Because they're all geeks. I used to be one, as a young CS student back in the late '80s. But now I'm a busy academic in another field and have a different perspective.
Geeks want to know what you CAN do with a device, i.e. feature set (official or unofficial, the more esoteric and broad the better). The more possible things you CAN do, the cooler it is, especially if it squeezes more an more things it CAN do into a smaller and smaller space and does them faster and faster.
Non-geeks aren't starting with "need a gadget" and then asking "which gadget does most things?" Non-geeks start with a limited set of needs (i.e. mobile browsing, eBook reading, etc.) and ask "which gadget does this ONE thing I'm interested in BEST, and with the SMALLEST learning curve and dependency set?"
So it's almost a guarantee that anything/. finds cool will flop massively in the mass market, and anything/. finds appallingly overpriced|oversimple|lacking-in-features-compared-to-x|fornoobsonly will be massively successful.
I know I had an iPod. Loved it. I still remember the infamous (+5, Insightful) comment when iPod was announced that ended with "Lame."
Same with the iPhone. It is the best phone I've ever had, bar none. People here bitch about it all the time; you'd think it was crap. But having owned a bunch of phones on a bunch of carriers, I wouldn't trade my iPhone for anything.
I don't really need an iPad so I'm not too tempted by it, but I'm fairly sure that it's going to do VERY WELL out there, and will appeal directly to a large variety of people who aren't tempted in the least by XP Tablet on a convertible or on UMPC.
or the "even more" link that takes you to yet more Google offerings.
Much more, if you compare Google News to Bing News or Hotmail to Gmail, I think you'll find that there's still something significant missing from Bing, even if the word itself is there.
so that you don't need to be sitting in from of your own Linux command line to remember your passwords. I use a base of two nonsense pairs (things like AkB and jzQ) and then use positions 4 and 5 in the password as a code for the type of site and "rank" in terms of frequency of use, for example (these aren't mine but you get the idea):
! (shift-1) = social networking @ (shift-2) = banking # (shift-3) = utilities / bill payments
1 = site in this category I use most 2 = second most used site 3 = third most used site
and so on. So the base for something like Facebook using a system like this might be A@B!1jzQ, for Twitter maybe AkB!2jzQ, and for my primary bank account AkB@1jzQ (invariant components AkB and jzQ, with @ [for banking] and 1 [for most used] sandwiched in between them).
Then, I postfix the password with the number of the instance of the password.
A = first use B = first mandated change C = second mandated change D = third mandated change
and so on. So after the third change, my primary banking password at a bank might be:
AkB@1jzQD
After they ask me to change it again, it will increment to:
AkB@1jzQE
and so on.
This way, there is always a base of predictability to my passwords (usually enough to get it within three tries) and the variable information is context-based in a way that is only meaningful to me and no two sites will ever share the same password.
The only place this falls down is when sites mandate their own password structure (max or min length, etc.) but it usually works (includes uppercase, lowercase, symbols, and numbers, which is enough to make most of them happy) and the few sites that don't allow such passwords are far enough between to stand out in my memory, meaning that I don't forget the specially-formed exceptions that I created for those sites.
A system like this won't work for everyone, but for most people with a reasonable IQ, it's good enough, once you can get them to buy into the need for password security and for them to design their own system.
What makes Google special isn't just its web search, it's the total value proposition. That little series of links across the top of the page. I can type a phrase and search the web. If that doesn't turn up what I want, I can just click "Images." Then "News." Then "Scholar." Then "Maps." I can search in a variety of well-sandboxed, semantically contextualized datasets for the same phrase, rapidly, without re-typing it, and at a single source.
Beyond just searching, I have a single iPhone app (Google) that lets me manage documents, my email, and my searching all with a single interface and within a single authentication context, rapidly and a fairly solid history of reliability and predictability.
When I can do all that with Bing, and with a site design that scales well from tiny devices to full-on desktops, let me know.
Until then, I believe Google's basic business model is fairly secure. Bing? Bing just just web search for full-fledged personal computers. Sure, that's what made Google to begin with, but it's actually a tiny part of the total value proposition that Google represents today.
I used to live in Salt Lake City, supposedly a
on
The Year of the E-Bicycle
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
mountain biking mecca. And I had much the same experience cycling in the city. There are few bike lanes, but the roads are pretty wide. You wouldn't think there would be a problem. But the motorists often got angry at bicycles simply because they were there. I OFTEN got honked at by passing cars (they'd wait until they were right on your tail or next to you, then HOOOOONK while they yelled out the window) and I got a decent number of things thrown at me.
