The amazing thing is the number of people willing to sell for less than a product costs. And not the obvious situation of retailers who sell enough to get a discounted purchase price. No wonder you can get such good deals online.
So far they've just taken my money and haven't actually shipped anything. Doesn't count as a sell yet. Possibly they'll send me a seemingly empty box with a letter explaining they've made my iPad invisible for my own protection.
Obviously you aren't in retail/e-commerce. This is unfortunately pretty common behavior from manufacturers. They just don't really want to sell their product. One of the manufacturers I deal with went bankrupt while sending me cease and desist letters for selling to many of their products. Doh.
Trust me, there is no security concept. That being why it was so easily bypassed. And the company across the street leaves their network completely exposed so you can even connect to them and then bounce over. Gotta enjoy people that don't bother turning security features on or leave default settings.
One of the funniest things I ever saw was two very expensive convertibles do a head on crash into each other along Miami's South Beach as both drivers (male) did head swivels to check out the hot girl walking by in almost nothing.
I just got into our network gear and routed an external IP to an internal system of my choice with my own VPN software installed. Who the heck uses the network access their boss decides they need? Are we geeks or not!?
Keep them each locked in a closet in the basement. They can't come out to pee or eat until they've finished their monthly quota. Not only will you get more productive coders but they'll lose weight lowering the cost of medical insurance for the bastards! Just be sure to block their network access to all porn and gaming.
I'm sure other brands exist that are equally good but I haven't found them and I've had a lot of monitors pass through my office. Apple's new LED back lit monitors look even better I think but as mine is still working I haven't had an excuse to buy one.
I'd be willing to fund their fight if they promise to wipe each other out quickly.
Of course I generally support letting people reach the self destruct point as quickly as possible. For example I think we should give drugs away for free as the solution the the war on drugs. Get the people who will destroy themselves to get on with it so the rest of us can stop spending money on them. Maybe we could even run an ad campaign - "Please use drugs, we don't like you."
Just disable swap. I always do. It just slows your computer down. Who really needs it these days anyway? You can buy a normal laptop with 8GB RAM these days which is plenty for most people.
Not much good for servers. Although I opt for just putting craploads of RAM into the system for the most part. Unfortunately HDDboost isn't appropriate for servers as it doesn't cache the most read data but just the start of the disk and requires a reboot to refresh it's data. Supposedly they are working on a server friendly version.
I have a custom FS that caches better to RAM for my use - especially writes. I'd rather see a hardware-based battery-backed RAM hdd cache though. Would be sweet if you could plug in massive amounts of RAM as a cache to these multi-terabyte drives. Caching writes safely would be extremely awesome for databases.
I have 128GB Consair Nova SSDs in my laptops right now. Would like bigger but 128GB covers what I need available all the time. The rest is all on my NAS.
A 27" screen kicks the butt of multiple monitors. No annoying seams. Of course I do both. Just wish I could afford some nice 30" cinema monitors but sadly am stuck with smaller 22" displays as sidekicks.
Seriously my iMac screen makes all the other monitors on my desk look like crap even if they look fine by themselves. It's especially noticeable when dragging a window from one to the other. Bigger and higher res is always appreciated but the biggest thing I notice is how bad the brightness and contrast of other monitors is even with the settings maxed out and the color profile customized.
Actually I've spent years tinkering with alternate user interfaces designed to be easy and efficient. It's mostly the UI that needs addressed as an OS such as Linux is overall fine otherwise. (Other than OS's need to tell hardware companies to f off and force them to design to common interfaces with open drivers.)
The first thing wrong with your average GUI OS environment is that it's based on the desktop and windowing metaphors. These never worked well but they were adopted because they had gee whiz factor way back when and gave people some basis to understand computers in a time when people hadn't grown up breast fed by them. They also were created when people had a handful of programs and maybe a few dozen files. In an average week I probably use hundreds of programs spread across many machines and networks. Likewise I have millions of files spread across the same. The average user doesn't have THAT many but they do have a lot more than their metaphor was designed to represent.
