You know what though? Slashdot has gotten really good about dupes. Remember how it was kind of a running joke, and then for a while a couple years ago it got really bad? Now, this one is, I think, the second or third dupe I've seen in a year. Congrats to the staff for fixing at least one part of our beloved Slashdot.
Now if you'l excuse me, I'm off to copy some +5 comments from yesterday's thread.:-)
The iPad is just a big iPod touch--in the same way that a swimming pool is "just a big bathtub." People who say that tend to not realize that size alone makes totally different things possible. (Cue corny jokes in 3... 2... )
Their "nonsense" gets defended because a lot of what the iPad DOES do, it does BETTER. I've had tablet PCs from work since early 2003 (shortly after they were introduced) and for many things, the iPad is NIGHT-AND-DAY better than the tablet, due to a UI that was DESIGNED to be used by hand, not one that was designed for mice and shipped with a stylus. (Sorry for the caps, too lazy to HTML-ize right now.) And it weighs MUCH less than the tablet, and runs longer, and turns on faster.
"Apple, which is generally believed to have the highest margins and profits in the market today, will roll out a dual-core iPhone when they're damn good and ready."
It is my firm belief that Android will soon capture the bulk of the market--they're already closing in fast, largely because they're available on more carriers (which is good) but also because they're cheaper. You won't be seeing "buy one, get one" from Apple anytime soon. Just as with desktops, the low end of the market is NOT where Apple wants to be. Apple does what they want, when they want, and they make tons on money doing it, so why would they change?
> Casual Encounters will become the new adult section but it will > spill over into the normal sections. Strictly platonic will probably > become the "normal" area.
Then platonic will move into services, services will move into electronics, electronics will move into computers, WHERE WILL IT END?!?!? IT'S NOT TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN!
Yeah, and after they get video playback working, all they have to do is get millions of games that require fast and accurate keyboarding and/our mousing to work on a device with an inaccurate, one-button mouse, no hover state, and a keyboard that covers part of the screen (or maybe, physical keys the size of chicklets, and typically no arrow keys, modifier keys.) Plus, you get to see all those annoying, bandwidth-intensive, CPU-chewing ads we all love so much! SIGN ME UP!
OK, that was a bit over the top, but in all seriousness, I don't miss Flash a bit. If I *ever* see Flash on a mobile device, it damn well better come with a Flash-blocker too.
If you take a cup of water and a cup of alcohol and mix them, two neat things will happen: 1) you'll wind up with less than two cups of solution because of the different sizes of the molecules (or so it was explained to me) like how you can mix a gallon of marbles and a gallon of sand and wind up with less than 2 gallons of sandy marbles, and 2) if you hold a cotton* handkerchief with a pair of metal tongs, dip it in the solution, and light it, the alcohol will burn but the water will keep the cloth from getting hot enough to burn.
Also: the key word in the phrase "put some on your hand and light it" is "some". Fire WILL burn you (yes, really) and it'll burn the hair off your hands, too. If you really want to do this put just a bit of the stuff (like a shallow puddle the size of a nickel) into your palm and light it. Be prepared to shake your hand and blow, and possibly have some water nearby to dunk your hand into. Remember kids, start small and work your way up.
Even so, if it's empty today, imagine how full it will be in a year, even if people only every use it when they're buying stuff. The first match I found on a basic search ( http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/06/itunes-sells-6-billion-songs-and-other-fun-stats-from-the-philnote/ ) says Apple sold a billion songs from June 2008 to January 2009. A billion songs in six months, a year and a half ago. They're probably doing a billion songs every 4 months, maybe a billion per quarter by now.* Also I've heard reports, and wouldn't be surprised, if it can build a list of what you have--same way it can download album art, even for stuff your ripped or downloaded.
I'm at the age where I, too, "don't have time" for all these things kids are doing, but somehow Facebook and the rest get along fine without people like us.
* I just remembered Apple's PR library. http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25itunes.html So they sold 4 billion songs in the 13 months from 1/2009 to 2/1010. Assuming they're growing, even at a small rate, they're above a billion songs per quarter by now. Let's pretend a quarter is 100 days--that's TEN MILLION SONGS PER DAY. It won't take very long for Ping to fill with data. Even if one user in a thousand uses it, that's 10,000 entries per day.
That said, I agree with your conclusion. This won't set the social world on fire--twitter and FB have nothing to worry about here--but it'll be gangbusters for marketing.
