I've owned two Nokias with physical keyboards (6800 and 6820) and a BlackBerry (Curve 8330--not the best) and an iPhone, and I prefer the iPhone's virtual keyboard by far. Not so much for speed, though some basic testing by me shows they're all comparable, but for ease. The 6800 is large with plastic between the nicely-rounded keys and it's very easy to hit the right one. The 6820 is a bit smaller but the keys are also nicely rounded and typing on that is pretty easy. Both also have dedicated buttons for numbers and some punctuation--hyphen, comma, period, slash, single quote, and more are all primary buttons. Their layouts also closely mimic a PC keyboard with comma, period, slash, semicolon, quote, and equals in roughly the same spots as on a regular keyboard.
The BlackBerry's keys are smaller and closer together and firmer than either Nokia and I find I've got to press on them with a thumbnail or the bony part of a finger to get them to register and not mash more than one key at a time, and there are no number or punctuation keys AT ALL which makes typing just about anything quite a pain.
The iPhone only shows letters or numbers/punctuation but since it's virtual the secondary and tertiary buttons are big and easy to find, not like the tiny glyphs you get from sticking two images on one physical key. But the thing I like most about virtual keys is that it only takes a very light tough to register a press, and the clickable area is very large, so typing with the biggest, roundest, softest part of your thumb is a cinch. And because of this, it is by far the easiest to use with one hand. (Though the split-keyboard Nokias are pretty much out of the running in this area, but the BB is similar in size and shape.)
But anyway, that's just my experience and preference. All that matters is what works best for you.
"Apparently there are only a couple hundred of these things in existence..."
And now, due to all the stories about them, they have become modern-day artifacts and will probably sell on eBay as collectibles for more than the real thing.
Wow. You are so totally wrong you don't deserve a single "insightful" mod. Since Slashdot still lacks a "-1. factually incorrect" mod option, I feel compelled to reply, lest people stand in awe of your "+5, Insightful" score and think you're actually right.
"There are laws against sending advertisements over the fax and cold-calling cell phones. The logic is that the recipient must pay for the unsolicited advertisement (in fax paper, toner, or cell phone minutes). Internet ads are no different. I pay for bandwidth and connection time, so your ad directly costs me money, and it should be illegal for that reason."
Wrong, wrong, WRONG. The ads you see WHEN YOU VISIT A SITE THAT SOMEONE ELSE IS RUNNING are NOT "unsolicited." Let me put it to you this way: if some junk mail arrives at your house, that's unsolicited. If a magazine that you subscribe to arrives and it contains ads, those ads are NOT "unsolicited." If someone sends you an ad via fax, that is unsolicited. If you're watching a TV show and it has ads, those ads are not. See the difference?
Ars is a business. They choose to pay writers to create content, they buy servers and pay for electricity to keep them running, and they pay for bandwidth to--believe it or not, they do not get ONE PENNY of the money you give your ISP. And since they spent all this money to create content, they get to choose how to pay for it. They offer subscriptions but obviously your cheap ass isn't paying for that--if you were, you would not be here complaining about the ads because you wouldn't see them. Pretty much the only other option they have to make money is to sell ads. It's their product that comes along with these ads, so they are fully within their rights to do whatever the hell they want to with it.
It breaks down like this:
They pay to create content.
They use ads to pay for the content.
You are free to block their ads.
They are free to deny you the content they paid to produce.
And that's the deal. You don't like it? Then block their ads or don't visit them. If they go out of business it is, as you say, "their problem." But get the idea out of your head that they're supposed to pay a staff to create content, pay to keep a bunch of servers running, AND then give that content away.
If somebody wants to run a site as a hobby and give away content, that's fine. If someone decides to run a site as a business, they are free to do so, and like EVERY OTHER BUSINESS N THE PLANET you are free to patronize them or not. It's just that simple. You don't like it? Then pay for some writers, start your own site, and give away the content, or "get creative" and find a way to monetize it that doesn't make whiny freeloaders like you unhappy. Otherwise, please STFU.
I've been very happy with my purchases there--a Panaphonics TV and Sorny monitor. Shop there with confidence.
