Yes, you are allowed a choice. FSF simply wants to make sure you make an INFORMED choice.
I don't see "Defective by Design" mounting a campaign to outlaw the iPad.
If, at the end of the day, someone is OK with (or even prefers that) their tablet PC being locked up by Apple, or the device's other attributes outweigh the disadvantage of vendor lockin, or even if someone yells "OOOHHHH!!! SHIIINY!" and pulls out their credit card to pre-order, that's absolutely their choice.
FSF is about freedom. Even your freedom to give away your freedom, actually, though their general goal is to try to let you know when you are about to do so. From there, the choice is yours.
A lot of people will say, and rightly so, "who cares? This is a toy, and I'll never do any serious computing on it, so why shouldn't I have a simple UI built by a company that is known for good UI design." And they're absolutely right in making that decision. Few people actually enjoy hacking their devices and recompiling kernels on them. For those of us that do, iPad is a deeply poor choice (until it can be jailbroken, which should happen about one picosecond after the first unit ships).
Trouble is, even if you lead the horses to water they're not going to drink. If people consciously choose to pretend something never happened, they're going to go to media that caters to their desires. TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, The Star, all examples of publications that generally haven't a single bit of useful information amongst their pages, yet those publications routinely outsell cheaper publications containing more information (the newspaper).
A personalized newsfeed (a' la Google News, or Yahoo!'s front page) gives me a very high content:drek ratio. I can tell such sites where I live and specific geographic areas that interest me, and it emphasizes stories that are closer to me (I actually DO care about Herbie being cut down, since I work 5 miles from him, but most of the country would have no reason to care. Nor should they, honestly).
The "Top Stories" feed percolates a few "celebrity drek" stories from time to time, but it's pretty minimal, and that section also contains a quick summary of (usually) heavy-hitting or important stories.
Hmm, I don't know. There's a difference between "running" an more than one application at a time and "having an application open". The iPod Touch does allow many applications to be "open" at a time.
In other words, as it stands right now on my wife's iPod Touch, she can go into an application and do something, then hit the HOME button and go back to that application, and nothing is lost. Nothing has happened with that application since she hit the HOME key (it wasn't running) but all the web pages she had open were still open, or whatever game she was in went back to wherever she left off.
I think (but I don't have one, so I can't say for sure) that you'll be able to pop from your word processor to your email and back without actually having to save your document and close the application.
This isn't as convenient as having the application actually running (as in, start some long process and go off and do something else while it finishes), but it's a far cry from the application totally terminating and having to be reloaded from scratch. My wife constantly hops back and forth between Safari, Facebook, and Gmail, and each app comes up exactly the way she left it.
The iPod Touch does it just fine - I'd have to imagine they'd carry this capability forward to the new iPad. If you have the applications you use most frequently on the same page (and this thing is big enough to hold a LOT of application icons on the first page!) you can switch between them with two clicks (home, then the app icon you want).
As far as form factor and typing, I'm not sure but I think I'd prefer this type of layout. Assuming, of course, that I could hold it like a clipboard while standing and use 5 fingers of one hand to type, or set it on a desk for brief heads-down typing.
I'd still prefer an actual hard keyboard for mass text entry, but I can see the form factor being handy for casual use. Especially if I could get some sort of decent keyboard and still have the capability to scribble out drawings interspersed with the text, this would be a major boon at meetings.
The trouble is, no one has gotten the interface right. I remember seeing the experiments with tablets in the 90s, and the technology was NOT ready at that point. I don't know if it is now, and I don't know if Apple has it right, but based on my experience with the iPod Touch I'd say they've come the closest anyone has so far.
Your ISP can easily protect you from IPv6 by giving you a NAT router, or you can get one yourself. As IPv6 gets rolled out, I expect more and more IPV6 to IPv4 NAT routers will become popular.
You ask for www.google.com, your computer does an IPv4 lookup to the router, the router translates that to an IPv6 lookup, caches the IPv6 address, and returns a valid-looking IPv4 address to your computer. When you ask for that IPv4 address, the router knows what IPv6 address it has associated with it and handles the heavy lifting for you. Just like regular NAT, except there's a protocol change too (which is pretty trivial).
Although, to be fair, you can actually load an IPv6 stack on Microsoft operating systems as far back as Windows 98 (DOS kernel) or Windows 2000 (NT kernel) and you may even be able to go further back than that. If you are concerned about IPv6 support on older operating systems than that, you'll have to opt for the router solution.
