... it's more to do with the thinking about phrasing, verifying what was entered and visualising the recipient's reaction to the message than the data entry.
While the user is focused on that, they are not scanning their surroundings properly and actually analyzing what their eyes are seeing.
I see this sort of disconnect between vision and processing ALL THE TIME on my motorcycle at intersections. People looking at you, and processing you and registering you as "seen" are two ENTIRELY DIFFERENT things. They aren't looking for a motorcycle, they're looking for a car. Hence, even though they stare straight at me, they pull out anyhow.
The text vs voice input is similar. Just because they are not looking at the screen and are physically looking outside, it doesn't mean their brain is spending cycles on processing it. Another motorcycle related analogy is this: you have $1 worth of brain-cpu time. You can spend it on different things, but you can only ever spend the $1. If you spend 70c on looking forwards, 10c on steering, 10c on route-planning and 10c on evaluating traffic, you have zero cents left. If you then spend 10-20c worth of your brain on sending a message, whether it is via text or siri or whatever, you need to re-allocate some previously used processing time on it. That will come out of your $1 worth. It can't be had for free. Something else will suffer.
This is why when learning a track you're told not to try and ride it at 100%, and even top level riders can not maintain 100% pace for long. Because when you are spending $1 on trying to control the bike, you have nothing left over to analyze the circuit, plan your race strategy, etc.
Political points with who? All they'll achieve by doing that is increase their manufacturing costs out of sight, and the shareholders will crucify them for it.
The being a prick aspect was a means to an end. The end was making things that didn't suck (for steve's personal definition of not sucking). Sometimes you need someone to tell it like it is ("your product is shit, try again") rather than maintain political correctness.
What about them? The iPad's success has proven that the feature set selected by Apple to include was market-relevant, and the number of ground-breaking applications for it have proven the feature set to be technically relevant also.
They're a publicly traded company, not a charity. Imagine what the US government could have done for the world with the trillions spent on Iraq and Afghanistan?
Along that line of thinking, maybe apple has been holding out on new products, waiting for the stock price to crash before buying it back cheap and launching the new shiny?
Before iPad, no tablet shipped with full colour, 3d capable GPU, motion sensor, GPS, compass and 10 hour battery life in a single device, that weighed less than anything of comparable size. To say it was merely branding successful is kinda... well.. flat out lying?
Causes: lack of consideration for design by the client (resulting in heaps of "minor" changes - death by a thousand cuts), lack or thorough analysis of the problem (no one wants to pay for proper analysis before starting work or even doing the project budget), lack of allowance for scheduling problems, etc.
Solution? Take your initial time estimate and multiply by 2-3x, to allow for the unforeseen.
Is a rule of thumb I have used for years and has served me well. And when you do come in UNDER budget and ahead of time (i.e., only taking 1.5-2x your initial time estimate), you look a lot better than coming in at 2x the cost and taking 1.5-2x as long as promised.
In other words: under-promise and over-deliver. Too many development/IT/sales types over-promise and under-deliver (possibly to win a sale), but it just pisses people off when the project the business is depending/wait on is late, and possibly drives repeat business away.
I wasn't necessarily referring specifically to the iPad in particular as a replacement for the PC with the NAS comment. But a device of it's nature. Whether it is an iPad, android, or other mobile device. The future is to carry something extremely light with long life and minimal storage and stream the data you need over the network (be it your own network or someone elses subscription based service) from a location which is fault tolerant, backed up, secure, etc. If you lose the end device, expire the passwords, all good. The actual "end game" end-user device probably doesn't exist just yet. But I know one thing - it won't look anything like a traditional PC, and will be more similar to a tablet.
To be fair, Sun was a corporation run by engineers. They were more focused on making "cool shit" than making money, which is unfortunately why they went broke.
This should be a non-issue. Any niche, mission critical systems should be isolated and protected from any threats like viruses, worms, etc. already, and NOT placed on the network with free access to the internet, automatically installing Windows updates, etc.
If they are NOT, then you already have far bigger problems than Windows XP going end of life.
