Yes, but this is a government contract with specific destruction requirements. Go complain to the feds if you don't like the myth. Or maybe the government knows something we don't. Who knows?
Ah, classic trolling tactic of changing your argument. Why bother? It's all just about opinions. I like convergence so that I don't have to carry multiple devices. I'd rather carry an iPad which does everything I need than a laptop and a smaller, lighter reader. That way I have more functionality all the time. You seem to prefer a dedi reader and (presumably) not a laptop all the time. Fair enough.
On average,I read about two books a month on my iPad and one in dead tree form (something unavailable digitally). I don't have any problems. If you do, then great. Stick with something smaller. Why the contention and arguing? Why the apparent anger? Maybe it's just the lack of nuance in text.
The minute you mention a bluetooth keyboard, you're basically carrying an overpriced crippled laptop around.
Well, no. I said I checked the keyboard. I thus have a lightweight screen to carry. I can use the keyboard in my hotel room. Like I said, I find note-taking on the iPad to be fine.
Laptops are better in flights, you can put them on the table and open the screen instead of having to hold an iPad in your arms. Ever hard to read a 700 page novel in a 10 hour flight constantly holding an iPad in your arms? I would get both a 7" tablet or an e-ink Kindle (actually a Nook Touch - no ads and cheaper) and a cheap laptop for the price, instead of an expensive flashy device that does nothing well.
Well those cheap laptops are usually large and heavy. I don't want to carry that around at all. Smaller and lighter means more expensive.
I'm lucky enough not to have to take long flights. Maybe that would make a difference. I've certainly read for several hours on the iPad, though.
Even so, if one can make do with an iPad alone, it will probably turn out to be better. One less charger to carry. Less weight overall. Less to keep track of or worry about losing.
I can see your obvious bias, so i just have this to say: To each his own.
As someone who regularly reads on an iPad, I'm not really there with you.
- the iPad has much lower pixel density than the Nook Color/ Tablet and Kindle Fire. You can see it. And peopel who read books aren't going to have much love for pixelated text.
I honestly haven't noticed the text being bad. Maybe I just don't know what I'm missing. A double-density display might be nice (comparing the iPad to the iPhone 4, it's noticeable, but not a degraded experience IMO.)
- the iPad screen is horribly, unusably glossy. Basically the only situation in which you are not dealing with awful reflections is indoors when you manage to position the iPad so that no lights are reflected in it. Outdoor use? Forget it. The Nook Color as I said does a lot better.
I agree with this. I got a matte screen protector because of it. I really wish Apple would deal with this problem.
- the iPad is big and bulky for reading. It's not about strength or being too weak to hold up something as light as the iPad, holding something iPad size at arms length for a while gets old really really fast.
I don't hold books at arms length. So I guess I never noticed a difference.
- the iPad is not portable, it is nothing like a book. The Nook Color and similar sized devices like the Kindle Fire fit easily into a jacket pocket or a handbag, the iPad is a pain to carry around in comparison. The iPad is a coffee table device, not a true mobile device.
I carry mine around in a handbag. I can't imagine having a 7" device in my pocket, jacket or otherwise. Heck, I can barely stand having a 3.5" screen phone in my pocket. It swings around annoyingly while I walk.
An iPad is a luxury, \anyone who does any seirous work will also have a laptop. The iPad is osmething you pull out when a laptop is inconvenient.
I never carry a laptop while I travel anymore. iPad in my carryon works great. I might throw a bluetooth keyboard in my checked luggage, if I think I'm going to have to do a whole lot of typing. Simple note-taking is fine without it, as are short, quick e-mails.
The other reason people will buy the Kindle Fire is the same reason people bought those junk $100-120 Android tablets. It's cheap enough to not have to think about.
Maybe. There are certainly more people out there who can afford not to think about a $200 purchase than a $500 purchase. I think $200 is still thought-provoking to most people. And anyone who reads specs (admittedly not most people) should be wary of the limited storage on the Fire. The Nook Tablet at $250 provides double the storage and expandability. If I were looking for a 7" tablet, that's where I'd be looking.
