You mean a keyboard-optional (or no keyboard) Mac Air with a digitizer.
The digitizer (most tablets seem to license pressure-sensitive Wacom technology, even though that's overkill for non-artists) is the probably the deal-breaker. It adds hundreds of dollars to the cost of manufacturing the thing. Tablets that run Windows cater to a relatively small user niche, but it's a niche within the huge PC marketplace, so they can scrape together enough customers to stay in business.
Macs cater to a niche marketplace to begin with, so a tablet would be a niche within a niche. It's hard enough for Apple to turn a profit with their relatively small customer base. It's that much harder to make profit selling a system that would appeal to even fewer users and cost much more to manufacture.
The really ironic part is that Windows tablets exist because they've been one of Bill Gates's pet projects!
I actually have an "artsy type" nephew you uses a tablet display connected to a Mac. It's one of those Wacom input tablets with a built-in display. So the "artsy" customer niche is satisfied, if they don't want portability.
You can do that in Windows 3.0 too. Perhaps Petzold should have used that as an initial example.
Or not. No real world GUI application just does one thing and exits. If you want your "hello world" example to be a basic program you can build on, it has to be a program that knows about events, even if the only event it handles is "program start".
Easy in modern APIs, painfully complicated in early ones. It was a real Rube Goldberg affair in Windows 3.0, but at least the event loop was built into the API. I seem to recall that early Mac developers had to code the event loop themselves! Which is why I snicker whenever I'm reminded of Apple's corporate address.
"Character assassinate"? Please. The O guy is the politico I respect more than any other (and his competition is way, way behind!). Pointing out screwups is a long way from accusing people of incompetence.
Anyway, one big reason I voted for the guy is that he knows that his shit smells.
The problems with whitehouse.gov have and that the Obama people have had adapting to life as federal employees are widely documented. You can find them if you want. Check out the 44 Blog in at washingtonpost.com and various other places.
Cellwriter is not a handwriting recognition program, it's a character recognition program. If I have to input one character at a time, I might as well use an on-screen keyboard, which is faster. But both are slower than being able to write whole words at once.
I never understood why they would choose YouTube over other Internet "channels". It is not exactly a "neutral choice".
Because the White House (from Mr. I-Want-My-Blackberry on down) is now staffed by your basic Web 2.0 geeks who are used to doing everything with certain widely used platforms: YouTube, FaceBook, Blackberry, etc. They're having a hard time adapting to life in a big organization with an established federal IT infrastructure that doesn't know how to support their Macs, is suspicious of any application that hasn't been vetted by their bureaucracy, and is more about security than about communication. It's why whitehouse.gov is still such a mess: the people who are running it are just now learning that there's more to creating a government web site than opening a Blogster account.
I think this Clash of Civilizations, snafus and all, is actually a healthy thing. It will force Obama's tech geeks to think things through and understand the real-world perils of the technology they love so much. And it will force the IT people to adapt the federal infrastructure to a world where online communication has become a central way of getting things done.
I have to admit I find that beast pretty tempting, despite the issues I mentioned when responding to catmistake/pudge's mindless rant. It's worth noting that the Macmod provides its own handwriting recognition software. I guess they don't trust Inkwell any more than I do.
Pudge, is that you? Let's see, extreme rudeness and contempt for differing opinions, check. Stereotyping of opposing views, check. Mac fanboy, check. Ignoring opposing arguments when he has no answer for them, check.
And who but an editor would create a sock puppet just to flame me?
OK. You need to pull your head out of the Microsoft hole at least once every 10 years to see what's really going on out there.
And you need to stop assuming that everybody else lives under a rock, like you. I use multiple OSs. I don't currently use MacOS day-to-day, I do track developments for that platform. Rather more, I'm guessing than you track non-Mac platforms.
OS X runs on x86.