I feel the exact same way, I've had that thought myself, and a couple years ago I took the first steps to creating exactly what you're describing. I wanted to create a Wikipedia-style thing where people could contribute whatever they knew or found out about a particular book -- for example, pictures of Italian locales mentioned in John Grisham's The Broker, or taking a freely-remixable book like Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and copying it directly into the Wiki, then adding pics of devices described, scenery, etc. -- but I haven't had the time to get it into a state where I felt like publicizing it. So it's just sitting there almost empty, but seeing at least one like mind has inspired me to go ahead and put it out there. If anyone wants to register* and contribute, have at it. Even if you want to pimp your own book, whatever. Go nuts.
Of course, a big problem is that too many people seem to think everything they find on the internet should be free. This stuff takes a lot of time and effort, not to mention the expense of having this stuff available online somewhere.
I have a friend who runs a server. I help him out every so often. In return, he gives me free hosting. That site is free and will remain free until bandwidth becomes too expensive (not bloody likely) at which point I'll chip in some money, ask for donations, or run some google ads.
Please, dear God, award them this patent, then force MS, Apple, and Adobe to use it. As I walk around my office late at night, I see many Macs showing the message "Shutdown (or logout) cancelled because XXX failed to quit" where XXX is either Excel or Illustrator, telling me "There is a large amount of data on the clipboard. Do you wish to leave this on the clipboard for other programs to use or dump it to free up memory?" (And Excel, in particular, is still living in the 640k days, because you can copy a few dozen cells of simple data and see this message.) Not to mention: come on, it's memory. If it's there, use it. If it gets full, swap. LET THE FUCKING O.S. DEAL WITH IT. Or if not, then please, you guys, partner together to find a way to get the OS to tell the apps, "Hey, I'm shutting down, skip the namby-pamby messages and quit unless the user has an unsaved document open." Or, at the very least, be smart about it. If EVERY OTHER APP has shut down, and the user hasn't touched the computer in, say, five minutes, JUST SHUT FUCKING DOWN.
Has wireless.* The Nomad is dead so space comparisons are moot. So, um, great!, I guess.:-)
* Sadly, still no wireless syncing of any kind. Dear Steve, I just want to sync a couple new songs and contacts every once in a while. Pleeeeeeease?!?!?
You can always spot the Apple-haters in the crowd because they always ignore #3: Apple really does make great stuff that a lot of people like. They sweat the details, they care about design, and if it takes 2 or 5 or 10 years to make a fantastic product, they'll put in the effort and not release some piece of crap early just to have something in the market.
The original iPod (2001) had a unique scroll wheel that let you move quickly through thousands of entries, compared to the buttons (1 page at a time) or side-mounted scroll wheels (a few entries at a time) used on other products.
The modern Tablet PC market was born in 2001 and limped along for year, then the iPad came out and shook things up and now, over six months later, there are still no really substantial competitors.
APPLE COULD NOT SURVIVE THIS LONG on marketing alone if their products were absolute crap. The fact that they make really great stuff is why users (and developers) are willing to put up with their other shortcomings. (And they do, indeed, have some shortcomings--you'll get no argument from me there.) THAT is why they can get away with this behavior. It's not just marketing and fanboys.
Well, most of the thousands of employees at Apple who were there during 1997-2000 were also there 1994-1997. To what do you attribute Apple's astounding turnaround?
"Remaining software is much more pleasant to use than the rest ever was; some feel this is a worthwhile tradeoff."
Sure, the ipad might put a dent--maybe even a sizable one--into the netbook market, but anyone who thinks the market is going to completely dry up, blow away, and take all the software with it, is RETARDED. This is chicken little BS to garner pageviews.
Besides, at the iPad intro, Steve Jobs himself said the iPad would be between a computer and a phone while standing in front of a 20-foot-tall screen with a goddamn DIAGRAM of that concept. He never once said "this is the only computing device you'll ever need."
I admit I misunderstood, but I don't think this is surprising at all. If you've ever taken a psychology or sociology class, you'd know that there have been countless studies showing that, for example, attractive people appear to be more honest. Being objective is a lot harder than you might think.
He totally forgot the Pandigital Novel -- a 7" Android tablet that is pitched mainly as an e-reader but which has many other capabilities. Sure, it's gotten lukewarm reviews, but at least it exists, unlike most of what's on his list.