I understand that OS dev's haven't tried to significantly improve the user-experience in years and like any geeks (being one myself) they'd rather fiddle with the interesting code bits than actually do usability studies and such. Balance it all you want but if it sucks for the user then it sucks. Fail to understand that and you shouldn't be writing software.
A combination of task-based and content-based design seem to be a good start. Not hiding everything behind a 'Start' menu and endless folders is a good idea too. Minimizing chrome and multiple windows helps a lot. I tend to favor a full-screen only approach to applications with a dashboard-like approach to certain apps that make sense to float such as calculators and note pads. I also favor apps that are small and to the point over huge monolithic messes that most people never fully understand or use. Components that can be plugged together by the end-user are my favorite and I've spent some time experimenting with these. For example instead of having an app that includes a gazillion photo effect filters you can have a special kind of applet that takes an image as input that when dropped on an image, or vice versa when the image is dropepd on the filter, would apply that effect to the image and save a new version of that image with the effect applied. Minimal levels of menus to dig through and dialog boxes. I favor a flat, tagged, versioning file-system where there is no file heirachy or visible difference between local and remote files and the file view is filtered by what kind of file is being looked for and specific keywords that have been attached. Accidentally over-writing or deleting a file should be as close to impossible as can be done. Or for another example, instead of a font selection dialog a standard file balloon (equiv to a file folder) should pop up showing available fonts and allow you to simply drag it to the text you want to apply it to. All these behaviors should not change based on what application you're running or what content type you're working with.
Your problem is you insist on seeing it as a phone or a netbook. It's neither. It's exactly what the majority of people need from a computer. The iPhone is great but it's not a good general purpose computer due mostly to it's screen size. It's small size is both it's best and worst feature depending on your need. Sure my 27" iMac is awesome but most of the time my computing needs don't have me sitting in front of a desk and being strapped to the desk is frustrating or not possible. The laptop is a little better but still not really a device that is always there. The iPhone/iTouch is always there but as I said it's size is limiting for some common uses. The netbook is almost always there but because of it's clamshell design and keyboard/touchpad requirement it is clumsy and it's reliance on outdated desktop/windows metaphors in the OS isn't well suited to seamless computing. Also netbooks have been getting bigger and are now practically laptops again which I think defeats some of the benefit. Makers have gotten confused between cheap laptop and netbook. The iPad slides nicely into that always there spot without the problems of a netbook.
The iPad really has only two problems. First is the price. I spent almost $900 on mine before the accessories. That's a bit high for their two biggest potential markets: moms on the run and kids. Even the cheaper models aren't that cheap. Sure a netbook of comparable specs would be just as expensive (try getting a cheap one with a 64GB SSD) but consumers see price tags first and not the fact that it's going to suck and break much faster than an iPad. Second, Apple really needs to make it easier/cheaper to sell 'Made for iPhone/iTouch/iPad.' hardware. Dock connected, bluetooth, and even local network devices that play well need to be far more abundant if they really want to challenge the netbook market let alone the PC market. It's fine that it doesn't have SD and USB - those suck anyway - but it should take full advantage of what it does offer. There are so many possibilities that Apple is just ignoring.
I think a couple OS upgrades could fix a lot. The hardware is pretty sweet (minus the lack of cameras). iPhone OS really isn't bad for what it was originally made for but it feels a little tight with our growing expectations from mobile devices. I'm disappointed in their upcoming version 4. Multitasking sounds well implemented but there are really no other interesting upgrades. I really was expecting a tags based filesystem that would transparently expose internal, local network, and Internet shared files, wireless printing/faxing, and some sort of access controls so you could really use the iPad in situations such as a classroom. I think these are critical features to the success of the iPad beyond those of us waiting to hack into them. Instead their giving us a stupid ad platform and OpenFeint competitor? Way to innovate guys.
I hope they relax the restrictions on being approved to develop dock-compatible devices (they relaxed it in programming with OS 3 afterall) and push to offer some cool bluetooth devices.