Worst was a 7-11 double gulp cup that was full. It hit me on the side of the head, the lid came off, I got drenched in Coke and then the edge of the cup got stuck between my crank and my chain causing me to wipe out. I was sticky, covered in soda, and had to walk my bike home and use tools to get the thing out and the bike cranking again.
This was in the '90s before the "national concsiousness of greenness and cycling" hit. Hopefully things are different now.
These days I live in NYC and would cycle everywhere (there are a lot of cyclists and motorists are aware of them) only my wife forbids it, being absolutely terrified that I will succumb to NYC traffic.:-P
I've settled on AT&T. I've spent a lot of time on the road and have been to nearly every state, and AT&T has been generally okay for me (certainly not good, but okay). But with that said, Verizon and T-Mobile both sucked for me, with both coverage issues and serious billing issues (the kind that get you red in the face and ruin your day, then your week, then your month, until you're telling people how ridiculous it's getting).
So I've been with AT&T several years now and am uninterested in switching at this point (and I live in NYC, where people [usually not AT&T customers] are sure AT&T is at its worst).
No need to involve the student. This isn't a kid prodigy building an atomic reactor; the device sounds (and likely was) simple in composition and principle. Just turn to the science teacher and say "That's not a bomb, is it?" and the science teacher will respond with "Oh, no, it's a simple little device for detecting motion made out of a plastic bottle, quite ingenious really, especially at this kid's grade level, gave it an 'A'."
And that would be that.
This principal ought to be then stripped in public, beaten senseless with a cane, then tarred, then feathered, then made fun of by an entire class of pointing science fair students.
at all. And you can't explain it to them. Despite the fact that I am the guy that they all turn to for computer help and their knowledge, and a reasonably prolific author of technology reference books at that, I have serious trouble convincing my family (nuclear and extended) that there is no difference between the photos their little Canon digicam stores on a $5 Chinese SD card versus a $60 card of the same capacity from the photography store.
"I can definitely tell the difference," they say, "the colors are brighter and the pictures are sharper and they just look more real and vibrant. You may know a lot but you don't know everything."
Attempts at technical explanations for why this is simply not possible cause eyes to glaze over and fights to start.
Same thing with blank DVD media. Rather than the $20 spindle, I have family that members buy the $10 apiece blanks because "if I'm going to send out family movies for Christmas, I want them to look as good as possible."
The world that most people live in is an analog world. Technology people see the world as a container for many abstract systems of constraint-based interaction of which "analog" and "digital" data processing are two, but for the regular folk, analog is REALITY and there is NOTHING ELSE; they can't even conceive of the properties of digital so it can't be explained to them. It's like asking a person who's been blind from birth to understand colors, visual scale, and horizon.
One particularly unhelpful wrinkle of the U.S. version of capitalism + culture has been investors' singular motivation to hit it big and rake in the bucks and a general social unwillingness (management, the population, investors, regulators) to believe there is any social good in any business that does not generate massive returns and growth on a quarter after quarter basis.
There are simply many things that we need the economy to do that are not going to generate double-digit returns and result in world domination by a single sexy corporation. Plumbing, for example. Or reference publishing. Or wood milling. Instead of taking sustaining business + paying employees or small but steady growth as good enough within the context of also employing people and providing a necessary social good, we're happy to say "This hospital isn't giving us 20% year-over-year; it's only giving me 1%! I can get that from a damned CD! Fuhggedaboudid." And nobody bats an eyelid, everyone takes for granted that a hospital is only valuable if it's nice and profitable, otherwise it "couldn't compete" and "should" close in a free market economy.
here saying I'd never use a touchscreen. Too inaccurate. I poo-poo'ed the iPhone when it was released and swore up and down I'd never leave Palm. Then, at an AT&T store I tried out an iPhone on a lark and I was blown away. I had an upgrade so I went to the iPhone immediately. I've had a chance to test a couple friends' Android phones since, and there's just no comparison.
The iPhone interface is absolutely transparent; it feels like "real world" physics is at work, not like you're using a user interface. The same suspension of disbelief can't happen on Android because the UI just gets it wrong or lags behind you motions way too often.
so different from Windows tablets by the time we got to the Newton 2000/2100. The digitizer was very high resolution (200dpi IIRC), which allowed for very high accuracy in handwriting recognition. Windows never came close.