What I would do? Isolate host from the network. Take a ghost image. Back up data regularly. If it's not connected to the network, it doesn't really matter a shit whether it is running Windows XP, Windows 98, or whatever.
If they went "all in" it wouldn't be such a problem. Windows 8 is not "all in" and still saddled with backwards compatibility, the classic UI which is still frequently needed, etc.
3x 1tb hard drives that have no level of hardware fault tolerance, are prone to theft, need to be lugged around, plugged/unplugged, etc. I'm no fan of the cloud as a be all and end all, but it doesn't mean you need to carry the storage in your device. Even if its not icloud, storing your work on a home NAS with fault tolerant storage is a lot more sensible than trusting it to a single drive in your portable device.
Johnny is in a programming class in high school, and he brings homework home, and it happens to be in a language other than Lua [twolivesleft.com] or Python [pythonforios.com]. Can he complete his assignment on an iPad?
Sure, he logs into a web service or SSH server and runs it from there. No need to carry all the CPU and battery drain with you. His assignment is written and submitted on-line and he can even chat with his professor if required.
In all honesty, the only BIG reason I am not tablet only already is because I'm a nerd, and want to do development. If push came to shove, I could get by with an iPad, keyboard and display as an end-use device for most of what I do at home - assuming I was to keep my existing PC based NAS, etc. It runs SSH, it has great battery life, can run X11, RDP or PCoIP, etc.
Cheap Windows tablets do this also. I recently evaluated an Atom based HP Envy tablet, which would have been fine if not for the SD storage. It was so slow as to be virtually unusable.
Problem is, in typical PC-hardware style, they'll do some brain-damaged shit like the last Atom based machine I used did (an HP Envy tablet of some spec I forget exact model) - pair it with SD card based storage for full fat windows 8, rather than SSD. It was so slow as to be almost unusable.
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While the user is focused on that, they are not scanning their surroundings properly and actually analyzing what their eyes are seeing.
I see this sort of disconnect between vision and processing ALL THE TIME on my motorcycle at intersections. People looking at you, and processing you and registering you as "seen" are two ENTIRELY DIFFERENT things. They aren't looking for a motorcycle, they're looking for a car. Hence, even though they stare straight at me, they pull out anyhow.
The text vs voice input is similar. Just because they are not looking at the screen and are physically looking outside, it doesn't mean their brain is spending cycles on processing it. Another motorcycle related analogy is this: you have $1 worth of brain-cpu time. You can spend it on different things, but you can only ever spend the $1. If you spend 70c on looking forwards, 10c on steering, 10c on route-planning and 10c on evaluating traffic, you have zero cents left. If you then spend 10-20c worth of your brain on sending a message, whether it is via text or siri or whatever, you need to re-allocate some previously used processing time on it. That will come out of your $1 worth. It can't be had for free. Something else will suffer.
This is why when learning a track you're told not to try and ride it at 100%, and even top level riders can not maintain 100% pace for long. Because when you are spending $1 on trying to control the bike, you have nothing left over to analyze the circuit, plan your race strategy, etc.
Political points with who? All they'll achieve by doing that is increase their manufacturing costs out of sight, and the shareholders will crucify them for it.
If they didn't know what to do with the money, they'd leave it in the bank.
The being a prick aspect was a means to an end. The end was making things that didn't suck (for steve's personal definition of not sucking). Sometimes you need someone to tell it like it is ("your product is shit, try again") rather than maintain political correctness.
Who do you think built the mass-market platform for Microsoft to release their basic for?
What about them? The iPad's success has proven that the feature set selected by Apple to include was market-relevant, and the number of ground-breaking applications for it have proven the feature set to be technically relevant also.
They're privately owned.
They're a publicly traded company, not a charity. Imagine what the US government could have done for the world with the trillions spent on Iraq and Afghanistan?
100%. For an example of a business run by engineers: See Sun. Oh wait...
Because you make money buying high and selling low, right?
"They must lower device prices"
Why? They became bigger than both Microsoft and Google combined by specifically NOT selling at the low end?