I understand that, but you've obviously never tried to use a laptop computer in your actual lap - while sitting up in bed or sideways in a couch, or reclining in a comfy chair. Your legs provide a perfect angle for viewing AND what little typing you need to do, and you don't need to hold it in either hand.
The desktop form factor is ideal for sitting at a desk. You can place your monitor at a perfect viewing angle, place your keyboard and pointing device at a good manipulating angle, place the box somewhere the hell out of the way, and have at it.
The laptop form factor is a compromise. It works OK at the desk but when you have the keyboard at the right spot you are looking down at the screen, and when you have the screen right your hands are way the hell up in the air. But it can be moved around and used somewhat comfortably on your lap, the kitchen table, etc.
The tablet form factor is designed for an entirely different usage pattern. It can be used while you are standing and moving around, sitting up in bed, reclining, or as a casual clipboard-style thing, which is not true of any other form of computer today.
And yes, they've been around for a while, but most of the operating systems for them are desktop OSes that were poorly adapted for the form factor. Apple, for all their faults, "gets it" on how a handheld computer should work.
It's a shame the thing is a nonextendable unit with nonreplaceable parts based on a closed operating system run by a company that has demonstrated incredible nannyism toward its users. Other than that, it looks great.
OK, maybe/maybe not more durable, though I'm not entirely convinced that an exposed 9+" glass screen with no significant edge protection and no front surface protection whatsoever could be built that durably.
The iPod Touch and iPhone are relatively rugged (for low values of rugged) because their glass surface is pretty small and they don't weigh a lot. So if it falls on a corner against the glass screen, there's not a lot of force behind that impact. And you don't have a large surface of relatively unsupported glass that will break before bending.
Take something that weighs 10 times as much, and has a larger surface to hit, and I have more doubts about the outcome.
This isn't an Apple criticism - they make things rugged, no argument.
But... That large a sheet of glass with no protective cover and not even a bezel around the edge... I fear the screen break rate is going to be very high on these.
He's asked a generic question, without shilling in the article section. That means it's less likely he's just out spamming, because he hasn't identified who he is or what the project is. So he's largely avoided the shitstorm of angry slashdotters accusing him of spamming.
But in doing so, he's piqued the curiosity of a few of us, and we've ASKED him to post details of his project now. If he does so, that means he's actually spent a few minutes here reading the responses. This marks him as someone who at least isn't doing a drive-by spamming.
Either very good and sophisticated marketing, or an honest question from a manager of a small project. I can't decide which. But either way, it works, and I'm curious about the project.
You know, I'm tempted to keep a half-dozen fonts I'm not interested in around so I can randomly install and uninstall 2-3 of them each morning. That, and enable/disable a plugin or two each day.:)
The only thing "porn mode" does is store all cookies, web history, and cache in a special place during the browsing session, and when you shut down private mode all of that stuff is deleted. While private mode is running, scripts still run, your useragent remains unchanged, and the web site that you are visiting knows exactly as much about you as if you had visited in normal mode.
It's only "private" in that other users of the computer who come after you can't tell what you did online. Your ISP and the remote web servers collect exactly the same information on you as they would if you ran in "normal" mode (with the exception of persistent cookies surviving across sessions).
That only changes one part of the fingerprint. The one part that is, for the most part, the LEAST unique. Personally, if I did this I'd ignore the useragent entirely, and go for the fonts and plugins. Those are more unique and harder to change.
No, actually, that's bad. Well, if you care about being tracked, that's bad. If you don't care, then the test results are irrelevant to you and the only bad thing is that you've wasted time running the test. But you've contributed a new signature to the EFF so you've helped out with the test.
What the EFF is saying is that all of the attributes they are checking (which can be checked by any web server) combine to form a fingerprint. That fingerprint identifies you as a unique individual to a greater or lesser extent. The more uniquely you can be identified, the more likely it is that a web server (or coalition of web servers) can track your usage on their sites. All they need to do is gather this information for each page you view.
Let's use an automotive analogy, because they always work so very well on Slashdot. I'm making up the ratios, but they only serve to demonstrate the point.
I'm driving at random through a large city (one million cars on the road right now), and you have lots of people trying to track my movements as I drive through the streets and run my errands.
- If you only know that I drive a car, you'll never find out anything about me, because over half the people on the road drive cars. I'm anonymous to you. Over 500,000 chances for a false match all the time means you'll never ever be able to tell where I am.