I still think iPhone OS and the iPhone/iTouch/iPad are awesome but I think Apple needs to step it up just a bit. Other companies are waiting to eat their lunch if they don't. It'd be pretty easy for Android to be adapted to not have a crappy user-interface/user-experience and someone is going to release a non-crap hardware platform for it eventually.
Their sign-on sucks so they can't have much to hide. It's one of the worst I've seen and I'm constantly having users run into issues with it such as accidentally creating a new account for a sub-account login. It has a lot of issues related to Google Apps too. It's clearly not engineered to handle the many different systems that they now use.
I don't find Obj-C any worse than Java really. I do wish it had a more extensive lib of useful classes but that isn't really a failure of the language. The biggest annoyance to me has been the mojo around doing things the Obj-C way. Rather than giving good feedback on your code functionality Obj-C fans just go on about how your coding style isn't the one true way. Of course Java fans can't explain why Java has problems with basic OOP functionality other than saying that you can't do that in Java. Fun.
I think most Obj-C books suck though. Don't believe that they'll have you coding iPhone apps in a week. Even as an experienced programmer it took me longer than that to get familiar with Obj-C and learning Cocoa and Touch is more involved than they tell you. XCode is okay but stay away from their crappy Interface Builder as it's a complete waste of time.
All because printer manufacturers are to stubborn and stupid to implement a standard print interface. Why doesn't Google just buy them out and make printers that don't suck.
Somewhat funny.. the biggest cost to our company is that we exceed our DNS query limit frequently on one of our domains (I dunno why it gets picked.) and it's always people hitting it from China or someplace unlikely like that. Our web servers don't get that many visitors from China so I have to suspect it's spam. I need to fight with Ultra DNS over just blocking those hits instead of charging me for them. We should all just cut China off the net IMO until they fix their issues.
Slashdot Mirror
So when can I kill Flash off all my computers completely? I hate that bastard and am glad to see it being given the shaft.
The amazing thing is the number of people willing to sell for less than a product costs. And not the obvious situation of retailers who sell enough to get a discounted purchase price. No wonder you can get such good deals online.
So far they've just taken my money and haven't actually shipped anything. Doesn't count as a sell yet. Possibly they'll send me a seemingly empty box with a letter explaining they've made my iPad invisible for my own protection.
Sorry, they repealed that.
Obviously you aren't in retail/e-commerce. This is unfortunately pretty common behavior from manufacturers. They just don't really want to sell their product. One of the manufacturers I deal with went bankrupt while sending me cease and desist letters for selling to many of their products. Doh.
Trust me, there is no security concept. That being why it was so easily bypassed. And the company across the street leaves their network completely exposed so you can even connect to them and then bounce over. Gotta enjoy people that don't bother turning security features on or leave default settings.
One of the funniest things I ever saw was two very expensive convertibles do a head on crash into each other along Miami's South Beach as both drivers (male) did head swivels to check out the hot girl walking by in almost nothing.
I just got into our network gear and routed an external IP to an internal system of my choice with my own VPN software installed. Who the heck uses the network access their boss decides they need? Are we geeks or not!?
Keep them each locked in a closet in the basement. They can't come out to pee or eat until they've finished their monthly quota. Not only will you get more productive coders but they'll lose weight lowering the cost of medical insurance for the bastards! Just be sure to block their network access to all porn and gaming.
I'm sure other brands exist that are equally good but I haven't found them and I've had a lot of monitors pass through my office. Apple's new LED back lit monitors look even better I think but as mine is still working I haven't had an excuse to buy one.
I'd be willing to fund their fight if they promise to wipe each other out quickly.
Of course I generally support letting people reach the self destruct point as quickly as possible. For example I think we should give drugs away for free as the solution the the war on drugs. Get the people who will destroy themselves to get on with it so the rest of us can stop spending money on them. Maybe we could even run an ad campaign - "Please use drugs, we don't like you."
Just disable swap. I always do. It just slows your computer down. Who really needs it these days anyway? You can buy a normal laptop with 8GB RAM these days which is plenty for most people.