Small detail: Apple does not make a tablet. There are third-party hackup of Apple laptops, and theoretically I could ignore the legalities and install MacOS on my Motion tablet (now there's a non-trivial project!). But these are both evil kludges that are not supported by Apple. No thanks. Vista may be crap, but at least it's officially supported for my platform, it runs my apps without my jumping through hoops (well, most of the time), and it's actually designed for the hardware I'm using.
Apple's Inkwell handwriting technology has been around and beloved since the days of Newton (i.e. Apple).
OK, it's news to me that Inkwell had been ported to the Mac. Not that I'm excited. I used it in its original Newton incarnation. Supposedly they've since fixed its notoriously poor recognition code, but it had so many other issues (punctuation is not part of a word's spelling!) that I'm damned wary of it. And Apple's not bothering to create hardware that uses it doesn't make me any less wary.
Perhaps Vista's recognition is a little better at the moment... but who cares, OS X pummels Vista in to a quivering mass of junk that it is...
In other words, you don't know or care whether Inkwell is a serious alternative to what I'm using. You just want to remind us all that the Mac Fanboy is the only life form with a glimmer of intelligence.
Right you are. I've been hearing about ARM netbooks so much, I just assumed that they were already in the wild. I guess this is like those blockbuster movie ads on TV that play over and over until you're sick of them, and then, just when you think you've been seeing them forever, they start saying "Opens in two weeks!"
Lots of ARM netbooks out there. It's an obvious market (because of ARM's low power requirements), and a big reason so many netbooks run Linux rather than Windows. Though I suspect serious ARM zealots wish they ran RISC OS!
I'm more intrigued by the use of Linux in a touch screen device. I have a tablet that runs Windows Vista solely because it's the only x86 OS with serious handwriting recognition. I thoroughly despise Vista (nobody despises Vista as much as somebody who's stuck with it) and I'd look very hard at any alternative that seriously exploits the tablet model.
It's a pretty good product--the only bad thing about it is from the publisher's standpoint, since IIRC it requires you to prepare your books in a new format (which is a not-insignificant undertaking) and Amazon has near-complete control over the pricing structure. (The pricing structure thing hurts authors, too.)
Speaking as an author who's had to deal with format issues, I'm hear to tell you that they have to do it anyway.
Don't want to overstate my experience as a mass-market writer. Most of what I've written is obscure, boring technical documentation only a few specialists ever read. But a couple years ago, I got a writing contract with Sun to help update the Java Tutorial, which had been neglected for a really long time. This document is still authored in a kludgy preprocessed HTML system designed over a decade ago. The preprocessor (which was somebody's very first Perl program!) is this evil thing that was designed to generate both web content and PDFs for the printed version. I'm just good enough with Perl and HTML/CSS to update the web generator so the tutorial pages had a more modern look and feel, but I would have been totally out of my depth making the PDF generator work.
Fortunately, that wasn't my problem. For this revision, Sun had agreed with the publisher that converting the HTML into PDF was the publisher's job. Instead of trying to get our old, kludgy setup working, they hired this consultant to convert our HTML to XML, which could then be fed into an off-the-shelf XSL-FO processor to create the PDF. I was extremely skeptical that he could pull this off, but in fact he did an excellent job.
The bottom line here is that publishers already have to think about delivering to multiple formats: PDF, HTML (with automatically generated navigation), WAP, and now eBooks. It's helpful, but not absolutely necessary, that the original content be authored in XML or SGML. The main reason to use these formats actually has more to do with maintaining large document bases and reusing content.
When I saw that the link was to a technology blog, my first thought was maybe I should subscribe to it. Then the guy spends 425 words on a particularly lame rant about a supposed product defect (if it's defective, why didn't he return it for a refund instead of demanding that Amazon replace it?) and customer service that refused to see it his way.
Lost interest in the rest of the post, never mind subscribing to the blog. Bloggers really need to get over themselves.
