you'll realize that this comment increasingly applies to the entire Linux ecosystem. From Kernel 1.2.13 or so through the age of KDE3+GNOME2, Linux was a fabulous, stable, powerful operating system, a free-as-in-both workhorse that you could recommend for a huge variety of roles.
Somehow, in the last half-decade or so, things have disintegrated; Linux is now more like a sandbox in which OS and UI geeks run their experiments and/or argue ideological points about software theory. There is this sense that "we'll leave it to the OEM [Google, IBM, whomever] to actually make a working system," leading to fragmentation, the beginning hints of vendor lock-in, and an absolute lack of canonical(no pun intended) choices for the community of enthusiasts, whitebox users, project hackers, and small-enterprisers that long called Linux home. Back in the day, you could choose Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, and a plethora of other Linux systems and they would all be very similar, very similar to "stock," and thus collectively definitive of this thing that was the "Linux operating system."
I used to argue with people that said "Linux is just a kernel," saying that the de-facto situation was otherwise, but these days they're right; Linux is just a kernel, and an increasingly massive, complex, and less-stable-than-other-Unices one at that.
that I am no longer of the "current technological generation" but am in fact a couple generations back.
Yes, I remember updating my office location, hours, and plan for finger-ers and actually miss that—somehow it all felt so much more personal to me than Facebook does today. That is, I suppose, how you know that time has passed you buy.
A better product? Obviously when the ENTIRE product was present, consumers didn't think so.
Could it be that the branding and the visual experience, the reference to tradition, memory, and social status are a part of the product? Perish the thought, that would be unheard of in all of society!
In fact, Coke clearly has a better product if consumers prefer it. Pepsi has a better product for the blind, it would seem.
But this is the same kind of nonsense that has people saying that Apple makes lousy products that consumers just happen to love and desire. Either your definition of "product" or your definition of "lousy" are faulty if you think this, because the entire POINT in the existence of PRODUCTS is to get consumers to love them.
You don't make them for science, and you don't make them for a particular combination of taste sensation in the absence of visual sensation and that's all that matters, yo. Or if you do, you're not going to take those VC dollars very far.
There are serious uses of the iPad enabled by the serious diversity of Apple's App Store.
I use mine for teaching. In the olden days I used to have to print my PDFs to read through/highlight before class, assemble my lecture outlines on computer, then print them out and carry them to class, etc. Emailing my students required either looking up their addresses in the school system or adding them into an address book, which then mixed in with quick search results from my personal address book in most email programs. I had to cook up and fill in attendance sheets, then remember to bring a pen/pencil to mark them up and reprint or modify them each time a student added or dropped. To grade at the end of the semester, I spent hours constructing Excel spreadsheets and formulas and then inputting data from handwritten score tables and attendance sheets. If a student asked for their grade in the course "at this point in the semester," I would have to tell them to wait for an email from me after class and then go calculate their grade. For media presentations in class, I had to cart around my full laptop—h.e.a.v.y. and slow to wake/sleep/boot, creating uncomfortable 10-15 second delays that interrupt lecture flow, followed by time spent opening files, etc.
All of this is replaced by one lightweight device in the iPad. A gradebook app has all of my courses, each with a roster, a list of assignments and their weights and due dates, and all of the email addresses for every student. I carry the iPad to class. If I need to make a presentation, I plug the iPad straight into the media system. I take attendance with a few taps—the roster is automatically built for each day and I just tap a here, not here, or late for each student. The lesson plan and notes are also in the iPad, as are the PDF readings, with any electronic highlights that I've added on the iPad. When assignments or exams are graded, I simply enter grades with a couple of taps for each student as I work through them; grades are automatically and continuously updated. If I want to email a student, I simply tap on their name. I can mail assignment sheets, PDF readings, grade summaries, whatever. If I want to email a bunch of students, I just tap a button in the course and email the whole class. I can do everything related to my job—prepare for class, make notes, assemble/do/markup readings, show presentations, track attendance, communicate with students, calculate grades, send announcements, etc.—from a single, lightweight device that I can hold in my hand as I stand in front of a class just as I would once have held stapled pack of typed notes. And I can do it all while recording my lectures in the background with the same device, for later download and reference.