Yes, I'm aware that the technology was a bit weak at the Newton 100 stage, but half a decade later I was taking all of my university notes on a Newton 2100, with handwriting recognition as fast as I could write, with zero mistakes, including punctuation, which Windows recognition also never got right. I still have the Newton 2100 and it still blows the handwriting recognition of everything else (including XP tablet and Phatware's offering) out of the water.
1. You can't easily carry a laptop around with you for six or seven days in a variety of non-office circumstances. Laptops are heavy and fragile. 2. You have to charge a laptop often. You can't pick up War and Peace and read it cover-to-cover on battery power on a laptop. 3. Laptops are obtrusive or not allowed in many circumstances. 4. WHILE READING, laptops require that they sit on your lap or a desk. ebook readers can be read in ANY POSITION. 5. The user interface of a laptop imposes all kinds of extra work; ebook reader you just open and read, no navigation of user interface.
I'm a serious reader. I've probably read 50-100k pages on my Kindle 1. I've had a personal laptop since the late '80s. I never read a single document on a laptop longer than about 50 pages. If I had to do that, I'd just buy the book. Since acquiring Kindle, I only buy academic books in printed form. For all other reading (newspapers, magazines, novels, non-academic nonfiction) I just buy it on Kindle. Easy impulse buy, easy, flexibile tool for reading. I charge maybe once or twice a week. I can carry my Kindle in a tiny messenger bag, wherever I go.
Apple's app store is already full of apps that require the creation of an account with a username and password. That's part of the value proposition of the technology platform: always-on synchronization between device and cloud.
In a significant portion of cases I imagine this means that users have a single username/password pair that they have used to create dozens of accounts with services around the web. The fact that the app has been vetted and functions exactly as promised does not mean that there is not also someone on the "service provider" end of things collecting all of those username/password pairs for more nefarious purposes.
It doesn't even have to be a phish for it to be a security issue. But so long as we do the username/password pair thing, this will remain a vulnerability for the general public, and no amount of "app vetting" can fix it.
don't excite me too much unless something seems broken.
I haven't had a single dropped call since going iPhone (despite Slashdot conventional wisdom, and in comparison to my Centro which dropped calls all the time) and I haven't jailbroken my iPhone or anything so I'm not too worried about security until I see a story on it.
I haven't worried too much about firmware.
With that said, I did install iTunes in my existing VirtualBox XP installation and as far as I know I have the most current firmware.
But it wouldn't worry me if I didn't and I don't sync often. I've done it maybe twice in a year, because everything is already "just working" and thus it doesn't occur to me to "sync" manually with iTunes.
I already had about 4GB of the "most important" music from my Centro (which was on a 4GB microSD card in that phone) that went into the iPhone with the first sync. I'm old enough that I already "have" all of my music; I haven't made a music purchase/addition in years (I ripped them all and LAMEd them up maybe 10 years ago) and that's that, I have all I need.
Despite the anti-iPhone rhetoric here, I've gone through a bunch of phones (Nokia models, LG flips, Motorola flips and smartphones, one Blackberry whose interface I wasn't in love with, and a series of Treos and a Centro) and the iPhone to me stands head, shoulders, knees, and toes above the rest for the "just use it and forget about it" factor.
It is integrated into my life in a way that none of the others ever were. I was always TRYING DESPERATELY to integrate the others into my data and scheduling and navigation life (especially the Palm devices, which seemed to have so much potential) but it was a perpetually unfinished project that took hours of my time every month and that I was always having to babysit (delete duplicates, see why X and Y weren't syncing, remember to sync regularly, blah, blah, update all of my sync stuff when I upgraded my Linux distro, etc.) and within 2 hours of getting the iPhone everything was set up to work perfectly and has been working perfectly ever since, total integration with zero babysitting.
I see people here saying "you can do all that with any phone" and all I can say is "Maybe YOU can, but I never could and I can with the iPhone and that's enough for me."
If user interfaces weren't so important, Apple would have died in the '80s.
And if great user interfaces were so easy to achieve, Microsoft and Linux with their respective massive resource pools ($$$$ for Microsoft and eyeballs+coders for Linux) would have come up with them already.
Instead, in the user interface space, everyone is playing distant catch-up to Apple.
All the stuff I care about syncs with the web (calendar, mail, notes+photos+voice memos app, task manager) so I don't much care about syncing with Linux.
iPhone syncs with Google everything and my Google everything can then sync with Evolution.
It's the first phone I've been able to get to do it that seamlessly, by the way. Others make all kinds of claims, but there are hiccups or unexplained issues or things just aren't updating or whatever.
With iPhone, everything is in sync and I never have to "sync," and to me that's everything.