To me "early" means 3.0, the first version of Windows that had a serious feature set, and that was widely adopted. But I believe that the code example I was talking about goes back to 2.0 at least.
I did once glance at the 1.0 version of Petzold's book. Didn't check out the "hello world" example, but it's interesting to note that in this version, Windows is described as a "Presentation Manager" for PC-DOS! This fits in with the original joint Microsoft-IBM plan to abandon DOS once a real OS had been created. (In OS/2, the "Presentation Manager" is the GUI subsystem.) So perhaps the 1.0 feature set reflects the assumption that Windows was just lipstick on a pig, not the complete new animal.
Now the consumer electronics industry just needs to convert everything over to run on DC and I'm all set.
Not asking for much, are you? With a little hacking, you can probably adapt all your devices that already use wall-wart DC. But don't expect a basic change in your lifetime. Consolidated Edison just finished a changeover that went the other way, and it took them 79 years. The original plan, their final white flag in he Current Wars, was for 45 years. That turned out to be too optimistic!
And this was for just one city! And it was in a country where AC had long been the dominant current format. I can't see a similar national changeover in less than a century.
Besides, the original reason that AC triumphed over DC still applies. No matter how many people have solar cells on their roofs, most power will still be centrally generated, and you'll need to access it as a backup on cloudy days. As of now, AC is the only way to transmit power long distances efficiently. I've been hearing talk of "high energy DC" for this purpose, but that's decades in the future, if it's doable at all.
You'll just have to buy a rectifier. Inefficient, but that's the price of backward compatibility!
This reminds me a lot of some nonsense Charles Petzold wrote in an early edition of "Programming Windows". As you'd expect, he starts with a "hello world" example. One expects such a basic program to be maybe a half-dozen lines, with only a line or two of logic, and the rest syntactic sugar. But Petzold's example covers almost two pages and is extremely dense and complicated code. And while this example is a little less elegant than it could be, there's not actually a lot you can do to make it shorter. He explains this by claiming that the Windows API is extremely powerful, and you can't have power without complexity.
Obvious nonsense. Powerful development environments hide the complexity behind simple idioms. The real problem is that the developers who created the Windows APIs simply didn't bother to think through the use cases that programmers would have to deal with. (To be fair, early Mac and X Window APIs were even worse.) Petzold, out of loyalty to the environment he's documenting, rationalizes this problem away.
Hirai is sort of making the same argument, but only as an afterthought. His main argument is a sort of reverse conspiracy theory, that making the platform hard to program for will has some weird positive benefit. Not clear what he thinks that benefit is — he probably doesn't know himself! In any case, he's just doing a lame "we meant to do that" rationalization.
Again with the vague pronouncements. What does "guaranteed to have their hardware supported by Windows" mean? That Microsoft includes the drivers on its install discs? By that definition, a lot of widely used hardware is not "supported by Windows".
I know this first hand, because I work for Sun, and a big part of my job is seeing to it that the process for installing drivers is properly documented. We do try to get as many of our drivers as we can onto the Windows server install discs. (Expediting that process is a big reason Sun is now a Microsoft OEM, despite past battles between the two companies.) But there are always new devices that Microsoft hasn't certified yet.
And we have exactly the same relationship with Red Hat and Novell, so they can certify our drivers for inclusion on their Linux distros. And I could be mistaken, but it's my perception that the process goes a little faster with Red Hat and SUSE, because these distros, like all Linux distros, are open source.
So whatever your reasons for preferring Windows to Linux, they should not include "guaranteed hardware support". Red Hat and SUSE are just as good in this department, and arguably a little better.
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You can sue for anything. The hard part is finding a jury that can get past the initial "EEEEWWW!"
Is that joke supposed to be racist, or just lame? Either way, it goes right by me.
1200? You wish. Try 2100! Or were you referring to the cost of a conversion?
Pudge, is that you?
You mean a keyboard-optional (or no keyboard) Mac Air with a digitizer.
