For traveling the $99 new (a lot less than that used) is awesome for those hotels that are stuck in wired land. It's a light, small, full-featured wireless router that turns your hotel room cat5 connection into something for all your devices.
You cannot truly use an iPad for production, i.e writing, video editing, programming, etc.
This is the conventional wisdom. It's not really true, though-- the production apps just have to catch up to the interaction metaphors. There are already people saying the new iMovie feels like what iMovie on the desktop was supposed to be. And Adobe seems to think Photoshop is going to be big on the iPad. Garageband is already augmenting the way some musicians work. While no one I know is coding directly on an iPad, it's certainly more than "consumption". I'd say it's wonderful for "augmented production", especially with the new I/O capabilities of the iPad2.
I don't think Microsoft will produce a credible product until they let the "Slate" name go. A slate is something you write on with a writing utensil... it evokes a relatively specific type of product, descended from pieces of rock. I made fun of the "pad" name as much as anyone when it was announced, but at least there are all kinds of pads out there.
Yeah... major astroturfing by Microsoft lately (including some newer Slashdot users to post happy messages), but the final sentence of the summary takes the cake:
Ultimately, this prevents the market being swamped, but above this, there seems to be a layer of games by big publishers (EA, etc) that just step past the smaller developers in the queue. This is the biggest drawback of the system.'
No... the biggest drawback of the system is that there are almost no customers to buy your app, so anything more than a quick port is uneconomical... and a quick port from iOS or Android (which is more important than XBox as a source of porting material) is impossible since W7 has no vanilla C/C++ and OpenGL ES.
Or perhaps because many of these businesses can only afford to pay these people so much because they corrupted the government and got bailouts and handouts?
Or perhaps the "bailouts" were actually loans that are being repaid with interest, and the Government was working for the benefit of the people, who are better off with a strong financial system?
My guess is this article was written on behalf of some of his friends at Google, who's trying to hire from the same pool of engineers that Goldman's is in NYC. Because, you know, advertising is SO much more noble a profession than determining how to provide capital to innovative startups.
Re-read the article summary from the point of view of someone who works for Goldman Sachs (disclosure: I do), and I think you'll find that while perhaps such a discussion isn't out of line, this article sure does "demonize" finance.
And good luck getting those thousand green and innovative startups going without any capital investment.
Just because someone once used a similar phrase in the past it doesn't mean it can't be trademarked today. We're not talking about patents. Acorn certainly isn't using it anymore, and there would be little confusion between an iPad and an Acorn OS machine. Besides, to my knowledge Acorn never actually used "App Store". As for Symbian, I'm sure they're safe from Apple's lawyers with their "application shop"-- in fact they can probably trademark that one themselves.
Apple has historically used "Application" as its descriptive term for this stuff. MacOS's place to put programs is called the "Applications" folder, while Windows used "Program Files". When the iPhone came around, they just shortened it to App, and the phrase became immediately descriptive for what it was-- a tiny application that ran on an embedded device. So an App is a little Application. And a store is where you buy them. But *the* "App Store" is Apple's place to sell iOS apps, and no one else was using that particular phraseology that I know of before them.
If anything, Apple's biggest challenge is going to be to prove that they themselves didn't ever use it generically, since they were brought rather reluctantly into the proprietary app business when developers refused to use HTML as the way to make iPhone software.
And does your phone spend most of its time running natively compiled C code or a Java-like garbage collecting JVM? Apple's toolchain is improving pretty rapidly, so with LLVM coming online I'd expect the same 256MB to provide more utility, let alone doubling it to 512MB. I was complaining about 256MB with the original iPad, but it doesn't actually seem to affect my usage much and now all the developers know how to write really tight code so 512MB really does seem like swimming in RAM.
The VW TDI cars are excellent cars, but Diesel is now so expensive that despite their phenomenal mileage they're still not economical. I now pay at least $0.20 more per gallon than premium unleaded around here.