- If you only know that I drive a green car, your confidence in identifying me is still pretty low, because (let's say) in 100 vehicles on the road are green cars. I'm still pretty anonymous, but in a city of 1,000,000 there are still 10,000 cars that could match. So for any practical purpose you can't tell who I am.
- If you only know that I drive a green Honda Civic, your confidence just went up, because green Honda Civics are unique to within (say) 1:2,000 - for every 2000 vehicles on the road there is one green Civic. There are still 500 cars that could be mine in the city, though, so it's still a really low confidence that you know where I am.
- If you know that I drive a green Civic with one headlight out, you've significantly upped your confidence, maybe to a useful level. There's still a chance of a false positive matching me, but you're pretty darned close. There may be 10 cars, at most, that match that description. But if you went up to one of them, there's still only a 1:10 chance it's me. I wouldn't bet on those odds.
- If you know that I drive a green Civic with one headlight out, the front drivers door has been replaced with a blue one, I've added a bumper sticker that reads "I BRAKE FOR CLOWNS", and the car has a scratch down the driver's side, it's unlikely in the extreme someone else's car looks like mine, so you can identify me with significant, if not absolute, confidence. Even in a city of a million people, it's terribly unlikely that someone else has a car that matches that description precisely.
- If you know my license plate number, you've got me identified with complete confidence (discounting the odd chance that someone has forged my plate).
With NoScript blocking eff.org, I was unique to about 1:7000. Once I allowed eff.org on NoScript, I came up as completely unique - Fonts and Plugins seemed to be the most unique factors (as you might expect).
To be honest, if I was using this as a tracking tool I'd probably not put a lot of stock in Useragent, but instead on more unique things like fonts and plugins. Useragents can be spoofed easily, and are generally not that unique. Fonts and plugins, on the other hand, are less likely to be spoofed and are a lot more unique to the user. A lot of people have installed or deleted at least one font on their system, and that's a relatively unique fingerprint.
My wife does most of her websurfing on an iPod Touch today, and her biggest complaint is the screen size.
She's been bugging me for a netbook but when it came down to a choice between that and upgrading the desktop, she chose the desktop. She's not really sure about the netbook form factor for sitting-in-the-bed-surfing and getting-a-little-work-done-portably tasks. She's unhappy with our old Dell D600 for that, and fears that the netbook might be just more of the same with a smaller screen.
Once she hears about this, she'll probably want one. We'll see...
Well, there you go then. If you work on something that doesn't require massive amounts of horsepower, you could just have your own very portable computer to take wherever you want to go.
Yes, a netbook will be cheaper, more durable, more powerful, etc. But there's a lot of appeal to a flat unit you can use like a clipboard while resting back in your favorite lounge chair or sitting up in bed.
There will be a market for this. I probably won't be part of it, but mostly on price and lack of flexibility.
You're assuming you'd ever use this at a desk without some form of external keyboard. I can see something like this sliding into a dock that holds it at a comfortable viewing angle and having a separate keyboard and some form of pointing device (mouse, trackpad, wacom, whatever) for desktop use.
That is, of course, assuming you want to use a device like this as both your go-everywhere oversized iPod Touch and your underpowered, small-screened desktop. However, a lot of people will make pretty serious compromises to consolidate to one device that can do everything they want.
More likely, this is targeted for doing what my wife does with her iPod Touch - checking her Facebook, surfing the web, typing up short emails, etc while sitting in bed or on the couch. For desktop stuff, we have a desktop computer.
I haven't read the slideshow in detail, but the thing does support Bluetooth. I wonder if it could work with a Bluetooth keyboard, and maybe mouse.
Mousing is going to be a toughie with an OS designed for multitouch, but if you are using it for document editing and/or other stuff you'd at a desktop where an efficient input mechanism trumps any desire for multitouch, it could still be OK for specific tasks.
I dunno. I really like my wife's iPod Touch, and she's hankering for a netbook/larger screen version, but neither of us would have been willing to shell out the kind of bucks that Apple wanted for the iTouch (I won it in a writing contest). I can't imagine the price they are going to get for an A4-sized iTouch.
Silly! You just need to buy iPants! They're shiny, and you can walk in them for about two hours until the batteries run out. Then the innovative active polymer reverts back to hard plastic until you recharge them from any iTunes-compatible computer.