The digitizer (most tablets seem to license pressure-sensitive Wacom technology, even though that's overkill for non-artists) is the probably the deal-breaker. It adds hundreds of dollars to the cost of manufacturing the thing. Tablets that run Windows cater to a relatively small user niche, but it's a niche within the huge PC marketplace, so they can scrape together enough customers to stay in business.
Macs cater to a niche marketplace to begin with, so a tablet would be a niche within a niche. It's hard enough for Apple to turn a profit with their relatively small customer base. It's that much harder to make profit selling a system that would appeal to even fewer users and cost much more to manufacture.
Pudge, is that you?
Yep, sounds like pudge. He's the only person who can call you 20 different names, then accuse you of being rude.
The really ironic part is that Windows tablets exist because they've been one of Bill Gates's pet projects!
I actually have an "artsy type" nephew you uses a tablet display connected to a Mac. It's one of those Wacom input tablets with a built-in display. So the "artsy" customer niche is satisfied, if they don't want portability.
Snipers are boring.
You can do that in Windows 3.0 too. Perhaps Petzold should have used that as an initial example.
Or not. No real world GUI application just does one thing and exits. If you want your "hello world" example to be a basic program you can build on, it has to be a program that knows about events, even if the only event it handles is "program start".
Easy in modern APIs, painfully complicated in early ones. It was a real Rube Goldberg affair in Windows 3.0, but at least the event loop was built into the API. I seem to recall that early Mac developers had to code the event loop themselves! Which is why I snicker whenever I'm reminded of Apple's corporate address.
"Character assassinate"? Please. The O guy is the politico I respect more than any other (and his competition is way, way behind!). Pointing out screwups is a long way from accusing people of incompetence.
Anyway, one big reason I voted for the guy is that he knows that his shit smells.
The problems with whitehouse.gov have and that the Obama people have had adapting to life as federal employees are widely documented. You can find them if you want. Check out the 44 Blog in at washingtonpost.com and various other places.
Cellwriter is not a handwriting recognition program, it's a character recognition program. If I have to input one character at a time, I might as well use an on-screen keyboard, which is faster. But both are slower than being able to write whole words at once.
I never understood why they would choose YouTube over other Internet "channels". It is not exactly a "neutral choice".
Because the White House (from Mr. I-Want-My-Blackberry on down) is now staffed by your basic Web 2.0 geeks who are used to doing everything with certain widely used platforms: YouTube, FaceBook, Blackberry, etc. They're having a hard time adapting to life in a big organization with an established federal IT infrastructure that doesn't know how to support their Macs, is suspicious of any application that hasn't been vetted by their bureaucracy, and is more about security than about communication. It's why whitehouse.gov is still such a mess: the people who are running it are just now learning that there's more to creating a government web site than opening a Blogster account.
I think this Clash of Civilizations, snafus and all, is actually a healthy thing. It will force Obama's tech geeks to think things through and understand the real-world perils of the technology they love so much. And it will force the IT people to adapt the federal infrastructure to a world where online communication has become a central way of getting things done.
I have to admit I find that beast pretty tempting, despite the issues I mentioned when responding to catmistake/pudge's mindless rant. It's worth noting that the Macmod provides its own handwriting recognition software. I guess they don't trust Inkwell any more than I do.
Pudge, is that you? Let's see, extreme rudeness and contempt for differing opinions, check. Stereotyping of opposing views, check. Mac fanboy, check. Ignoring opposing arguments when he has no answer for them, check.
And who but an editor would create a sock puppet just to flame me?
OK. You need to pull your head out of the Microsoft hole at least once every 10 years to see what's really going on out there.
And you need to stop assuming that everybody else lives under a rock, like you. I use multiple OSs. I don't currently use MacOS day-to-day, I do track developments for that platform. Rather more, I'm guessing than you track non-Mac platforms.
OS X runs on x86.