", I can't imagine why anybody would *want* a camera in that device, but someone must because it's one of the things I see people bitching about the most."
The front-facing camera has obvious utility for video chatting. The back-facing one, in my mind, is for vertical-market purposes. If you've got iPads in a warehouse tracking inventory it would be nice to scan a barcode... Or hospital records, etc.
I just had mental a picture of Data or Dr. Who saying, "We could use thermal nanotape to reduce thermal cycling with carbon nanotubes" and me snickering at the blatant pseudoscience jargon.
Except that Google *DID* distribute the copyrighted code in question, even if they didn't put it into the handsets. So it's actually this story that's wrong-- Google did, in fact, violate the copyright. Does that mean Slashdot should stop posting pro-Google stories for a couple days? Your point doesn't make much sense to me.
More to the point, the company needs a plan. "Work hard until you're profitable" is like throwing an less-than-infinite amount of monkeys at the problem. If they had a 6-month product plan with a reasonable chance of success and some employee stake (profit sharing, bonuses, stock, options, whatever) people can do great things. And after 6 months they'll have a pretty good idea where they stand. But don't focus on hours worked... Come up with some better metrics and milestones. Buyers of products don't care how many hours the employees worked.
It's probably true that at the lowest levels, "software engineer" and "programmer" are used interchangeably these days. But as soon as you start throwing around the prefix "Senior", the requirements for the software engineering side go up fast. I've known folks who can write code but have never even heard of "big-O" notation, let alone studied data structure analysis for years. "Programmer" is traditionally a two-year degree from a college on a particular language, while "Software Engineer" is a four-year University degree including language-independent computational theory.
The expectation should be that your $600 tablet does, out-of-the-box, at least $600 worth of stuff. If it happens to run Honeycomb or some other OS later on, then that's a great bonus for you.
That's all well and good, but the 800lb gorilla in the tablet room is Apple and they've set higher expectations. The last major iPad OS upgrade was free for all iPad owners and capable of running on current hardware, and it's likely the next one will be as well. At this point, the "expectation" of any Android device should be that it competes well against the alternatives on the market.
I'm often modded troll when I claim that every advancement in computer processing power has been absorbed by look and feel of the OS interface.
To put it another way, all the processing power recently has been put toward making computers more accessible and engaging to people and feel like actual appliances instead of obscure gadgets. Sign me up!
However, I don't think you're looking at the whole picture. A typical data center's 32-core powerhouses aren't rendering GUIs. The client machines spend their additional cycles making things look better while the servers spend their additional cycles crunching additional data. Again, I don't seem to have the same problem with this that you do.
>Volume is also a much bigger deal due to market share. If android outsells apple 10 to 1, and apple makes the same profit on the device, apple isn't making the same profit on any additional profits to the device due to having 10% of the volume (app store purchases, advertising, etc).
You're making some pretty big assumptions. Right now Android is significantly less market share than iOS (although in the phone space they're about even, iOS also has iPod Touch and iPads selling millions a month). And Apple has fantastic economies of scale. Imagining Android pulling ahead 10-to-1 is some mighty wishful thinking. And in the meantime, Apple can re-invest the profit its making into better products and better manufacturing/distribution.
In the iPod market, Apple didn't go bottom of the barrel but they did go much, much cheaper than just sticking to the top 10% of the market. They maintain about a 70-80% share of the MP3 market despite not being the cheapest. And no one can seem to match the iPad at $499 yet. The thinking that Apple only sticks to the high end forever is wishful thinking and about a decade out of date.
What's so different about this Samsung compared to the range of Archos Android devices...
The Archos uses resistive touch screen with much lower resolution. It doesn't connect to the Android Marketplace for apps. They're not built in any quantity so are always "Out of Stock" (go ahead... I dare you to try to actually buy a 43it). And for that it's basically the same price as the iPod Touch. It's hard to say they're a competitor when almost no one can actually buy one.