That should be irrelevant. Execution is close to native speed on Android. Heck, on the Desktop, the "Java is slow" is an ancient argument.
And large chunks of Android (along with 99% of the apps) don't use hardware acceleration.
Bingo.
But Amazon should have addressed this. As you say, with the Kindle fire, they essentially have the entire stack. They could have taken advantage of acceleration. And they've got the resources to make that happen.
The iPhone 4S takes full advantage of offloading all UI rendering to the GPU, which makes it seem snappy and responsive.
"seem" is a weasel word. Using the GPU makes it snappy and responsive.
Though there have been times where the keyboard didn't work. USB keyboard, FreeBSD 6ish (two releases iirc), on the installer disk. You had to toggle something in the boot menu, or else the keyboard wouldn't work once you got into the installer.
Both iOS and Android have APIs to help developers trick you into thinking that you're multitasking. They save the state of the app and reload that state when you switch back to it. It's a trick from the old Palm days, and possibly earlier.
And for a huge number of applications, it makes sense. You don't need your magazine app to actually be running while you're playing a game, as long as it gets you back to the page you were on when you switched away.
That said, the same applies for the Nook Tablet, so B&N's comparison still isn't valid.
It's not an Android tablet. It's a Nook Tablet. It may be built on Android, but they are not associating themselves with Android. Just like the Amazon with the Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble is taking control of the platform.
You might as well ask why you can't get a package manager on your TiVo.
Many on Slashdot would say that it's because iOS devices are status symbols. That real, discerning users use Android.
It's because the interface is pleasing to use and doesn't require a lot of customization.
Right. It is a sane set of defaults that work well for most people.
While GNOME's audience right now might be configuration-obsessed Linux users, they're trying to branch out into the audience that includes grandmas and teenagers with this new interface by making it simpler (in the long run, I mean, when people get used to it). I think that's as good of a goal as any, and it's only going to make GNOME more popular in the long run.
Only if they provide good, useful defaults. Low-configuration plus low-usability doesn't usually make something popular.
Apple design is great until someone actually points out an Apple failure. Then the fanboys will try to talk around the issue, marginalize the problem, and marginalize those that are capable of seeing the problem.
I haven't found a perfect phone, computer, or operating system. Every one has its warts. I choose to use the ones which annoy me the least. These tend to be Apple products for things I directly interact with, and Linux (typically Ubuntu) or FreeBSD for things I don't directly touch.
Are there problems with Apple products? Absolutely. There are also problems with Windows and Linux. So I'm not sure I see what you're getting at.
A shiny veneer is great, but some of us just want to get stuff done. Apple's designs aren't all they are hyped to be in this regard.
See, I guess I don't see that.
With (most) Apple products, I find that I spend less time trying to get my computer to work in a way that I can get stuff done, and more time getting stuff done.
Phone devices are a relatively cheap way to find this out for yourself. Hopefully Apple won't manage to litigate competitors out of the market.
Agreed. Without Android, Apple would likely still have a shitty notifications system. Certainly they wouldn't have been able to steal the best UI feature of Android. They might have come up with something as good. I doubt they would do better.
Competition is good, and the patent wars are patently absurd.
I went from a Windows Mobile phone to an iPhone, to and Android. Then I went back to iPhone. There are things about the Android that I loved--the reflowing text when you tap-to-zoom is fantastic. Far and away better than Apple, who only zooms to the DIV element (which might be too large to read, requiring pinch-zooming and then scrolling.) Though I never needed to use it, I like the ability to install third-party software (which isn't available on every Android device, by the way.) And Google had the cloud down long before Apple. The notifications were better than Apple's pre-iOS5. Both of these last two points are now addressed on the iPhone. I also loved that I could view an app manifest in order to know what kinds of things an app was going to have permissions to do, though this wasn't always completely helpful (full internet access was required to view ads--a fairly big permission to do a very common task.)