It has made my life so much easier and saved me so much time and organizational headache I'd pay three times as much to have the capabilities. But there are no similar teaching apps on Android, nor are the PDF reading options anything like many for iPad that do annotations, multi-color highlighting, filing, etc.
So I'd respond to you by saying (1) it's definitely not a fashion accessory for me, it gets more mileage than my laptop by far, and (2) it's a matter of the marriage of the user interface properties of the device (very light, simple touch interface, long battery life) to the availability of well-developed, highly specialized applications of which there are many in the App Store.
or would they like some more? After all, when barbecued poor person meat becomes popular, the rich and powerful will all leave if we don't give it to them, so we might as well skewer us some regular folks and start butchering for the Great Freedom Feast (by invitation only)!
freedom and the free market (which is the same thing as freedom) and anyone that would ever sue a corporation is therefore a freedom-hater, which makes them one of: Marxist, Terrorist, Islamofascist.
By definition, if you want to sue one of our American Companies, you are a traitor.
The carrier (and, by extension, law enforcement if they have any inclination) are ALREADY tracking you all the time, in real time, and have done since the dawn of the mobile phone age and the advent of cell towers.
Why it's suddenly horrific when Apple builds a product that keeps a list of cell towers in a DEVICE-LOCAL file is beyond me. It's a cache. It makes locational work faster. I'm all for it.
If you don't want The Man to know where you are JUST IN CASE you're on a slippery slope toward totalitarianism somehow, DON'T CARRY A POWERED-ON MOBILE PHONE WITH YOU. It has shit all to do with Apple or anything Apple has designed.
unemployed liberal arts majors and other independent workers that are educated but unable to find jobs. The content is generated through sites like Textbroker.com. They pay $1-$5 or something like that per article for "freelance authors" willing to chuck out dozens of 300-500 articles to spec in a day.
Ironically, the list of articles that they are willing to pay for at any moment is automatically generated, and looks something like:
How to pharmaceutically bend gravity How to ride a celery to the fishpond How to rocket bravely to the moon How to blend avocado into guacamole How to remachine a flange for an ESM-1501X...
The list runs into the hundreds of thousands of "needed" articles. The hapless contract crowdsource workers then keyword search or browse through them endlessly looking for anything they can chuck out a 300-500 word article for, in order to earn their dollar or two. By writing several thousand words in a day whilst endlessly consulting Wikipedia, one can make something approximating a minimum-wage income.
I know this because as a former managing editor we had several interns in our department that had used this or similar sites (there are several, I don't know if they're all owned by Demand Media) to make extra dollars in college.
"The desktop is not yet an iPhone" ------ THIS. x1000. Yes, mobile computing represents a new and powerful use paradigm (I'll call it a paradigm, yes), but there is still a role for the desktop... only in order to fill this role, the desktop needs to remain a desktop, something too many in the technology world seem to misunderstand as they all rush to cause desktops to act like mobile devices, ignoring the obvious physics problems involved in this transformation.
the behavior of nearly every item, object, menu entry, and control center option is unpredictable, for two reasons:
(1) They do not share a common conceptual framework, set of terms, or state/activity flowchart, so there is no way to intuit how one widget will behave by generalizing from the behavior of all others; none of the others are similar enough to ever make possible an idea like "the behavior of all the others." It's as if each tiny component was written by an individual with no guidance about the general structure or ethose of the UI of the system, and then they were all glued together with Krazy glue at the last moment.
(2) They are buggy as hell. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they manage to save their state information. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are visible. Sometimes they are simply missing for no reason, only to turn up later. People kept saying that this was fixed in later versions of KDE4 but through KDE4.5 late last year on Fedora 12 everything was still as disastrous as ever.
