1. As parent points out, computer savvy people who already own several devices, but want something simple and large enough to read comfortably while lying in bed, lounging on the couch, beach, back yard, etc.
2. College students. This is partly why an iPad specific version of iWork was developed. Combine this with wireless printing, and electronic text books at reasonable cost, and this device more or less pays for itself in a couple of semesters, especially if parents send their kids off to college with this instead of a laptop.
she remembers those tricks much better than where her files magically hide on her netbook.
This bit is key, and it's the paradigm shift few are seeing here.
The shift is from document centric computing to task centric computing. Document centric computing got its start on command line interface machines as "files." It was copied over unthinkingly to the first WIMP machines via the desktop and GUI folder concept. Task centric computing has users do tasks via apps, each of which stores its associated data however the app developer sees fit. The user is blissfully unaware of where or how the data is stored.
This is the part that surprises most/. readers:
For the overwhelming majority of users, not knowing or having to know where data is stored is a huge improvement.
This is why old timers and tech geeks will be late to the party. Apple have already moved on. For the vast majority of users, the future is a task-centric, cloud computing world, and it will make their computing lives much simpler and easier.
The small groups model works only so long as capital isn't accumulating. Once individuals or groups can accumulate wealth (a.k.a., capital) and the resulting power, they have the means to undermine the egalitarian, common-good morality of these small groups. BTW, these sorts of small groups are what Marx and Engels called primitive communism.
Which would matter if wealth were absolute. It isn't though, it's relative. By medieval standards almost everyone in the US today is "wealthy." But no one cares. What matters is how much wealth you have compared to others now.
By the time technology gets around to making what GP has available to the underclass of developing nations, the upper middle classes of the developed industrialized nations will have much, much more, so technology buys you nothing here.
Social problems rarely have technological solutions because their causes are tied up in the evolutionary selective pressures underlying our social systems, not a lack of available technology. Lords were lords in medieval times because men like dominating and controlling other men, not because we hadn't yet invented the cell phone. Wealth and power are entirely about differentiation, not meeting some absolute standard. All of this flows from the biological purpose of accumulating wealth and power, which is mate competition. Men like dominating and controlling other men because in previous generations such men got more mating opportunities (women preferred them) and they left more descendants than men who didn't. Women prefer such men because in previous generations such women, through their wealthy, powerful mates, had access to more resources, so when times got hard and resources were scarcer, more of their children survived to reproduce.
We are descended largely from men and women who prefer having more resources and power than others. Advancing technology to provide today's notion of "wealth" to tomorrow's underclass will not change these innate preferences, nor will it make what is considered wealthy today the equivalent of what is considered wealthy in the future.
Just to be clear, many of these laws only apply inside the region that promulgates them. So, for example, Kraft can legally sell in the US what they call Parmesan cheese which is made in the US, but it would be illegal to sell such a cheese made in the US as Parmesan in Europe where the term Parmesan is a very restricted designation.
Cell phone cameras and video? Of course it would not only get out, it would be all over the internet within minutes. Remember, we're talking about the TSA here. They can't even keep from posting their own internal procedures manual on the internet, and now you think they can control the personal communications of everyone in an airport terminal.
He was shot because he was a brown man in a white man's country. Running or not, there's no way an unarmed white brit gets shot just because he is running from police.
I'd venture a guess that the whole reason this is being researched by DARPA is because of the high number of casualties caused by roadside bombs. If an insurgent enemy knows that you must transport personnel and materiel via existing roads, it makes it easy to target you without being seen. The US wants an engagement where they know where the enemy is. The US doesn't want an engagement where the enemy knows where they are (i.e., on the road) but the enemy can himself remain hidden while inflicting damage.
If you have a vehicle that allows you to choose a more unpredictable path (i.e., not always use roads) then an insurgent enemy has one of their most effective weapons taken from them. In effect, a vehicle like this would force an insurgent enemy to come out into the open to attack it. This is a good thing if, like the US, you have superior weapons, logistics, communication, air support, etc. The enemy must reveal their position, for example, to fire an RPG, and experience shows that when they reveal their position, they die.
This is not news in any way. Apple's platforms (Mac and iPhone) have been successful for precisely the same reason. They exploit open source for the infrastructure (OS and developer tool chain) and layer proprietary applications on top for profitability.
Certainly if what you want is confirmation of your existing biases, yes.
Oh, you want real, fact-checked journalism, not editorial rants?
FOX? ha, ha haaa, ahh, haa haaa... oh, I can't breathe I'm laughing so hard!
really, my eyes are tearing, it's so funny to think anyone thinks FOX presents actual news.
Hint: CNN is moving right because the mass video market is right leaning, not because reality is farther to the right than CNN's reporting was. Giving a biased audience what it wants to hear is not fact-checked, balanced, news reporting. We have a word for giving a closed minded, biased audience what they want to hear:
The problem is that the FCC gutted the requirement that broadcast networks run their news divisions as a community service, even if this was at a loss. Once network news divisions became profit centers rather than pro-bono losses, they were financially required to present as news that which people wanted to see, not what is actually true. (i.e., corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize profit - they can't run their news division at a loss without the risk of shareholder lawsuit).
It is sad that what most people want to watch as "news" is not actually true, but there is and always has been a corrective to this: require that that which is labelled "news" actually be fact checked and balanced, and require networks to provide such real news as one of the requirements for holding a broadcast license.