But ultimately, I felt like I was fighting my Android phone constantly. Scrolling was terrible--I would move my finger across the screen, and about a second later the view would scroll. Apps running in the background slowed my phone down constantly and drained the battery--I had to wipe the phone and install apps one by one until I found which one was doing it (the battery usage screen wasn't showing any third-party app as using a lot of battery.) People could never understand me on the phone--a problem I didn't have before or since (a different Android phone might have fixed that, but it's hard to shop for that particular feature and I don't want to have to return phones until I find one that is usable as a phone.) The mail client (not the Gmail client) was awful. Like something out of the iPhone's first release. I had far more problems with the market, which seemed to auto-update itself and often didn't show me accurate information. And don't get me started on updates. I was running a vulnerable version of the OS for quite some time before I finally rooted and used Cyanogen--more fighting with the phone. Updates to Cyanogen never worked right. Even when I managed to get the update installed, it often utterly killed my performance unless I wiped and reinstalled. Then I had to set a bunch of stuff back up--only some things would be restored from the cloud.
When looking for new phones recently, I realized that there's no coherence for Android devices. Every one is vastly different. On the one hand, this provides more choice. On the other, it's quite overwhelming
This actually seems to be an argument against any protection whatsoever.
Security is about layers. You protect as much as you can, and acknowledge that you can never get 100% protection. Silently hijacking a known good server gets around a lot of things--DNS, SSL, etc. Lots of warning flags that might go up with a wholly fake server won't exist.
All of which just goes to show that the whole PCI-DSS thing is more about legal ass-covering than real security
For the merchant, it's primarily about legal ass-covering. The merchant doesn't care about his customer's credit cards. Why should he? He care much more that a fake card isn't used in his shop. Because the merchant doesn't care about the customer's credit cards, the payment card industry has to make them care by imposing regulations and penalties.
It forces small companies to buy products which do most of that for them. It's a cost of doing business. There's an entire industry of payment processors (think Paypal) that a small web merchant could use to avoid ever having credit cards touch their systems. The processors take a percentage (much like the bank) and the merchant raises the cost of their products accordingly.
some of the standard security policies are dubious anyway,
Absolutely. You'll get no argument from me. But most of them are good security practices that most businesses wouldn't even know are good practices. They absolutely should be doing them if they're going to store my credit card information.
It's all in the PCI DSS, which you can find via Google. Generally speaking, you have to isolate the machine on which the encrypted data is stored. I believe the requirements still call for the machine to be behind a NAT firewall, to be accessed with two-factor authentication, and for passwords to adhere to certain requirements as well as be changed every 90 days. The entire system has to be documented including network diagrams (that you probably won't have from Dropbox--I doubt that a giant cloud would be sufficient, but I could be wrong.)
Payment card data is still payment card data, even if it's encrypted. Ask any QSA. If it's at rest on a machine, there are certain requirements for that machine which encryption does not (solely) satisfy.
Users could have the option to pay for the extra bandwidth via a separate microtransaction API Verizon is developing and hopes to have in place by the end of 2012, Fletcher said.
So it's users paying to be put in a higher priority queue. It's possible that providers would have to pay to license the API, but I didn't see anything about that in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if the publisher allows it.
Yes, but this is a government contract with specific destruction requirements. Go complain to the feds if you don't like the myth. Or maybe the government knows something we don't. Who knows?
Ah, classic trolling tactic of changing your argument. Why bother? It's all just about opinions. I like convergence so that I don't have to carry multiple devices. I'd rather carry an iPad which does everything I need than a laptop and a smaller, lighter reader. That way I have more functionality all the time. You seem to prefer a dedi reader and (presumably) not a laptop all the time. Fair enough.
On average,I read about two books a month on my iPad and one in dead tree form (something unavailable digitally). I don't have any problems. If you do, then great. Stick with something smaller. Why the contention and arguing? Why the apparent anger? Maybe it's just the lack of nuance in text.
