Seriously, the march of the "user interface police" in Linux and open source kills me.
We once had this uber-great Unix-like system: modular, customizable, efficient, intelligent. What was missing were drivers and applications.
Now we get drivers and applications only with them comes the same idiotic Windows/Mac-like interface and interoperability world that I spent so many years in Unix trying to avoid.
I guess you can't have a modular, customizable, efficient, intelligent system that also has lots of drivers and great applications. At least, nothing like this has yet existed in the world of computing, half a century on.
I used to prefer GIMP to Photoshop back in the day because I could work so much more quickly with many, many open files and windows using GIMP thanks to the "lots of little windows" approach. It made fine-grained window management easy using a capable window manager and focus-follows-mouse.
I always found the Photoshop interface clumsy in comparison, but now with every release GIMP gets closer to it.
a lot of family and friends with dead Li-Ion batteries, yet rarely experiences these myself.
One major difference in usage patterns is that I ALWAYS run on a smooth, flat surface (desk, table) and often try to elevate the rear of the machine to keep airspace underneath (i.e. with a docking station or similar).
The family and friends I know with laptops almost always use them... on their laps. Or on a bed or a couch or similar.
Heat concerns about the hard drive, graphics, processor, and general stability (bitflips in memory and so on) were always my motive, but I wonder if this is the reason I seem to have great batteries that last me years and years with full capacity, while they seem to end up with 2 minute charge bricks after just a few months.
See my post above for an anecdote with opposite parameters. But it definitely seems as though batteries remain something of an "unsolved problem" for computing, as compared to mobile phones, where things hum along rather nicely. Higher current drain? Bigger hardware diversity married to a software ecosystem? Uneven usage meaning uneven current drain over time?
I don't understand anything about battery chemistry or the finer points of PC power management, but it does seem to be one of the sketchier areas of current PC hardware.
in the world, and it's been there since before Windows 7.
I don't think I've ever had a friend, significant other, or family member that actually had a working battery in their laptop after the first 5-6 months or so, leaving them all permanently tethered until their next PC (which would end up that way again after the first 5-6 months).
Meanwhile, my batteries have always lasted the life of the unit with more or less full capacity.
I've long assumed it had something to do with usage patterns and charging habits, but I've not really looked into it more than that. One variable was that they were all using Windows (in some incarnation) and I rarely boot into Windows at all.
reflecting on how this kind of tragedy can happen, and how it relates to our very rational, ends-oriented world, should read Horkheimer and Adorno's (in)famous Dialectic of Enlightenment and its much heralded account of how the very nature of rational Enlightenment thinking carries the danger that we'll fail to enter into "a truly human state" as a world, instead descending into "a new age of barbarism" marked by things like anti-intellectual mass culture, multiplying high-tech wars, short-sighted exploitation, and other modern ills that appear to destroy society and the planet.
It was written back during the Nazi+Emerging Cold War era, but it remains as relevant a warning today as ever.
You do have background processes. iPhone does multitask. It's a Unix-like OS in there for God's sake. You can get an app that shows you your process list, including all of the typical daemons, and lets you kill them (System is the one I use), and this on a LOCKED iPhone.
I have never seen the need to jailbreak, it does everything I need without.
I get notifications just fine. They can even be configured in the configuration settings: which apps you want to get notifications for.
I'm replying again in hopes that you'll see one or the other.
You can totally have background tasks. It's just that they have to come from Apple. (Phone, iPod, iTunes, voice recorder, etc.) Third-party tasks are not allowed to remain in the background.
But yes: read and listen to MP3. Talk on the phone while you are browsing. Voice record while you are checking the weather. Get notifications for incoming content popping up over whatever you are doing.
This "no multitasking" meme is from the Android and Palm folks, who imply (incorrectly) that if you want to take a call on your iPhone, you have to be sitting in the "phone" app, or if you want to listen to music, you have to be sitting in the iPod app. Not true, total bullshit.