Re:Firefox + NoScript + Adblock Plus + FlashBlocke
on
Window Pain
·
· Score: 1
I don't know about Windows, but I've been using their hosts files for forever, all the way back to 10.2 on an 800 MHz G3 iBook, with no noticeable slowdown whatsoever--and a HUGE speed INCREASE from not loading a zillion ads while browsing. Seriously--try it. Free, easy, and easy to undo if you happen not to like it. Just open the plain text version, select all, copy, switch to Terminal, type sudo pico/etc/hosts and enter your password when prompted. This will open up a basic text editor with the hosts file. Press the down arrow key 'till you're at the end of the file, 'paste' (command-V or 'Edit' menu -> 'Paste'), wait a couple minutes for it to fill in, then press control-X (NOT command-X) y enter to save the file, then quit Temrinal and enjoy browsing. (There are other, better ways to edit that file, but that's the easiest.)
"... a number of Android applications are offering practical solutions that unlock the power of a phone that's really a Unix machine you can slip into your pocket... Any Java developer familiar with Eclipse should be able to use Google's Android documentation to turn out a very basic application in just a few hours."
It also has wireless, and more space than a Nomad. The iPhone's defeat is imminent!
Re:Firefox + NoScript + Adblock Plus + FlashBlocke
on
Window Pain
·
· Score: 1
1983 - War Games - realistic depiction of old-school hacking
1992 - Sneakers - realistic depiction of social engineering
1995 - Hackers - Agelina Jolie briefly topless
2001 - Swordfish - long scene of Halle Berry topless
The best hacking film of all time, therefore, is Swordfish, followed by a two-way tie between War Games and Sneakers. Hackers comes in fourth--not even a naked 19-year-old Angelina Jolie could save that piece of shit.:-)
You polled professional users about this question, and none of them cared? Let's see your raw data.
Oh, come on. I didn't poll a million astronomers last night to see if the sun will rise tomorrow either but I feel pretty confident in saying that it will, and speaking for them.
I'm not saying it's not an issue AT ALL or that it should not be addressed AT ALL, I'm just saying it's not an IMPORTANT issue. Consider this: millions of people have shoes with laces. Sometimes these laces come untied. Once untied, they sometimes cause problems--you might trip over them, they might get sucked into an escalator or wound up in a bike pedal, etc. Are loose shoelaces a problem? YES. Are loose shoelaces an IMPORTANT problem? NO.
Images of famous paintings in art books would be a great start, since you're supposed to be seeing what the artist painted, not a rough approximation.
Wow. This is a fantastically bad idea and, not trying to be mean, but it just shows exactly how unqualified you are to have your opinion be counted. There are a MILLION issues at hand that will effect image quality; this tiny gamma shift is WAY down on the list.
First of all, there are uncountable thousands of pieces of art out there, so this is bewilderingly impractical to begin with
And much of it is too big to scan
No sense mentioning things like the Sistine Chapel
But beyond that, getting into the strictly technical issues...
Should the artwork be photographed/scanned in natural sunlight or in artificial light? Indoors or out? What time of day?
Artificial light? What temperature? Incandescent, florescent, or other?
By the way, with all the pollution in the air now, is the sunlight that comes through your window even the same color as it was in Monet's time?
OK, so say you decide that things should be photographed outdoors on a mountain at the equator at noon on the date of the summer solstice. Great. You do realize that any print made from this image (and let's pretend RGB/CMYK issues don't exist, just to make things easier) will look different when viewed inside, through tinted windows (note: ALL glass is tinted to some extent) and artificial light? You can do whatever you want when capturing the image, but if the viewer won't see it under the same conditions, why bother? (Oh, and I almost forgot--you do know that human visual perception isn't a constant, non-moving target, right? Even just looking at something for a while will change how you perceive it.)
You say "you're supposed to be seeing what the artist painted, not a rough approximation" so obviously you have no idea how TINY the gamut of reproducible colors is compared to actual paint. Try this experiment: Find a museum with a famous colorful painting. Go to a bookstore and buy the most expensive book you can find that contains a print of that art. Find the image online and bring the most expensive laptop you can find too, or a desktop and a calibrated monitor and a LaCie hood if you're really serious. Then compare the two reproductions with the original artwork and, having studied the relative weights of the issues listed above, tell me exactly how much of the giant difference between the original and reproductions was caused by gamma shift due to electronic resizing.
This is like saying you should steam-clean the under
Good call, except the typical argument against Macs is that they're "overpriced", which is arguable if you go feature by feature. But the GP here (the first time around) was strictly saying "affordable".
"Most affordable" (lowest price) is not always the same as "best value" (number of good features per dollar). And most people forget, it is possible for a tool to do FEWER THINGS, BETTER. If I had to do some construction, I'd rather have a $10 straight screwdriver, a $10 philips, and a $10 pair of scissors rather than a $30 Swiss Army knife.