Along that line of thinking, maybe apple has been holding out on new products, waiting for the stock price to crash before buying it back cheap and launching the new shiny?
Before iPad, no tablet shipped with full colour, 3d capable GPU, motion sensor, GPS, compass and 10 hour battery life in a single device, that weighed less than anything of comparable size. To say it was merely branding successful is kinda... well.. flat out lying?
So you're comparing a single vendor (apple) to an entire industry (iPhone + Android - Win Mobile and others are a rounding error).
And they're still just under 40% of the market.
Companies in any other market would kill for a 40% market share, yet it's supposed to be the death knell?
You see if you doubled your initial estimate (rule of thumb) you would have promised 1600 hrs, it came in at 1200 and everyone is happy :)
Causes: lack of consideration for design by the client (resulting in heaps of "minor" changes - death by a thousand cuts), lack or thorough analysis of the problem (no one wants to pay for proper analysis before starting work or even doing the project budget), lack of allowance for scheduling problems, etc.
Solution? Take your initial time estimate and multiply by 2-3x, to allow for the unforeseen.
Is a rule of thumb I have used for years and has served me well. And when you do come in UNDER budget and ahead of time (i.e., only taking 1.5-2x your initial time estimate), you look a lot better than coming in at 2x the cost and taking 1.5-2x as long as promised.
In other words: under-promise and over-deliver. Too many development/IT/sales types over-promise and under-deliver (possibly to win a sale), but it just pisses people off when the project the business is depending/wait on is late, and possibly drives repeat business away.
I wasn't necessarily referring specifically to the iPad in particular as a replacement for the PC with the NAS comment. But a device of it's nature. Whether it is an iPad, android, or other mobile device. The future is to carry something extremely light with long life and minimal storage and stream the data you need over the network (be it your own network or someone elses subscription based service) from a location which is fault tolerant, backed up, secure, etc. If you lose the end device, expire the passwords, all good. The actual "end game" end-user device probably doesn't exist just yet. But I know one thing - it won't look anything like a traditional PC, and will be more similar to a tablet.
To be fair, Sun was a corporation run by engineers. They were more focused on making "cool shit" than making money, which is unfortunately why they went broke.
This should be a non-issue. Any niche, mission critical systems should be isolated and protected from any threats like viruses, worms, etc. already, and NOT placed on the network with free access to the internet, automatically installing Windows updates, etc.
If they are NOT, then you already have far bigger problems than Windows XP going end of life.
What I would do? Isolate host from the network. Take a ghost image. Back up data regularly. If it's not connected to the network, it doesn't really matter a shit whether it is running Windows XP, Windows 98, or whatever.
If they went "all in" it wouldn't be such a problem. Windows 8 is not "all in" and still saddled with backwards compatibility, the classic UI which is still frequently needed, etc.
3x 1tb hard drives that have no level of hardware fault tolerance, are prone to theft, need to be lugged around, plugged/unplugged, etc. I'm no fan of the cloud as a be all and end all, but it doesn't mean you need to carry the storage in your device. Even if its not icloud, storing your work on a home NAS with fault tolerant storage is a lot more sensible than trusting it to a single drive in your portable device.
Sure, he logs into a web service or SSH server and runs it from there. No need to carry all the CPU and battery drain with you. His assignment is written and submitted on-line and he can even chat with his professor if required.
In all honesty, the only BIG reason I am not tablet only already is because I'm a nerd, and want to do development. If push came to shove, I could get by with an iPad, keyboard and display as an end-use device for most of what I do at home - assuming I was to keep my existing PC based NAS, etc. It runs SSH, it has great battery life, can run X11, RDP or PCoIP, etc.
Cheap Windows tablets do this also. I recently evaluated an Atom based HP Envy tablet, which would have been fine if not for the SD storage. It was so slow as to be virtually unusable.
Problem is, in typical PC-hardware style, they'll do some brain-damaged shit like the last Atom based machine I used did (an HP Envy tablet of some spec I forget exact model) - pair it with SD card based storage for full fat windows 8, rather than SSD. It was so slow as to be almost unusable.