But everyone without an iPhone seems to have bought it.
You can get notifications of pushed items and listen to all your MP3 files in the background while you do other things.
You can also start the sound recorder and leave it recording while you do other things.
You can also start a phone call and use Safari (or any other app) while you talk, even over bluetooth with a headset.
The "it doesn't multitask" thing is a LIE based on marketing. It absolutely multitasks. There is simply a restriction: only Apple-supplied software is allowed to run in the background.
Third party software is not allowed to run in the background.
People bitch and moan about this and call it "not multitasking" but in fact given my experience in the past with third-party background apps on other devices behaving like shit (not to mention in Windows itself), I'd say Apple has a valid rationale (whether you agree or disagree) for insisting that the only apps that are allowed to do whatever they want in the background come from Apple themselves.
I have about 15,000 pieces of content in my library, which I manage with Calibre. Books, lots of journal articles, reference volumes, etc.
Some of them began life as PDF files, others as MOBI, RTF, DOC, EPUB, TXT, even a few old LIT files. They can all be converted to MobiPocket files easily, and then simply USB'ed onto the Kindle.
Whispernet doesn't take anything away from you. I can read any format the Sony readers can. What it does do is give you an option to go online and buy content. In other words, it gives you an extra option, rather than taking options away.
Oh, and by the way, you CAN use DRM'ed MobiPocket files on your Kindle (just use your Kindle's PID as your device ID) and they'll work fine.
And double-by-the-way, you can always use DRM removers to strip DRM from both AZW (Amazon Kindle format) and MOBI (MobiPocket) files, which are the two dominant ebook file formats at ebook stores. All you have to do is use a DRM stripper (like MobiDeDRM) with your Kindle PID and out plops a non-DRM file. It takes all of about 2 seconds.
I am essentially a professional reader, and I go through 1,000-2,000 pages a week easily, if not more.
I've also been a gadgeteer since the same time as many of us greyhairs on/. I can remember when the Newton was the coolest new tech thing on the block and I was busy reading books on it. In the meantime, I've gone through desktops, tablet PCs, laptops, netbooks, smartphones, and Palm devices galore.
Laptops suck for reading in volume. They discipline your body; you must adopt a specific narrow range of postures and locations in order to use a laptop, which is heavy, hot, and fragile. Not good by page 800 when you're still trying to plough on. Not to mention eyestrain and headaches from the backlight.
I can get through a couple hundred pages on my iPhone, tiny as it is, but suffer many of the same problems in the end.
Kindle has been a revelation. I have nearly switched to Kindle entirely for my secondary research, and it's clearly a reading device. Light, endless battery, no eyestrain, nonfragile (no hinges, worries about pressure on the LCD, popping keys off when they catch on your zipper, etc.), no heat generation, legible in anything other than pitch darkness.
I'm tempted by the iPad, but it certainly would NOT be a Kindle-killer for me until/unless high-refresh color e-ink emerges.
iPad, it would have been $3500 and come with sixteen fans, an all-aluminum brushed metal exterior, LED glow lights around the edges, an SLI cable for linking two tablets together to get really high framerates on Google, and a poorly supported Linux SDK.
In fact, you're imposing your own arbitrary perspectives.
The Kindle is also your basic good old fashioned Von Neumann architecture computer with inputs and outputs. Even a keyboard and a display, in fact.
So why is the iPad a "poor computer" and not an "insanely great Kindle?"
In fact, why is it either?
I have a Kindle. I love it. I use it to read books.
I have a computer. I love it. I use it to manage data, code, and do research.
I have an iPhone. I love it. I use it to web browse, email, Facebook, and watch YouTube videos.
I don't walk around musing about how the computer is the "real" computer and the other two are just pale imitations of it, or how the Kindle is the "real" Kindle and the other two are just pale imitations of it, etc.
iPad is a device with specific properties and limitations that will serve some users well and other users not at all. The latter should not buy it. But I suspect that members of the latter group who have been marching around on/. for two days making fun of iPad and suggesting either that (1) nobody will buy it or (2) that nobody should buy it are a little myopic, to say the least.
