Besides, I'm not sure what the poster's implication is... 1080i is "full HD", isn't it? Isn't this essentially what that is? 1080p split into two interleaved streams...
If you read the article, though, it's basically an ad for Palantir, a commercial product that's only become mature in the last couple years (long after most DCGS-A investment was made). Palantir is also a very, very expensive single-sourced product with a high per-seat licensing cost. Faced with the decision of having already spent a couple billion and the engineers tell you for a few million more they can have the system working, versus throwing it all away and buying an unproven commercial product that will lock the Government into a single vendor, what would you do? Palantir isn't magical-- it's just a semantic graph database that would be once (expensive!) piece in an intel/ops arsenal. Maybe you'd risk everything on this small company, but it's not exactly as clear cut as this article's rhetoric would have you believe.
Of course, I happen to agree with their assessment of DCGS-A, but I would have replaced it with an upgraded CPOF (of course, I'm biased because I worked for the defense contractor that invented CPOF back in the day) that adds the human terrain feeds and visualizations. Everybody's got their pet solution, and everyone wants to rewrite the last guy's code.
Yes, but they're competing against the iPad. The iPad already has options for VPN, VNC, Citrix, encryption, external monitor displays, bluetooth keyboards, Exchange support, remote wipe, restricted settings, etc... Except for the fact that this article is obvious astroturf I'd wonder why the author thinks these things make Cisco's offerings so special.
You can request all your data from Facebook anyway under "Account Settings->Download Your Information". I did... it takes several hours to a day and then you get an email with a download path to all the data you've ever put on Facebook.
While I understand and don't necessarily disagree with your opinion, I'm also reminded that a lot of these arguments could have applied to phones before the iPhone or MP3 players before the iPod Touch. It might be interesting to see what a TV with an embedded iPhone in it, syncing to an iCloud/iTMS could bring. Maybe Apple will even take advantage of the recent rulings that cable/FiOS providers need to lease capacity and essentially become media distribution competitors on the TV just like they are on iDevices.
It's also got GPS, a much better camera, and an IPS screen. And antennae and 3G chips aren't free in either component or integration costs. But really, yeah, it's the value (not cost) of the phone that increases the price the most.
HDMI... cables, how quaint. I stream video wirelessly to the TV via the $99 Apple TV (which also has the best Netflix UI of any device out there) from the iPad2. If you don't want to stream wirelessly, though, I suppose you COULD buy the HDMI cable for the iPad2. I also have a ton of stuff downloaded off the TiVo as well as movies ripped from Handbrake. I'm not sure why you think the iPad can't do this stuff... it does it better than anything else around.
Is a dual core processor at that speed really better than a single-core at 3.6 MHz
Yes, it's almost a thousand times faster:) . Assuming you meant GHz, though, it comes down to battery life. Fast clocks mean lots of switching and deep pipelines which means lots of battery burn. It also helps with responsiveness. If there's always a core around to respond quickly to user events it will seem a lot snappier.
They don't care what you do with your iPad. They care what Best Buy, Target, etc., do, and how it's marketed to the masses. Their enforcement, I suspect, is via allocation of additional supply.
Heck, why artificially set prices at all? Someday everyone will be recharging their electric cars at night and companies will beg us to use electricity during the day instead.
Now that meters are getting high-tech enough, we should just have a spot market for power and buy/sell into that market any time of the day or night.
So the FSF should not put up a web page explaining which licenses they recommend and why, because someone on the Internet might disagree? Seriously?
No, they should title it something other than "How to choose a license for your own work." Perhaps "What license the FSF thinks you should choose for your work."
If all you want is someone to churn out code to a spec, I guess you have a point. But who writes the spec, or turns users needs into practical products, or writes the libraries you use to accomplish your tasks, or even intelligently evaluates the libraries? Programming is only part of a computer science degree, and if you don't have the rest of the fundamentals it's going to take you an extra decade of industry experience before you can hope to be more than a coder.
I agree you should try to get into a "top school" as you term it. There's definitely value in it disproportionate to how much it costs. The US still has the best CS schools in the world. But you shouldn't expect to do well at one of those top schools if you haven't already immersed yourself in the subject. If your high school doesn't offer it, take it as independent study or go online and find materials. Because if the first time you've sat down in front of a compiler (or a whiteboard with some algorithm analysis on it) is when you hit the university, expect to be washed out-- and I don't think that's unreasonable.
They forget to add a USB port to their iPad. Users cry out. Next iteration has a USB port.
iPad2 has exactly the same ports as the original iPad. It comes with a dock connecter-to-USB cable, just like the original. You can buy a USB port adapter, just like the original.
