You make a good case for having a browser tailored to digital newspapers/magazines with a push model. However, I suspect that it's overkill to have a separately-designed one for every newspaper when a single, well-designed one with a standard interface would probably be more effective.
And yes they were great and incredibly popular and I agree with you 100%. Generic push apps do a fine job. Both of them offered plugins so for example in Pointcast I could get my national news from the NYTimes and my local news from my local newspaper. I agree that's the way to go.
And I should state that this is what iTunes is moving towards. There are news aggregators like the early edition, but so far they aren't caching locally: But its happening on these new devices.
That said, as I acknowledged, there *are* legitimate business reasons for each media outlet having its own "app". One can accept these reasons, while still disliking app proliferation from a usability point of view, and the general fact that it's a retrograde step that has no real direct benefit to the end user.
I would separate push and knowledge of the structure which does have real benefit, from a zillion client interfaces which is just based on the fact there is no one playing Bill Gates (who did wonders to promote push in the day) for news content.
If you are doing much text, entry tablets aren't good. But remember most times people are essentially single tasking either:
a) Consuming content b) Writing in a linear fashion
Things like heavy editing would be miserable if not impossible, though light editing would doable. Also don't forget how small the original niche for portables / laptops were. Systems like the IBM 5155 were a niche product. It wasn't until 5 years later that Compaq invented the first portable that people actually liked because it could operate on its own power. And another 2 years later IBM made a mainstream product (Apple was well) and it was still tremendously expensive. In the early 1990s PDA's like the Palm were the rage for portable computing. Work on the palm -> sync with your desktop was how people interfaced. Until about 2000, I used to have to own a laptop for mobile work, and a desktop for horsepower. It wasn't until I bought a Dell Inspiron 8000 (Pentium III 1ghz, 500 megs ram, 50 gig hd) that I moved to laptop with a screen and keyboard. And every time I look at the new Mac Pros and how much power and speed I'm giving up I'm still not sure I'm doing the right thing.
I agree the iPad is a niche product. But for example 2 years ago I was picking a standard laptop for nurses where weight really matters. If I were picking today, I'd want to run some durability tests (like literally seeing how well they do with urine) to figure out how high my breakage would be but an iPad would be a huge contender. They would gladly give up typing speed to go from 3lbs to 1lb.
In the beginning, most users browsed the Internet from similar desktop machines. Even if the operating system was different, standardized web protocols and languages made the final experience similar, whether you were using Windows 3.1 machine or your trusty classic Mac.
Just to add your point. First off he means browsing the web. There was a whole more on the internet other than the web in the days of Windows 3.1 that was a lot more interesting. The AOL users were often first attracted to usenet. And the experience in those days was not remotely similar. We hadn't settled on the web yet, I mainly used usenet and gopher. Some people were on irc others used direct connections like ytalk. On Mac's and Windows machines the applications for these things were widely splintered, and generally quite terrible. I ran a good terminal program and logged onto Unix machines.
And finally he's a few years early. The real wave of non Unix users started in 1995.
I suspect that there is far more content available on the Internet now than there was ten years ago.
If you are suspecting I'll assume you are really young. And yes there is. For example: On March 22, 2001 Wikipedia was two months old and didn't have much of value. Britianica was selling their content cheaply on CDs and Americana was the dominant online encyclopedia.
I don't think you ever tried push technologies in situations where connectivity is questionable. There are substantial advantages to push. Now there is no reason web browsers couldn't have push built in, like I.E. channels or later RSS. But there is real advantage to custom apps that understand the layout of a site and can ask intelligent questions about what to cache locally.
DNS is a fairly easy protocol. If DNS become a tool of censorship you just DNS servers. Most OSes make that pretty easy to do by hand and even easier to give someone a "go uncensored" script. And if port 53 gets censored how long till browsers have a work around? Webkit is open source and there are already a dozen spin off browsers. Firefox would have a patch instantly. Maybe IE has problems but IE has been a problem child for years.
Even bigger change came with the rise of social networks and various web apps. Every day more content is hidden in the walled gardens of the web, like Facebook or Twitter, behind the fence of login and password. Just think about it: how much interesting content have you discovered in your friend’s updates, notes and tweets? This content is invisible to Google and other search engines, it’s not backed up by wayback machine or proxy servers. The number of people seeing only the things recommended by their social circle is growing.
Well that's interesting. He specifically talking about the mid 1980-today and the flat internet. But in the 1980s the internet was not remotely flat. You frequently had to log onto sites and had all sorts of features depending on your IP address that you wouldn't have elsewhere. Passwords and user accounts dominanted and when you got things had a lot to do with the servers directly upstream from you. For example how quickly did your Usenet feeds updated determined what the cycle time was on discussions like this one. And of course there were huge numbers of walled gardens, much more walled then today since they belonged to your ISP. AOL, Prodigy, Genie, Compuserve and smaller sites were very different experiences. Other sites like Odyssey were almost completely walled off and rode piggy back on Compuserve's network as a private virtual walled garden, much like a corporate interanet today using an MPLS.