There's a YouTube app. When you click on someone's YouTube link in Safari or something, surprise surprise, it opens the YouTube app and plays the video.
People who don't have one have a lot of notions about the limitations of an iPhone but a lot of it (missing flash, no multitasking, etc.) is a kind of semantic game: it does things in a new way, which means that the old terms don't quite apply. But then people assume that it's not capable, not just that it's not the same.
Because my iPhone doesn't act like that. When I exit safari and then come back, it doesn't have to reload anything. It exactly where I left it. It's perfectly state-stable across entrances and exits, and with no delays.
Not to mention that Facebook is an app, and the app is MUCH easier to use than the website; I tend to facebook from my iPhone and never from my PC.
Every iPhone app I have (yes, that's the iPhone famous for "not multitasking") stores complete state information when it exits.
Safari comes back with all the same tabs and windows open. It doesn't have to reload them. It is scrolled to exactly the same place I was at. Partially filled out forms are still partially filled out.
The document I was working on in DocsToGo is exactly the way it looked (with the cursor in exactly the same place).
It's COMPLETELY state-stable and FAST, there's no "saving state" when you switch applications, because they store their state continuously as it evolves.
I am a power Linux user. I HAVE a home-built hardware RAID sitting here on my desktop, along with a triple-head display.
I run from the updates-testing repos on Fedora. I have patched my own radeon_drv.so Xorg module to fix the infamous compositing corruption bug (for those who care, when doing copy-from-screen, first do a test to see if the bitmap being copied is smaller than 32 pixels; if it is, don't copy-from, because the bitmap hasn't made it into the buffer yet to be copied back from).
I'm the sort you'd think would be bugged as hell with "no multitasking."
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.
The only thing that can't be approximated is background processes (i.e. start it and let it compute while I work on something else), but it's not like I'm going to do a 20-day render on my iPhone, is it? Nor on my iPad.
adaptation that provides a great cognitive interface for flash decision making (think of it as the "summary view" of the facts that you have) and for lineage and group preservation (i.e. getting offspring reared to adulthood). We enlightenment-era folk think we don't like emotion, but it's one of the innovations that has made humankind very successful. Emotions aren't irrational emergent properties of no particular origin, they are indicators of conclusions made subconsciously based on evidence and previous experience and/or necessary safeguards for self-preservation and species-preservation.
They work quite well and have done for much of human history.
Sure, it's "her own fucking problem" and it looks like iPad is how she's going to solve it, judging by her excitement at watching the YouTube videos and my answers to her questions about it last night. I'm sure you don't care.
Maybe you think she's an idiot. Maybe I'm really bad at explaining. Both of those things have little to do with my suggestion that geeks will likely continue to wonder until the end of time why not everyone wants a bare/caseless single board computer that fits inside a coffee cup, runs embedded Linux, and is hackable for umpteen million projects.
I'm just ruminating on all the Slashdot anti-Apple posting and the apparent geek frustration at the success of Apple.
A: "Apple sucks!" B: "Regular people like Apple!" A: "But Apple isn't a hackable Linux embedded device with hooks for 23 language APIs!" B: "Regular people don't want that!" A: "Then regular people are really stupid and deserve to be dominated and reamed!" B: "?!!?" A: "By the way, why don't people like us, and why can't I get a girlfriend?"
because (a) I'm a Linux user since 1993 (Unix since 1986) and often personally share some of the frustration that geeks have about narrowly specified consumer devices (as opposed to flexible, powerful IT tools), but at the same time and paradoxically, (b) since getting my iPhone I carry my laptop about 90 percent less. I already am doing most of the web browsing, emailing, facebooking, document editing, and even ssh logins in my life NOT FROM A COMPUTER but from a locked down Apple device, only one with a tiny-ass screen. If that's how it's going to be, might I not as well just get an iPad?