That's a good idea. I wonder if anyone sells a SSD designed to fit that form factor or an adapter.
Not much good for servers. Although I opt for just putting craploads of RAM into the system for the most part. Unfortunately HDDboost isn't appropriate for servers as it doesn't cache the most read data but just the start of the disk and requires a reboot to refresh it's data. Supposedly they are working on a server friendly version.
I have a custom FS that caches better to RAM for my use - especially writes. I'd rather see a hardware-based battery-backed RAM hdd cache though. Would be sweet if you could plug in massive amounts of RAM as a cache to these multi-terabyte drives. Caching writes safely would be extremely awesome for databases.
I have 128GB Consair Nova SSDs in my laptops right now. Would like bigger but 128GB covers what I need available all the time. The rest is all on my NAS.
They should create a Roku channel. I'd pay for a membership.
If we could only give them more effective weapons maybe we could bring this issue to an end.
A 27" screen kicks the butt of multiple monitors. No annoying seams. Of course I do both. Just wish I could afford some nice 30" cinema monitors but sadly am stuck with smaller 22" displays as sidekicks.
Seriously my iMac screen makes all the other monitors on my desk look like crap even if they look fine by themselves. It's especially noticeable when dragging a window from one to the other. Bigger and higher res is always appreciated but the biggest thing I notice is how bad the brightness and contrast of other monitors is even with the settings maxed out and the color profile customized.
Actually I've spent years tinkering with alternate user interfaces designed to be easy and efficient. It's mostly the UI that needs addressed as an OS such as Linux is overall fine otherwise. (Other than OS's need to tell hardware companies to f off and force them to design to common interfaces with open drivers.)
The first thing wrong with your average GUI OS environment is that it's based on the desktop and windowing metaphors. These never worked well but they were adopted because they had gee whiz factor way back when and gave people some basis to understand computers in a time when people hadn't grown up breast fed by them. They also were created when people had a handful of programs and maybe a few dozen files. In an average week I probably use hundreds of programs spread across many machines and networks. Likewise I have millions of files spread across the same. The average user doesn't have THAT many but they do have a lot more than their metaphor was designed to represent.
I understand that OS dev's haven't tried to significantly improve the user-experience in years and like any geeks (being one myself) they'd rather fiddle with the interesting code bits than actually do usability studies and such. Balance it all you want but if it sucks for the user then it sucks. Fail to understand that and you shouldn't be writing software.
A combination of task-based and content-based design seem to be a good start. Not hiding everything behind a 'Start' menu and endless folders is a good idea too. Minimizing chrome and multiple windows helps a lot. I tend to favor a full-screen only approach to applications with a dashboard-like approach to certain apps that make sense to float such as calculators and note pads. I also favor apps that are small and to the point over huge monolithic messes that most people never fully understand or use. Components that can be plugged together by the end-user are my favorite and I've spent some time experimenting with these. For example instead of having an app that includes a gazillion photo effect filters you can have a special kind of applet that takes an image as input that when dropped on an image, or vice versa when the image is dropepd on the filter, would apply that effect to the image and save a new version of that image with the effect applied. Minimal levels of menus to dig through and dialog boxes. I favor a flat, tagged, versioning file-system where there is no file heirachy or visible difference between local and remote files and the file view is filtered by what kind of file is being looked for and specific keywords that have been attached. Accidentally over-writing or deleting a file should be as close to impossible as can be done. Or for another example, instead of a font selection dialog a standard file balloon (equiv to a file folder) should pop up showing available fonts and allow you to simply drag it to the text you want to apply it to. All these behaviors should not change based on what application you're running or what content type you're working with.