> Lenovo will, certainly, build a more affordable and compatible/open device than Apple.
"Certainly"? Really? You're positive that this device, which is basically two whole computers, one of which is also a giant touchscreen, will come in under $499?
Considering that, to the naked eye, Saturn looks NO DIFFERENT from every other star in the sky, I think being able to see ANY Indication of rings AT ALL would be awesome. I would love to see Saturn, even as you show in pic #1, with my own eyes. (Will take some work--besides not having a telescope, I live in a heavily light-polluted area.) To the submitter: if you can find Saturn, go for it. And Jupiter, being bigger and closer, ought to be worth it too.
"Multi-tasking is a dumb way to do this. it puts the load for managing the interaction on the human not the device."
Er, the device isn't SENTIENT, you know. You can ONLY interact in ways that programmers have PREDICTED and PROGRAMMED FOR. For example*, it is a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS to send multiple pics in an email. Select a pic, copy, press the "home" button, tap "Mail", paste, press "home", tap on "Pictures", find the pic again (starting again at the bottom--the damn thing doesn't even stay where you left it!), etc etc etc. This is very much a case of "[putting] the load for managing the interaction on the human not the device"!!!
Think I should post them to Flickr or Facebook? Well, I can use the app, if one has been written. But what if I want to post to a smaller service? What if I already have my own online gallery? Hell, I can't even send my pics to Walgreens, since they have a web-based uploader (no user-browsable filesystem!) and they haven't written an app.
I agree that there's a place for simplicity and I think the iPad is pretty spiffy but come on, you can't even easily switch between an IM session and another app. Yes, there are some IM apps with notifications, but what if you want to IM while playing a game, and the game is one that doesn't save state perfectly when you press "home"?
Furthermore, push notifications are NOT equal to local daemons in all cases. They're great if you want to get data from the outside world, but what if you want to a) ACT on data from the outside world (example: I want my iPhone to download the local temperature hourly and sound an alarm if it goes above or below a certain point), or b) what if you want to SEND data from the iPhone--for example, I want my phone to post its location to a server every hour. There are some truly great things that could be done with background processes and it'd be great to have an inch of leeway here.
* not so much an example of multitasking being needed per se, but an example of how hard it is to do things that weren't accounted for, or if they were, that weren't accounted for well.
> Pursuing an attacker once the threat to yourself and family is clearly over is no longer self-defence.
Right, because having been chased once, criminals immediately become law-abiding citizens. No chance at all that they guy was running away to get some more buddies to come back and finish the job. I have no problem at all with someone who wants to ensure that crooks are available for the police to deal with.
Oh dear, a criminal getting a "permanent injury" from a victim. My heart is bleeding for him. Dude: you break the law, you're taking a chance. You'll get NO SYMPATHY if someone strikes back.
Munir Hussain found his family home in High Wycombe being burgled in a rather painful way. His wife and three children had been tied up and threatened with death. [emphasis mine] Munir himself, rather bravely, escaped by throwing a coffee table at the men, putting them to flight, and then chased after them. Thinking, understandably, that he might not himself be able to overpower and capture them, he armed himself with a cricket bat, and got hold of his brother Tokeer and, apparently, a couple of other people as well. There is no point in trying to apprehend criminals if you don't bring along the power to overcome them. [emphasis mine]
Don't know about you, but the last line makes a lot of sense to me.
No, it isn't. Not for all situations. The iPad is a bit pricey at the moment but in the future when they're cheaper (and/or used) I could see this actually being quite good for the kids to play checkers in the backseat of the car or on a flight. 1) No pieces to lose 2) Bored of checkers? It can hold a few hundred other games. 3) Related to #1: also no pencils/pens/crayons floating around/getting lost/poking people in tender places Honestly, I'd rather have the kids in the backseat playing games instead of watching movies the whole time.
"By using a 'data:' URL, the entire page content is all in the URL... I created a 355kb URL for my home page (complete with images) and it loaded just fine on my iPhone."
But the iPad is not just "less." To a large chunk of the market, security and ease of use have quite a bit of value. Many people very strongly DON'T want an "open" box and the neverending fight against malware, software that doesn't take into account various differences in hardware, etc.
You are trying to convince me that paying more for a device that does less is somehow a good thing.