On a related note, does anyone know if the new WebKit browser on the now-$139 Kindle is any good?
No fucking shit. I've said for ages (on a related topic) that I'd rather have my TiVo hooked to my old 9" black-and-white TV than suffer through regular TiVo-less TV--on the networks' schedule, with all ads, and no abolity to pause or rewind--on the best A/V setup in the world. I might be an outsider in the Slashdot world but, as much as I love neat stuff, I don't really care about HD at all, and surround-sound, only a little. It's nice, and I really enjoy it for nature shows, but it is absolutely not essential. I have worked in movie theaters, a car audio shop, and with a home theater installer, and I can design, build, and enjoy a good home theater setup, but it's just not that important to me. And not once in my life have I ever suffered through a show and thought "I'd enjoy this a lot more if it were highly defined." My main setup at home is an SD projector and an old L/R/surround system.
Long story short: good presentation will make a good show better, but it absolutely can not make a bad show good.
From my experience, any speedup gained from using 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 would only be detectable by measurement. I've been using a long, custom/etc/hosts file for many years now. I had one on my 800 MHz, single-core, G3 iBook and there was absolutely no noticeable slowdown--and I even had Apache up and running, serving up a custom 404 so I could see a note whenever it blocked an ad (in an IFRAME; images just came in as broken) and it even logged all 404s because I never bothered to turn logging off. It ran just fine, and today's hardware is one or two orders of magnitude faster. However, the speedUP due to blocked ads was QUITE noticeable.
Here's how to test: go to 127.0.0.1/blop. Maybe relead a few times. Watch how fast the page loads. Does it take a while? No? Then don't worry about it. I'm on an iMac right now with web serving off and when I type in that address and press 'enter', Safari finishes drawing its error message before my finger is off the key.
By the way, AdBlock and proxy servers are also cool but the thing I like about/etc/hosts is that it works with every browser, for every user, and needs no configuration. Then I also install a flash blocker on a per-browser basis and the Web is a happy place.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what though? Slashdot has gotten really good about dupes. Remember how it was kind of a running joke, and then for a while a couple years ago it got really bad? Now, this one is, I think, the second or third dupe I've seen in a year. Congrats to the staff for fixing at least one part of our beloved Slashdot.
Now if you'l excuse me, I'm off to copy some +5 comments from yesterday's thread. :-)
The iPad is just a big iPod touch--in the same way that a swimming pool is "just a big bathtub." People who say that tend to not realize that size alone makes totally different things possible. (Cue corny jokes in 3... 2... )
Their "nonsense" gets defended because a lot of what the iPad DOES do, it does BETTER. I've had tablet PCs from work since early 2003 (shortly after they were introduced) and for many things, the iPad is NIGHT-AND-DAY better than the tablet, due to a UI that was DESIGNED to be used by hand, not one that was designed for mice and shipped with a stylus. (Sorry for the caps, too lazy to HTML-ize right now.) And it weighs MUCH less than the tablet, and runs longer, and turns on faster.
We're waiting for the outcome of desktops vs. laptops before we can tackle that.
"Apple, which is generally believed to have the highest margins and profits in the market today, will roll out a dual-core iPhone when they're damn good and ready."
It is my firm belief that Android will soon capture the bulk of the market--they're already closing in fast, largely because they're available on more carriers (which is good) but also because they're cheaper. You won't be seeing "buy one, get one" from Apple anytime soon. Just as with desktops, the low end of the market is NOT where Apple wants to be. Apple does what they want, when they want, and they make tons on money doing it, so why would they change?
> Casual Encounters will become the new adult section but it will
> spill over into the normal sections. Strictly platonic will probably
> become the "normal" area.
Then platonic will move into services, services will move into electronics, electronics will move into computers, WHERE WILL IT END?!?!? IT'S NOT TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN!
Yeah, and after they get video playback working, all they have to do is get millions of games that require fast and accurate keyboarding and/our mousing to work on a device with an inaccurate, one-button mouse, no hover state, and a keyboard that covers part of the screen (or maybe, physical keys the size of chicklets, and typically no arrow keys, modifier keys.) Plus, you get to see all those annoying, bandwidth-intensive, CPU-chewing ads we all love so much! SIGN ME UP!
OK, that was a bit over the top, but in all seriousness, I don't miss Flash a bit. If I *ever* see Flash on a mobile device, it damn well better come with a Flash-blocker too.