Your problem is you insist on seeing it as a phone or a netbook. It's neither. It's exactly what the majority of people need from a computer. The iPhone is great but it's not a good general purpose computer due mostly to it's screen size. It's small size is both it's best and worst feature depending on your need. Sure my 27" iMac is awesome but most of the time my computing needs don't have me sitting in front of a desk and being strapped to the desk is frustrating or not possible. The laptop is a little better but still not really a device that is always there. The iPhone/iTouch is always there but as I said it's size is limiting for some common uses. The netbook is almost always there but because of it's clamshell design and keyboard/touchpad requirement it is clumsy and it's reliance on outdated desktop/windows metaphors in the OS isn't well suited to seamless computing. Also netbooks have been getting bigger and are now practically laptops again which I think defeats some of the benefit. Makers have gotten confused between cheap laptop and netbook. The iPad slides nicely into that always there spot without the problems of a netbook.
The iPad really has only two problems. First is the price. I spent almost $900 on mine before the accessories. That's a bit high for their two biggest potential markets: moms on the run and kids. Even the cheaper models aren't that cheap. Sure a netbook of comparable specs would be just as expensive (try getting a cheap one with a 64GB SSD) but consumers see price tags first and not the fact that it's going to suck and break much faster than an iPad. Second, Apple really needs to make it easier/cheaper to sell 'Made for iPhone/iTouch/iPad.' hardware. Dock connected, bluetooth, and even local network devices that play well need to be far more abundant if they really want to challenge the netbook market let alone the PC market. It's fine that it doesn't have SD and USB - those suck anyway - but it should take full advantage of what it does offer. There are so many possibilities that Apple is just ignoring.
I think a couple OS upgrades could fix a lot. The hardware is pretty sweet (minus the lack of cameras). iPhone OS really isn't bad for what it was originally made for but it feels a little tight with our growing expectations from mobile devices. I'm disappointed in their upcoming version 4. Multitasking sounds well implemented but there are really no other interesting upgrades. I really was expecting a tags based filesystem that would transparently expose internal, local network, and Internet shared files, wireless printing/faxing, and some sort of access controls so you could really use the iPad in situations such as a classroom. I think these are critical features to the success of the iPad beyond those of us waiting to hack into them. Instead their giving us a stupid ad platform and OpenFeint competitor? Way to innovate guys.
I hope they relax the restrictions on being approved to develop dock-compatible devices (they relaxed it in programming with OS 3 afterall) and push to offer some cool bluetooth devices.
I still think iPhone OS and the iPhone/iTouch/iPad are awesome but I think Apple needs to step it up just a bit. Other companies are waiting to eat their lunch if they don't. It'd be pretty easy for Android to be adapted to not have a crappy user-interface/user-experience and someone is going to release a non-crap hardware platform for it eventually.
Their sign-on sucks so they can't have much to hide. It's one of the worst I've seen and I'm constantly having users run into issues with it such as accidentally creating a new account for a sub-account login. It has a lot of issues related to Google Apps too. It's clearly not engineered to handle the many different systems that they now use.
I don't find Obj-C any worse than Java really. I do wish it had a more extensive lib of useful classes but that isn't really a failure of the language. The biggest annoyance to me has been the mojo around doing things the Obj-C way. Rather than giving good feedback on your code functionality Obj-C fans just go on about how your coding style isn't the one true way. Of course Java fans can't explain why Java has problems with basic OOP functionality other than saying that you can't do that in Java. Fun.
I think most Obj-C books suck though. Don't believe that they'll have you coding iPhone apps in a week. Even as an experienced programmer it took me longer than that to get familiar with Obj-C and learning Cocoa and Touch is more involved than they tell you. XCode is okay but stay away from their crappy Interface Builder as it's a complete waste of time.
All because printer manufacturers are to stubborn and stupid to implement a standard print interface. Why doesn't Google just buy them out and make printers that don't suck.
Somewhat funny.. the biggest cost to our company is that we exceed our DNS query limit frequently on one of our domains (I dunno why it gets picked.) and it's always people hitting it from China or someplace unlikely like that. Our web servers don't get that many visitors from China so I have to suspect it's spam. I need to fight with Ultra DNS over just blocking those hits instead of charging me for them. We should all just cut China off the net IMO until they fix their issues.