As for hardware making a difference, it did then too. Unix users had a much richer fuller internet experience.
Oh I see what you were saying. You were focusing on the email part. Sorry terrible way to phrase additional functionality using an example of a feature it does in fact have.
Well I assumed there was some reason they wanted the tablet in and of itself. If not then obviously a Windows laptop you have is better then buying a whole bunch of new stuff.
If you buy Apple products you agree to accept his leadership. And he exercises a strong hand. Adobe has not done enough to prevent the memory leaks, crashes and performance leaks in flash apps so Steve has had enough. But you can put whatever you want on there, including another web browser. Just install the iOS-SDK and push whatever you want through iTunes.
In the PC world Microsoft has a very light touch in moving the direction, and the hardware manufacturers move glacially but that gives you options. The Linux world is more interesting in terms offering diversity on both the hardware and software fronts, real and true freedom. Apple has a more closed system by default but in practice there isn't much difference.
So how is that not a fit. The real computer (the Mac) has Office and has the iWork. The IPad has iWork only which does a 1/2 way decent job of pulling back and forth. Further they might like iWork better.
Smart phones are much tougher on the eyes. When I was 30 I comfortably used a 1600x1200 15" screen. At 40 I was using 1920x1200 at 23" and still sometimes having to boost font sizes.
Read the post I was responding to. You are making an entirely different point, I assume about price. His point was about the need for a smaller form factor.
Heck I'd love to have the original spec of the One Laptop Per Child. A usable netbook that aggressive finds internet connections, durable enough to be mistreated and can operate off a foot pedal. I'd buy that in a second.
What do you mean it hasn't happened? Desktop sales have been flat for 4 years while laptop sales tripled. And by 2008 laptop sales were already greater than desktop sales. Desktops are becoming a niche product for office clerical workers who have fixed seating.
Getting information isn't necessarily playing with a toy. Lots of commuters like to read and use it like a kindle or a nook, but a kindle or nook that also email. Not having a keyboard isn't necessarily a disadvantage if you are going to be using it on a train or subway, especially if you might need to be standing while using it. Etc... Look if you are fully stationary a desktop is better than a laptop. If you need to be portable a laptop is better. If you aren't going to be able to be in an office like environment a tablet is often better.
And my $700 desktop will crush a $3000 laptop in performance. So what? Increase the form factor you decrease the price. The cost and expense of a tablet is making it small and light. Besides a comparison of a $200 laptop bought from Craigslist and a $550 tablet brought brand new with warranty seems to also shaving a bit. I will admit that at around $400 you can start to get laptops these days that are substantially better at processing data, have keyboards and have CD/DVD burners, more storage....
Mainly this article is a list of reasons he wants a large form factor device: he wants a keyboard, he wants lots of ports, he wants a big cheap drive... OK if you want a large form factor device don't buy a small form factor device. Why is that worth mentioning? The much more interesting comparison would be someone who desperately wants the small form factor but has other concerns that push them towards a laptop. Heck I might fall into that category.
The XXX-studies, sociology, and all of all the other leftist propaganda courses have displaced important core courses.
The Western University system was developed to teach theology. Philosophy, ancient cultures, languages, pure mathematics are the core courses. Engineering is by and large a trade and used to be taught in trade schools and before that through apprenticeships. The college system is much less liberal than it was a generation ago, a century ago, a millennia ago.
that no one wants these jobs. "If you are smart enough to do the work, you're smart enough not to work here."
I doubt that. Maybe it is "on one wants these jobs at that price". So raise the price. We have no doubling the cost of gasoline when we need to, double the price of programming.
Trying to impose more barriers to trade... Not to mention that we have the internet now; not letting programmers into the US only drives whole projects off-shore
I don't think you understand how tariffs work. Once the project is offshore then what? You can't use it without paying a large tariff on the transactions.
If you want more Americans hired, you should increase the ease of immigration, not make it harder; it would bring more entrepreneurs to our country, who in turn would employ more Americans.
This is silly. Adding to the labor pool depresses wages. There is nothing magic about labor as contrasted with any other good, increase the supply you decrease the price.
Slashdot Mirror
You make a good case for having a browser tailored to digital newspapers/magazines with a push model. However, I suspect that it's overkill to have a separately-designed one for every newspaper when a single, well-designed one with a standard interface would probably be more effective.