Listen, I'm a Linux user (okay, I do own an iPhone, but I was a Palm phone user for years before that) and don't own or use a Mac or any other Apple products (apart from an iPhone), but seriously. Apple makes products that are, to my eye, of a generally better design, quality, and level of attentiveness and integration than your average Dell or HP or Motorola, etc.
Apple products are well-liked and often do very well in their market segments.
Shock though it may come to some here, the iPhone does in fact make and receive calls and do any number of other very useful things, yes even in New York, and I imagine that the iPod is pretty good at playing music and Macs are pretty good at web browsing, word processing, multimedia, and other things that many people typically use computers for.
So what's with the virulent, rabid anti-Apple hyperbole and the (getting very old and boring) claims (presumably in the interest of a kind of sledgehammer humor) that Apple products don't actually work at all, and that there is therefore something offensive about people that use Apple products?
Is Slashdot the victim of a giant backhanded astroturfing campaign by Verizon, HP, and Dell, or what?
on a FABULOUS astroturfing campaign here at Slashdot that has convinced everyone that your major competitor is woefully bad (despite massive market share) and that you are the only real alternative.
To read Slashdot these days, you'd think that there are only seven iPhones in New York, all of them unlocked and brought in from Jersey and Conneticut (since they clearly don't sell them here because the signal is too poor, so don't bother going to the AT&T Store/Apple Store to try to get one) and that they don't work anyway, as indicated by the random shouts of "MY GOD, DAMNED DROPPED CALLS!" every other block as you walk through Manhattan.
In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Spend a week in NYC and you'll come away with the clear impression that the iPhone is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, phone(s) in the city, there aren't violent ant-AT&T screams from angry customers bursting forth on every street corner, and you can walk into any AT&T Store or Apple Store and pick one up tomorrow.
I have one, I live in Queens and work in Manhattan, most of my friends have one, they all live in the boroughs and work in Manhattan, we all got them at AT&T stores in the city, and every one of us agrees its the best phone, by a large margin, we've ever owned.
But don't take our word for it, definitely believe these weird front-page anti-Apple-fanboi-fests that tout the advantages of the clearly flawless Verizon network (good luck with that) and the truly superior phones that Verizon offers (despite the fact that the iPhone has the largest market share on the market) that don't work outside the United States.
And when the iPhone was first released, the AT&T store on the corner of Broadway and about 26th or 27th in Manhattan had a big sign outside advertising that iPhones were available there, after months of marketing in the window.
Judging by the vast number of iPhones all over New York, I'd say that this story (or that CSR) is basically bullshit.
- Phone + Google + Evolution + Mac OS calendar, all synced, automatically, all the time - GTD system task manager that syncs automatically to a web-based GTD system (Toodledo) - A rapidly accessible text + voice + photo notes system with tagging that syncs automatically to a web-based interface - No more "event" syncs (i.e. put in dock/plug into USB, have to remember to sync), all syncs immediate and transparent - The REAL web of non-"mobile" pages, including AJAX capability - Flexibility to grow in capabilities
I also got along with it:
- A kindle (with Kindle app) - YouTube anywhere - Great GPS integration for nearly every app both for consumption (shopping, dining, directions) and production (contextualizing input data)
iPhone gave me all of this. I tried Palm and Blackberry and they never came close to what I wanted. The iPhone is actually the first technology device in a very long time that I'm absolutely fully satisfied with. No complaints, no qualms, no niggles. That never happens, but it happened with the iPhone. You'd have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
specifically because of the iPhone and iPhone upgrades. Yes, I like the iPhone. It's the first smartphone (having used Palm for a long time, then Blackberry for a while) that I really use to its potential, and that really simply transparently works for me for all of my calendaring, contacts, email, etc. in a way that doesn't feel "phone-ish."
Of the three, Verizon is the one I would absolutely refuse to go back to no matter what, for two reasons: 1) GSM [lack of], and 2) Verizon is the one of the three that caused the biggest billing cock-ups, which took months to clear up in each case and led to my determination to leave them ASAP.
Slashdot Mirror
Because they're all geeks. I used to be one, as a young CS student back in the late '80s. But now I'm a busy academic in another field and have a different perspective.
Geeks want to know what you CAN do with a device, i.e. feature set (official or unofficial, the more esoteric and broad the better).
The more possible things you CAN do, the cooler it is, especially if it squeezes more an more things it CAN do into a smaller and smaller space and does them faster and faster.
Non-geeks aren't starting with "need a gadget" and then asking "which gadget does most things?"
