Good thing it has Push Notifications for exactly these types of use cases.
Except, if I understand correctly, that requires special support on the third party server to send out push notifications via Apple's system. So, for example, if I wanted to write an RSS feed reader, I'd have to create a special server, out in internet-land, who's job was to take RSS updates and funnel them to Apple's push notification service, which would then send them down to the phone. Maybe I'm being naive, but that seems like a strong limiting factor for anyone who can't afford to run their own push notification proxy.
I can tell you've never used an iPhone. If I'm composing a message in the Mail app, and move to something else, when I return to Mail, the application state is preserved perfectly.
I can tell you don't understand what it means to have email running in the background.
I want to be *told* when an email shows up, or an IM arrives, or someone updates their facebook status. I want to be *told* when a new items shows up in my RSS feed. I don't want to have to manually switch apps to check.
What you describe works just fine on a phone because you only interact with it for very short spurts. But a device like the iPad is intended to somewhat longer-term, online interactions, and in that case people want to stay connected, not to have to switch around polling their various event sources to see if anything interesting is happening.
Honestly, you Apple apologists just amaze me. You're willing to throw away one of the greatest advancements in computer interaction in the last 50 years (the ability to have multiple activities ongoing simultaneously) simply because Apple, apparently, thinks that's a good idea, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Hell, Palm did this 20 fucking years ago, and were ripped left and right for having a ridiculously limited operating paradigm. Yet you seem to think it's incredibly awesome. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so absurd.
What you call "background tasks" works just fine on the iPhone
No, *Apple's* background tasks work just fine on the iPhone. Last I checked, *I* can't go and write, say, a new IM application that would run in the background on an iPhone.
Other crap "running in the background" is usually because on a computer, starting a program takes so much longer than switching to it when it's already running.
Bullshit. My examples of IM and Email are perfect examples of apps I want running in the background, alerting me of new activities. Same goes with RSS readers, facebook notifications, and god knows how many other types of online interaction. And unless Apple deigns to write their own, special privileged apps to support those things, you won't see them on the iPhone or iPad. And that's a real problem, IMHO.
Only I'm totally not. As far as I'm concerned, for an interface on a tiny screen (where you're unlikely to have multiple windows onscreen at once), perfect stateful information is damn close to multitasking.
1990 called and wants it's Palm Pilot back.
If people were happy about this mode of operation, they wouldn't have bitched about PalmOS for the last two decades.
No, they don't. They interact with one foreground task while having multiple background tasks active and running. Or do most people you know not have an IM client installed? Or have their email running in the background? Because the iPad won't allow any of that.
is the iphone's hardware good enough to handle arbitrary multitasking? i don't know the answer to that.
iPhone? What? We're talking about the iPad, here. It has a freakin' 1Ghz ARM CPU onboard. If it can't handle reasonable multitasking with that kind of hardware, something is terribly, terribly wrong.
Say what you want, but a) she's my wife, b) she's rather beautiful, c) it's absolutely impossible to even try to say "okay, let me explain to you why..." and d) Apple's gonna continue to make bank selling devices to people just like her.
And then when she says "Why can't my stupid email program stay open while I'm browsing the web on this thing", your answer will be "well, you said you hated multitasking... now lie in the bed you made".
The simple fact is, everyone multitasks *every day* with their computer. They may not realize that's what they're doing, but when MSN and their email program are twiddling their thumbs in the background while they're browsing the web and listening to a little music on iTunes, they're multitasking. The fact that the iPad doesn't allow for this kind of operation is simply absurd, given it's seemingly designed for the type of person who sits down and browses the web for twenty to thirty minutes at a pop (as opposed to the five minutes someone spends on their iPhone) and wants to stay connected while they're doing it.
Meanwhile, the geeks are running around blasting Apple products for all the things they "don't have" and recommending complex alternatives.
Wait, so multitasking is a "complex alternative"? Please.
