Most Playbook issues are software related; most Fire issues are hardware related. Next month, RIM will be releasing that email client update and other patches can follow, so the Playbook will be get better.
On the other hand, Amazon can't issue a patch that would add RAM, storage, bluetooth, a GPS or extra cameras; the Fire will always remain a very limited device, while the Playbook has far more potential even if RIM folds a couple of years from now.
Compare the specs yourself. Notice what the Fire lacks compared to the most basic of Playbooks.
16GB Playbook: CPU: 1 GHz TI OMAP 4 4430 dual core Display: 7", 1024×600,Capacitive touch sensitive. Storage: 16 GB RAM: 1 GB GPS 3-axis accelerometer-gyroscope Magnetometer Camera 1080p HD video: 5 MP rear, 3 MP front Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n) Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR Micro-USB Micro-HDMI
Now, the far shorter list of the Fire: CPU: 1 GHz TI OMAP 4 4430 dual core Display: 7", 1024×600,Capacitive touch sensitive. Storage: 8 GB RAM: 512 MB Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n) Micro-USB 3.5 mm stereo socket Accelerometer
I got my wife a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I do think it's a very nice device (and good enough for her needs), but aside for the CPU and screen in no way is it equivalent to the lowest end Playbook feature-wise; GPS + Bluetooth + twice the RAM + Twice the Storage + 2 Cameras + gyroscope + Magnetometer + HDMI out justify the $99 difference. I do like Android a whole lot (even have my own Android tablet) but it doesn't make me blind to the fact that at this price, the Playbook is an excellent value.
I own a hacked Viewsonic g Tablet as well and it more than meets my needs but I agree it's not the best as an ereader, so my own wife wasn't that interested in it. However, as soon as she saw the Kindle Fire's price and specs, she expressed far more interest than for any other tablet so far.
Amazon is going for casual users unwilling to pay the much higher cost of the admittedly superior iPad; sounds like Wii (when it was launched) vs other, "better" consoles, doesn't it?
I've had the pleasure of meeting the Slashdot crew waaaaaay back in 1999 (I think at ALS); seeing the people responsible for my favorite geeky site was very cool (and so were they). It will be strange to not have CmdrTaco on the only website I've visited almost every day since 1998.
Thanks dude, you made many days spent at work a lot more enjoyable.
I also recently bought the g-Tablet, a splendid tablet once flashed with another ROM (aside from the screen, which isn't as bad as I had feared based on all the reviews I read). Viewsonic completely dropped the ball on their customization of Android, making a tablet superb hardware specs (same CPU as the Xoom) slow and unstable. It's sad that there are multiple hacker developed ROMs that completely crush the stock version performance- and stability-wise.
Google's announcements do mean that Honeycomb ROMs are still many months away, which is unfortunate. Still, XDA developers have done a fine job with Froyo; with gingerbread ROMs in the works, I don't feel bad about having to wait a bit more for Honeycomb.
Which is exactly why it would be huge and relevant news if there was something that could make Twitter run way better. It's a perfect example, as it is a very well know websites, with very well known problems related to scalability.
Thank you for helping me prove the point, by the way, that was mighty kind of you.
Scaling. If something turns out to be robust and fast enough for Twitter, it is definitely of interest to anyone working on significantly large and busy websites.
Cool nickname, I used to read Scrameustache comics as a kid.
Yeah, I received a few of them in my spam folder; I adjusted the settings and new OLPC emails now show up in my inbox. Thank you Yahoo mail for protecting me so well;)
I'm a December 14th donor; while I'm a little disappointed that it hasn't reached me yet, I've no problem cutting OLPC quite a bit of slack, as what matters most is the "GIVE 1" part of the G1G1 program. There are plenty of articles showing that kids in less fortunate areas have started using them and they are a hit. Because OLPC is fulfilling that part of the promise, I will be patient and forgive them those delays, although I am somewhat less forgiving of the subcontractors (but not terribly so).