No, I'm trying to convince you that more is not always better. There is a GIANT market for devices that are somewhat "dumbed down" but (this is what WebTV and the Audrey missed) still very good. Apple has shown that they are very good at finding that balance.
Furthermore, the Asus tablet you linked to has half the battery life, weighs more, and has a smaller screen.
Why would I pay for a locked down, restricted half computer when I could buy an open, full computer at the same price?
And again, you're missing my point. YOU might not. Plenty of other people will. Different people have different tastes. Period.
they ignored a segment of the market that they could have included ALONG WITH their main target market...yet didn't.
The same way they "ignored" people who wanted a netbook for the last two years. Apple does NOT want to make as many people as happy as possible. They want to make as much money as possible. The two aren't always equal.
And who are you to say it would have been "easy" to port the full version of OS X to the A4 CPU? How do you think they're getting such great performance and battery life out of that chip? By specializing, and leaving out what they don't need. It's all about tradeoffs. OS X takes up about 600 MB on the iPhone. It takes about 10x as much on a desktop. Hmm, think they're leaving something out? Think that missing 90% is just wallpapers and printer drivers?
So you're telling me I'm going to spend at minimum $500 on a device that is just as locked down as an iPod Touch or iPhone? I'm going to have to hack the damn thing just so I can run an unapproved application? Great. Thanks for that, Apple.
Who, exactly, is telling you that you MUST buy this device? Is Apple ORDERING you to buy one, like a mom orders a kid to finish his lima beans? Without that foundation, the rest of your argument pretty much falls apart. You want a general-purpose tablet, buyone.There have been locked-down tablets before. There will be more in the future. This is Apple's. There will always be a need for, and a supply of, general-purpose computers.
Basically, this COULD have been an amazing device...but regardless of what they did right, Apple made some unbelievably stupid decisions that puts it firmly in the "what's the point" category for me. [emphasis mine]
And there's the key point. Taco called the original iPod "lame" and Apple went on to sell 250,000,000 of them. They don't care what some geek on Slashdot--you, me, or him--thinks.
they decided to put on a velvet glove and slap the shit out of their customers
Really? They aren't trying to put anything past their customers. Apple makes it VERY CLEAR that this is not a general purpose computer. People will buy it, or not, and like it, or not. Just like any other device.
Slashdot Mirror
I've owned two Nokias with physical keyboards (6800 and 6820) and a BlackBerry (Curve 8330--not the best) and an iPhone, and I prefer the iPhone's virtual keyboard by far. Not so much for speed, though some basic testing by me shows they're all comparable, but for ease. The 6800 is large with plastic between the nicely-rounded keys and it's very easy to hit the right one. The 6820 is a bit smaller but the keys are also nicely rounded and typing on that is pretty easy. Both also have dedicated buttons for numbers and some punctuation--hyphen, comma, period, slash, single quote, and more are all primary buttons. Their layouts also closely mimic a PC keyboard with comma, period, slash, semicolon, quote, and equals in roughly the same spots as on a regular keyboard.
The BlackBerry's keys are smaller and closer together and firmer than either Nokia and I find I've got to press on them with a thumbnail or the bony part of a finger to get them to register and not mash more than one key at a time, and there are no number or punctuation keys AT ALL which makes typing just about anything quite a pain.
The iPhone only shows letters or numbers/punctuation but since it's virtual the secondary and tertiary buttons are big and easy to find, not like the tiny glyphs you get from sticking two images on one physical key. But the thing I like most about virtual keys is that it only takes a very light tough to register a press, and the clickable area is very large, so typing with the biggest, roundest, softest part of your thumb is a cinch. And because of this, it is by far the easiest to use with one hand. (Though the split-keyboard Nokias are pretty much out of the running in this area, but the BB is similar in size and shape.)
But anyway, that's just my experience and preference. All that matters is what works best for you.
Occam's razor time: LHC caused a ripple in spacetime, or Slashdot editors screwed up. Hmm...
"Apparently there are only a couple hundred of these things in existence..."
And now, due to all the stories about them, they have become modern-day artifacts and will probably sell on eBay as collectibles for more than the real thing.
Wow. You are so totally wrong you don't deserve a single "insightful" mod. Since Slashdot still lacks a "-1. factually incorrect" mod option, I feel compelled to reply, lest people stand in awe of your "+5, Insightful" score and think you're actually right.