They could have saved a boatload of money by having a llama eat brightly colored food, vomit, and take a picture of the result. Patentable, unique, and all you need is a llama and a camera. Oh, wait, the folks from WinAmp might sue them over the llama thing. Scratch the llama. Go with a muskox.
For small-platform computing, do the same with a chipmunk (to accommodate the smaller screen sizes).
Possible backronym: Beginners Application Regulation Framework.
Actually, what they are changing is the default search engine in the "Chrome" (the little thingamabob up next to the "awesomebar" that is dedicated to searching that most of us call the searchbar). Right now, you'll probably see a little 4-color "G" logo on the left side of the Chrome. After Lucid Lynx comes out, that will be a "Y!".
Click on the Y!, then click on the G, and your default search engine will go back to Google. This will also change your default home page to the Ubuntu custom Google landing page rather than the Ubuntu custom Yahoo! one they'll be introducing in Lucid.
Then, to your point, thank goodness for the ability to change home pages, because I like to keep mine blank. I don't want to report in to someone every time I open my web browser, and I don't want to waste the time and resources (however minimal) to load a web page I'm not going to use.
A change in the default from one of the supported search engines to another of the supported search engines?
This isn't a material change to Firefox at all. It's a change to one of the many defaults.
This is actually less invasive than changing the home page to Ubuntu's landing site, or adding all the Ubuntu shortcuts to the bookmarks toolbar. And Firefox has not, to my knowledge, said "boo" about either of those.
Voicemail is a problem, but AT&T had a gizmo that stripped the contacts off my wife's old Verizon Moto RAZR and straight in to her Blackberry, and her parents' old Verizon phones got similar treatment. They had their address books in their new phones in mere seconds.
But, your point is taken - there's a lot of information in a phone beyond addresses and the number. Application settings, saved voicemails and emails, etc. I could see where Google might be a threat to that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you are allowed a choice. FSF simply wants to make sure you make an INFORMED choice.
I don't see "Defective by Design" mounting a campaign to outlaw the iPad.
If, at the end of the day, someone is OK with (or even prefers that) their tablet PC being locked up by Apple, or the device's other attributes outweigh the disadvantage of vendor lockin, or even if someone yells "OOOHHHH!!! SHIIINY!" and pulls out their credit card to pre-order, that's absolutely their choice.
FSF is about freedom. Even your freedom to give away your freedom, actually, though their general goal is to try to let you know when you are about to do so. From there, the choice is yours.
A lot of people will say, and rightly so, "who cares? This is a toy, and I'll never do any serious computing on it, so why shouldn't I have a simple UI built by a company that is known for good UI design." And they're absolutely right in making that decision. Few people actually enjoy hacking their devices and recompiling kernels on them. For those of us that do, iPad is a deeply poor choice (until it can be jailbroken, which should happen about one picosecond after the first unit ships).
Trouble is, even if you lead the horses to water they're not going to drink. If people consciously choose to pretend something never happened, they're going to go to media that caters to their desires. TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, The Star, all examples of publications that generally haven't a single bit of useful information amongst their pages, yet those publications routinely outsell cheaper publications containing more information (the newspaper).
A personalized newsfeed (a' la Google News, or Yahoo!'s front page) gives me a very high content:drek ratio. I can tell such sites where I live and specific geographic areas that interest me, and it emphasizes stories that are closer to me (I actually DO care about Herbie being cut down, since I work 5 miles from him, but most of the country would have no reason to care. Nor should they, honestly).
The "Top Stories" feed percolates a few "celebrity drek" stories from time to time, but it's pretty minimal, and that section also contains a quick summary of (usually) heavy-hitting or important stories.
Hmm, I don't know. There's a difference between "running" an more than one application at a time and "having an application open". The iPod Touch does allow many applications to be "open" at a time.
In other words, as it stands right now on my wife's iPod Touch, she can go into an application and do something, then hit the HOME button and go back to that application, and nothing is lost. Nothing has happened with that application since she hit the HOME key (it wasn't running) but all the web pages she had open were still open, or whatever game she was in went back to wherever she left off.
I think (but I don't have one, so I can't say for sure) that you'll be able to pop from your word processor to your email and back without actually having to save your document and close the application.
This isn't as convenient as having the application actually running (as in, start some long process and go off and do something else while it finishes), but it's a far cry from the application totally terminating and having to be reloaded from scratch. My wife constantly hops back and forth between Safari, Facebook, and Gmail, and each app comes up exactly the way she left it.