I can wait a couple more weeks; the only thing that bugs me is that I can't play with it right now, as I've seen and handled an XO and it is so neat:)
In the same wikipedia article about Charlemagne, there is this gem in the Education reforms section:
"His reign and the era it ushered in are often referred to as the Carolingian Renaissance because of the flowering of scholarship, literature, art, and architecture which characterise it"
True, while he was hardly what anyone in this day and age would call "nice" ("brutal" would probably be more accurate), he seems to have done a lot with regards to knowledge, culture and art while he reigned. Not bad for an illiterate barbarian.
Ooops, did I say illiterate? (from the same article):
"Charlemagne took a serious interest in his and others' scholarship and had learned to read in his adulthood, although he never quite learned how to write, he used to keep a slate and stylus underneath his pillow, according to Einhard. His handwriting was bad, from which grew the legend that he could not write. Even learning to read was quite an achievement for kings at this time, most of whom were illiterate."
They mention speeds up to 4000mph, in a tunnel 150 to 300ft under the surface of the Atlantic. Horribly expensive (at least $25 million per mile), however.
Thanks for the reply. Adding your name in the "About us" would probably help quite a bit, as it humanizes your organization and probably would put people a bit more at ease with donating to OSSDI.
The goal certainly is worthy, so every little detail that may encourage people to send money will certainly help you reach your objectives and help those schools even more.
Does anyone else find it odd that the site is remarkably anonymous? Usually, in an "About" or "Contact Us" page, you'll find at least the name of one contact (or the name(s) of the founders, board members, etc), which is not the case here.
There may be an excellent reason for this, but it just seems strange to me. Oh well, maybe I've become overly paranoid in my old age when people are asking me for my money;)
The main thing I noticed on the roads is that a driver who drives differently than the local norm is always a major pain. It can be a driver who is going 20Mph faster or slower than the surrounding traffic on a highway, a hesitant driver obviously lost in a busy city street, an overly aggressive driver on the main street of a small town, a driver who thinks rules are for others in an area where people tend to follow them or someone who follows the rules strictly in an area where most drivers fudge them quite a bit.
Essentially, most people drive badly; people in an area just have to drive badly the same way and things go much more smoothly. When someone drives badly in a different way (i.e. when someone non-local uses a different style of driving), then you have problems.
I have a somewhat low number, but I find it hard to believe it translates into anything more than having wasted way too many hours reading Slashdot;)
On the other hand, I've 13 years in full-time IT under my belt (tech support, sysadmin, developer (not necessarily in that order)) and have been using computers (and programming) since 1982, which means two things: I'm getting really old and... hum... I forget.
Agreed. In my previous job, we used ActivePerl extensively, in standalone scripts and on NT/2000 with IIS. In my current job, we use it even more internally (mrtg, various scripts, web apps). The ease of adding packages and the seamless integration in IIS makes it a very valuable tool (since we will continue to run on windows for the foreseable future and have tons of code in VBScript (*sigh*), the last part is especially important).
Part of my job is to test out the site in various browser/platform combinations, to make sure it at least looks ok and works for 99.9% of our users (until recently, those tests included Firefox/Win/Linux (therefore, also other gecko-based browsers), IE/Win 5/5.5/6.0, IE/Mac 5.x, Safari and sometimes Opera/Win and Konqueror/Linux; adding those up covers above 99.9% of our users, as other browser are barely a blip in our stats); we were then fairly certain that it just works.
The biggest problem with this selection is IE/Mac 5.x. Compared to all the other browsers I mentionned, it has, by far, the absolute worst CSS rendering. With just very minor adjustments, we could make our site look essentially the same on the other browsers, with problems with IE/Win 5.0 but not bad ones (essentially, the site doesn't look quite as good on it, but it doesn't look bad either; it also just works). Also, for reasons of bandwidth savings and general speed improvements, we decided to use AJAX quite extensively (boo! bad AJAX, not even a standard, evil buzzword, boo!), except IE/Mac doesn't support it. So, just for those users, we had to kludge together an ugly solution that used hidden iframes so the functionality could be the same (but far from being as efficient); it meant a lot of extra work for a browser which only represents 0.7% of all of our users. But, since a fair number of users were paying customers, we did the work anyway. However, since that moment I checked user agent stats on a weekly basis, looking forward to the day that it would drop under 0.1%, the point at which we might drop active development and QA (actually, we waited much longer for NS 4.x; we dropped support in 2004, when usage was at 0.02%; main reason was we wanted to use CSS and NS 4 was abysmal with it).