But then, clearly, I will be banned from/. forever. Still, it's only $499... There's something do the idea of a limited-function generalized network access appliance with a long battery life, completely uncumbersome (and no-mouse-or-pen needed) user interface, that's super lightweight and portable, and runs "full" versions of the few things it does well (as opposed to the crippled versions of everything that were common on mobile machines before iPhone came along).
I haven't decided yet. But I know that in about 60 days my wife will be turning up saying "so I went into Manhattan today, and I bought a little something for myself..."
with my wife hating multitasking. She never closes a thing (tab, application, etc.) and invariably runs out of memory. Often, there are dozens of background processes. Her hard drive starts to thrash. Things grind to a halt. I get called.
I've tried to explain about things taking up memory, the problem of lots of background applications, the problem of never closing applications. She doesn't want to know what memory even IS. "Why is the computer so stupid," she wants to know, "that it can't figure out that I only care about what I'm working on RIGHT NOW?"
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.
"I can either outfit you with Gentoo on an 64-way 128GB NUMA server with a 16TB ZFS RAID that you access via ssh over gigabit ethernet... or with your basic hunk of steel... if the 64-way Linux box is too complicated for you. No, you don't want that iPad. All it does it access the web, your email, Facebook, YouTube, and iTunes with the touch of a finger, but only over a wireless network so unspecial you'll find it anywhere in the world, and it doesn't do anything beyond that, really. Oh, and it won't force you to learn anything while you're at it. Naw, either stick to the Gentoo server or the hunk of steel, those are your two best bets, depending on what sort of person you are."
It's not about "do more things," it's about "do very few things better."
That's why Apple wins.
My wife asked about the iPad last night (she owns a netbook right now) and now she's drooling over one. Why? It doesn't have "files." It doesn't have "windows." She won't have to worry about "flash drives." And so on. She was so excited about all the things it didn't have (and that she therefore didn't have to worry about) that she was disappointed when I told her they weren't in the Apple Store in Manhattan yet.
Meanwhile, the geeks are running around blasting Apple products for all the things they "don't have" and recommending complex alternatives.
That's why Apple is making $$$ these days. Because they're removing 60 percent of the features and making the remaining 40 percent configuration free and so polished they make your eyes hurt.
over their computers. Go ahead. Give it to them. Explain that they need to right-click on the icon and choose "Run as Administrator," or that they need to run spyware scans, or virus scans, or allow the machine to install updates, or use Browser X instead of Browser Y, or manage a filesystem in a clean and organized way. What do they say? Come on, we've all heard it.
"Can't you fix it so that I don't have to worry about that?" "Why doesn't the computer just do that for me?" "Why do I have to do that? I never had to do that before." "Do I really have to worry about this stuff?" "Just make it work, I don't care how, and I don't want to know." "I'll just buy a new computer."
They DO NOT WANT to perform maintenance, worry about security, track down tools, learn to use said tools, administer storage or filesystems, etc. Given the choice between technology that slides into malfunction when not administered properly (i.e. "it's broken" as far as they can tell) and no technology at all, most regular people will simply opt for "none," as in "I tried it for a while, but it was always broken or crashing or getting a virus, it sucked. I sold it and just went back to my old XYZ."
Say what you will, but the masses are sheep and they're happy as sheep. You cannot teach them to think, vote, raise children, or use computers responsibly because they DO NOT WANT TO BE THE SHEPHERD, only the sheep. And there will always be a market to sell them sheep-friendly devices.
As a non-coder who writes and teaches for a living, I would be VERY tempted to get rid of my laptop and use my iPhone as my main (only?) computing device if only it had a USB port or bluetooth keyboard + mouse connectivity.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, the march of the "user interface police" in Linux and open source kills me.