The minute you mention a bluetooth keyboard, you're basically carrying an overpriced crippled laptop around.
Well, no. I said I checked the keyboard. I thus have a lightweight screen to carry. I can use the keyboard in my hotel room. Like I said, I find note-taking on the iPad to be fine.
Laptops are better in flights, you can put them on the table and open the screen instead of having to hold an iPad in your arms. Ever hard to read a 700 page novel in a 10 hour flight constantly holding an iPad in your arms? I would get both a 7" tablet or an e-ink Kindle (actually a Nook Touch - no ads and cheaper) and a cheap laptop for the price, instead of an expensive flashy device that does nothing well.
Well those cheap laptops are usually large and heavy. I don't want to carry that around at all. Smaller and lighter means more expensive.
I'm lucky enough not to have to take long flights. Maybe that would make a difference. I've certainly read for several hours on the iPad, though.
Even so, if one can make do with an iPad alone, it will probably turn out to be better. One less charger to carry. Less weight overall. Less to keep track of or worry about losing.
I can see your obvious bias, so i just have this to say: To each his own.
As someone who regularly reads on an iPad, I'm not really there with you.
- the iPad has much lower pixel density than the Nook Color/ Tablet and Kindle Fire. You can see it. And peopel who read books aren't going to have much love for pixelated text.
I honestly haven't noticed the text being bad. Maybe I just don't know what I'm missing. A double-density display might be nice (comparing the iPad to the iPhone 4, it's noticeable, but not a degraded experience IMO.)
- the iPad screen is horribly, unusably glossy. Basically the only situation in which you are not dealing with awful reflections is indoors when you manage to position the iPad so that no lights are reflected in it. Outdoor use? Forget it. The Nook Color as I said does a lot better.
I agree with this. I got a matte screen protector because of it. I really wish Apple would deal with this problem.
- the iPad is big and bulky for reading. It's not about strength or being too weak to hold up something as light as the iPad, holding something iPad size at arms length for a while gets old really really fast.
I don't hold books at arms length. So I guess I never noticed a difference.
- the iPad is not portable, it is nothing like a book. The Nook Color and similar sized devices like the Kindle Fire fit easily into a jacket pocket or a handbag, the iPad is a pain to carry around in comparison. The iPad is a coffee table device, not a true mobile device.
I carry mine around in a handbag. I can't imagine having a 7" device in my pocket, jacket or otherwise. Heck, I can barely stand having a 3.5" screen phone in my pocket. It swings around annoyingly while I walk.
An iPad is a luxury, \anyone who does any seirous work will also have a laptop. The iPad is osmething you pull out when a laptop is inconvenient.
I never carry a laptop while I travel anymore. iPad in my carryon works great. I might throw a bluetooth keyboard in my checked luggage, if I think I'm going to have to do a whole lot of typing. Simple note-taking is fine without it, as are short, quick e-mails.
The other reason people will buy the Kindle Fire is the same reason people bought those junk $100-120 Android tablets. It's cheap enough to not have to think about.
Maybe. There are certainly more people out there who can afford not to think about a $200 purchase than a $500 purchase. I think $200 is still thought-provoking to most people. And anyone who reads specs (admittedly not most people) should be wary of the limited storage on the Fire. The Nook Tablet at $250 provides double the storage and expandability. If I were looking for a 7" tablet, that's where I'd be looking.
based on Java
That should be irrelevant. Execution is close to native speed on Android. Heck, on the Desktop, the "Java is slow" is an ancient argument.
And large chunks of Android (along with 99% of the apps) don't use hardware acceleration.
Bingo.
But Amazon should have addressed this. As you say, with the Kindle fire, they essentially have the entire stack. They could have taken advantage of acceleration. And they've got the resources to make that happen.
The iPhone 4S takes full advantage of offloading all UI rendering to the GPU, which makes it seem snappy and responsive.