Then, oh happy day, MS announces it was dropping support for IE/Mac 5. Mac users, those of ours on OS X anyway, quickly switched to the many modern browsers available to them (Safari for 10.2 and up, normally firefox or Camino for the rest). Those on OS 8/9 had a problem, as the best browsers available to them were Mozilla 1.3.1 and Netscape 7.0.2; better than IE/Mac at least and they could display the site properly, however, they're not exactly new either. Still, the effect was that in a few weeks, we went from 0.7% usage to under 0.1%, also meaning way too few paying customers using it to justify the effort. We don't do any further development with that browser in mind, but we have not taken out the previous IE/Mac specific code already in place; as new features are added or when sections of the site are overhauled, we just won't make any effort to make it work for IE/Mac.
Hummm... wouldn't they be right, though? The Powers That Were/Be at Apple did choose to stick with a single button mouse all this time, after all; I think it is entirely reasonable to question such a choice, since they were the only ones to do it (and considering how many people bought themselves a multi-button mouse for their Mac). Had this been the "right" design decision, lots of manufacturers would have copied the single button philosophy (just look at how many iPod clones there are, an example of of when Apple gets it very "right"). Perhaps it was the right choice in the past, but as computer litteracy spread, it may not be that relevant anymore. (Please don't use the grandma/grandpa argument, they can use solitaire and write texts/e-mails just fine on windows even though there is an evil, diabolic right button on the mouse)
So wondering what took them so long is perfectly valid, even coming from someone who has been using Macs since 1984 (like yours truly).
Linux does indeed run on "serious" servers, such as this one, which can scale up to 512 processors per *system* (not per cluster). You can check some of its specs here. Relevant quotes: "Up to 512 processors tightly coupled and operating under a single copy of the O/S" "All resources in the system are managed through a single instance of the operating system--the industry's largest single system image."
>> Mac Zealots evangelize Mac just as much as Linux users do Linux.
This is very true. However, most Linux users who "evangelize" tend to grow out of that phase and just use it. Also, by that point they see there are valid alternatives (OS X, *BSD, even Windows), each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
I've met way too many long-time Mac users for whom nothing could equal their beloved Macintosh. And those people do *not* grow out of it: say one thing that might indicate that it is less than perfect and it's as if you've just insulted their family, friends and favorite sports team all at the same time.
For a good deal of professionals (especially programmers, sysadmins and DBAs), the desktop is the machine that does "mundane tasks", the real, important work being on the servers. What the desktop offers is an interface to applications, services or data on servers. In a proper configuration, the death of a desktop machine is annoying, but not that critical, while if a server dies things are usually much, much worse. To me, a desktop is an interchangeable part: all it needs to do is run certain types of applications (sometimes specific applications). In this regard, it doesn't matter what the client OS might be, as long as it does the job.
>> You also say that its a "case of using the best tools for their specific needs" which seems to imply that the Mac is the best tool for a person's main machine.
Yes, I'm glad you used "seems", as it implies no such thing. It means that for *the specific needs* of certain linux people who bought a mac, OS X was, *for them*, the best tool on the desktop. I never said I felt it was necessarily the best tool for a main machine; in fact, depending on what your needs are, it's entirely possible Windows could a much better choice if your specific needs included wide availability of software, it could be linux if your primary need was bang for the buck and performance (same case as FreeBSD), it could be OpenBSD if your overriding need was security on your main box, etc.
While many linux users have bought a Mac of late, far more have *not*, which indicates that their needs are met well enough by their current systems to avoid such a purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/11/blackberry-playbook-native-email-calendar-and-contacts-app-spotted/
Most Playbook issues are software related; most Fire issues are hardware related. Next month, RIM will be releasing that email client update and other patches can follow, so the Playbook will be get better.
On the other hand, Amazon can't issue a patch that would add RAM, storage, bluetooth, a GPS or extra cameras; the Fire will always remain a very limited device, while the Playbook has far more potential even if RIM folds a couple of years from now.