Small detail: Apple does not make a tablet. There are third-party hackup of Apple laptops, and theoretically I could ignore the legalities and install MacOS on my Motion tablet (now there's a non-trivial project!). But these are both evil kludges that are not supported by Apple. No thanks. Vista may be crap, but at least it's officially supported for my platform, it runs my apps without my jumping through hoops (well, most of the time), and it's actually designed for the hardware I'm using.
Apple's Inkwell handwriting technology has been around and beloved since the days of Newton (i.e. Apple).
OK, it's news to me that Inkwell had been ported to the Mac. Not that I'm excited. I used it in its original Newton incarnation. Supposedly they've since fixed its notoriously poor recognition code, but it had so many other issues (punctuation is not part of a word's spelling!) that I'm damned wary of it. And Apple's not bothering to create hardware that uses it doesn't make me any less wary.
Perhaps Vista's recognition is a little better at the moment... but who cares, OS X pummels Vista in to a quivering mass of junk that it is...
In other words, you don't know or care whether Inkwell is a serious alternative to what I'm using. You just want to remind us all that the Mac Fanboy is the only life form with a glimmer of intelligence.
Right you are. I've been hearing about ARM netbooks so much, I just assumed that they were already in the wild. I guess this is like those blockbuster movie ads on TV that play over and over until you're sick of them, and then, just when you think you've been seeing them forever, they start saying "Opens in two weeks!"
Lots of ARM netbooks out there. It's an obvious market (because of ARM's low power requirements), and a big reason so many netbooks run Linux rather than Windows. Though I suspect serious ARM zealots wish they ran RISC OS!
I'm more intrigued by the use of Linux in a touch screen device. I have a tablet that runs Windows Vista solely because it's the only x86 OS with serious handwriting recognition. I thoroughly despise Vista (nobody despises Vista as much as somebody who's stuck with it) and I'd look very hard at any alternative that seriously exploits the tablet model.
It's a pretty good product--the only bad thing about it is from the publisher's standpoint, since IIRC it requires you to prepare your books in a new format (which is a not-insignificant undertaking) and Amazon has near-complete control over the pricing structure. (The pricing structure thing hurts authors, too.)
Speaking as an author who's had to deal with format issues, I'm hear to tell you that they have to do it anyway.
Don't want to overstate my experience as a mass-market writer. Most of what I've written is obscure, boring technical documentation only a few specialists ever read. But a couple years ago, I got a writing contract with Sun to help update the Java Tutorial, which had been neglected for a really long time. This document is still authored in a kludgy preprocessed HTML system designed over a decade ago. The preprocessor (which was somebody's very first Perl program!) is this evil thing that was designed to generate both web content and PDFs for the printed version. I'm just good enough with Perl and HTML/CSS to update the web generator so the tutorial pages had a more modern look and feel, but I would have been totally out of my depth making the PDF generator work.
Fortunately, that wasn't my problem. For this revision, Sun had agreed with the publisher that converting the HTML into PDF was the publisher's job. Instead of trying to get our old, kludgy setup working, they hired this consultant to convert our HTML to XML, which could then be fed into an off-the-shelf XSL-FO processor to create the PDF. I was extremely skeptical that he could pull this off, but in fact he did an excellent job.
The really ironic part was that the PDF then got converted back to HTML for the Safari Books Online version. Although I'm reasonable proud of the look and feel I created for the original version, Safari's version is better.
The bottom line here is that publishers already have to think about delivering to multiple formats: PDF, HTML (with automatically generated navigation), WAP, and now eBooks. It's helpful, but not absolutely necessary, that the original content be authored in XML or SGML. The main reason to use these formats actually has more to do with maintaining large document bases and reusing content.
When I saw that the link was to a technology blog, my first thought was maybe I should subscribe to it. Then the guy spends 425 words on a particularly lame rant about a supposed product defect (if it's defective, why didn't he return it for a refund instead of demanding that Amazon replace it?) and customer service that refused to see it his way.