Yes, Apple's tablet is meant to be a computing appliance. But ffs, no fucking user-level multitasking? Christ, people bitched and complained about PalmOS and it's lack of multitasking, and now you're cheering it on like it's some kind of feature. It's fucking baffling.
That and the fact that the iPad is a completely closed off system puts it off my list. No, I don't believe a tablet must be a general purpose computer. But I do believe that I should at least be able to install what I want on it from whatever source I like, and I should be able to run more than one fucking application at the same damn time.
I use XMonad and was thinking the same thing as soon as I started reading the summary. Unfortunately the poster specifically claims to want a "traditional" DE setup, rather than a lightweight tiling WM. I've heard of using XMonad as the WM for Gnome, but I'm not sure how easy it is to set up or how well it works.
It's easy to set up and works extremely well, but you have to be willing to hack Haskell to configure the thing once it's up and running, and you have to be happy with a tiling WM.
That said, at the most basic, you just have to install xmonad somehow (apt-get, hackage, etc), create a Gnome desktop file for it (here's an example... just edit the path to xmonad and copy it to ~/.local/share/applications/xmonad.desktop), and then use gconf-editor to change this key:
As an example, try setting up teredo on an XP box that's behind NAT (the main reason for using teredo, btw). Doing a bit of packet sniffing, you'll discover that you're getting an occassional port scan. Yes indeed there are black hats out there scanning ipv6 space already.
True. And all I'm saying is that the exposure isn't nearly so earth shattering as you seem to think, so long as you a) don't turn off your firewall like an idiot (this applies to virtually all home users, who don't even know what a firewall is, let alone how to disable it), and b) don't enable services you don't need (something any knowledgeable user should already be doing).
Because there were oh so many in the world who weren't being heavily influenced by wealthy special interest groups?
There are many places in the world that are *far better* than the US in this regard. The first step is not codifying in law the utterly ridiculous notion that money == speech. Then you ban the legalized bribrary that is the US lobbying industry. Do that and maybe the level of corruption in the US government could drop to levels that would be comparable with the rest of the developed world.
Microsoft doesn't enable services to listen on IPv6 unless the application explicitly requests it. Furthermore, the built-in firewall doesn't allow unsolicited inbound traffic unless you explicitly enable it.
I'm aware of that. That doesn't change the fact that stateless autoconfiguration uses a 64-bit prefix and the end host typically populates the 64-bit suffix with the MAC plus some padding bits.
ISPs will need to keep track of who has which IP at which time. At least in the EU they are required by law, afaik in the US they make this information available for law enforcement too (occasionally even without warrant).
This bookkeeping is just so much easier if every user gets a fixed IP (or -subnet), so i do not see why they would allow everone to just pick any address in their subnet.
Then they'll deploy DHCPv6 and do things the same way they do them today, in which case the anonymity issue is a wash.
But I guarantee you, unless you ask for it, you won't be getting a subnet of your own. ISPs just don't think that way, nor do their customers.
But no matter what the user configures, he is stuck in the/64, or do I missunderstand this?
That 64-bit prefix is actually the ISP's subnet. The confusion is really my fault, as I used poor phrasing when I said they "give" the user a/64... what they do is advertise it. The machine then takes that 64-bit prefix, tacks their 64-bit MAC on the end (or, if that RFC is used, some randomized identifier), and voila, they're connected.
If the user wanted their own subnet, they would then have to request a routed/48 or/56. But their firewall/gateway box would still have an IP in that/64 advertised by the ISP. But any boxes on that subnet would instantly be trackable, so if you wanted to preserve your anonymity, ironically, you'd probably want to use NAT (or use some other method, such as Tor or an anonymizing proxy).
Once we get IPv6 everywhere, most ISPs will simply assign each user a fixed subnet, since that is so much easier and more efficient than keeping track of dynamic assignements.
Not necessarily. Unless the user explicitly asks for a routable/48 or/56, I'll bet most ISPs just give each user a/64 and have them autoconfigure, in which case there's always the Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration option.