You think the two devices are equivalent?
Dude.
Compare the specs yourself. Notice what the Fire lacks compared to the most basic of Playbooks.
16GB Playbook:
CPU: 1 GHz TI OMAP 4 4430 dual core
Display: 7", 1024×600,Capacitive touch sensitive.
Storage: 16 GB
RAM: 1 GB
GPS
3-axis accelerometer-gyroscope
Magnetometer
Camera 1080p HD video: 5 MP rear, 3 MP front
Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n)
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Micro-USB
Micro-HDMI
Now, the far shorter list of the Fire:
CPU: 1 GHz TI OMAP 4 4430 dual core
Display: 7", 1024×600,Capacitive touch sensitive.
Storage: 8 GB
RAM: 512 MB
Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n)
Micro-USB
3.5 mm stereo socket
Accelerometer
I got my wife a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I do think it's a very nice device (and good enough for her needs), but aside for the CPU and screen in no way is it equivalent to the lowest end Playbook feature-wise; GPS + Bluetooth + twice the RAM + Twice the Storage + 2 Cameras + gyroscope + Magnetometer + HDMI out justify the $99 difference. I do like Android a whole lot (even have my own Android tablet) but it doesn't make me blind to the fact that at this price, the Playbook is an excellent value.
I own a hacked Viewsonic g Tablet as well and it more than meets my needs but I agree it's not the best as an ereader, so my own wife wasn't that interested in it. However, as soon as she saw the Kindle Fire's price and specs, she expressed far more interest than for any other tablet so far.
Amazon is going for casual users unwilling to pay the much higher cost of the admittedly superior iPad; sounds like Wii (when it was launched) vs other, "better" consoles, doesn't it?
I've had the pleasure of meeting the Slashdot crew waaaaaay back in 1999 (I think at ALS); seeing the people responsible for my favorite geeky site was very cool (and so were they). It will be strange to not have CmdrTaco on the only website I've visited almost every day since 1998.
Thanks dude, you made many days spent at work a lot more enjoyable.
I also recently bought the g-Tablet, a splendid tablet once flashed with another ROM (aside from the screen, which isn't as bad as I had feared based on all the reviews I read). Viewsonic completely dropped the ball on their customization of Android, making a tablet superb hardware specs (same CPU as the Xoom) slow and unstable. It's sad that there are multiple hacker developed ROMs that completely crush the stock version performance- and stability-wise.
Google's announcements do mean that Honeycomb ROMs are still many months away, which is unfortunate. Still, XDA developers have done a fine job with Froyo; with gingerbread ROMs in the works, I don't feel bad about having to wait a bit more for Honeycomb.
Yeah, I remember the show. My geeky teenage self liked it and was disappointed when it got quickly canceled.
You're cute when you confuse the problem and the solution.
Or you're a bit slow. Either way, rock on, you sweet, sweet kid.
Which is exactly why it would be huge and relevant news if there was something that could make Twitter run way better. It's a perfect example, as it is a very well know websites, with very well known problems related to scalability.
Thank you for helping me prove the point, by the way, that was mighty kind of you.
Scaling. If something turns out to be robust and fast enough for Twitter, it is definitely of interest to anyone working on significantly large and busy websites.
The point is like in any other hobby: because to the person indulging in said hobby, it's fun.
It doesn't have to be fun to anyone else; I don't find anything entertaining about knitting, yet millions knit because they like to. Good for them.
Cool nickname, I used to read Scrameustache comics as a kid.
;)
Yeah, I received a few of them in my spam folder; I adjusted the settings and new OLPC emails now show up in my inbox. Thank you Yahoo mail for protecting me so well
I'm a December 14th donor; while I'm a little disappointed that it hasn't reached me yet, I've no problem cutting OLPC quite a bit of slack, as what matters most is the "GIVE 1" part of the G1G1 program. There are plenty of articles showing that kids in less fortunate areas have started using them and they are a hit. Because OLPC is fulfilling that part of the promise, I will be patient and forgive them those delays, although I am somewhat less forgiving of the subcontractors (but not terribly so).