We once had this uber-great Unix-like system: modular, customizable, efficient, intelligent. What was missing were drivers and applications.
Now we get drivers and applications only with them comes the same idiotic Windows/Mac-like interface and interoperability world that I spent so many years in Unix trying to avoid.
I guess you can't have a modular, customizable, efficient, intelligent system that also has lots of drivers and great applications. At least, nothing like this has yet existed in the world of computing, half a century on.
I used to prefer GIMP to Photoshop back in the day because I could work so much more quickly with many, many open files and windows using GIMP thanks to the "lots of little windows" approach. It made fine-grained window management easy using a capable window manager and focus-follows-mouse.
I always found the Photoshop interface clumsy in comparison, but now with every release GIMP gets closer to it.
a lot of family and friends with dead Li-Ion batteries, yet rarely experiences these myself.
One major difference in usage patterns is that I ALWAYS run on a smooth, flat surface (desk, table) and often try to elevate the rear of the machine to keep airspace underneath (i.e. with a docking station or similar).
The family and friends I know with laptops almost always use them... on their laps. Or on a bed or a couch or similar.
Heat concerns about the hard drive, graphics, processor, and general stability (bitflips in memory and so on) were always my motive, but I wonder if this is the reason I seem to have great batteries that last me years and years with full capacity, while they seem to end up with 2 minute charge bricks after just a few months.
See my post above for an anecdote with opposite parameters. But it definitely seems as though batteries remain something of an "unsolved problem" for computing, as compared to mobile phones, where things hum along rather nicely. Higher current drain? Bigger hardware diversity married to a software ecosystem? Uneven usage meaning uneven current drain over time?
I don't understand anything about battery chemistry or the finer points of PC power management, but it does seem to be one of the sketchier areas of current PC hardware.
in the world, and it's been there since before Windows 7.
I don't think I've ever had a friend, significant other, or family member that actually had a working battery in their laptop after the first 5-6 months or so, leaving them all permanently tethered until their next PC (which would end up that way again after the first 5-6 months).
Meanwhile, my batteries have always lasted the life of the unit with more or less full capacity.
I've long assumed it had something to do with usage patterns and charging habits, but I've not really looked into it more than that. One variable was that they were all using Windows (in some incarnation) and I rarely boot into Windows at all.
reflecting on how this kind of tragedy can happen, and how it relates to our very rational, ends-oriented world, should read Horkheimer and Adorno's (in)famous Dialectic of Enlightenment and its much heralded account of how the very nature of rational Enlightenment thinking carries the danger that we'll fail to enter into "a truly human state" as a world, instead descending into "a new age of barbarism" marked by things like anti-intellectual mass culture, multiplying high-tech wars, short-sighted exploitation, and other modern ills that appear to destroy society and the planet.
It was written back during the Nazi+Emerging Cold War era, but it remains as relevant a warning today as ever.
You do have background processes. iPhone does multitask. It's a Unix-like OS in there for God's sake. You can get an app that shows you your process list, including all of the typical daemons, and lets you kill them (System is the one I use), and this on a LOCKED iPhone.
I have never seen the need to jailbreak, it does everything I need without.
I get notifications just fine. They can even be configured in the configuration settings: which apps you want to get notifications for.
FUD is what this all is.
I'm replying again in hopes that you'll see one or the other.
You can totally have background tasks. It's just that they have to come from Apple. (Phone, iPod, iTunes, voice recorder, etc.) Third-party tasks are not allowed to remain in the background.
But yes: read and listen to MP3. Talk on the phone while you are browsing. Voice record while you are checking the weather. Get notifications for incoming content popping up over whatever you are doing.
This "no multitasking" meme is from the Android and Palm folks, who imply (incorrectly) that if you want to take a call on your iPhone, you have to be sitting in the "phone" app, or if you want to listen to music, you have to be sitting in the iPod app. Not true, total bullshit.
But everyone without an iPhone seems to have bought it.