"There are laws against sending advertisements over the fax and cold-calling cell phones. The logic is that the recipient must pay for the unsolicited advertisement (in fax paper, toner, or cell phone minutes). Internet ads are no different. I pay for bandwidth and connection time, so your ad directly costs me money, and it should be illegal for that reason."
Wrong, wrong, WRONG. The ads you see WHEN YOU VISIT A SITE THAT SOMEONE ELSE IS RUNNING are NOT "unsolicited." Let me put it to you this way: if some junk mail arrives at your house, that's unsolicited. If a magazine that you subscribe to arrives and it contains ads, those ads are NOT "unsolicited." If someone sends you an ad via fax, that is unsolicited. If you're watching a TV show and it has ads, those ads are not. See the difference?
Ars is a business. They choose to pay writers to create content, they buy servers and pay for electricity to keep them running, and they pay for bandwidth to--believe it or not, they do not get ONE PENNY of the money you give your ISP. And since they spent all this money to create content, they get to choose how to pay for it. They offer subscriptions but obviously your cheap ass isn't paying for that--if you were, you would not be here complaining about the ads because you wouldn't see them. Pretty much the only other option they have to make money is to sell ads. It's their product that comes along with these ads, so they are fully within their rights to do whatever the hell they want to with it.
It breaks down like this:
And that's the deal. You don't like it? Then block their ads or don't visit them. If they go out of business it is, as you say, "their problem." But get the idea out of your head that they're supposed to pay a staff to create content, pay to keep a bunch of servers running, AND then give that content away.
If somebody wants to run a site as a hobby and give away content, that's fine. If someone decides to run a site as a business, they are free to do so, and like EVERY OTHER BUSINESS N THE PLANET you are free to patronize them or not. It's just that simple. You don't like it? Then pay for some writers, start your own site, and give away the content, or "get creative" and find a way to monetize it that doesn't make whiny freeloaders like you unhappy. Otherwise, please STFU.
Troll? Really? Since when does Slashdot give mod points to humor-impaired users who have never seen The Simpsons? *sigh* I must be getting old.
1. Move the default ssh port to a higher order port (5000+)
Agreed. The higher the better. For the ultimate in security, I recommend 65536.
I've been very happy with my purchases there--a Panaphonics TV and Sorny monitor. Shop there with confidence.
I don't know about Windows, but I've been using their hosts files for forever, all the way back to 10.2 on an 800 MHz G3 iBook, with no noticeable slowdown whatsoever--and a HUGE speed INCREASE from not loading a zillion ads while browsing. Seriously--try it. Free, easy, and easy to undo if you happen not to like it. Just open the plain text version, select all, copy, switch to Terminal, type /etc/hosts
sudo pico
and enter your password when prompted. This will open up a basic text editor with the hosts file. Press the down arrow key 'till you're at the end of the file, 'paste' (command-V or 'Edit' menu -> 'Paste'), wait a couple minutes for it to fill in, then press
control-X (NOT command-X)
y
enter
to save the file, then quit Temrinal and enjoy browsing. (There are other, better ways to edit that file, but that's the easiest.)
"... a number of Android applications are offering practical solutions that unlock the power of a phone that's really a Unix machine you can slip into your pocket... Any Java developer familiar with Eclipse should be able to use Google's Android documentation to turn out a very basic application in just a few hours."
It also has wireless, and more space than a Nomad. The iPhone's defeat is imminent!
On Mac OS X, Safari and a custom /etc/hosts file does it for me. Oh, and ClickToFlash FTW.
The best hacking films are...
The best hacking film of all time, therefore, is Swordfish, followed by a two-way tie between War Games and Sneakers. Hackers comes in fourth--not even a naked 19-year-old Angelina Jolie could save that piece of shit. :-)
You polled professional users about this question, and none of them cared? Let's see your raw data.
Oh, come on. I didn't poll a million astronomers last night to see if the sun will rise tomorrow either but I feel pretty confident in saying that it will, and speaking for them.
I'm not saying it's not an issue AT ALL or that it should not be addressed AT ALL, I'm just saying it's not an IMPORTANT issue. Consider this: millions of people have shoes with laces. Sometimes these laces come untied. Once untied, they sometimes cause problems--you might trip over them, they might get sucked into an escalator or wound up in a bike pedal, etc. Are loose shoelaces a problem? YES. Are loose shoelaces an IMPORTANT problem? NO.
Images of famous paintings in art books would be a great start, since you're supposed to be seeing what the artist painted, not a rough approximation.