The iPod Touch does it just fine - I'd have to imagine they'd carry this capability forward to the new iPad. If you have the applications you use most frequently on the same page (and this thing is big enough to hold a LOT of application icons on the first page!) you can switch between them with two clicks (home, then the app icon you want).
As far as form factor and typing, I'm not sure but I think I'd prefer this type of layout. Assuming, of course, that I could hold it like a clipboard while standing and use 5 fingers of one hand to type, or set it on a desk for brief heads-down typing.
I'd still prefer an actual hard keyboard for mass text entry, but I can see the form factor being handy for casual use. Especially if I could get some sort of decent keyboard and still have the capability to scribble out drawings interspersed with the text, this would be a major boon at meetings.
The trouble is, no one has gotten the interface right. I remember seeing the experiments with tablets in the 90s, and the technology was NOT ready at that point. I don't know if it is now, and I don't know if Apple has it right, but based on my experience with the iPod Touch I'd say they've come the closest anyone has so far.
Your ISP can easily protect you from IPv6 by giving you a NAT router, or you can get one yourself. As IPv6 gets rolled out, I expect more and more IPV6 to IPv4 NAT routers will become popular.
You ask for www.google.com, your computer does an IPv4 lookup to the router, the router translates that to an IPv6 lookup, caches the IPv6 address, and returns a valid-looking IPv4 address to your computer. When you ask for that IPv4 address, the router knows what IPv6 address it has associated with it and handles the heavy lifting for you. Just like regular NAT, except there's a protocol change too (which is pretty trivial).
Although, to be fair, you can actually load an IPv6 stack on Microsoft operating systems as far back as Windows 98 (DOS kernel) or Windows 2000 (NT kernel) and you may even be able to go further back than that. If you are concerned about IPv6 support on older operating systems than that, you'll have to opt for the router solution.
I understand that, but you've obviously never tried to use a laptop computer in your actual lap - while sitting up in bed or sideways in a couch, or reclining in a comfy chair. Your legs provide a perfect angle for viewing AND what little typing you need to do, and you don't need to hold it in either hand.
The desktop form factor is ideal for sitting at a desk. You can place your monitor at a perfect viewing angle, place your keyboard and pointing device at a good manipulating angle, place the box somewhere the hell out of the way, and have at it.
The laptop form factor is a compromise. It works OK at the desk but when you have the keyboard at the right spot you are looking down at the screen, and when you have the screen right your hands are way the hell up in the air. But it can be moved around and used somewhat comfortably on your lap, the kitchen table, etc.
The tablet form factor is designed for an entirely different usage pattern. It can be used while you are standing and moving around, sitting up in bed, reclining, or as a casual clipboard-style thing, which is not true of any other form of computer today.
And yes, they've been around for a while, but most of the operating systems for them are desktop OSes that were poorly adapted for the form factor. Apple, for all their faults, "gets it" on how a handheld computer should work.
It's a shame the thing is a nonextendable unit with nonreplaceable parts based on a closed operating system run by a company that has demonstrated incredible nannyism toward its users. Other than that, it looks great.
OK, maybe/maybe not more durable, though I'm not entirely convinced that an exposed 9+" glass screen with no significant edge protection and no front surface protection whatsoever could be built that durably.
The iPod Touch and iPhone are relatively rugged (for low values of rugged) because their glass surface is pretty small and they don't weigh a lot. So if it falls on a corner against the glass screen, there's not a lot of force behind that impact. And you don't have a large surface of relatively unsupported glass that will break before bending.
Take something that weighs 10 times as much, and has a larger surface to hit, and I have more doubts about the outcome.
This isn't an Apple criticism - they make things rugged, no argument.
But... That large a sheet of glass with no protective cover and not even a bezel around the edge... I fear the screen break rate is going to be very high on these.
I disagree. I think he's doing it perfectly.
He's asked a generic question, without shilling in the article section. That means it's less likely he's just out spamming, because he hasn't identified who he is or what the project is. So he's largely avoided the shitstorm of angry slashdotters accusing him of spamming.
But in doing so, he's piqued the curiosity of a few of us, and we've ASKED him to post details of his project now. If he does so, that means he's actually spent a few minutes here reading the responses. This marks him as someone who at least isn't doing a drive-by spamming.