"seem" is a weasel word. Using the GPU makes it snappy and responsive.
Whether it's this or something else, I got much worse battery life with Linux on my laptop than with Windows.
I liked Windows 7. I liked iOS when I first tried it. I haven't tried Metro, so I can't speculate.
I hate Unity. It just doesn't fit my workflow, and I can't make it fit my workflow.
I don't mind change when it doesn't get in my way. A slight learning curve is okay, but a steep one or something that simply won't work for me isn't.
The first sentence of the summary says
For years, a business named Compu-Finder has been sending spam all around the province of Quebec, Canada
Is CAN-SPAM Canadian?
Though there have been times where the keyboard didn't work. USB keyboard, FreeBSD 6ish (two releases iirc), on the installer disk. You had to toggle something in the boot menu, or else the keyboard wouldn't work once you got into the installer.
Both iOS and Android have APIs to help developers trick you into thinking that you're multitasking. They save the state of the app and reload that state when you switch back to it. It's a trick from the old Palm days, and possibly earlier.
And for a huge number of applications, it makes sense. You don't need your magazine app to actually be running while you're playing a game, as long as it gets you back to the page you were on when you switched away.
That said, the same applies for the Nook Tablet, so B&N's comparison still isn't valid.
It's not an Android tablet. It's a Nook Tablet. It may be built on Android, but they are not associating themselves with Android. Just like the Amazon with the Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble is taking control of the platform.
You might as well ask why you can't get a package manager on your TiVo.
I agree, but it doesn't stop that opinion from being spouted on every iPhone story, of which there are many these days.
Usability is relative.
Yes, but if you're going to reduce configurability, you damned well better design with usability for as many people as you can.
Many GNOME developers like the new interface
Developers ideas of usability may not align with users ideas of usability.
Then why is iOS so popular?
Many on Slashdot would say that it's because iOS devices are status symbols. That real, discerning users use Android.
It's because the interface is pleasing to use and doesn't require a lot of customization.
Right. It is a sane set of defaults that work well for most people.
While GNOME's audience right now might be configuration-obsessed Linux users, they're trying to branch out into the audience that includes grandmas and teenagers with this new interface by making it simpler (in the long run, I mean, when people get used to it). I think that's as good of a goal as any, and it's only going to make GNOME more popular in the long run.
Only if they provide good, useful defaults. Low-configuration plus low-usability doesn't usually make something popular.
Apple design is great until someone actually points out an Apple failure. Then the fanboys will try to talk around the issue, marginalize the problem, and marginalize those that are capable of seeing the problem.
I haven't found a perfect phone, computer, or operating system. Every one has its warts. I choose to use the ones which annoy me the least. These tend to be Apple products for things I directly interact with, and Linux (typically Ubuntu) or FreeBSD for things I don't directly touch.
Are there problems with Apple products? Absolutely. There are also problems with Windows and Linux. So I'm not sure I see what you're getting at.
A shiny veneer is great, but some of us just want to get stuff done. Apple's designs aren't all they are hyped to be in this regard.
See, I guess I don't see that.
With (most) Apple products, I find that I spend less time trying to get my computer to work in a way that I can get stuff done, and more time getting stuff done.
Phone devices are a relatively cheap way to find this out for yourself. Hopefully Apple won't manage to litigate competitors out of the market.
Agreed. Without Android, Apple would likely still have a shitty notifications system. Certainly they wouldn't have been able to steal the best UI feature of Android. They might have come up with something as good. I doubt they would do better.
Competition is good, and the patent wars are patently absurd.