You can get notifications of pushed items and listen to all your MP3 files in the background while you do other things.
You can also start the sound recorder and leave it recording while you do other things.
You can also start a phone call and use Safari (or any other app) while you talk, even over bluetooth with a headset.
The "it doesn't multitask" thing is a LIE based on marketing. It absolutely multitasks. There is simply a restriction: only Apple-supplied software is allowed to run in the background.
Third party software is not allowed to run in the background.
People bitch and moan about this and call it "not multitasking" but in fact given my experience in the past with third-party background apps on other devices behaving like shit (not to mention in Windows itself), I'd say Apple has a valid rationale (whether you agree or disagree) for insisting that the only apps that are allowed to do whatever they want in the background come from Apple themselves.
I have about 15,000 pieces of content in my library, which I manage with Calibre. Books, lots of journal articles, reference volumes, etc.
Some of them began life as PDF files, others as MOBI, RTF, DOC, EPUB, TXT, even a few old LIT files. They can all be converted to MobiPocket files easily, and then simply USB'ed onto the Kindle.
Whispernet doesn't take anything away from you. I can read any format the Sony readers can. What it does do is give you an option to go online and buy content. In other words, it gives you an extra option, rather than taking options away.
Oh, and by the way, you CAN use DRM'ed MobiPocket files on your Kindle (just use your Kindle's PID as your device ID) and they'll work fine.
And double-by-the-way, you can always use DRM removers to strip DRM from both AZW (Amazon Kindle format) and MOBI (MobiPocket) files, which are the two dominant ebook file formats at ebook stores. All you have to do is use a DRM stripper (like MobiDeDRM) with your Kindle PID and out plops a non-DRM file. It takes all of about 2 seconds.
I am essentially a professional reader, and I go through 1,000-2,000 pages a week easily, if not more.
I've also been a gadgeteer since the same time as many of us greyhairs on /. I can remember when the Newton was the coolest new tech thing on the block and I was busy reading books on it. In the meantime, I've gone through desktops, tablet PCs, laptops, netbooks, smartphones, and Palm devices galore.
Laptops suck for reading in volume. They discipline your body; you must adopt a specific narrow range of postures and locations in order to use a laptop, which is heavy, hot, and fragile. Not good by page 800 when you're still trying to plough on. Not to mention eyestrain and headaches from the backlight.
I can get through a couple hundred pages on my iPhone, tiny as it is, but suffer many of the same problems in the end.
Kindle has been a revelation. I have nearly switched to Kindle entirely for my secondary research, and it's clearly a reading device. Light, endless battery, no eyestrain, nonfragile (no hinges, worries about pressure on the LCD, popping keys off when they catch on your zipper, etc.), no heat generation, legible in anything other than pitch darkness.
I'm tempted by the iPad, but it certainly would NOT be a Kindle-killer for me until/unless high-refresh color e-ink emerges.
iPad, it would have been $3500 and come with sixteen fans, an all-aluminum brushed metal exterior, LED glow lights around the edges, an SLI cable for linking two tablets together to get really high framerates on Google, and a poorly supported Linux SDK.
rather than a better Kindle?
In fact, you're imposing your own arbitrary perspectives.
The Kindle is also your basic good old fashioned Von Neumann architecture computer with inputs and outputs. Even a keyboard and a display, in fact.
So why is the iPad a "poor computer" and not an "insanely great Kindle?"
In fact, why is it either?
I have a Kindle. I love it. I use it to read books.
I have a computer. I love it. I use it to manage data, code, and do research.
I have an iPhone. I love it. I use it to web browse, email, Facebook, and watch YouTube videos.
I don't walk around musing about how the computer is the "real" computer and the other two are just pale imitations of it, or how the Kindle is the "real" Kindle and the other two are just pale imitations of it, etc.
iPad is a device with specific properties and limitations that will serve some users well and other users not at all. The latter should not buy it. But I suspect that members of the latter group who have been marching around on /. for two days making fun of iPad and suggesting either that (1) nobody will buy it or (2) that nobody should buy it are a little myopic, to say the least.