(Still, jail seems kind of disproportionate. Scientology has engaged in worse online censorship-fraud without even being fined.)
Yeah, you're right. Whether or not we like the victim should definitely play into the punishment of the accused. I mean, who really cares about that whole, "equal protection", constitution thingy? It's just some silly piece of paper, right?
Broadband access will never get faster. Broadband providers will never speed up broadband speeds unless the gobernment forces them to do so.
That's not necessarily true. Verizon's FIOS service wasn't government mandated. Heck, my provider, Shaw, has regularly upgraded their backhaul network over the last few years, and as such, my available bandwidth has increased fairly consistently.
All you really need is a bit of competition, and even just two companies (a telco and a cable operator) are enough to create a competitive environment such that available bandwidth will increase over time. Roll in things like 4G/WiMax, and I think, over the next 5-10 years, you'll see traditional operators all but forced to upgrade their networks in order to keep up.
Funny, all the people sending twitter messages from their phones (Twitter being nothing more than broadcast instant messaging, which I'd call an "application") and Facebook status updates would probably tend to disagree. The dividing line between a simple website and an "application" is increasingly blurry these days.
'course, I could list others if you want to get picky. Do Google Maps count (complete with augmented reality features) or Docs count? What about Google Reader? (You'll notice a trend, here... Google is one of the most successful (or, apparently, unsuccessful) purveyors of web-based applications).
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Good thing it has Push Notifications for exactly these types of use cases.
Except, if I understand correctly, that requires special support on the third party server to send out push notifications via Apple's system. So, for example, if I wanted to write an RSS feed reader, I'd have to create a special server, out in internet-land, who's job was to take RSS updates and funnel them to Apple's push notification service, which would then send them down to the phone. Maybe I'm being naive, but that seems like a strong limiting factor for anyone who can't afford to run their own push notification proxy.
I can tell you've never used an iPhone. If I'm composing a message in the Mail app, and move to something else, when I return to Mail, the application state is preserved perfectly.
I can tell you don't understand what it means to have email running in the background.
I want to be *told* when an email shows up, or an IM arrives, or someone updates their facebook status. I want to be *told* when a new items shows up in my RSS feed. I don't want to have to manually switch apps to check.
What you describe works just fine on a phone because you only interact with it for very short spurts. But a device like the iPad is intended to somewhat longer-term, online interactions, and in that case people want to stay connected, not to have to switch around polling their various event sources to see if anything interesting is happening.
Honestly, you Apple apologists just amaze me. You're willing to throw away one of the greatest advancements in computer interaction in the last 50 years (the ability to have multiple activities ongoing simultaneously) simply because Apple, apparently, thinks that's a good idea, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Hell, Palm did this 20 fucking years ago, and were ripped left and right for having a ridiculously limited operating paradigm. Yet you seem to think it's incredibly awesome. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so absurd.
What you call "background tasks" works just fine on the iPhone
No, *Apple's* background tasks work just fine on the iPhone. Last I checked, *I* can't go and write, say, a new IM application that would run in the background on an iPhone.
Other crap "running in the background" is usually because on a computer, starting a program takes so much longer than switching to it when it's already running.
Bullshit. My examples of IM and Email are perfect examples of apps I want running in the background, alerting me of new activities. Same goes with RSS readers, facebook notifications, and god knows how many other types of online interaction. And unless Apple deigns to write their own, special privileged apps to support those things, you won't see them on the iPhone or iPad. And that's a real problem, IMHO.
Only I'm totally not. As far as I'm concerned, for an interface on a tiny screen (where you're unlikely to have multiple windows onscreen at once), perfect stateful information is damn close to multitasking.
1990 called and wants it's Palm Pilot back.
If people were happy about this mode of operation, they wouldn't have bitched about PalmOS for the last two decades.