Users discover Apple is tracking them! Users cry out! Next iOS update makes it so they wouldn't have been able to see it in the first place.
No, users discover that their PHONE is tracking them so the phone can give your location to apps. The next update will cut the log retention time to a week and not back it up on the host computer (so it will be less accurate for awhile if you restore from backup, but the data can't be compromised via the backup.)
Why the fuck do people continue to use Apple? Why the hell doesn't Apple want their users to see how they're being tracked and where they're being tracked?
So much for 'thinking different'.
Because they make the best stuff, and their biggest competitor is an advertising agency who REALLY DO track your data and sell it.
"I don’t understand why so many reviewers bend over backwards to grade these things on a curve. If the iPad 2 had the problems and deficiencies the Xoom and PlayBook have, these same reviewers would (rightly) trash it, and declare (again, rightly) that Apple had finally lost its Midas touch. These aren’t “beta” tablets. (...)"
This is a lie. People were all over the first iPad despite all the deficiencies, claiming they were not needed (Some of those being implemented in the second iPad). I haven't touched this RIM tablet (and I won't, I think tablets are pointless for me), but the reviewers' bias for Apple is obvious no matter the state of the market.
He said iPad 2, not iPad. This is 2011. People aren't comparing the PlayBook against a product they'd have to own a time machine to buy... compared to the competition today, the PlayBook appears to be a bad device. It's arguable about whether one would want to buy an iPad 1 (if they still made them) or a PlayBook due to the PlayBook's incomplete software, but that's not relevant to the market today.
Why would Apple want to compete against the folks that are making them all this money? Apple's advantage is iTunes and their app platform, so any acquisition should feed people's ability to buy things on/for their devices.
They could buy Visa with cash on hand, and I think they'd get a lot more for their money.
Well I did say to exclude tablets but I guess I should have said MP3 players, too. Otherwise you are comparing Apple and Oranges. Is there even such a thing as a droid standalone mp3 player? What would be the point? Tablets obviously Droid is barely even mentionable.
Why are you referring to the iPod Touch as a "standalone mp3 player"? Is that what you call the Nintendo DS or PSP families of products? It's an app platform. One of the apps is an mp3 player. The iPhone, in fact, is just an iPod Touch that has hardware support for a "phone" app.
If you're trying to make money writing apps, there's no difference. And besides pissing rights, what other reason is there to break apart OS market share?
That prediction was based on the ridiculously high price of the iPhone, before they lowered it a few hundred dollars.
Which is exactly the same argument being made today regarding iPhone's competitiveness versus Android. I'm not sure why people assume Apple will never compete on price like they did to win the iPod market. A pre-paid iPhone nano (hopefully not an iPhone Shuffle!:) ) is an inevitability someday.
but I might want that to be with standard Linux apps instead of only with Android.
Why? Wouldn't most Linux (or even Windows) apps be a huge pain to use on just a touch screen?
This is the core problem with Android tablets so far. They are currently having trouble bootstrapping their software/hardware co-dependent marketplace. So what is this device really for, then, if it's not going to get many of the best tablet-sized apps being developed on the iPad?
Err, the laptop its actually SITTING ON MY LAP. Opposed to a tablet which I need to hold and use my other hand to control it. I can literally use a laptop with a beer in one hand, but its a lot more tricky with a tablet. You may to rethink this one.
You don't actually own one, apparently. Among the problems everyone I know who has an iPad have mentioned, that's never one of them.
Yeah... I'm not sure where the article submitter lives or got their information, but cities are often just as bad as rural areas for broadband and wireless. Its the suburbs that get it first, since they have lots of nice, evenly spaced houses with telephone poles everywhere and a simple hookup. Rewiring a high-rise or brownstone isn't exactly simple.
Because Best Buy charges $40 for a cable that's $4.99 with free shipping at new egg. Brick and mortar stores have resorted to extorting consumers on certain smaller items for which they can count on people not wanting to wait for a delivery.
Plus, large scale online outfits are probably more "green" that brick and mortar stores anyway. They only operate some offices and warehouses and any delivery fuel usage is mostly offset by deliveries to a brick and mortar store plus the consumer driving to and from the store.
All that is fine and good. If they are more efficient and/or provide better value then they should win in the marketplace. But it should be a fair win, and the sales tax system shouldn't favor buying from out-of-state merchants.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure when this is going to end. Maybe Operating Systems needs to be redesigned with built in security.
Yes, because that's made iOS very popular around here.
Besides, I'm not sure what the poster's implication is... 1080i is "full HD", isn't it? Isn't this essentially what that is? 1080p split into two interleaved streams...