Basically what you are describing is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AvantGo (PDAs) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom)
And yes they were great and incredibly popular and I agree with you 100%. Generic push apps do a fine job. Both of them offered plugins so for example in Pointcast I could get my national news from the NYTimes and my local news from my local newspaper. I agree that's the way to go.
And I should state that this is what iTunes is moving towards. There are news aggregators like the early edition, but so far they aren't caching locally: But its happening on these new devices.
That said, as I acknowledged, there *are* legitimate business reasons for each media outlet having its own "app". One can accept these reasons, while still disliking app proliferation from a usability point of view, and the general fact that it's a retrograde step that has no real direct benefit to the end user.
I would separate push and knowledge of the structure which does have real benefit, from a zillion client interfaces which is just based on the fact there is no one playing Bill Gates (who did wonders to promote push in the day) for news content.
If you are doing much text, entry tablets aren't good. But remember most times people are essentially single tasking either:
a) Consuming content
b) Writing in a linear fashion
Things like heavy editing would be miserable if not impossible, though light editing would doable. Also don't forget how small the original niche for portables / laptops were. Systems like the IBM 5155 were a niche product. It wasn't until 5 years later that Compaq invented the first portable that people actually liked because it could operate on its own power. And another 2 years later IBM made a mainstream product (Apple was well) and it was still tremendously expensive. In the early 1990s PDA's like the Palm were the rage for portable computing. Work on the palm -> sync with your desktop was how people interfaced. Until about 2000, I used to have to own a laptop for mobile work, and a desktop for horsepower. It wasn't until I bought a Dell Inspiron 8000 (Pentium III 1ghz, 500 megs ram, 50 gig hd) that I moved to laptop with a screen and keyboard. And every time I look at the new Mac Pros and how much power and speed I'm giving up I'm still not sure I'm doing the right thing.
I agree the iPad is a niche product. But for example 2 years ago I was picking a standard laptop for nurses where weight really matters. If I were picking today, I'd want to run some durability tests (like literally seeing how well they do with urine) to figure out how high my breakage would be but an iPad would be a huge contender. They would gladly give up typing speed to go from 3lbs to 1lb.
I doubt it. Desktop components are still cheaper than laptops even though the sales ratio is like 4:1 in favor of laptops.
In the beginning, most users browsed the Internet from similar desktop machines. Even if the operating system was different, standardized web protocols and languages made the final experience similar, whether you were using Windows 3.1 machine or your trusty classic Mac.
Just to add your point. First off he means browsing the web. There was a whole more on the internet other than the web in the days of Windows 3.1 that was a lot more interesting. The AOL users were often first attracted to usenet. And the experience in those days was not remotely similar. We hadn't settled on the web yet, I mainly used usenet and gopher. Some people were on irc others used direct connections like ytalk. On Mac's and Windows machines the applications for these things were widely splintered, and generally quite terrible. I ran a good terminal program and logged onto Unix machines.
And finally he's a few years early. The real wave of non Unix users started in 1995.
I suspect that there is far more content available on the Internet now than there was ten years ago.
If you are suspecting I'll assume you are really young. And yes there is. For example: On March 22, 2001 Wikipedia was two months old and didn't have much of value. Britianica was selling their content cheaply on CDs and Americana was the dominant online encyclopedia.
I don't think you ever tried push technologies in situations where connectivity is questionable. There are substantial advantages to push. Now there is no reason web browsers couldn't have push built in, like I.E. channels or later RSS. But there is real advantage to custom apps that understand the layout of a site and can ask intelligent questions about what to cache locally.
DNS is a fairly easy protocol. If DNS become a tool of censorship you just DNS servers. Most OSes make that pretty easy to do by hand and even easier to give someone a "go uncensored" script. And if port 53 gets censored how long till browsers have a work around? Webkit is open source and there are already a dozen spin off browsers. Firefox would have a patch instantly. Maybe IE has problems but IE has been a problem child for years.
That was funny. Your an AC but well put.
Well that's interesting. He specifically talking about the mid 1980-today and the flat internet. But in the 1980s the internet was not remotely flat. You frequently had to log onto sites and had all sorts of features depending on your IP address that you wouldn't have elsewhere. Passwords and user accounts dominanted and when you got things had a lot to do with the servers directly upstream from you. For example how quickly did your Usenet feeds updated determined what the cycle time was on discussions like this one. And of course there were huge numbers of walled gardens, much more walled then today since they belonged to your ISP. AOL, Prodigy, Genie, Compuserve and smaller sites were very different experiences. Other sites like Odyssey were almost completely walled off and rode piggy back on Compuserve's network as a private virtual walled garden, much like a corporate interanet today using an MPLS.
As for hardware making a difference, it did then too. Unix users had a much richer fuller internet experience.
So I'm not sure what he's talking about.