Wow. This is a fantastically bad idea and, not trying to be mean, but it just shows exactly how unqualified you are to have your opinion be counted. There are a MILLION issues at hand that will effect image quality; this tiny gamma shift is WAY down on the list.
But beyond that, getting into the strictly technical issues...
You say "you're supposed to be seeing what the artist painted, not a rough approximation" so obviously you have no idea how TINY the gamut of reproducible colors is compared to actual paint. Try this experiment: Find a museum with a famous colorful painting. Go to a bookstore and buy the most expensive book you can find that contains a print of that art. Find the image online and bring the most expensive laptop you can find too, or a desktop and a calibrated monitor and a LaCie hood if you're really serious. Then compare the two reproductions with the original artwork and, having studied the relative weights of the issues listed above, tell me exactly how much of the giant difference between the original and reproductions was caused by gamma shift due to electronic resizing.
This is like saying you should steam-clean the under
"There is an important error in most photography scaling algorithms."
No, there isn't. If millions of professional users haven't been bothered by it over the course of two decades, it is CLEARLY not important.
... you can go here and start learning the other Python.
"I came in here for an argument!"
"Oh, oh, I'm sorry, this is abuse."
You can see I've been studying. :-)
Good call, except the typical argument against Macs is that they're "overpriced", which is arguable if you go feature by feature. But the GP here (the first time around) was strictly saying "affordable".
"Most affordable" (lowest price) is not always the same as "best value" (number of good features per dollar). And most people forget, it is possible for a tool to do FEWER THINGS, BETTER. If I had to do some construction, I'd rather have a $10 straight screwdriver, a $10 philips, and a $10 pair of scissors rather than a $30 Swiss Army knife.
> Lenovo will, certainly, build a more affordable and compatible/open device than Apple.
"Certainly"? Really? You're positive that this device, which is basically two whole computers, one of which is also a giant touchscreen, will come in under $499?
Who is "we"? I'm pretty happy with what the iPad is. Also, I'm happy to pay half the cost of an IdeaPad, and get it 8 months sooner.
Considering that, to the naked eye, Saturn looks NO DIFFERENT from every other star in the sky, I think being able to see ANY Indication of rings AT ALL would be awesome. I would love to see Saturn, even as you show in pic #1, with my own eyes. (Will take some work--besides not having a telescope, I live in a heavily light-polluted area.) To the submitter: if you can find Saturn, go for it. And Jupiter, being bigger and closer, ought to be worth it too.
Some good points, but one little snag...
"Multi-tasking is a dumb way to do this. it puts the load for managing the interaction on the human not the device."
Er, the device isn't SENTIENT, you know. You can ONLY interact in ways that programmers have PREDICTED and PROGRAMMED FOR. For example*, it is a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS to send multiple pics in an email. Select a pic, copy, press the "home" button, tap "Mail", paste, press "home", tap on "Pictures", find the pic again (starting again at the bottom--the damn thing doesn't even stay where you left it!), etc etc etc. This is very much a case of "[putting] the load for managing the interaction on the human not the device"!!!
Think I should post them to Flickr or Facebook? Well, I can use the app, if one has been written. But what if I want to post to a smaller service? What if I already have my own online gallery? Hell, I can't even send my pics to Walgreens, since they have a web-based uploader (no user-browsable filesystem!) and they haven't written an app.
I agree that there's a place for simplicity and I think the iPad is pretty spiffy but come on, you can't even easily switch between an IM session and another app. Yes, there are some IM apps with notifications, but what if you want to IM while playing a game, and the game is one that doesn't save state perfectly when you press "home"?
Furthermore, push notifications are NOT equal to local daemons in all cases. They're great if you want to get data from the outside world, but what if you want to a) ACT on data from the outside world (example: I want my iPhone to download the local temperature hourly and sound an alarm if it goes above or below a certain point), or b) what if you want to SEND data from the iPhone--for example, I want my phone to post its location to a server every hour. There are some truly great things that could be done with background processes and it'd be great to have an inch of leeway here.
* not so much an example of multitasking being needed per se, but an example of how hard it is to do things that weren't accounted for, or if they were, that weren't accounted for well.
> Pursuing an attacker once the threat to yourself and family is clearly over is no longer self-defence.
Right, because having been chased once, criminals immediately become law-abiding citizens. No chance at all that they guy was running away to get some more buddies to come back and finish the job. I have no problem at all with someone who wants to ensure that crooks are available for the police to deal with.