If you read the article, though, it's basically an ad for Palantir, a commercial product that's only become mature in the last couple years (long after most DCGS-A investment was made). Palantir is also a very, very expensive single-sourced product with a high per-seat licensing cost. Faced with the decision of having already spent a couple billion and the engineers tell you for a few million more they can have the system working, versus throwing it all away and buying an unproven commercial product that will lock the Government into a single vendor, what would you do? Palantir isn't magical-- it's just a semantic graph database that would be once (expensive!) piece in an intel/ops arsenal. Maybe you'd risk everything on this small company, but it's not exactly as clear cut as this article's rhetoric would have you believe.
Of course, I happen to agree with their assessment of DCGS-A, but I would have replaced it with an upgraded CPOF (of course, I'm biased because I worked for the defense contractor that invented CPOF back in the day) that adds the human terrain feeds and visualizations. Everybody's got their pet solution, and everyone wants to rewrite the last guy's code.
Yes, but they're competing against the iPad. The iPad already has options for VPN, VNC, Citrix, encryption, external monitor displays, bluetooth keyboards, Exchange support, remote wipe, restricted settings, etc... Except for the fact that this article is obvious astroturf I'd wonder why the author thinks these things make Cisco's offerings so special.
You can request all your data from Facebook anyway under "Account Settings->Download Your Information". I did... it takes several hours to a day and then you get an email with a download path to all the data you've ever put on Facebook.
While I understand and don't necessarily disagree with your opinion, I'm also reminded that a lot of these arguments could have applied to phones before the iPhone or MP3 players before the iPod Touch. It might be interesting to see what a TV with an embedded iPhone in it, syncing to an iCloud/iTMS could bring. Maybe Apple will even take advantage of the recent rulings that cable/FiOS providers need to lease capacity and essentially become media distribution competitors on the TV just like they are on iDevices.
It's also got GPS, a much better camera, and an IPS screen. And antennae and 3G chips aren't free in either component or integration costs. But really, yeah, it's the value (not cost) of the phone that increases the price the most.
HDMI... cables, how quaint. I stream video wirelessly to the TV via the $99 Apple TV (which also has the best Netflix UI of any device out there) from the iPad2. If you don't want to stream wirelessly, though, I suppose you COULD buy the HDMI cable for the iPad2. I also have a ton of stuff downloaded off the TiVo as well as movies ripped from Handbrake. I'm not sure why you think the iPad can't do this stuff... it does it better than anything else around.
Is a dual core processor at that speed really better than a single-core at 3.6 MHz
Yes, it's almost a thousand times faster :) . Assuming you meant GHz, though, it comes down to battery life. Fast clocks mean lots of switching and deep pipelines which means lots of battery burn. It also helps with responsiveness. If there's always a core around to respond quickly to user events it will seem a lot snappier.
They don't care what you do with your iPad. They care what Best Buy, Target, etc., do, and how it's marketed to the masses. Their enforcement, I suspect, is via allocation of additional supply.
Heck, why artificially set prices at all? Someday everyone will be recharging their electric cars at night and companies will beg us to use electricity during the day instead.
Now that meters are getting high-tech enough, we should just have a spot market for power and buy/sell into that market any time of the day or night.
So the FSF should not put up a web page explaining which licenses they recommend and why, because someone on the Internet might disagree? Seriously?
No, they should title it something other than "How to choose a license for your own work." Perhaps "What license the FSF thinks you should choose for your work."
If all you want is someone to churn out code to a spec, I guess you have a point. But who writes the spec, or turns users needs into practical products, or writes the libraries you use to accomplish your tasks, or even intelligently evaluates the libraries? Programming is only part of a computer science degree, and if you don't have the rest of the fundamentals it's going to take you an extra decade of industry experience before you can hope to be more than a coder.
I agree you should try to get into a "top school" as you term it. There's definitely value in it disproportionate to how much it costs. The US still has the best CS schools in the world. But you shouldn't expect to do well at one of those top schools if you haven't already immersed yourself in the subject. If your high school doesn't offer it, take it as independent study or go online and find materials. Because if the first time you've sat down in front of a compiler (or a whiteboard with some algorithm analysis on it) is when you hit the university, expect to be washed out-- and I don't think that's unreasonable.
And besides, there are billions of iPod docking ports out there, so this isn't really going to affect those device manufacturers much anytime soon.
Google also testified today.
Apple sent an Engineering PhD VP to describe the measures they've taken to make sure the potential privacy violations don't happen again.
Google sent a Congressional lobbyist to tell people how wonderful it is that Google can use your personal information to make better products.