Non-geeks start with a limited set of needs (i.e. mobile browsing, eBook reading, etc.) and ask "which gadget does this ONE thing I'm interested in BEST, and with the SMALLEST learning curve and dependency set?"
So it's almost a guarantee that anything /. finds cool will flop massively in the mass market, and anything /. finds appallingly overpriced|oversimple|lacking-in-features-compared-to-x|fornoobsonly will be massively successful.
I know I had an iPod. Loved it. I still remember the infamous (+5, Insightful) comment when iPod was announced that ended with "Lame."
Same with the iPhone. It is the best phone I've ever had, bar none. People here bitch about it all the time; you'd think it was crap. But having owned a bunch of phones on a bunch of carriers, I wouldn't trade my iPhone for anything.
I don't really need an iPad so I'm not too tempted by it, but I'm fairly sure that it's going to do VERY WELL out there, and will appeal directly to a large variety of people who aren't tempted in the least by XP Tablet on a convertible or on UMPC.
Books
Finance
Scholar
Translate
Blogs
YouTube
Calendar
Photos
Documents
Reader
Groups
or the "even more" link that takes you to yet more Google offerings.
Much more, if you compare Google News to Bing News or Hotmail to Gmail, I think you'll find that there's still something significant missing from Bing, even if the word itself is there.
so that you don't need to be sitting in from of your own Linux command line to remember your passwords. I use a base of two nonsense pairs (things like AkB and jzQ) and then use positions 4 and 5 in the password as a code for the type of site and "rank" in terms of frequency of use, for example (these aren't mine but you get the idea):
! (shift-1) = social networking
@ (shift-2) = banking
# (shift-3) = utilities / bill payments
1 = site in this category I use most
2 = second most used site
3 = third most used site
and so on. So the base for something like Facebook using a system like this might be A@B!1jzQ, for Twitter maybe AkB!2jzQ, and for my primary bank account AkB@1jzQ (invariant components AkB and jzQ, with @ [for banking] and 1 [for most used] sandwiched in between them).
Then, I postfix the password with the number of the instance of the password.
A = first use
B = first mandated change
C = second mandated change
D = third mandated change
and so on. So after the third change, my primary banking password at a bank might be:
AkB@1jzQD
After they ask me to change it again, it will increment to:
AkB@1jzQE
and so on.
This way, there is always a base of predictability to my passwords (usually enough to get it within three tries) and the variable information is context-based in a way that is only meaningful to me and no two sites will ever share the same password.
The only place this falls down is when sites mandate their own password structure (max or min length, etc.) but it usually works (includes uppercase, lowercase, symbols, and numbers, which is enough to make most of them happy) and the few sites that don't allow such passwords are far enough between to stand out in my memory, meaning that I don't forget the specially-formed exceptions that I created for those sites.
A system like this won't work for everyone, but for most people with a reasonable IQ, it's good enough, once you can get them to buy into the need for password security and for them to design their own system.
What makes Google special isn't just its web search, it's the total value proposition. That little series of links across the top of the page. I can type a phrase and search the web. If that doesn't turn up what I want, I can just click "Images." Then "News." Then "Scholar." Then "Maps." I can search in a variety of well-sandboxed, semantically contextualized datasets for the same phrase, rapidly, without re-typing it, and at a single source.
Beyond just searching, I have a single iPhone app (Google) that lets me manage documents, my email, and my searching all with a single interface and within a single authentication context, rapidly and a fairly solid history of reliability and predictability.
When I can do all that with Bing, and with a site design that scales well from tiny devices to full-on desktops, let me know.
Until then, I believe Google's basic business model is fairly secure. Bing? Bing just just web search for full-fledged personal computers. Sure, that's what made Google to begin with, but it's actually a tiny part of the total value proposition that Google represents today.
mountain biking mecca. And I had much the same experience cycling in the city. There are few bike lanes, but the roads are pretty wide. You wouldn't think there would be a problem. But the motorists often got angry at bicycles simply because they were there. I OFTEN got honked at by passing cars (they'd wait until they were right on your tail or next to you, then HOOOOONK while they yelled out the window) and I got a decent number of things thrown at me.
Worst was a 7-11 double gulp cup that was full. It hit me on the side of the head, the lid came off, I got drenched in Coke and then the edge of the cup got stuck between my crank and my chain causing me to wipe out. I was sticky, covered in soda, and had to walk my bike home and use tools to get the thing out and the bike cranking again.
This was in the '90s before the "national concsiousness of greenness and cycling" hit. Hopefully things are different now.