Oh dear, a criminal getting a "permanent injury" from a victim. My heart is bleeding for him. Dude: you break the law, you're taking a chance. You'll get NO SYMPATHY if someone strikes back.
I assume the case in question is this one: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timcollard/100020129/the-criminal-justice-system-is-just-not-cricket/
Munir Hussain found his family home in High Wycombe being burgled in a rather painful way. His wife and three children had been tied up and threatened with death. [emphasis mine] Munir himself, rather bravely, escaped by throwing a coffee table at the men, putting them to flight, and then chased after them. Thinking, understandably, that he might not himself be able to overpower and capture them, he armed himself with a cricket bat, and got hold of his brother Tokeer and, apparently, a couple of other people as well. There is no point in trying to apprehend criminals if you don't bring along the power to overcome them. [emphasis mine]
Don't know about you, but the last line makes a lot of sense to me.
> The perfect board game platform is cardboard.
No, it isn't. Not for all situations. The iPad is a bit pricey at the moment but in the future when they're cheaper (and/or used) I could see this actually being quite good for the kids to play checkers in the backseat of the car or on a flight.
1) No pieces to lose
2) Bored of checkers? It can hold a few hundred other games.
3) Related to #1: also no pencils/pens/crayons floating around/getting lost/poking people in tender places
Honestly, I'd rather have the kids in the backseat playing games instead of watching movies the whole time.
Access to local storage is one of the few things I really miss in the iPhone, but if you're reading Slashdot you probably won't be too scared of this workaround: http://blog.clawpaws.net/post/2007/07/16/Storing-iPhone-apps-locally-with-data-URLs
"By using a 'data:' URL, the entire page content is all in the URL... I created a 355kb URL for my home page (complete with images) and it loaded just fine on my iPhone."
+1,000,000, Insightful. Thank you.
But the iPad is not just "less." To a large chunk of the market, security and ease of use have quite a bit of value. Many people very strongly DON'T want an "open" box and the neverending fight against malware, software that doesn't take into account various differences in hardware, etc.
You are trying to convince me that paying more for a device that does less is somehow a good thing.
No, I'm trying to convince you that more is not always better. There is a GIANT market for devices that are somewhat "dumbed down" but (this is what WebTV and the Audrey missed) still very good. Apple has shown that they are very good at finding that balance.
Furthermore, the Asus tablet you linked to has half the battery life, weighs more, and has a smaller screen.
Why would I pay for a locked down, restricted half computer when I could buy an open, full computer at the same price?
And again, you're missing my point. YOU might not. Plenty of other people will. Different people have different tastes. Period.
they ignored a segment of the market that they could have included ALONG WITH their main target market...yet didn't.
The same way they "ignored" people who wanted a netbook for the last two years. Apple does NOT want to make as many people as happy as possible. They want to make as much money as possible. The two aren't always equal.
And who are you to say it would have been "easy" to port the full version of OS X to the A4 CPU? How do you think they're getting such great performance and battery life out of that chip? By specializing, and leaving out what they don't need. It's all about tradeoffs. OS X takes up about 600 MB on the iPhone. It takes about 10x as much on a desktop. Hmm, think they're leaving something out? Think that missing 90% is just wallpapers and printer drivers?
Wait, you lost me at the third sentence:
So you're telling me I'm going to spend at minimum $500 on a device that is just as locked down as an iPod Touch or iPhone? I'm going to have to hack the damn thing just so I can run an unapproved application? Great. Thanks for that, Apple.
Who, exactly, is telling you that you MUST buy this device? Is Apple ORDERING you to buy one, like a mom orders a kid to finish his lima beans? Without that foundation, the rest of your argument pretty much falls apart. You want a general-purpose tablet, buy one. There have been locked-down tablets before. There will be more in the future. This is Apple's. There will always be a need for, and a supply of, general-purpose computers.
Basically, this COULD have been an amazing device...but regardless of what they did right, Apple made some unbelievably stupid decisions that puts it firmly in the "what's the point" category for me. [emphasis mine]
And there's the key point. Taco called the original iPod "lame" and Apple went on to sell 250,000,000 of them. They don't care what some geek on Slashdot--you, me, or him--thinks.
they decided to put on a velvet glove and slap the shit out of their customers
Really? They aren't trying to put anything past their customers. Apple makes it VERY CLEAR that this is not a general purpose computer. People will buy it, or not, and like it, or not. Just like any other device.