellent vocabulary.
It was better than Android. I like iPhone OS better though. Part of the problem I had with webOS was the actual device though so I'd be interested on seeing it on an actual tablet.
Yeah - so I think the rest of us will avoid the nerdpad and stick to nice devices based off user-friendly designs such as iPhone OS and maybe even webOS and Android (although they, especially Android, has a touch of the nerdpad still there).
Without a lot of work I just don't see Android or WebOS as a competitor against the iPad. About the most they can hope for is to be a cheaper alternative which may get sales but will still leave them as also-rans. People that buy a Visio tv from Walmart would buy them but would lust for an iPad. The iPad is buggy and the available software is mostly inflated iPhone apps and buggy, if you can find it at all, just released stuff and I still love the darn thing. You can just feel the potential radiating from the thing. I've yet to see any other brand of slate anywhere near as sexy and half of that is the well thought out interface. I'd love to see Android and WebOS kick up the competition but they need their own Steve Jobs to throw out all the garbage and force them to take real shape. Someone with some sense of style and usability that is okay with being a jerk and telling people to go do it again over and over and over again. (That is what most software projects need.) I always liked id's "When it's ready." motto. Make me wait but make it worth waiting for.
My 23 month old has been looking at both real and iTouch/iPad based books since she could sit up. I don't think it's caused any damage at all. She recognizes some letters, words, numbers, and shapes and a lot of random items, can sing much of the ABC song and other kids songs, etc. If anything I'd say she is slightly advanced compared to a lot of other kids. I even let her watch tv and it's hardly destroyed her mind. She especially like Signing Time, Monkey Time, and Dora the Explorer. Along with reading and speaking at least as well as most kids her age she has a good understanding of technology. She uses the iTouch/iPad by herself better than many adults, understands how buttons on her DVD player control play, stop, next, etc, can use the Roku remote to select and play her own Netflix show, she loves using a keyboard and mouse or joystick, etc.
As always it's about finding a balance and about parent interaction. You shouldn't drop your kid in front of a machine and ignore them but so long as you're reading along and participating the machine just enhances the experience. Games and books on the iPad have especially been awesome, even better than the iTouch, and she just loves them. The screen is beautiful, the audio vibrant, and the touch and tilt interface is fantastic for kids.
I think touch is a better replacement for most things but for certain tasks a mouse or joystick or real keyboard is better. It's not quite the situation of voice input though where it is useful but much less so than a keyboard and mouse.
It looks retarded. What is useful?
You've been able to do most of what Flash is used for for at least a decade. People are just to lazy to do it without their brainless click-and-point design tools and there is evidently no money in making tools that don't lock you in to crappy proprietary solutions. It's been fairly recently that we've even seen sites that really used Flash in such a way that was hard to duplicate without it. (Mostly because of crappy incompatible browsers that people use - IE.)
It'd be awesome if they could implement a SPICE client this way.
But they still can use HTML 5 in apps either web based or submitted to the app store. HTML 5 is one of their approved methods.
I don't think this is really true. Apple has specifically said tools that allow programming in other languages are allowed. It's more that you can't completely abstract away the programming interfaces or compile a binary directly because you're app is likely to stop working in a future version of iPhone OS and Apple will have no way to correct the problem.
BS. The only benefit Apple gets by not allowing Flash is to not have to deal with a million slow poorly written apps that make the iPhone/iPad suck. There is almost no benefit to using Flash and the vast majority of Flash apps suck and would create customer service issues for Apple. I've never seen a good Flash app. What has everybody so in a boner that they must have Flash? 90% of Flash could have been written with HTML/CSS/Javascript and 99.99% with HTML5. That extra tiny percentage probably would be better off as a real app anyway. There are already to many suck apps for iPhone. If you're to lazy or stupid to learn a new language then don't try to push your crap on me. I just wish Apple would block more apps from the App Store so i didn't have to sort through alpha quality crap. Customers are paying a premium NOT to have to look at badly made crap.
As opposed to an actual laptop or an iPad with a real, removable, keyboard in a case made to hold both?
Not only can it run apps but it offers a selection of viruses and a genuine blue screen of death too! Brings back the memories but if it can't run http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game) then forget it! Anyway I'll stick to my iPad. The idea of a hinged book-style tablet is horrible. It's not a 'real computer' as everyone bitches about the iPad but you have to hold it with both hands and it has a moving part to break. That and it'd run some gawd-awful OS from Microsoft. Why do that? If you want extreme geekness go for Android and if you want the damn thing to actually work go for iPhone OS. I've tried many others and they just sucked.