These days I live in NYC and would cycle everywhere (there are a lot of cyclists and motorists are aware of them) only my wife forbids it, being absolutely terrified that I will succumb to NYC traffic. :-P
I've settled on AT&T. I've spent a lot of time on the road and have been to nearly every state, and AT&T has been generally okay for me (certainly not good, but okay). But with that said, Verizon and T-Mobile both sucked for me, with both coverage issues and serious billing issues (the kind that get you red in the face and ruin your day, then your week, then your month, until you're telling people how ridiculous it's getting).
So I've been with AT&T several years now and am uninterested in switching at this point (and I live in NYC, where people [usually not AT&T customers] are sure AT&T is at its worst).
No need to involve the student. This isn't a kid prodigy building an atomic reactor; the device sounds (and likely was) simple in composition and principle. Just turn to the science teacher and say "That's not a bomb, is it?" and the science teacher will respond with "Oh, no, it's a simple little device for detecting motion made out of a plastic bottle, quite ingenious really, especially at this kid's grade level, gave it an 'A'."
And that would be that.
This principal ought to be then stripped in public, beaten senseless with a cane, then tarred, then feathered, then made fun of by an entire class of pointing science fair students.
And then they ought to be fired.
at all. And you can't explain it to them. Despite the fact that I am the guy that they all turn to for computer help and their knowledge, and a reasonably prolific author of technology reference books at that, I have serious trouble convincing my family (nuclear and extended) that there is no difference between the photos their little Canon digicam stores on a $5 Chinese SD card versus a $60 card of the same capacity from the photography store.
"I can definitely tell the difference," they say, "the colors are brighter and the pictures are sharper and they just look more real and vibrant. You may know a lot but you don't know everything."
Attempts at technical explanations for why this is simply not possible cause eyes to glaze over and fights to start.
Same thing with blank DVD media. Rather than the $20 spindle, I have family that members buy the $10 apiece blanks because "if I'm going to send out family movies for Christmas, I want them to look as good as possible."
The world that most people live in is an analog world. Technology people see the world as a container for many abstract systems of constraint-based interaction of which "analog" and "digital" data processing are two, but for the regular folk, analog is REALITY and there is NOTHING ELSE; they can't even conceive of the properties of digital so it can't be explained to them. It's like asking a person who's been blind from birth to understand colors, visual scale, and horizon.
One particularly unhelpful wrinkle of the U.S. version of capitalism + culture has been investors' singular motivation to hit it big and rake in the bucks and a general social unwillingness (management, the population, investors, regulators) to believe there is any social good in any business that does not generate massive returns and growth on a quarter after quarter basis.
There are simply many things that we need the economy to do that are not going to generate double-digit returns and result in world domination by a single sexy corporation. Plumbing, for example. Or reference publishing. Or wood milling. Instead of taking sustaining business + paying employees or small but steady growth as good enough within the context of also employing people and providing a necessary social good, we're happy to say "This hospital isn't giving us 20% year-over-year; it's only giving me 1%! I can get that from a damned CD! Fuhggedaboudid." And nobody bats an eyelid, everyone takes for granted that a hospital is only valuable if it's nice and profitable, otherwise it "couldn't compete" and "should" close in a free market economy.
here saying I'd never use a touchscreen. Too inaccurate. I poo-poo'ed the iPhone when it was released and swore up and down I'd never leave Palm. Then, at an AT&T store I tried out an iPhone on a lark and I was blown away. I had an upgrade so I went to the iPhone immediately. I've had a chance to test a couple friends' Android phones since, and there's just no comparison.
The iPhone interface is absolutely transparent; it feels like "real world" physics is at work, not like you're using a user interface. The same suspension of disbelief can't happen on Android because the UI just gets it wrong or lags behind you motions way too often.
so different from Windows tablets by the time we got to the Newton 2000/2100. The digitizer was very high resolution (200dpi IIRC), which allowed for very high accuracy in handwriting recognition. Windows never came close.
Yes, I'm aware that the technology was a bit weak at the Newton 100 stage, but half a decade later I was taking all of my university notes on a Newton 2100, with handwriting recognition as fast as I could write, with zero mistakes, including punctuation, which Windows recognition also never got right. I still have the Newton 2100 and it still blows the handwriting recognition of everything else (including XP tablet and Phatware's offering) out of the water.
(sigh) clearly Slashdot geeks don't read much.
1. You can't easily carry a laptop around with you for six or seven days in a variety of non-office circumstances. Laptops are heavy and fragile.