It only looks like an integrated, coherent, usable desktop environment to someone that's accustomed to the worst traditions of the ad-hoc nature of Linux desktops; not to anyone coming from an actually "integrated" desktop environment like Windows or Mac OS.
that the Linux Desktop suddenly decided to drive off a cliff over the last few years. I was a very happy Linux user for a very long time, and for so many years, the progress was continuous and substantive.
Then, suddenly, KDE4 happens, still a disastrous mess despite the claims of its worst-stereotypes-about-geeks users, and I leave KDEland for GNOME 2, which I finally start to feel is a great example of a desktop by 2010 or so at which point GNOME3 happens, a new disastrous mess that once again recalls JWZ's complaint about so much of OSS development, in parallel with Unity.
There is suddenly no currently under development heavyweight IDE for Linux to offer a choice to those of us that want the convenience and coherence of a Windows-like or Mac OS-like desktop that is also stable and retains the X11 infrastructure that so much software going back so many years relies on.
There is simply no choice in OSSland, apart from "stop upgrading your software/distro (and thus, your hardware, due to lack of driver support in old versions), stick to GNOME2 or KDE3, and give up on any further development in this area."
Not acceptable, and really puts a dent in the perception of OSS as a set of platforms with long-term investments in stable user interfaces.
to hide the fact that there is not a single desktop environment in Linux that works well, feels polished, is stable, doesn't suffer from jarring visual issues or compatibility issues of some kind, and offers a comparable feature set to non-Linux offerings.
It's not just choice, it's a Hobson's choice in disguise: you can have anything your heart desires in Linux so long as your heart doesn't desire very much.
is a "laptop lite" and for us the primary selling point was in fact the sub-$200 price. It's a Damned Cheap Computer and that's why you buy one—because they're essentially disposable laptops but with adequate performance for most uses. Then you don't mind tossing them in a bag, taking them to the beach, using them on bouncy train rides with the screen hinge flopping, etc.
They can be used in all the places you don't want to risk your much more expensive laptop, and the small size that the constraint of small price imposed was just a bonus. No way I'd pay $300+ for a netbook, but our second netbook was recently acquired on eBay for $75. We didn't mind that it only had a sub-Ghz celeron processor, 512MB of memory, and a smallish hard drive. It runs the latest web browsers fine, and that's all that matters.
In my case, from a three-digit (100 second+) boot process to a one-digit (8-9 second) boot process, comparing a 1TB WD Scorpio Blue drive to an Intel X-25M drive storing the OS. It was a MASSIVE difference, a ridiculous difference.
There's no comparison between the 5,600-10,000 RPM gap and the HDD-SSD gap.
I took the plunge last year and installed X-25M drives in my desktop and laptop as OS drives, with secondary drives for user data. The difference is the single greatest performance jump I've ever experienced in 30 years of upgrading, going even back to the days of replacing clock generators on mainboards to overclock 8-bit CPUs by 50 percent.
There is literally a several-orders-of-magnitude difference in the overall speed of the system. If you haven't experienced it, a description of the difference doesn't sound credible, but a multi-drive RAID-0 array of 10k drives doesn't come close to a single SSD in terms of throughput.
I can't go back to non-SSD OS installs now. Systems without an SSD literally seem to crawl, as if stuck in a time warp of some kind. Non-SSD systems seem, frankly, absurdly slow.
it's the best manifestation of Linux that's ever likely to exist, and a viable alternative to iOS—no small feat—though I'm not sure it measures up yet socially (apps count, user interface polish, and so on).
You seem to think (unlike nearly everyone else) that the primary competitor to iOS isn't Android on touchscreen but Windows on Wacom. I presume the primary competitor to Android, therefore, is OSX-on-iMac?
Meanwhile, your link points to a device with a 5 hour battery life. Enough said.
shrill, but it's not like I just got here. And despite the decline in quality, I've continued to try to like Slashdot.