If you take a cup of water and a cup of alcohol and mix them, two neat things will happen: 1) you'll wind up with less than two cups of solution because of the different sizes of the molecules (or so it was explained to me) like how you can mix a gallon of marbles and a gallon of sand and wind up with less than 2 gallons of sandy marbles, and 2) if you hold a cotton* handkerchief with a pair of metal tongs, dip it in the solution, and light it, the alcohol will burn but the water will keep the cloth from getting hot enough to burn.
Also: the key word in the phrase "put some on your hand and light it" is "some". Fire WILL burn you (yes, really) and it'll burn the hair off your hands, too. If you really want to do this put just a bit of the stuff (like a shallow puddle the size of a nickel) into your palm and light it. Be prepared to shake your hand and blow, and possibly have some water nearby to dunk your hand into. Remember kids, start small and work your way up.
* not polyester, not silk
Even so, if it's empty today, imagine how full it will be in a year, even if people only every use it when they're buying stuff. The first match I found on a basic search ( http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/06/itunes-sells-6-billion-songs-and-other-fun-stats-from-the-philnote/ ) says Apple sold a billion songs from June 2008 to January 2009. A billion songs in six months, a year and a half ago. They're probably doing a billion songs every 4 months, maybe a billion per quarter by now.* Also I've heard reports, and wouldn't be surprised, if it can build a list of what you have--same way it can download album art, even for stuff your ripped or downloaded.
I'm at the age where I, too, "don't have time" for all these things kids are doing, but somehow Facebook and the rest get along fine without people like us.
* I just remembered Apple's PR library. http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25itunes.html So they sold 4 billion songs in the 13 months from 1/2009 to 2/1010. Assuming they're growing, even at a small rate, they're above a billion songs per quarter by now. Let's pretend a quarter is 100 days--that's TEN MILLION SONGS PER DAY. It won't take very long for Ping to fill with data. Even if one user in a thousand uses it, that's 10,000 entries per day.
That said, I agree with your conclusion. This won't set the social world on fire--twitter and FB have nothing to worry about here--but it'll be gangbusters for marketing.
I feel the exact same way, I've had that thought myself, and a couple years ago I took the first steps to creating exactly what you're describing. I wanted to create a Wikipedia-style thing where people could contribute whatever they knew or found out about a particular book -- for example, pictures of Italian locales mentioned in John Grisham's The Broker, or taking a freely-remixable book like Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and copying it directly into the Wiki, then adding pics of devices described, scenery, etc. -- but I haven't had the time to get it into a state where I felt like publicizing it. So it's just sitting there almost empty, but seeing at least one like mind has inspired me to go ahead and put it out there. If anyone wants to register* and contribute, have at it. Even if you want to pimp your own book, whatever. Go nuts.
Of course, a big problem is that too many people seem to think everything they find on the internet should be free. This stuff takes a lot of time and effort, not to mention the expense of having this stuff available online somewhere.
I have a friend who runs a server. I help him out every so often. In return, he gives me free hosting. That site is free and will remain free until bandwidth becomes too expensive (not bloody likely) at which point I'll chip in some money, ask for donations, or run some google ads.
* registration required to keep spam down.
XZIBIT?!?!
You dawg, I heard you like wikileaks, so we...
Please, dear God, award them this patent, then force MS, Apple, and Adobe to use it. As I walk around my office late at night, I see many Macs showing the message "Shutdown (or logout) cancelled because XXX failed to quit" where XXX is either Excel or Illustrator, telling me "There is a large amount of data on the clipboard. Do you wish to leave this on the clipboard for other programs to use or dump it to free up memory?" (And Excel, in particular, is still living in the 640k days, because you can copy a few dozen cells of simple data and see this message.) Not to mention: come on, it's memory. If it's there, use it. If it gets full, swap. LET THE FUCKING O.S. DEAL WITH IT. Or if not, then please, you guys, partner together to find a way to get the OS to tell the apps, "Hey, I'm shutting down, skip the namby-pamby messages and quit unless the user has an unsaved document open." Or, at the very least, be smart about it. If EVERY OTHER APP has shut down, and the user hasn't touched the computer in, say, five minutes, JUST SHUT FUCKING DOWN.
... is a decade-plus-old Palm--why, exactly?
Has wireless.* The Nomad is dead so space comparisons are moot. So, um, great!, I guess. :-)
* Sadly, still no wireless syncing of any kind. Dear Steve, I just want to sync a couple new songs and contacts every once in a while. Pleeeeeeease?!?!?