It doesn't feel like shutting anything down. It feels--exactly, in fact--like switching windows and then switching back.
There's a YouTube app. When you click on someone's YouTube link in Safari or something, surprise surprise, it opens the YouTube app and plays the video.
People who don't have one have a lot of notions about the limitations of an iPhone but a lot of it (missing flash, no multitasking, etc.) is a kind of semantic game: it does things in a new way, which means that the old terms don't quite apply. But then people assume that it's not capable, not just that it's not the same.
Because my iPhone doesn't act like that. When I exit safari and then come back, it doesn't have to reload anything. It exactly where I left it. It's perfectly state-stable across entrances and exits, and with no delays.
Not to mention that Facebook is an app, and the app is MUCH easier to use than the website; I tend to facebook from my iPhone and never from my PC.
Every iPhone app I have (yes, that's the iPhone famous for "not multitasking") stores complete state information when it exits.
Safari comes back with all the same tabs and windows open. It doesn't have to reload them. It is scrolled to exactly the same place I was at. Partially filled out forms are still partially filled out.
The document I was working on in DocsToGo is exactly the way it looked (with the cursor in exactly the same place).
It's COMPLETELY state-stable and FAST, there's no "saving state" when you switch applications, because they store their state continuously as it evolves.
I am a power Linux user. I HAVE a home-built hardware RAID sitting here on my desktop, along with a triple-head display.
I run from the updates-testing repos on Fedora. I have patched my own radeon_drv.so Xorg module to fix the infamous compositing corruption bug (for those who care, when doing copy-from-screen, first do a test to see if the bitmap being copied is smaller than 32 pixels; if it is, don't copy-from, because the bitmap hasn't made it into the buffer yet to be copied back from).
I'm the sort you'd think would be bugged as hell with "no multitasking."
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.
The only thing that can't be approximated is background processes (i.e. start it and let it compute while I work on something else), but it's not like I'm going to do a 20-day render on my iPhone, is it? Nor on my iPad.
adaptation that provides a great cognitive interface for flash decision making (think of it as the "summary view" of the facts that you have) and for lineage and group preservation (i.e. getting offspring reared to adulthood). We enlightenment-era folk think we don't like emotion, but it's one of the innovations that has made humankind very successful. Emotions aren't irrational emergent properties of no particular origin, they are indicators of conclusions made subconsciously based on evidence and previous experience and/or necessary safeguards for self-preservation and species-preservation.
They work quite well and have done for much of human history.
Sure, it's "her own fucking problem" and it looks like iPad is how she's going to solve it, judging by her excitement at watching the YouTube videos and my answers to her questions about it last night. I'm sure you don't care.
Maybe you think she's an idiot. Maybe I'm really bad at explaining. Both of those things have little to do with my suggestion that geeks will likely continue to wonder until the end of time why not everyone wants a bare/caseless single board computer that fits inside a coffee cup, runs embedded Linux, and is hackable for umpteen million projects.
I'm just ruminating on all the Slashdot anti-Apple posting and the apparent geek frustration at the success of Apple.
A: "Apple sucks!"
B: "Regular people like Apple!"
A: "But Apple isn't a hackable Linux embedded device with hooks for 23 language APIs!"
B: "Regular people don't want that!"
A: "Then regular people are really stupid and deserve to be dominated and reamed!"
B: "?!!?"
A: "By the way, why don't people like us, and why can't I get a girlfriend?"
because (a) I'm a Linux user since 1993 (Unix since 1986) and often personally share some of the frustration that geeks have about narrowly specified consumer devices (as opposed to flexible, powerful IT tools), but at the same time and paradoxically, (b) since getting my iPhone I carry my laptop about 90 percent less. I already am doing most of the web browsing, emailing, facebooking, document editing, and even ssh logins in my life NOT FROM A COMPUTER but from a locked down Apple device, only one with a tiny-ass screen. If that's how it's going to be, might I not as well just get an iPad?