Samsung, though, is a household name associated with quality products, and more to the point they operate their own screen and chip fabs so can actually make the things in quantity. I could see an iPod Touch competitor from them actually being real.
if it comes down to the situation where they fire a nuclear weapon at Seoul, or Tokyo, or wherever (thereby killing millions) then there are many who would state that retaliation in kind is the safest option.
The current plan, as far as I'm aware, is that if we got indication that they were about to launch an attack, we'd hit them first, and hard. We're a lot more agile than North Korea, and can put ordinance on target a lot quicker and more accurately. Seoul is essentially indefensible, but we have made it very clear that North Korea would lose such a war. They know it.
Thus, this is essentially a negotiating tactic. We tend to reward this behavior with additional talks and humanitarian aid, and they've had a bad year.
If you actually pivot the data, though, you see that while Android preferers are vastly on the male side, iOS preferers are split pretty much 50/50. In other words, it's not that "women prefer iOS" so much as it's that Android only seems to appeal to males while iOS is balanced closer to what would be expected from a random sample.
Sure, it might have "The Edge" - but that doesn't mean its always a good thing.
"The Edge" over what, anyway? These devices aren't going to ship for 3-5 months, by which time they'll be competing against iPad2 and who-knows-what. The fact that the specs are even comparable to this past year's machine kind of indicates it won't have "the edge" in performance over anything.
Linux, the GNU userland and Enlightenment and its foundation libraries (EFL) are known for their resource efficiency and flexibility
This article seems to go out of its way to give GNU undue credit for the Linux environment... can we stop with the blatant GNU plugs and just talk about the technology? Unless you want to start calling Linux "GNU/MIT/BSD/Apache/Linux", let's just stick to the technology.
I agree that the HD in the name is unfortunate since it's usually the name given to iPad software, but there's very little difference in the number of pixels in an iPhone4 (960x640@326dpi) vs an iPad (1024x768@132dpi) so it's not exactly false advertising.
Personally I think the "on rails" comment is comparing it to the tech demo that the Unreal team recently did where you walked around an outdoor castle/town environment with full range of motion. There was no "game" yet, but it was an impressive display of technology.
Slashdot Mirror
For traveling the $99 new (a lot less than that used) is awesome for those hotels that are stuck in wired land. It's a light, small, full-featured wireless router that turns your hotel room cat5 connection into something for all your devices.
You cannot truly use an iPad for production, i.e writing, video editing, programming, etc.
This is the conventional wisdom. It's not really true, though-- the production apps just have to catch up to the interaction metaphors. There are already people saying the new iMovie feels like what iMovie on the desktop was supposed to be. And Adobe seems to think Photoshop is going to be big on the iPad. Garageband is already augmenting the way some musicians work. While no one I know is coding directly on an iPad, it's certainly more than "consumption". I'd say it's wonderful for "augmented production", especially with the new I/O capabilities of the iPad2.
I don't think Microsoft will produce a credible product until they let the "Slate" name go. A slate is something you write on with a writing utensil... it evokes a relatively specific type of product, descended from pieces of rock. I made fun of the "pad" name as much as anyone when it was announced, but at least there are all kinds of pads out there.
Yeah... major astroturfing by Microsoft lately (including some newer Slashdot users to post happy messages), but the final sentence of the summary takes the cake:
Ultimately, this prevents the market being swamped, but above this, there seems to be a layer of games by big publishers (EA, etc) that just step past the smaller developers in the queue. This is the biggest drawback of the system.'
No... the biggest drawback of the system is that there are almost no customers to buy your app, so anything more than a quick port is uneconomical... and a quick port from iOS or Android (which is more important than XBox as a source of porting material) is impossible since W7 has no vanilla C/C++ and OpenGL ES.
Or perhaps because many of these businesses can only afford to pay these people so much because they corrupted the government and got bailouts and handouts?
Or perhaps the "bailouts" were actually loans that are being repaid with interest, and the Government was working for the benefit of the people, who are better off with a strong financial system?