Oh I see what you were saying. You were focusing on the email part. Sorry terrible way to phrase additional functionality using an example of a feature it does in fact have.
I agree with you on the smartphone in general but let me point out something you may not be considering:
When I was 30 I used a 15" 1600x1200 screen comfortably
When I was 40 I used a 23" 1920x1200 screen and still often boosted the fonts
That ain't uncommon.
Well I assumed there was some reason they wanted the tablet in and of itself. If not then obviously a Windows laptop you have is better then buying a whole bunch of new stuff.
Well put! I have moderation points but I already commented on this thread.
Steve Jobs has been pretty open about this for a while: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
If you buy Apple products you agree to accept his leadership. And he exercises a strong hand. Adobe has not done enough to prevent the memory leaks, crashes and performance leaks in flash apps so Steve has had enough. But you can put whatever you want on there, including another web browser. Just install the iOS-SDK and push whatever you want through iTunes.
In the PC world Microsoft has a very light touch in moving the direction, and the hardware manufacturers move glacially but that gives you options. The Linux world is more interesting in terms offering diversity on both the hardware and software fronts, real and true freedom. Apple has a more closed system by default but in practice there isn't much difference.
So how is that not a fit. The real computer (the Mac) has Office and has the iWork. The IPad has iWork only which does a 1/2 way decent job of pulling back and forth. Further they might like iWork better.
Smart phones are much tougher on the eyes. When I was 30 I comfortably used a 1600x1200 15" screen. At 40 I was using 1920x1200 at 23" and still sometimes having to boost font sizes.
Read the post I was responding to. You are making an entirely different point, I assume about price. His point was about the need for a smaller form factor.
Size: .34
HP mini 110 (as an example) 10.55 x 7.51 x 1.26
ipad 2: 9.5 x 7.31 x
Weight: 3.1 HP 1.33 (ipad)
What you are paying a lot for is 1/3rd as thick and under 1/2 the weight. That makes them much much much more expensive.
That may be your experience but its not what is happening. Apple originally projected 7.1m for 2010 they did 12.9m. 2011 they manufacturing 36.5m.
Heck I'd love to have the original spec of the One Laptop Per Child. A usable netbook that aggressive finds internet connections, durable enough to be mistreated and can operate off a foot pedal. I'd buy that in a second.
What do you mean it hasn't happened? Desktop sales have been flat for 4 years while laptop sales tripled. And by 2008 laptop sales were already greater than desktop sales. Desktops are becoming a niche product for office clerical workers who have fixed seating.
Getting information isn't necessarily playing with a toy. Lots of commuters like to read and use it like a kindle or a nook, but a kindle or nook that also email. Not having a keyboard isn't necessarily a disadvantage if you are going to be using it on a train or subway, especially if you might need to be standing while using it. Etc... Look if you are fully stationary a desktop is better than a laptop. If you need to be portable a laptop is better. If you aren't going to be able to be in an office like environment a tablet is often better.
And my $700 desktop will crush a $3000 laptop in performance. So what? Increase the form factor you decrease the price. The cost and expense of a tablet is making it small and light. Besides a comparison of a $200 laptop bought from Craigslist and a $550 tablet brought brand new with warranty seems to also shaving a bit. I will admit that at around $400 you can start to get laptops these days that are substantially better at processing data, have keyboards and have CD/DVD burners, more storage....
Mainly this article is a list of reasons he wants a large form factor device: he wants a keyboard, he wants lots of ports, he wants a big cheap drive... OK if you want a large form factor device don't buy a small form factor device. Why is that worth mentioning? The much more interesting comparison would be someone who desperately wants the small form factor but has other concerns that push them towards a laptop. Heck I might fall into that category.
The XXX-studies, sociology, and all of all the other leftist propaganda courses have displaced important core courses.
The Western University system was developed to teach theology. Philosophy, ancient cultures, languages, pure mathematics are the core courses. Engineering is by and large a trade and used to be taught in trade schools and before that through apprenticeships. The college system is much less liberal than it was a generation ago, a century ago, a millennia ago.
that no one wants these jobs. "If you are smart enough to do the work, you're smart enough not to work here."
I doubt that. Maybe it is "on one wants these jobs at that price". So raise the price. We have no doubling the cost of gasoline when we need to, double the price of programming.
Trying to impose more barriers to trade ... Not to mention that we have the internet now; not letting programmers into the US only drives whole projects off-shore
I don't think you understand how tariffs work. Once the project is offshore then what? You can't use it without paying a large tariff on the transactions.
If you want more Americans hired, you should increase the ease of immigration, not make it harder; it would bring more entrepreneurs to our country, who in turn would employ more Americans.
This is silly. Adding to the labor pool depresses wages. There is nothing magic about labor as contrasted with any other good, increase the supply you decrease the price.