2. You have to charge a laptop often. You can't pick up War and Peace and read it cover-to-cover on battery power on a laptop.
3. Laptops are obtrusive or not allowed in many circumstances.
4. WHILE READING, laptops require that they sit on your lap or a desk. ebook readers can be read in ANY POSITION.
5. The user interface of a laptop imposes all kinds of extra work; ebook reader you just open and read, no navigation of user interface.
I'm a serious reader. I've probably read 50-100k pages on my Kindle 1. I've had a personal laptop since the late '80s. I never read a single document on a laptop longer than about 50 pages. If I had to do that, I'd just buy the book. Since acquiring Kindle, I only buy academic books in printed form. For all other reading (newspapers, magazines, novels, non-academic nonfiction) I just buy it on Kindle. Easy impulse buy, easy, flexibile tool for reading. I charge maybe once or twice a week. I can carry my Kindle in a tiny messenger bag, wherever I go.
Go on eBay and you can pick up greyscale LCD e-book readers for well under $100, sometimes under $50.
Thing is, they suck. You don't want to read 1,000 pages with a backlight, nor can you sustain a battery for 1,000 pages with a backlight.
Apple's app store is already full of apps that require the creation of an account with a username and password. That's part of the value proposition of the technology platform: always-on synchronization between device and cloud.
In a significant portion of cases I imagine this means that users have a single username/password pair that they have used to create dozens of accounts with services around the web. The fact that the app has been vetted and functions exactly as promised does not mean that there is not also someone on the "service provider" end of things collecting all of those username/password pairs for more nefarious purposes.
It doesn't even have to be a phish for it to be a security issue. But so long as we do the username/password pair thing, this will remain a vulnerability for the general public, and no amount of "app vetting" can fix it.
don't excite me too much unless something seems broken.
I haven't had a single dropped call since going iPhone (despite Slashdot conventional wisdom, and in comparison to my Centro which dropped calls all the time) and I haven't jailbroken my iPhone or anything so I'm not too worried about security until I see a story on it.
I haven't worried too much about firmware.
With that said, I did install iTunes in my existing VirtualBox XP installation and as far as I know I have the most current firmware.
But it wouldn't worry me if I didn't and I don't sync often. I've done it maybe twice in a year, because everything is already "just working" and thus it doesn't occur to me to "sync" manually with iTunes.
I already had about 4GB of the "most important" music from my Centro (which was on a 4GB microSD card in that phone) that went into the iPhone with the first sync. I'm old enough that I already "have" all of my music; I haven't made a music purchase/addition in years (I ripped them all and LAMEd them up maybe 10 years ago) and that's that, I have all I need.
Despite the anti-iPhone rhetoric here, I've gone through a bunch of phones (Nokia models, LG flips, Motorola flips and smartphones, one Blackberry whose interface I wasn't in love with, and a series of Treos and a Centro) and the iPhone to me stands head, shoulders, knees, and toes above the rest for the "just use it and forget about it" factor.
It is integrated into my life in a way that none of the others ever were. I was always TRYING DESPERATELY to integrate the others into my data and scheduling and navigation life (especially the Palm devices, which seemed to have so much potential) but it was a perpetually unfinished project that took hours of my time every month and that I was always having to babysit (delete duplicates, see why X and Y weren't syncing, remember to sync regularly, blah, blah, update all of my sync stuff when I upgraded my Linux distro, etc.) and within 2 hours of getting the iPhone everything was set up to work perfectly and has been working perfectly ever since, total integration with zero babysitting.
I see people here saying "you can do all that with any phone" and all I can say is "Maybe YOU can, but I never could and I can with the iPhone and that's enough for me."
See my previous post.
If user interfaces weren't so important, Apple would have died in the '80s.
And if great user interfaces were so easy to achieve, Microsoft and Linux with their respective massive resource pools ($$$$ for Microsoft and eyeballs+coders for Linux) would have come up with them already.
Instead, in the user interface space, everyone is playing distant catch-up to Apple.
They add a DAMN GOOD user interface. Which, at the end of the day, is what made the iPhone, the iPod, and Mac OS X.
And, as Linux, Windows, and the incredibly crowded universe of phones continually demonstrate, it's not easy to come up with a good user interface.
All the stuff I care about syncs with the web (calendar, mail, notes+photos+voice memos app, task manager) so I don't much care about syncing with Linux.
iPhone syncs with Google everything and my Google everything can then sync with Evolution.