But now this dynamic has emerged by which the editors post a slanted Apple story and the crowd responds by rabidly tearing Apple and Apple products to bits... once again... often in factually incorrect ways.
It all reeks of the propaganda and mob response, turned toward profit. Apple-bait from eds, Apple-decry en masse from posters and mods. Two stories later, Apple-bait from eds, immediate Apple-decry en masse from posters and mods. And of course the content of their discourse is (ironically) the sheeple-ness of Apple users.
textbook form factors, are actually not so differently priced (Kindle DX ~$300, iPad WiFi ~$500) when you consider the differences in capabilities.
And are you seriously suggesting that the/. crowd of today would behave any differently if the story were about Kindle purchases for students?
I would be just as critical of the Slashdot response to Kindle, which—if you go back and look—has been very similar to the Slashdot response to iPad, despite both devices' obvious utility and popularity. In fact, the Slashdot crowd takes popularity amongst actual users to be a bad thing, taking the role of the Basil Fawlties of IT: "The world of technology would be perfect if it wasn't for all of these damned users!"
Disclaimer: I own both devices. But I also have plastic disk file full of about 130 Slackware Linux floppies and a set of SunOS media on DC600 tapes. That gives me a little bit of cred. Yes, the much (not all) of the Slashdot crowd has taken on ludditic and technoemo characteristics in recent years. And the story quality has gone down as well. The general public is now more geeky and technological than the Slashdot crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
you'll realize that this comment increasingly applies to the entire Linux ecosystem. From Kernel 1.2.13 or so through the age of KDE3+GNOME2, Linux was a fabulous, stable, powerful operating system, a free-as-in-both workhorse that you could recommend for a huge variety of roles.
Somehow, in the last half-decade or so, things have disintegrated; Linux is now more like a sandbox in which OS and UI geeks run their experiments and/or argue ideological points about software theory. There is this sense that "we'll leave it to the OEM [Google, IBM, whomever] to actually make a working system," leading to fragmentation, the beginning hints of vendor lock-in, and an absolute lack of canonical(no pun intended) choices for the community of enthusiasts, whitebox users, project hackers, and small-enterprisers that long called Linux home. Back in the day, you could choose Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, and a plethora of other Linux systems and they would all be very similar, very similar to "stock," and thus collectively definitive of this thing that was the "Linux operating system."
I used to argue with people that said "Linux is just a kernel," saying that the de-facto situation was otherwise, but these days they're right; Linux is just a kernel, and an increasingly massive, complex, and less-stable-than-other-Unices one at that.
that I am no longer of the "current technological generation" but am in fact a couple generations back.
Yes, I remember updating my office location, hours, and plan for finger-ers and actually miss that—somehow it all felt so much more personal to me than Facebook does today. That is, I suppose, how you know that time has passed you buy.
A Slashdot first!
A better product? Obviously when the ENTIRE product was present, consumers didn't think so.
Could it be that the branding and the visual experience, the reference to tradition, memory, and social status are a part of the product? Perish the thought, that would be unheard of in all of society!
In fact, Coke clearly has a better product if consumers prefer it. Pepsi has a better product for the blind, it would seem.
But this is the same kind of nonsense that has people saying that Apple makes lousy products that consumers just happen to love and desire. Either your definition of "product" or your definition of "lousy" are faulty if you think this, because the entire POINT in the existence of PRODUCTS is to get consumers to love them.
You don't make them for science, and you don't make them for a particular combination of taste sensation in the absence of visual sensation and that's all that matters, yo. Or if you do, you're not going to take those VC dollars very far.
When the Linux desktop wars happened in the late '90s, it was exciting and meant that the Linux desktop was growing up.
When the Linux desktop wars started all over again in the late '00s, it was depressing and meant that the Linux desktop had stopped growing up.
In the late '90s, I doubled down on my enthusiasm about Linux.
In the late '00s, I switched to a desktop that was already grown up and gave up on Linux for now.