Lost interest in the rest of the post, never mind subscribing to the blog. Bloggers really need to get over themselves.
I stand corrected. Should have done a little googling.
The fact remains that most of our infrasructure is AC, and it's not going to be replaced by DC in our lifetimes.
To me "early" means 3.0, the first version of Windows that had a serious feature set, and that was widely adopted. But I believe that the code example I was talking about goes back to 2.0 at least.
I did once glance at the 1.0 version of Petzold's book. Didn't check out the "hello world" example, but it's interesting to note that in this version, Windows is described as a "Presentation Manager" for PC-DOS! This fits in with the original joint Microsoft-IBM plan to abandon DOS once a real OS had been created. (In OS/2, the "Presentation Manager" is the GUI subsystem.) So perhaps the 1.0 feature set reflects the assumption that Windows was just lipstick on a pig, not the complete new animal.
Now the consumer electronics industry just needs to convert everything over to run on DC and I'm all set.
Not asking for much, are you? With a little hacking, you can probably adapt all your devices that already use wall-wart DC. But don't expect a basic change in your lifetime. Consolidated Edison just finished a changeover that went the other way, and it took them 79 years. The original plan, their final white flag in he Current Wars, was for 45 years. That turned out to be too optimistic!
And this was for just one city! And it was in a country where AC had long been the dominant current format. I can't see a similar national changeover in less than a century.
Besides, the original reason that AC triumphed over DC still applies. No matter how many people have solar cells on their roofs, most power will still be centrally generated, and you'll need to access it as a backup on cloudy days. As of now, AC is the only way to transmit power long distances efficiently. I've been hearing talk of "high energy DC" for this purpose, but that's decades in the future, if it's doable at all.
You'll just have to buy a rectifier. Inefficient, but that's the price of backward compatibility!
This reminds me a lot of some nonsense Charles Petzold wrote in an early edition of "Programming Windows". As you'd expect, he starts with a "hello world" example. One expects such a basic program to be maybe a half-dozen lines, with only a line or two of logic, and the rest syntactic sugar. But Petzold's example covers almost two pages and is extremely dense and complicated code. And while this example is a little less elegant than it could be, there's not actually a lot you can do to make it shorter. He explains this by claiming that the Windows API is extremely powerful, and you can't have power without complexity.
Obvious nonsense. Powerful development environments hide the complexity behind simple idioms. The real problem is that the developers who created the Windows APIs simply didn't bother to think through the use cases that programmers would have to deal with. (To be fair, early Mac and X Window APIs were even worse.) Petzold, out of loyalty to the environment he's documenting, rationalizes this problem away.
Hirai is sort of making the same argument, but only as an afterthought. His main argument is a sort of reverse conspiracy theory, that making the platform hard to program for will has some weird positive benefit. Not clear what he thinks that benefit is — he probably doesn't know himself! In any case, he's just doing a lame "we meant to do that" rationalization.
Again with the vague pronouncements. What does "guaranteed to have their hardware supported by Windows" mean? That Microsoft includes the drivers on its install discs? By that definition, a lot of widely used hardware is not "supported by Windows".
I know this first hand, because I work for Sun, and a big part of my job is seeing to it that the process for installing drivers is properly documented. We do try to get as many of our drivers as we can onto the Windows server install discs. (Expediting that process is a big reason Sun is now a Microsoft OEM, despite past battles between the two companies.) But there are always new devices that Microsoft hasn't certified yet.
And we have exactly the same relationship with Red Hat and Novell, so they can certify our drivers for inclusion on their Linux distros. And I could be mistaken, but it's my perception that the process goes a little faster with Red Hat and SUSE, because these distros, like all Linux distros, are open source.
So whatever your reasons for preferring Windows to Linux, they should not include "guaranteed hardware support". Red Hat and SUSE are just as good in this department, and arguably a little better.