My guess is this article was written on behalf of some of his friends at Google, who's trying to hire from the same pool of engineers that Goldman's is in NYC. Because, you know, advertising is SO much more noble a profession than determining how to provide capital to innovative startups.
Re-read the article summary from the point of view of someone who works for Goldman Sachs (disclosure: I do), and I think you'll find that while perhaps such a discussion isn't out of line, this article sure does "demonize" finance.
And good luck getting those thousand green and innovative startups going without any capital investment.
Just because someone once used a similar phrase in the past it doesn't mean it can't be trademarked today. We're not talking about patents. Acorn certainly isn't using it anymore, and there would be little confusion between an iPad and an Acorn OS machine. Besides, to my knowledge Acorn never actually used "App Store". As for Symbian, I'm sure they're safe from Apple's lawyers with their "application shop"-- in fact they can probably trademark that one themselves.
Apple has historically used "Application" as its descriptive term for this stuff. MacOS's place to put programs is called the "Applications" folder, while Windows used "Program Files". When the iPhone came around, they just shortened it to App, and the phrase became immediately descriptive for what it was-- a tiny application that ran on an embedded device. So an App is a little Application. And a store is where you buy them. But *the* "App Store" is Apple's place to sell iOS apps, and no one else was using that particular phraseology that I know of before them.
If anything, Apple's biggest challenge is going to be to prove that they themselves didn't ever use it generically, since they were brought rather reluctantly into the proprietary app business when developers refused to use HTML as the way to make iPhone software.
My phone has 512MB RAM.
And does your phone spend most of its time running natively compiled C code or a Java-like garbage collecting JVM? Apple's toolchain is improving pretty rapidly, so with LLVM coming online I'd expect the same 256MB to provide more utility, let alone doubling it to 512MB. I was complaining about 256MB with the original iPad, but it doesn't actually seem to affect my usage much and now all the developers know how to write really tight code so 512MB really does seem like swimming in RAM.
The VW TDI cars are excellent cars, but Diesel is now so expensive that despite their phenomenal mileage they're still not economical. I now pay at least $0.20 more per gallon than premium unleaded around here.
", I can't imagine why anybody would *want* a camera in that device, but someone must because it's one of the things I see people bitching about the most."
The front-facing camera has obvious utility for video chatting. The back-facing one, in my mind, is for vertical-market purposes. If you've got iPads in a warehouse tracking inventory it would be nice to scan a barcode... Or hospital records, etc.
I just had mental a picture of Data or Dr. Who saying, "We could use thermal nanotape to reduce thermal cycling with carbon nanotubes" and me snickering at the blatant pseudoscience jargon.
Except that Google *DID* distribute the copyrighted code in question, even if they didn't put it into the handsets. So it's actually this story that's wrong-- Google did, in fact, violate the copyright. Does that mean Slashdot should stop posting pro-Google stories for a couple days? Your point doesn't make much sense to me.
More to the point, the company needs a plan. "Work hard until you're profitable" is like throwing an less-than-infinite amount of monkeys at the problem. If they had a 6-month product plan with a reasonable chance of success and some employee stake (profit sharing, bonuses, stock, options, whatever) people can do great things. And after 6 months they'll have a pretty good idea where they stand. But don't focus on hours worked... Come up with some better metrics and milestones. Buyers of products don't care how many hours the employees worked.
It's probably true that at the lowest levels, "software engineer" and "programmer" are used interchangeably these days. But as soon as you start throwing around the prefix "Senior", the requirements for the software engineering side go up fast. I've known folks who can write code but have never even heard of "big-O" notation, let alone studied data structure analysis for years. "Programmer" is traditionally a two-year degree from a college on a particular language, while "Software Engineer" is a four-year University degree including language-independent computational theory.
The expectation should be that your $600 tablet does, out-of-the-box, at least $600 worth of stuff. If it happens to run Honeycomb or some other OS later on, then that's a great bonus for you.