There are serious uses of the iPad enabled by the serious diversity of Apple's App Store.
I use mine for teaching. In the olden days I used to have to print my PDFs to read through/highlight before class, assemble my lecture outlines on computer, then print them out and carry them to class, etc. Emailing my students required either looking up their addresses in the school system or adding them into an address book, which then mixed in with quick search results from my personal address book in most email programs. I had to cook up and fill in attendance sheets, then remember to bring a pen/pencil to mark them up and reprint or modify them each time a student added or dropped. To grade at the end of the semester, I spent hours constructing Excel spreadsheets and formulas and then inputting data from handwritten score tables and attendance sheets. If a student asked for their grade in the course "at this point in the semester," I would have to tell them to wait for an email from me after class and then go calculate their grade. For media presentations in class, I had to cart around my full laptop—h.e.a.v.y. and slow to wake/sleep/boot, creating uncomfortable 10-15 second delays that interrupt lecture flow, followed by time spent opening files, etc.
All of this is replaced by one lightweight device in the iPad. A gradebook app has all of my courses, each with a roster, a list of assignments and their weights and due dates, and all of the email addresses for every student. I carry the iPad to class. If I need to make a presentation, I plug the iPad straight into the media system. I take attendance with a few taps—the roster is automatically built for each day and I just tap a here, not here, or late for each student. The lesson plan and notes are also in the iPad, as are the PDF readings, with any electronic highlights that I've added on the iPad. When assignments or exams are graded, I simply enter grades with a couple of taps for each student as I work through them; grades are automatically and continuously updated. If I want to email a student, I simply tap on their name. I can mail assignment sheets, PDF readings, grade summaries, whatever. If I want to email a bunch of students, I just tap a button in the course and email the whole class. I can do everything related to my job—prepare for class, make notes, assemble/do/markup readings, show presentations, track attendance, communicate with students, calculate grades, send announcements, etc.—from a single, lightweight device that I can hold in my hand as I stand in front of a class just as I would once have held stapled pack of typed notes. And I can do it all while recording my lectures in the background with the same device, for later download and reference.
It has made my life so much easier and saved me so much time and organizational headache I'd pay three times as much to have the capabilities. But there are no similar teaching apps on Android, nor are the PDF reading options anything like many for iPad that do annotations, multi-color highlighting, filing, etc.
So I'd respond to you by saying (1) it's definitely not a fashion accessory for me, it gets more mileage than my laptop by far, and (2) it's a matter of the marriage of the user interface properties of the device (very light, simple touch interface, long battery life) to the availability of well-developed, highly specialized applications of which there are many in the App Store.
or would they like some more? After all, when barbecued poor person meat becomes popular, the rich and powerful will all leave if we don't give it to them, so we might as well skewer us some regular folks and start butchering for the Great Freedom Feast (by invitation only)!
freedom and the free market (which is the same thing as freedom) and anyone that would ever sue a corporation is therefore a freedom-hater, which makes them one of: Marxist, Terrorist, Islamofascist.
By definition, if you want to sue one of our American Companies, you are a traitor.
is just Marxist code for "redistribution of wealth" and change is just radical code for "overthrowing of the United States," right?
Been that way at least since Reagan.
The carrier (and, by extension, law enforcement if they have any inclination) are ALREADY tracking you all the time, in real time, and have done since the dawn of the mobile phone age and the advent of cell towers.
Why it's suddenly horrific when Apple builds a product that keeps a list of cell towers in a DEVICE-LOCAL file is beyond me. It's a cache. It makes locational work faster. I'm all for it.
If you don't want The Man to know where you are JUST IN CASE you're on a slippery slope toward totalitarianism somehow, DON'T CARRY A POWERED-ON MOBILE PHONE WITH YOU. It has shit all to do with Apple or anything Apple has designed.