Either very good and sophisticated marketing, or an honest question from a manager of a small project. I can't decide which. But either way, it works, and I'm curious about the project.
You know, I'm tempted to keep a half-dozen fonts I'm not interested in around so I can randomly install and uninstall 2-3 of them each morning. That, and enable/disable a plugin or two each day. :)
No surprise there.
The only thing "porn mode" does is store all cookies, web history, and cache in a special place during the browsing session, and when you shut down private mode all of that stuff is deleted. While private mode is running, scripts still run, your useragent remains unchanged, and the web site that you are visiting knows exactly as much about you as if you had visited in normal mode.
It's only "private" in that other users of the computer who come after you can't tell what you did online. Your ISP and the remote web servers collect exactly the same information on you as they would if you ran in "normal" mode (with the exception of persistent cookies surviving across sessions).
That only changes one part of the fingerprint. The one part that is, for the most part, the LEAST unique. Personally, if I did this I'd ignore the useragent entirely, and go for the fonts and plugins. Those are more unique and harder to change.
No, actually, that's bad. Well, if you care about being tracked, that's bad. If you don't care, then the test results are irrelevant to you and the only bad thing is that you've wasted time running the test. But you've contributed a new signature to the EFF so you've helped out with the test.
What the EFF is saying is that all of the attributes they are checking (which can be checked by any web server) combine to form a fingerprint. That fingerprint identifies you as a unique individual to a greater or lesser extent. The more uniquely you can be identified, the more likely it is that a web server (or coalition of web servers) can track your usage on their sites. All they need to do is gather this information for each page you view.
Let's use an automotive analogy, because they always work so very well on Slashdot. I'm making up the ratios, but they only serve to demonstrate the point.
I'm driving at random through a large city (one million cars on the road right now), and you have lots of people trying to track my movements as I drive through the streets and run my errands.
- If you only know that I drive a car, you'll never find out anything about me, because over half the people on the road drive cars. I'm anonymous to you. Over 500,000 chances for a false match all the time means you'll never ever be able to tell where I am.
- If you only know that I drive a green car, your confidence in identifying me is still pretty low, because (let's say) in 100 vehicles on the road are green cars. I'm still pretty anonymous, but in a city of 1,000,000 there are still 10,000 cars that could match. So for any practical purpose you can't tell who I am.
- If you only know that I drive a green Honda Civic, your confidence just went up, because green Honda Civics are unique to within (say) 1:2,000 - for every 2000 vehicles on the road there is one green Civic. There are still 500 cars that could be mine in the city, though, so it's still a really low confidence that you know where I am.
- If you know that I drive a green Civic with one headlight out, you've significantly upped your confidence, maybe to a useful level. There's still a chance of a false positive matching me, but you're pretty darned close. There may be 10 cars, at most, that match that description. But if you went up to one of them, there's still only a 1:10 chance it's me. I wouldn't bet on those odds.
- If you know that I drive a green Civic with one headlight out, the front drivers door has been replaced with a blue one, I've added a bumper sticker that reads "I BRAKE FOR CLOWNS", and the car has a scratch down the driver's side, it's unlikely in the extreme someone else's car looks like mine, so you can identify me with significant, if not absolute, confidence. Even in a city of a million people, it's terribly unlikely that someone else has a car that matches that description precisely.
- If you know my license plate number, you've got me identified with complete confidence (discounting the odd chance that someone has forged my plate).
With NoScript blocking eff.org, I was unique to about 1:7000. Once I allowed eff.org on NoScript, I came up as completely unique - Fonts and Plugins seemed to be the most unique factors (as you might expect).
To be honest, if I was using this as a tracking tool I'd probably not put a lot of stock in Useragent, but instead on more unique things like fonts and plugins. Useragents can be spoofed easily, and are generally not that unique. Fonts and plugins, on the other hand, are less likely to be spoofed and are a lot more unique to the user. A lot of people have installed or deleted at least one font on their system, and that's a relatively unique fingerprint.
My wife does most of her websurfing on an iPod Touch today, and her biggest complaint is the screen size.
She's been bugging me for a netbook but when it came down to a choice between that and upgrading the desktop, she chose the desktop. She's not really sure about the netbook form factor for sitting-in-the-bed-surfing and getting-a-little-work-done-portably tasks. She's unhappy with our old Dell D600 for that, and fears that the netbook might be just more of the same with a smaller screen.