:)
I can wait a couple more weeks; the only thing that bugs me is that I can't play with it right now, as I've seen and handled an XO and it is so neat
In the same wikipedia article about Charlemagne, there is this gem in the Education reforms section:
"His reign and the era it ushered in are often referred to as the Carolingian Renaissance because of the flowering of scholarship, literature, art, and architecture which characterise it"
True, while he was hardly what anyone in this day and age would call "nice" ("brutal" would probably be more accurate), he seems to have done a lot with regards to knowledge, culture and art while he reigned. Not bad for an illiterate barbarian.
Ooops, did I say illiterate? (from the same article):
"Charlemagne took a serious interest in his and others' scholarship and had learned to read in his adulthood, although he never quite learned how to write, he used to keep a slate and stylus underneath his pillow, according to Einhard. His handwriting was bad, from which grew the legend that he could not write. Even learning to read was quite an achievement for kings at this time, most of whom were illiterate."
There is this old article on Popular science:
Trans-Atlantic Maglev.
They mention speeds up to 4000mph, in a tunnel 150 to 300ft under the surface of the Atlantic. Horribly expensive (at least $25 million per mile), however.
Thanks for the reply. Adding your name in the "About us" would probably help quite a bit, as it humanizes your organization and probably would put people a bit more at ease with donating to OSSDI.
The goal certainly is worthy, so every little detail that may encourage people to send money will certainly help you reach your objectives and help those schools even more.
Does anyone else find it odd that the site is remarkably anonymous? Usually, in an "About" or "Contact Us" page, you'll find at least the name of one contact (or the name(s) of the founders, board members, etc), which is not the case here.
;)
There may be an excellent reason for this, but it just seems strange to me. Oh well, maybe I've become overly paranoid in my old age when people are asking me for my money
The main thing I noticed on the roads is that a driver who drives differently than the local norm is always a major pain. It can be a driver who is going 20Mph faster or slower than the surrounding traffic on a highway, a hesitant driver obviously lost in a busy city street, an overly aggressive driver on the main street of a small town, a driver who thinks rules are for others in an area where people tend to follow them or someone who follows the rules strictly in an area where most drivers fudge them quite a bit.
Essentially, most people drive badly; people in an area just have to drive badly the same way and things go much more smoothly. When someone drives badly in a different way (i.e. when someone non-local uses a different style of driving), then you have problems.
When in Rome, drive badly as the Romans.
I have a somewhat low number, but I find it hard to believe it translates into anything more than having wasted way too many hours reading Slashdot ;)
On the other hand, I've 13 years in full-time IT under my belt (tech support, sysadmin, developer (not necessarily in that order)) and have been using computers (and programming) since 1982, which means two things: I'm getting really old and... hum... I forget.
If we can't use "Web 2.0", what alternatives can we use?
Maybe "New Web II: Electric Boogaloo" would do the trick.
Agreed. In my previous job, we used ActivePerl extensively, in standalone scripts and on NT/2000 with IIS. In my current job, we use it even more internally (mrtg, various scripts, web apps). The ease of adding packages and the seamless integration in IIS makes it a very valuable tool (since we will continue to run on windows for the foreseable future and have tons of code in VBScript (*sigh*), the last part is especially important).
Part of my job is to test out the site in various browser/platform combinations, to make sure it at least looks ok and works for 99.9% of our users (until recently, those tests included Firefox/Win/Linux (therefore, also other gecko-based browsers), IE/Win 5/5.5/6.0, IE/Mac 5.x, Safari and sometimes Opera/Win and Konqueror/Linux; adding those up covers above 99.9% of our users, as other browser are barely a blip in our stats); we were then fairly certain that it just works.