The discussion is about the user interface, not the shape of the handset, and you know it.
unemployed liberal arts majors and other independent workers that are educated but unable to find jobs. The content is generated through sites like Textbroker.com. They pay $1-$5 or something like that per article for "freelance authors" willing to chuck out dozens of 300-500 articles to spec in a day.
Ironically, the list of articles that they are willing to pay for at any moment is automatically generated, and looks something like:
How to pharmaceutically bend gravity ...
How to ride a celery to the fishpond
How to rocket bravely to the moon
How to blend avocado into guacamole
How to remachine a flange for an ESM-1501X
The list runs into the hundreds of thousands of "needed" articles. The hapless contract crowdsource workers then keyword search or browse through them endlessly looking for anything they can chuck out a 300-500 word article for, in order to earn their dollar or two. By writing several thousand words in a day whilst endlessly consulting Wikipedia, one can make something approximating a minimum-wage income.
I know this because as a former managing editor we had several interns in our department that had used this or similar sites (there are several, I don't know if they're all owned by Demand Media) to make extra dollars in college.
"The desktop is not yet an iPhone" ------ THIS. x1000. Yes, mobile computing represents a new and powerful use paradigm (I'll call it a paradigm, yes), but there is still a role for the desktop... only in order to fill this role, the desktop needs to remain a desktop, something too many in the technology world seem to misunderstand as they all rush to cause desktops to act like mobile devices, ignoring the obvious physics problems involved in this transformation.
the behavior of nearly every item, object, menu entry, and control center option is unpredictable, for two reasons:
(1) They do not share a common conceptual framework, set of terms, or state/activity flowchart, so there is no way to intuit how one widget will behave by generalizing from the behavior of all others; none of the others are similar enough to ever make possible an idea like "the behavior of all the others." It's as if each tiny component was written by an individual with no guidance about the general structure or ethose of the UI of the system, and then they were all glued together with Krazy glue at the last moment.
(2) They are buggy as hell. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they manage to save their state information. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are visible. Sometimes they are simply missing for no reason, only to turn up later. People kept saying that this was fixed in later versions of KDE4 but through KDE4.5 late last year on Fedora 12 everything was still as disastrous as ever.
It only looks like an integrated, coherent, usable desktop environment to someone that's accustomed to the worst traditions of the ad-hoc nature of Linux desktops; not to anyone coming from an actually "integrated" desktop environment like Windows or Mac OS.
that the Linux Desktop suddenly decided to drive off a cliff over the last few years. I was a very happy Linux user for a very long time, and for so many years, the progress was continuous and substantive.
Then, suddenly, KDE4 happens, still a disastrous mess despite the claims of its worst-stereotypes-about-geeks users, and I leave KDEland for GNOME 2, which I finally start to feel is a great example of a desktop by 2010 or so at which point GNOME3 happens, a new disastrous mess that once again recalls JWZ's complaint about so much of OSS development, in parallel with Unity.
There is suddenly no currently under development heavyweight IDE for Linux to offer a choice to those of us that want the convenience and coherence of a Windows-like or Mac OS-like desktop that is also stable and retains the X11 infrastructure that so much software going back so many years relies on.
There is simply no choice in OSSland, apart from "stop upgrading your software/distro (and thus, your hardware, due to lack of driver support in old versions), stick to GNOME2 or KDE3, and give up on any further development in this area."
Not acceptable, and really puts a dent in the perception of OSS as a set of platforms with long-term investments in stable user interfaces.
Alpha and several other non-x86 platforms?
I seem to recall this was back when Windows NT Workstation was aspiring to supplant Unices on a variety of Unix vendor hardware in the early '90s.
to hide the fact that there is not a single desktop environment in Linux that works well, feels polished, is stable, doesn't suffer from jarring visual issues or compatibility issues of some kind, and offers a comparable feature set to non-Linux offerings.
It's not just choice, it's a Hobson's choice in disguise: you can have anything your heart desires in Linux so long as your heart doesn't desire very much.
Gone to OSX and not coming back, even after having written six books on Linux over a ten year period and converted countless Windows users.