I went from a Windows Mobile phone to an iPhone, to and Android. Then I went back to iPhone. There are things about the Android that I loved--the reflowing text when you tap-to-zoom is fantastic. Far and away better than Apple, who only zooms to the DIV element (which might be too large to read, requiring pinch-zooming and then scrolling.) Though I never needed to use it, I like the ability to install third-party software (which isn't available on every Android device, by the way.) And Google had the cloud down long before Apple. The notifications were better than Apple's pre-iOS5. Both of these last two points are now addressed on the iPhone. I also loved that I could view an app manifest in order to know what kinds of things an app was going to have permissions to do, though this wasn't always completely helpful (full internet access was required to view ads--a fairly big permission to do a very common task.)
But ultimately, I felt like I was fighting my Android phone constantly. Scrolling was terrible--I would move my finger across the screen, and about a second later the view would scroll. Apps running in the background slowed my phone down constantly and drained the battery--I had to wipe the phone and install apps one by one until I found which one was doing it (the battery usage screen wasn't showing any third-party app as using a lot of battery.) People could never understand me on the phone--a problem I didn't have before or since (a different Android phone might have fixed that, but it's hard to shop for that particular feature and I don't want to have to return phones until I find one that is usable as a phone.) The mail client (not the Gmail client) was awful. Like something out of the iPhone's first release. I had far more problems with the market, which seemed to auto-update itself and often didn't show me accurate information. And don't get me started on updates. I was running a vulnerable version of the OS for quite some time before I finally rooted and used Cyanogen--more fighting with the phone. Updates to Cyanogen never worked right. Even when I managed to get the update installed, it often utterly killed my performance unless I wiped and reinstalled. Then I had to set a bunch of stuff back up--only some things would be restored from the cloud.
When looking for new phones recently, I realized that there's no coherence for Android devices. Every one is vastly different. On the one hand, this provides more choice. On the other, it's quite overwhelming
They wanted them to leave the building. They needed to be tested in a variety of conditions, not just all in relatively small location.
The ones on Slashdot claiming that Android beats Apple in terms of experience clearly don't see the problem.
This actually seems to be an argument against any protection whatsoever.
Security is about layers. You protect as much as you can, and acknowledge that you can never get 100% protection. Silently hijacking a known good server gets around a lot of things--DNS, SSL, etc. Lots of warning flags that might go up with a wholly fake server won't exist.
I didn't know that they advertised it like that. Yeah, that's pretty crappy.
If their website became compromised, they could redirect to a fake payment processor to steal credit cards.
All of which just goes to show that the whole PCI-DSS thing is more about legal ass-covering than real security
For the merchant, it's primarily about legal ass-covering. The merchant doesn't care about his customer's credit cards. Why should he? He care much more that a fake card isn't used in his shop. Because the merchant doesn't care about the customer's credit cards, the payment card industry has to make them care by imposing regulations and penalties.
It forces small companies to buy products which do most of that for them. It's a cost of doing business. There's an entire industry of payment processors (think Paypal) that a small web merchant could use to avoid ever having credit cards touch their systems. The processors take a percentage (much like the bank) and the merchant raises the cost of their products accordingly.
some of the standard security policies are dubious anyway,
Absolutely. You'll get no argument from me. But most of them are good security practices that most businesses wouldn't even know are good practices. They absolutely should be doing them if they're going to store my credit card information.
It's all in the PCI DSS, which you can find via Google. Generally speaking, you have to isolate the machine on which the encrypted data is stored. I believe the requirements still call for the machine to be behind a NAT firewall, to be accessed with two-factor authentication, and for passwords to adhere to certain requirements as well as be changed every 90 days. The entire system has to be documented including network diagrams (that you probably won't have from Dropbox--I doubt that a giant cloud would be sufficient, but I could be wrong.)
So you're advocating not being compliant?
Payment card data is still payment card data, even if it's encrypted. Ask any QSA. If it's at rest on a machine, there are certain requirements for that machine which encryption does not (solely) satisfy.
Users could have the option to pay for the extra bandwidth via a separate microtransaction API Verizon is developing and hopes to have in place by the end of 2012, Fletcher said.
So it's users paying to be put in a higher priority queue. It's possible that providers would have to pay to license the API, but I didn't see anything about that in the article.