That's all well and good, but the 800lb gorilla in the tablet room is Apple and they've set higher expectations. The last major iPad OS upgrade was free for all iPad owners and capable of running on current hardware, and it's likely the next one will be as well. At this point, the "expectation" of any Android device should be that it competes well against the alternatives on the market.
I'm often modded troll when I claim that every advancement in computer processing power has been absorbed by look and feel of the OS interface.
To put it another way, all the processing power recently has been put toward making computers more accessible and engaging to people and feel like actual appliances instead of obscure gadgets. Sign me up!
However, I don't think you're looking at the whole picture. A typical data center's 32-core powerhouses aren't rendering GUIs. The client machines spend their additional cycles making things look better while the servers spend their additional cycles crunching additional data. Again, I don't seem to have the same problem with this that you do.
>Volume is also a much bigger deal due to market share. If android outsells apple 10 to 1, and apple makes the same profit on the device, apple isn't making the same profit on any additional profits to the device due to having 10% of the volume (app store purchases, advertising, etc).
You're making some pretty big assumptions. Right now Android is significantly less market share than iOS (although in the phone space they're about even, iOS also has iPod Touch and iPads selling millions a month). And Apple has fantastic economies of scale. Imagining Android pulling ahead 10-to-1 is some mighty wishful thinking. And in the meantime, Apple can re-invest the profit its making into better products and better manufacturing/distribution.
In the iPod market, Apple didn't go bottom of the barrel but they did go much, much cheaper than just sticking to the top 10% of the market. They maintain about a 70-80% share of the MP3 market despite not being the cheapest. And no one can seem to match the iPad at $499 yet. The thinking that Apple only sticks to the high end forever is wishful thinking and about a decade out of date.
The Archos uses resistive touch screen with much lower resolution. It doesn't connect to the Android Marketplace for apps. They're not built in any quantity so are always "Out of Stock" (go ahead... I dare you to try to actually buy a 43it). And for that it's basically the same price as the iPod Touch. It's hard to say they're a competitor when almost no one can actually buy one.
Samsung, though, is a household name associated with quality products, and more to the point they operate their own screen and chip fabs so can actually make the things in quantity. I could see an iPod Touch competitor from them actually being real.
The current plan, as far as I'm aware, is that if we got indication that they were about to launch an attack, we'd hit them first, and hard. We're a lot more agile than North Korea, and can put ordinance on target a lot quicker and more accurately. Seoul is essentially indefensible, but we have made it very clear that North Korea would lose such a war. They know it.
Thus, this is essentially a negotiating tactic. We tend to reward this behavior with additional talks and humanitarian aid, and they've had a bad year.
If you actually pivot the data, though, you see that while Android preferers are vastly on the male side, iOS preferers are split pretty much 50/50. In other words, it's not that "women prefer iOS" so much as it's that Android only seems to appeal to males while iOS is balanced closer to what would be expected from a random sample.
Besides, the software would be prohibitively expensive. See the Denver International Airport's automated bag handling system, which has long-since been abandoned.
"The Edge" over what, anyway? These devices aren't going to ship for 3-5 months, by which time they'll be competing against iPad2 and who-knows-what. The fact that the specs are even comparable to this past year's machine kind of indicates it won't have "the edge" in performance over anything.
This article seems to go out of its way to give GNU undue credit for the Linux environment... can we stop with the blatant GNU plugs and just talk about the technology? Unless you want to start calling Linux "GNU/MIT/BSD/Apache/Linux", let's just stick to the technology.
I agree that the HD in the name is unfortunate since it's usually the name given to iPad software, but there's very little difference in the number of pixels in an iPhone4 (960x640@326dpi) vs an iPad (1024x768@132dpi) so it's not exactly false advertising.
Personally I think the "on rails" comment is comparing it to the tech demo that the Unreal team recently did where you walked around an outdoor castle/town environment with full range of motion. There was no "game" yet, but it was an impressive display of technology.