No, they don't. They interact with one foreground task while having multiple background tasks active and running. Or do most people you know not have an IM client installed? Or have their email running in the background? Because the iPad won't allow any of that.
is the iphone's hardware good enough to handle arbitrary multitasking? i don't know the answer to that.
iPhone? What? We're talking about the iPad, here. It has a freakin' 1Ghz ARM CPU onboard. If it can't handle reasonable multitasking with that kind of hardware, something is terribly, terribly wrong.
Say what you want, but a) she's my wife, b) she's rather beautiful, c) it's absolutely impossible to even try to say "okay, let me explain to you why..." and d) Apple's gonna continue to make bank selling devices to people just like her.
And then when she says "Why can't my stupid email program stay open while I'm browsing the web on this thing", your answer will be "well, you said you hated multitasking... now lie in the bed you made".
The simple fact is, everyone multitasks *every day* with their computer. They may not realize that's what they're doing, but when MSN and their email program are twiddling their thumbs in the background while they're browsing the web and listening to a little music on iTunes, they're multitasking. The fact that the iPad doesn't allow for this kind of operation is simply absurd, given it's seemingly designed for the type of person who sits down and browses the web for twenty to thirty minutes at a pop (as opposed to the five minutes someone spends on their iPhone) and wants to stay connected while they're doing it.
Meanwhile, the geeks are running around blasting Apple products for all the things they "don't have" and recommending complex alternatives.
Wait, so multitasking is a "complex alternative"? Please.
Yes, Apple's tablet is meant to be a computing appliance. But ffs, no fucking user-level multitasking? Christ, people bitched and complained about PalmOS and it's lack of multitasking, and now you're cheering it on like it's some kind of feature. It's fucking baffling.
That and the fact that the iPad is a completely closed off system puts it off my list. No, I don't believe a tablet must be a general purpose computer. But I do believe that I should at least be able to install what I want on it from whatever source I like, and I should be able to run more than one fucking application at the same damn time.
I use XMonad and was thinking the same thing as soon as I started reading the summary. Unfortunately the poster specifically claims to want a "traditional" DE setup, rather than a lightweight tiling WM. I've heard of using XMonad as the WM for Gnome, but I'm not sure how easy it is to set up or how well it works.
It's easy to set up and works extremely well, but you have to be willing to hack Haskell to configure the thing once it's up and running, and you have to be happy with a tiling WM.
That said, at the most basic, you just have to install xmonad somehow (apt-get, hackage, etc), create a Gnome desktop file for it (here's an example... just edit the path to xmonad and copy it to ~/.local/share/applications/xmonad.desktop), and then use gconf-editor to change this key:
to xmonad. Logout, log back in, and enjoy!
Just a few words for you: Fuck off you xenophobic, racist prick.
Thanks, have a good day.
As an example, try setting up teredo on an XP box that's behind NAT (the main reason for using teredo, btw). Doing a bit of packet sniffing, you'll discover that you're getting an occassional port scan. Yes indeed there are black hats out there scanning ipv6 space already.
True. And all I'm saying is that the exposure isn't nearly so earth shattering as you seem to think, so long as you a) don't turn off your firewall like an idiot (this applies to virtually all home users, who don't even know what a firewall is, let alone how to disable it), and b) don't enable services you don't need (something any knowledgeable user should already be doing).
Such as? Please name me these magical utopia countries where none of the politicians are beholden to any special interest groups.
Canada? The UK? Germany? Just to name a few.
Yes, they do exist. Try looking outside your little American box occasionally.
And yet looking around I see just as much corruption in those countries as anywhere else.
No, you don't. You're just convinced that the American way is the only way, for reasons I can't possibly fathom.
Because there were oh so many in the world who weren't being heavily influenced by wealthy special interest groups?
There are many places in the world that are *far better* than the US in this regard. The first step is not codifying in law the utterly ridiculous notion that money == speech. Then you ban the legalized bribrary that is the US lobbying industry. Do that and maybe the level of corruption in the US government could drop to levels that would be comparable with the rest of the developed world.