It's the first phone I've been able to get to do it that seamlessly, by the way. Others make all kinds of claims, but there are hiccups or unexplained issues or things just aren't updating or whatever.
With iPhone, everything is in sync and I never have to "sync," and to me that's everything.
Listen, I'm a Linux user (okay, I do own an iPhone, but I was a Palm phone user for years before that) and don't own or use a Mac or any other Apple products (apart from an iPhone), but seriously. Apple makes products that are, to my eye, of a generally better design, quality, and level of attentiveness and integration than your average Dell or HP or Motorola, etc.
Apple products are well-liked and often do very well in their market segments.
Shock though it may come to some here, the iPhone does in fact make and receive calls and do any number of other very useful things, yes even in New York, and I imagine that the iPod is pretty good at playing music and Macs are pretty good at web browsing, word processing, multimedia, and other things that many people typically use computers for.
So what's with the virulent, rabid anti-Apple hyperbole and the (getting very old and boring) claims (presumably in the interest of a kind of sledgehammer humor) that Apple products don't actually work at all, and that there is therefore something offensive about people that use Apple products?
Is Slashdot the victim of a giant backhanded astroturfing campaign by Verizon, HP, and Dell, or what?
on a FABULOUS astroturfing campaign here at Slashdot that has convinced everyone that your major competitor is woefully bad (despite massive market share) and that you are the only real alternative.
To read Slashdot these days, you'd think that there are only seven iPhones in New York, all of them unlocked and brought in from Jersey and Conneticut (since they clearly don't sell them here because the signal is too poor, so don't bother going to the AT&T Store/Apple Store to try to get one) and that they don't work anyway, as indicated by the random shouts of "MY GOD, DAMNED DROPPED CALLS!" every other block as you walk through Manhattan.
In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Spend a week in NYC and you'll come away with the clear impression that the iPhone is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, phone(s) in the city, there aren't violent ant-AT&T screams from angry customers bursting forth on every street corner, and you can walk into any AT&T Store or Apple Store and pick one up tomorrow.
I have one, I live in Queens and work in Manhattan, most of my friends have one, they all live in the boroughs and work in Manhattan, we all got them at AT&T stores in the city, and every one of us agrees its the best phone, by a large margin, we've ever owned.
But don't take our word for it, definitely believe these weird front-page anti-Apple-fanboi-fests that tout the advantages of the clearly flawless Verizon network (good luck with that) and the truly superior phones that Verizon offers (despite the fact that the iPhone has the largest market share on the market) that don't work outside the United States.
and Ditmars Boulevard in Queens.
Had them all along, 11105 Astoria.
And when the iPhone was first released, the AT&T store on the corner of Broadway and about 26th or 27th in Manhattan had a big sign outside advertising that iPhones were available there, after months of marketing in the window.
Judging by the vast number of iPhones all over New York, I'd say that this story (or that CSR) is basically bullshit.
on a phone. Here are the things I did want:
- Phone + Google + Evolution + Mac OS calendar, all synced, automatically, all the time
- GTD system task manager that syncs automatically to a web-based GTD system (Toodledo)
- A rapidly accessible text + voice + photo notes system with tagging that syncs automatically to a web-based interface
- No more "event" syncs (i.e. put in dock/plug into USB, have to remember to sync), all syncs immediate and transparent
- The REAL web of non-"mobile" pages, including AJAX capability
- Flexibility to grow in capabilities
I also got along with it:
- A kindle (with Kindle app)
- YouTube anywhere
- Great GPS integration for nearly every app both for consumption (shopping, dining, directions) and production (contextualizing input data)
iPhone gave me all of this. I tried Palm and Blackberry and they never came close to what I wanted. The iPhone is actually the first technology device in a very long time that I'm absolutely fully satisfied with. No complaints, no qualms, no niggles. That never happens, but it happened with the iPhone. You'd have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
in which we do not agree to be raped every hour on the hour by corporations is in fact socialism, and socialism we leave for the "evildoers."
Same reason we prefer the poor to starve and the sick to have no medical care.
specifically because of the iPhone and iPhone upgrades. Yes, I like the iPhone. It's the first smartphone (having used Palm for a long time, then Blackberry for a while) that I really use to its potential, and that really simply transparently works for me for all of my calendaring, contacts, email, etc. in a way that doesn't feel "phone-ish."
Of the three, Verizon is the one I would absolutely refuse to go back to no matter what, for two reasons: 1) GSM [lack of], and 2) Verizon is the one of the three that caused the biggest billing cock-ups, which took months to clear up in each case and led to my determination to leave them ASAP.