KDE4 and GNOME3 are simply not usability wins. They're toys for curious coders that want to play with UI design.
Some of us have work to do, and Apple these days is the company letting workers get to work.
is a "laptop lite" and for us the primary selling point was in fact the sub-$200 price. It's a Damned Cheap Computer and that's why you buy one—because they're essentially disposable laptops but with adequate performance for most uses. Then you don't mind tossing them in a bag, taking them to the beach, using them on bouncy train rides with the screen hinge flopping, etc.
They can be used in all the places you don't want to risk your much more expensive laptop, and the small size that the constraint of small price imposed was just a bonus. No way I'd pay $300+ for a netbook, but our second netbook was recently acquired on eBay for $75. We didn't mind that it only had a sub-Ghz celeron processor, 512MB of memory, and a smallish hard drive. It runs the latest web browsers fine, and that's all that matters.
I would say two orders of magnitude.
In my case, from a three-digit (100 second+) boot process to a one-digit (8-9 second) boot process, comparing a 1TB WD Scorpio Blue drive to an Intel X-25M drive storing the OS. It was a MASSIVE difference, a ridiculous difference.
There's no comparison between the 5,600-10,000 RPM gap and the HDD-SSD gap.
I took the plunge last year and installed X-25M drives in my desktop and laptop as OS drives, with secondary drives for user data. The difference is the single greatest performance jump I've ever experienced in 30 years of upgrading, going even back to the days of replacing clock generators on mainboards to overclock 8-bit CPUs by 50 percent.
There is literally a several-orders-of-magnitude difference in the overall speed of the system. If you haven't experienced it, a description of the difference doesn't sound credible, but a multi-drive RAID-0 array of 10k drives doesn't come close to a single SSD in terms of throughput.
I can't go back to non-SSD OS installs now. Systems without an SSD literally seem to crawl, as if stuck in a time warp of some kind. Non-SSD systems seem, frankly, absurdly slow.
it's the best manifestation of Linux that's ever likely to exist, and a viable alternative to iOS—no small feat—though I'm not sure it measures up yet socially (apps count, user interface polish, and so on).
You seem to think (unlike nearly everyone else) that the primary competitor to iOS isn't Android on touchscreen but Windows on Wacom. I presume the primary competitor to Android, therefore, is OSX-on-iMac?
Meanwhile, your link points to a device with a 5 hour battery life. Enough said.
shrill, but it's not like I just got here. And despite the decline in quality, I've continued to try to like Slashdot.
But now this dynamic has emerged by which the editors post a slanted Apple story and the crowd responds by rabidly tearing Apple and Apple products to bits... once again... often in factually incorrect ways.
It all reeks of the propaganda and mob response, turned toward profit. Apple-bait from eds, Apple-decry en masse from posters and mods. Two stories later, Apple-bait from eds, immediate Apple-decry en masse from posters and mods. And of course the content of their discourse is (ironically) the sheeple-ness of Apple users.
textbook form factors, are actually not so differently priced (Kindle DX ~$300, iPad WiFi ~$500) when you consider the differences in capabilities.
And are you seriously suggesting that the /. crowd of today would behave any differently if the story were about Kindle purchases for students?
I would be just as critical of the Slashdot response to Kindle, which—if you go back and look—has been very similar to the Slashdot response to iPad, despite both devices' obvious utility and popularity. In fact, the Slashdot crowd takes popularity amongst actual users to be a bad thing, taking the role of the Basil Fawlties of IT: "The world of technology would be perfect if it wasn't for all of these damned users!"
Disclaimer: I own both devices. But I also have plastic disk file full of about 130 Slackware Linux floppies and a set of SunOS media on DC600 tapes. That gives me a little bit of cred. Yes, the much (not all) of the Slashdot crowd has taken on ludditic and technoemo characteristics in recent years. And the story quality has gone down as well. The general public is now more geeky and technological than the Slashdot crowd.