They forget to add a USB port to their iPad. Users cry out. Next iteration has a USB port.
iPad2 has exactly the same ports as the original iPad. It comes with a dock connecter-to-USB cable, just like the original. You can buy a USB port adapter, just like the original.
Users discover Apple is tracking them! Users cry out! Next iOS update makes it so they wouldn't have been able to see it in the first place.
No, users discover that their PHONE is tracking them so the phone can give your location to apps. The next update will cut the log retention time to a week and not back it up on the host computer (so it will be less accurate for awhile if you restore from backup, but the data can't be compromised via the backup.)
Why the fuck do people continue to use Apple? Why the hell doesn't Apple want their users to see how they're being tracked and where they're being tracked?
So much for 'thinking different'.
Because they make the best stuff, and their biggest competitor is an advertising agency who REALLY DO track your data and sell it.
"I don’t understand why so many reviewers bend over backwards to grade these things on a curve. If the iPad 2 had the problems and deficiencies the Xoom and PlayBook have, these same reviewers would (rightly) trash it, and declare (again, rightly) that Apple had finally lost its Midas touch. These aren’t “beta” tablets. (...)"
This is a lie. People were all over the first iPad despite all the deficiencies, claiming they were not needed (Some of those being implemented in the second iPad). I haven't touched this RIM tablet (and I won't, I think tablets are pointless for me), but the reviewers' bias for Apple is obvious no matter the state of the market.
He said iPad 2, not iPad. This is 2011. People aren't comparing the PlayBook against a product they'd have to own a time machine to buy... compared to the competition today, the PlayBook appears to be a bad device. It's arguable about whether one would want to buy an iPad 1 (if they still made them) or a PlayBook due to the PlayBook's incomplete software, but that's not relevant to the market today.
...and get slow performance on anything delivered via Akamai or similar services which try to use regional data centers.
OpenDNS and Google DNS are hacks that work increasingly badly.
Why would Apple want to compete against the folks that are making them all this money? Apple's advantage is iTunes and their app platform, so any acquisition should feed people's ability to buy things on/for their devices.
They could buy Visa with cash on hand, and I think they'd get a lot more for their money.
Well I did say to exclude tablets but I guess I should have said MP3 players, too. Otherwise you are comparing Apple and Oranges. Is there even such a thing as a droid standalone mp3 player? What would be the point? Tablets obviously Droid is barely even mentionable.
Why are you referring to the iPod Touch as a "standalone mp3 player"? Is that what you call the Nintendo DS or PSP families of products? It's an app platform. One of the apps is an mp3 player. The iPhone, in fact, is just an iPod Touch that has hardware support for a "phone" app.
If you're trying to make money writing apps, there's no difference. And besides pissing rights, what other reason is there to break apart OS market share?
That prediction was based on the ridiculously high price of the iPhone, before they lowered it a few hundred dollars.
Which is exactly the same argument being made today regarding iPhone's competitiveness versus Android. I'm not sure why people assume Apple will never compete on price like they did to win the iPod market. A pre-paid iPhone nano (hopefully not an iPhone Shuffle! :) ) is an inevitability someday.
but I might want that to be with standard Linux apps instead of only with Android.
Why? Wouldn't most Linux (or even Windows) apps be a huge pain to use on just a touch screen?
This is the core problem with Android tablets so far. They are currently having trouble bootstrapping their software/hardware co-dependent marketplace. So what is this device really for, then, if it's not going to get many of the best tablet-sized apps being developed on the iPad?
Err, the laptop its actually SITTING ON MY LAP. Opposed to a tablet which I need to hold and use my other hand to control it. I can literally use a laptop with a beer in one hand, but its a lot more tricky with a tablet. You may to rethink this one.
You don't actually own one, apparently. Among the problems everyone I know who has an iPad have mentioned, that's never one of them.
Yeah... I'm not sure where the article submitter lives or got their information, but cities are often just as bad as rural areas for broadband and wireless. Its the suburbs that get it first, since they have lots of nice, evenly spaced houses with telephone poles everywhere and a simple hookup. Rewiring a high-rise or brownstone isn't exactly simple.
Because Best Buy charges $40 for a cable that's $4.99 with free shipping at new egg. Brick and mortar stores have resorted to extorting consumers on certain smaller items for which they can count on people not wanting to wait for a delivery.
Plus, large scale online outfits are probably more "green" that brick and mortar stores anyway. They only operate some offices and warehouses and any delivery fuel usage is mostly offset by deliveries to a brick and mortar store plus the consumer driving to and from the store.
All that is fine and good. If they are more efficient and/or provide better value then they should win in the marketplace. But it should be a fair win, and the sales tax system shouldn't favor buying from out-of-state merchants.