But then, clearly, I will be banned from /. forever. Still, it's only $499... There's something do the idea of a limited-function generalized network access appliance with a long battery life, completely uncumbersome (and no-mouse-or-pen needed) user interface, that's super lightweight and portable, and runs "full" versions of the few things it does well (as opposed to the crippled versions of everything that were common on mobile machines before iPhone came along).
I haven't decided yet. But I know that in about 60 days my wife will be turning up saying "so I went into Manhattan today, and I bought a little something for myself..."
with my wife hating multitasking. She never closes a thing (tab, application, etc.) and invariably runs out of memory. Often, there are dozens of background processes. Her hard drive starts to thrash. Things grind to a halt. I get called.
I've tried to explain about things taking up memory, the problem of lots of background applications, the problem of never closing applications. She doesn't want to know what memory even IS. "Why is the computer so stupid," she wants to know, "that it can't figure out that I only care about what I'm working on RIGHT NOW?"
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.
people.
"I can either outfit you with Gentoo on an 64-way 128GB NUMA server with a 16TB ZFS RAID that you access via ssh over gigabit ethernet... or with your basic hunk of steel... if the 64-way Linux box is too complicated for you. No, you don't want that iPad. All it does it access the web, your email, Facebook, YouTube, and iTunes with the touch of a finger, but only over a wireless network so unspecial you'll find it anywhere in the world, and it doesn't do anything beyond that, really. Oh, and it won't force you to learn anything while you're at it. Naw, either stick to the Gentoo server or the hunk of steel, those are your two best bets, depending on what sort of person you are."
It's not about "do more things," it's about "do very few things better."
That's why Apple wins.
My wife asked about the iPad last night (she owns a netbook right now) and now she's drooling over one. Why? It doesn't have "files." It doesn't have "windows." She won't have to worry about "flash drives." And so on. She was so excited about all the things it didn't have (and that she therefore didn't have to worry about) that she was disappointed when I told her they weren't in the Apple Store in Manhattan yet.
Meanwhile, the geeks are running around blasting Apple products for all the things they "don't have" and recommending complex alternatives.
That's why Apple is making $$$ these days. Because they're removing 60 percent of the features and making the remaining 40 percent configuration free and so polished they make your eyes hurt.
over their computers. Go ahead. Give it to them. Explain that they need to right-click on the icon and choose "Run as Administrator," or that they need to run spyware scans, or virus scans, or allow the machine to install updates, or use Browser X instead of Browser Y, or manage a filesystem in a clean and organized way. What do they say? Come on, we've all heard it.
"Can't you fix it so that I don't have to worry about that?"
"Why doesn't the computer just do that for me?"
"Why do I have to do that? I never had to do that before."
"Do I really have to worry about this stuff?"
"Just make it work, I don't care how, and I don't want to know."
"I'll just buy a new computer."
They DO NOT WANT to perform maintenance, worry about security, track down tools, learn to use said tools, administer storage or filesystems, etc. Given the choice between technology that slides into malfunction when not administered properly (i.e. "it's broken" as far as they can tell) and no technology at all, most regular people will simply opt for "none," as in "I tried it for a while, but it was always broken or crashing or getting a virus, it sucked. I sold it and just went back to my old XYZ."
Say what you will, but the masses are sheep and they're happy as sheep. You cannot teach them to think, vote, raise children, or use computers responsibly because they DO NOT WANT TO BE THE SHEPHERD, only the sheep. And there will always be a market to sell them sheep-friendly devices.
As a non-coder who writes and teaches for a living, I would be VERY tempted to get rid of my laptop and use my iPhone as my main (only?) computing device if only it had a USB port or bluetooth keyboard + mouse connectivity.