The biggest problem with this selection is IE/Mac 5.x. Compared to all the other browsers I mentionned, it has, by far, the absolute worst CSS rendering. With just very minor adjustments, we could make our site look essentially the same on the other browsers, with problems with IE/Win 5.0 but not bad ones (essentially, the site doesn't look quite as good on it, but it doesn't look bad either; it also just works). Also, for reasons of bandwidth savings and general speed improvements, we decided to use AJAX quite extensively (boo! bad AJAX, not even a standard, evil buzzword, boo!), except IE/Mac doesn't support it. So, just for those users, we had to kludge together an ugly solution that used hidden iframes so the functionality could be the same (but far from being as efficient); it meant a lot of extra work for a browser which only represents 0.7% of all of our users. But, since a fair number of users were paying customers, we did the work anyway. However, since that moment I checked user agent stats on a weekly basis, looking forward to the day that it would drop under 0.1%, the point at which we might drop active development and QA (actually, we waited much longer for NS 4.x; we dropped support in 2004, when usage was at 0.02%; main reason was we wanted to use CSS and NS 4 was abysmal with it).
Then, oh happy day, MS announces it was dropping support for IE/Mac 5. Mac users, those of ours on OS X anyway, quickly switched to the many modern browsers available to them (Safari for 10.2 and up, normally firefox or Camino for the rest). Those on OS 8/9 had a problem, as the best browsers available to them were Mozilla 1.3.1 and Netscape 7.0.2; better than IE/Mac at least and they could display the site properly, however, they're not exactly new either. Still, the effect was that in a few weeks, we went from 0.7% usage to under 0.1%, also meaning way too few paying customers using it to justify the effort. We don't do any further development with that browser in mind, but we have not taken out the previous IE/Mac specific code already in place; as new features are added or when sections of the site are overhauled, we just won't make any effort to make it work for IE/Mac.
Hummm... wouldn't they be right, though?
The Powers That Were/Be at Apple did choose to stick with a single button mouse all this time, after all; I think it is entirely reasonable to question such a choice, since they were the only ones to do it (and considering how many people bought themselves a multi-button mouse for their Mac). Had this been the "right" design decision, lots of manufacturers would have copied the single button philosophy (just look at how many iPod clones there are, an example of of when Apple gets it very "right"). Perhaps it was the right choice in the past, but as computer litteracy spread, it may not be that relevant anymore. (Please don't use the grandma/grandpa argument, they can use solitaire and write texts/e-mails just fine on windows even though there is an evil, diabolic right button on the mouse)
So wondering what took them so long is perfectly valid, even coming from someone who has been using Macs since 1984 (like yours truly).
Linux does indeed run on "serious" servers, such as this one, which can scale up to 512 processors per *system* (not per cluster). You can check some of its specs here. Relevant quotes:
"Up to 512 processors tightly coupled and operating under a single copy of the O/S"
"All resources in the system are managed through a single instance of the operating system--the industry's largest single system image."
I believe this constitutes "big iron".
>> Mac Zealots evangelize Mac just as much as Linux users do Linux.
This is very true. However, most Linux users who "evangelize" tend to grow out of that phase and just use it. Also, by that point they see there are valid alternatives (OS X, *BSD, even Windows), each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
I've met way too many long-time Mac users for whom nothing could equal their beloved Macintosh. And those people do *not* grow out of it: say one thing that might indicate that it is less than perfect and it's as if you've just insulted their family, friends and favorite sports team all at the same time.
For a good deal of professionals (especially programmers, sysadmins and DBAs), the desktop is the machine that does "mundane tasks", the real, important work being on the servers. What the desktop offers is an interface to applications, services or data on servers. In a proper configuration, the death of a desktop machine is annoying, but not that critical, while if a server dies things are usually much, much worse. To me, a desktop is an interchangeable part: all it needs to do is run certain types of applications (sometimes specific applications). In this regard, it doesn't matter what the client OS might be, as long as it does the job.
>> You also say that its a "case of using the best tools for their specific needs" which seems to imply that the Mac is the best tool for a person's main machine.
Yes, I'm glad you used "seems", as it implies no such thing. It means that for *the specific needs* of certain linux people who bought a mac, OS X was, *for them*, the best tool on the desktop. I never said I felt it was necessarily the best tool for a main machine; in fact, depending on what your needs are, it's entirely possible Windows could a much better choice if your specific needs included wide availability of software, it could be linux if your primary need was bang for the buck and performance (same case as FreeBSD), it could be OpenBSD if your overriding need was security on your main box, etc.
While many linux users have bought a Mac of late, far more have *not*, which indicates that their needs are met well enough by their current systems to avoid such a purchase.