If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
—Seymour Cray
You can always spot the Apple-haters in the crowd because they always ignore #3: Apple really does make great stuff that a lot of people like. They sweat the details, they care about design, and if it takes 2 or 5 or 10 years to make a fantastic product, they'll put in the effort and not release some piece of crap early just to have something in the market.
APPLE COULD NOT SURVIVE THIS LONG on marketing alone if their products were absolute crap. The fact that they make really great stuff is why users (and developers) are willing to put up with their other shortcomings. (And they do, indeed, have some shortcomings--you'll get no argument from me there.) THAT is why they can get away with this behavior. It's not just marketing and fanboys.
Well, most of the thousands of employees at Apple who were there during 1997-2000 were also there 1994-1997. To what do you attribute Apple's astounding turnaround?
> Insightful my arse. Linux is much bigger than Mac in the enterprise.
Informative my ass.
"Remaining software is much more pleasant to use than the rest ever was; some feel this is a worthwhile tradeoff."
Sure, the ipad might put a dent--maybe even a sizable one--into the netbook market, but anyone who thinks the market is going to completely dry up, blow away, and take all the software with it, is RETARDED. This is chicken little BS to garner pageviews.
Besides, at the iPad intro, Steve Jobs himself said the iPad would be between a computer and a phone while standing in front of a 20-foot-tall screen with a goddamn DIAGRAM of that concept. He never once said "this is the only computing device you'll ever need."
Of course the moon is shrinking like an old apple. Someone left it out sitting in the sun.
I admit I misunderstood, but I don't think this is surprising at all. If you've ever taken a psychology or sociology class, you'd know that there have been countless studies showing that, for example, attractive people appear to be more honest. Being objective is a lot harder than you might think.
He totally forgot the Pandigital Novel -- a 7" Android tablet that is pitched mainly as an e-reader but which has many other capabilities. Sure, it's gotten lukewarm reviews, but at least it exists, unlike most of what's on his list.
On a related note, does anyone know if the new WebKit browser on the now-$139 Kindle is any good?
No fucking shit. I've said for ages (on a related topic) that I'd rather have my TiVo hooked to my old 9" black-and-white TV than suffer through regular TiVo-less TV--on the networks' schedule, with all ads, and no abolity to pause or rewind--on the best A/V setup in the world. I might be an outsider in the Slashdot world but, as much as I love neat stuff, I don't really care about HD at all, and surround-sound, only a little. It's nice, and I really enjoy it for nature shows, but it is absolutely not essential. I have worked in movie theaters, a car audio shop, and with a home theater installer, and I can design, build, and enjoy a good home theater setup, but it's just not that important to me. And not once in my life have I ever suffered through a show and thought "I'd enjoy this a lot more if it were highly defined." My main setup at home is an SD projector and an old L/R/surround system.
Long story short: good presentation will make a good show better, but it absolutely can not make a bad show good.
From TFS: "One and a half million Facebook users die each year."
Yeah, I'm sure their valuation is much higher when they can claim 500,000,000 users instead of the 498,500,000 that they actually have. Bastards!
Besides, Wikipedia, and just about anyone else who matters, always says things like "Facebook is a social networking website... with more than 500 million active users [emphasis mine] in July 2010." See also http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics and http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=409753352130
From my experience, any speedup gained from using 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 would only be detectable by measurement. I've been using a long, custom /etc/hosts file for many years now. I had one on my 800 MHz, single-core, G3 iBook and there was absolutely no noticeable slowdown--and I even had Apache up and running, serving up a custom 404 so I could see a note whenever it blocked an ad (in an IFRAME; images just came in as broken) and it even logged all 404s because I never bothered to turn logging off. It ran just fine, and today's hardware is one or two orders of magnitude faster. However, the speedUP due to blocked ads was QUITE noticeable.
Here's how to test: go to 127.0.0.1/blop. Maybe relead a few times. Watch how fast the page loads. Does it take a while? No? Then don't worry about it. I'm on an iMac right now with web serving off and when I type in that address and press 'enter', Safari finishes drawing its error message before my finger is off the key.
By the way, AdBlock and proxy servers are also cool but the thing I like about /etc/hosts is that it works with every browser, for every user, and needs no configuration. Then I also install a flash blocker on a per-browser basis and the Web is a happy place.