If there were true competition in the market...
And if magical fairies existed, we could all fly to never-never land.
Hint: If the world doesn't work the way you want, passing laws and regulations as if it did results in *broken laws and a broken system*.
Microsoft doesn't enable services to listen on IPv6 unless the application explicitly requests it. Furthermore, the built-in firewall doesn't allow unsolicited inbound traffic unless you explicitly enable it.
As for netbios, it's not defined over IPv6.
I'm aware of that. That doesn't change the fact that stateless autoconfiguration uses a 64-bit prefix and the end host typically populates the 64-bit suffix with the MAC plus some padding bits.
I find it sadly hilarious that this utterly contentless post somehow managed to get an insightful mod...
Luckily, the same software on your PC doesn't listen on IPv6 in the first place, so it doesn't really matter that your box is v6 accessible.
ISPs will need to keep track of who has which IP at which time. At least in the EU they are required by law, afaik in the US they make this information available for law enforcement too (occasionally even without warrant).
This bookkeeping is just so much easier if every user gets a fixed IP (or -subnet), so i do not see why they would allow everone to just pick any address in their subnet.
Then they'll deploy DHCPv6 and do things the same way they do them today, in which case the anonymity issue is a wash.
But I guarantee you, unless you ask for it, you won't be getting a subnet of your own. ISPs just don't think that way, nor do their customers.
But no matter what the user configures, he is stuck in the /64, or do I missunderstand this?
That 64-bit prefix is actually the ISP's subnet. The confusion is really my fault, as I used poor phrasing when I said they "give" the user a /64... what they do is advertise it. The machine then takes that 64-bit prefix, tacks their 64-bit MAC on the end (or, if that RFC is used, some randomized identifier), and voila, they're connected.
If the user wanted their own subnet, they would then have to request a routed /48 or /56. But their firewall/gateway box would still have an IP in that /64 advertised by the ISP. But any boxes on that subnet would instantly be trackable, so if you wanted to preserve your anonymity, ironically, you'd probably want to use NAT (or use some other method, such as Tor or an anonymizing proxy).
Once we get IPv6 everywhere, most ISPs will simply assign each user a fixed subnet, since that is so much easier and more efficient than keeping track of dynamic assignements.
Not necessarily. Unless the user explicitly asks for a routable /48 or /56, I'll bet most ISPs just give each user a /64 and have them autoconfigure, in which case there's always the Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration option.
(Still, jail seems kind of disproportionate. Scientology has engaged in worse online censorship-fraud without even being fined.)
Yeah, you're right. Whether or not we like the victim should definitely play into the punishment of the accused. I mean, who really cares about that whole, "equal protection", constitution thingy? It's just some silly piece of paper, right?
Then complain to the OP. If your definition of "cloud computing" is the "correct" one, then it has precisely zero (0) to do with netbooks, correct?
Broadband access will never get faster. Broadband providers will never speed up broadband speeds unless the gobernment forces them to do so.
That's not necessarily true. Verizon's FIOS service wasn't government mandated. Heck, my provider, Shaw, has regularly upgraded their backhaul network over the last few years, and as such, my available bandwidth has increased fairly consistently.
All you really need is a bit of competition, and even just two companies (a telco and a cable operator) are enough to create a competitive environment such that available bandwidth will increase over time. Roll in things like 4G/WiMax, and I think, over the next 5-10 years, you'll see traditional operators all but forced to upgrade their networks in order to keep up.
Funny, all the people sending twitter messages from their phones (Twitter being nothing more than broadcast instant messaging, which I'd call an "application") and Facebook status updates would probably tend to disagree. The dividing line between a simple website and an "application" is increasingly blurry these days.
'course, I could list others if you want to get picky. Do Google Maps count (complete with augmented reality features) or Docs count? What about Google Reader? (You'll notice a trend, here... Google is one of the most successful (or, apparently, unsuccessful) purveyors of web-based applications).