Once she hears about this, she'll probably want one. We'll see...
Well, there you go then. If you work on something that doesn't require massive amounts of horsepower, you could just have your own very portable computer to take wherever you want to go.
Yes, a netbook will be cheaper, more durable, more powerful, etc. But there's a lot of appeal to a flat unit you can use like a clipboard while resting back in your favorite lounge chair or sitting up in bed.
There will be a market for this. I probably won't be part of it, but mostly on price and lack of flexibility.
You're assuming you'd ever use this at a desk without some form of external keyboard. I can see something like this sliding into a dock that holds it at a comfortable viewing angle and having a separate keyboard and some form of pointing device (mouse, trackpad, wacom, whatever) for desktop use.
That is, of course, assuming you want to use a device like this as both your go-everywhere oversized iPod Touch and your underpowered, small-screened desktop. However, a lot of people will make pretty serious compromises to consolidate to one device that can do everything they want.
More likely, this is targeted for doing what my wife does with her iPod Touch - checking her Facebook, surfing the web, typing up short emails, etc while sitting in bed or on the couch. For desktop stuff, we have a desktop computer.
I haven't read the slideshow in detail, but the thing does support Bluetooth. I wonder if it could work with a Bluetooth keyboard, and maybe mouse.
Mousing is going to be a toughie with an OS designed for multitouch, but if you are using it for document editing and/or other stuff you'd at a desktop where an efficient input mechanism trumps any desire for multitouch, it could still be OK for specific tasks.
I dunno. I really like my wife's iPod Touch, and she's hankering for a netbook/larger screen version, but neither of us would have been willing to shell out the kind of bucks that Apple wanted for the iTouch (I won it in a writing contest). I can't imagine the price they are going to get for an A4-sized iTouch.
Silly! You just need to buy iPants! They're shiny, and you can walk in them for about two hours until the batteries run out. Then the innovative active polymer reverts back to hard plastic until you recharge them from any iTunes-compatible computer.
COLOUR FUCKING PICTURE BOOKS!
Your pr0n habit is honestly your own business, but I for one didn't need that image. Or are you referring to a colorized version of the Kama Sutra?
They could have saved a boatload of money by having a llama eat brightly colored food, vomit, and take a picture of the result. Patentable, unique, and all you need is a llama and a camera. Oh, wait, the folks from WinAmp might sue them over the llama thing. Scratch the llama. Go with a muskox.
For small-platform computing, do the same with a chipmunk (to accommodate the smaller screen sizes).
Possible backronym: Beginners Application Regulation Framework.
Actually, what they are changing is the default search engine in the "Chrome" (the little thingamabob up next to the "awesomebar" that is dedicated to searching that most of us call the searchbar). Right now, you'll probably see a little 4-color "G" logo on the left side of the Chrome. After Lucid Lynx comes out, that will be a "Y!".
Click on the Y!, then click on the G, and your default search engine will go back to Google. This will also change your default home page to the Ubuntu custom Google landing page rather than the Ubuntu custom Yahoo! one they'll be introducing in Lucid.
Then, to your point, thank goodness for the ability to change home pages, because I like to keep mine blank. I don't want to report in to someone every time I open my web browser, and I don't want to waste the time and resources (however minimal) to load a web page I'm not going to use.
Yes. Canonical is the organization that supports and distributes Ubuntu.
Please tear up your geek card and mail it in. Thanks. :)
A change in the default from one of the supported search engines to another of the supported search engines?
This isn't a material change to Firefox at all. It's a change to one of the many defaults.
This is actually less invasive than changing the home page to Ubuntu's landing site, or adding all the Ubuntu shortcuts to the bookmarks toolbar. And Firefox has not, to my knowledge, said "boo" about either of those.
Learn to cook again, just in case?
Yes, it is right, this is a "bug".
Google's statement was completely correct, they just used a form of the word "bug" that you might not have expected them to use in that context.
That is the common vernacular for a wiretap device, right? A "bug"?
It bugs me that they would bug me then call it a bug.
Voicemail is a problem, but AT&T had a gizmo that stripped the contacts off my wife's old Verizon Moto RAZR and straight in to her Blackberry, and her parents' old Verizon phones got similar treatment. They had their address books in their new phones in mere seconds.
But, your point is taken - there's a lot of information in a phone beyond addresses and the number. Application settings, saved voicemails and emails, etc. I could see where Google might be a threat to that.