Return news divisions to their former status - i.e., one of the community service requirements for the granting of a broadcast license - and we will return to the days of responsible, fact-checked, balanced journalism.
You obviously don't understand Murdock very well if you think that Government funded journalism would be his dream.
Hint: we already have government funded journalism - it's called The News Hour on your local PBS and CPB funded public television station. This is what government funded journalism looks like - fact-checked, truly balanced (not merely in name only like FOX), with no fear of taking on strong vested financial interests, and bureaucratic government interests.
Now, compare the content of the News Hour with the content of FOX News. Is the News Hour even remotely like anything Murdock's FOX would put on the air?
Governrnent funded journalism is Rupert Murdock's worst nightmare, not his fantasy, because more government funded journalism would mean more of those independently verified, pesky facts that contradict FOX's loudly trumpeted, absurdly biased bullshit.
it is the electorate's stupidly steadfast refusal to recognize that their "representative government" has been sold to the highest bidder that is to blame, not "the government".
CPB, PBS? How has the fact that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS, created by an act of congress and funded by federal tax dollars, in any way stopped public television stations from covering stories critical of Federal Government officials?
If anything, the CPB via PBS stations has funded some of the toughest critics - of the lead up to the Iraq war, the contested 2000 election, etc. - so much so that the right tried very hard to get the CPB and PBS entirely de-funded.
Even the US Congress is more than capable of creating a non-profit, private corporation that funds real, fact-checked, investigative journalism. If this is the only way we can continue to have such reporters, whether they are published in print or on the net, then we should certainly do so.
Such an entity - a hypothetical Corporation for Public Newsgathering - could also fund investigative bloggers. The only criterion would be original, investigative, fact-checked news content, whether published on paper or on-line.
I do remember when Google entered the internet search market. Google gained search share precisely because that market was not being well served by the existing search engines. Google's results were better (thanks to PageRank) which is why more and more users switched to Google as their primary search engine.
In the case of notebook/netbook OSes, the current crop of mainstream contenders (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) has more functionality than ChromeOS, which makes it very unlikely to displace the current mature offerings. This strategy, of providing a more poorly functioning offering, is exactly the opposite of how Google came to dominate Web search.
ChromeOS appears to be motivated entirely by wishful thinking. "We (Google) wish that the only thing users wanted to do is use web apps cause then we could sell more ads, so lets make an OS that only does the cloud!" It's a lame attempt at vendor lock-in in the guise of convenience.
Unfortunately for Google, in the case of ChromeOS, less is less.
Or you could just print it for the cost of about 2 cents and have a hard copy which you really don't care if it gets splattered with tomato sauce. ChromeOS is a cloud solution in search of a problem. Thing is, cloud capabilities are a small proper subset of general purpose laptop/netbook capabilities, so why chain yourself to a crippled platform?
I get it that such limitations might work for the extremely light usage crowd (grandma and people who like to pretend to be working adults by using social media sites, etc.) but for real working adults, the cloud (sans local data retention under user control) is a catastrophic, organization-wide, data loss incident waiting to happen. But adding local data stores to the cloud just makes it a regular old OS with lame web apps and online backup, something which is already available in the current crop of mature, polished, debugged, mainstream OSes like Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
From the article on the "low power" neurogrid chip (page 3):
Just a few miles down the road, at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, a computer scientist named Dharmendra Modha recently used 16 digital Blue Gene supercomputer racks to mathematically simulate 55 million neurons connected by 442 billion synapses. The insights gained from that impressive feat will help in the design of future neural chips. But Modha’s computers consumed 320,000 watts of electricity, enough to power 260 American households. By comparison, Neurogrid’s 1 million neurons are expected to sip less than a watt.
So 5 orders of magnitude less power than current digital designs. Note however that they compute in a fundamentally different way - i.e., probabilistically, not deterministically. Since this is how real neurons work, the non-determinism is not a problem for such uses.
btw, they achieve this low power consumption by not generating a voltage spike until a certain threshold of much lower voltage (and much more variable) signals has accumulated in a capacitor. By contrast, digital devices effectively generate a voltage spike for every clock cycle, which of course requires far more power.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear, hear.
The iPad has, imho, two core markets:
1. As parent points out, computer savvy people who already own several devices, but want something simple and large enough to read comfortably while lying in bed, lounging on the couch, beach, back yard, etc.
2. College students. This is partly why an iPad specific version of iWork was developed. Combine this with wireless printing, and electronic text books at reasonable cost, and this device more or less pays for itself in a couple of semesters, especially if parents send their kids off to college with this instead of a laptop.
she remembers those tricks much better than where her files magically hide on her netbook.
This bit is key, and it's the paradigm shift few are seeing here.
The shift is from document centric computing to task centric computing.
Document centric computing got its start on command line interface machines as "files."
It was copied over unthinkingly to the first WIMP machines via the desktop and GUI folder concept.
Task centric computing has users do tasks via apps, each of which stores its associated data
however the app developer sees fit. The user is blissfully unaware of where or how the data is stored.
This is the part that surprises most /. readers:
For the overwhelming majority of users,
not knowing or having to know where data is stored is a huge improvement.
This is why old timers and tech geeks will be late to the party. Apple have already moved on.
For the vast majority of users, the future is a task-centric, cloud computing world,
and it will make their computing lives much simpler and easier.
So you'd think. But this would cause confusion with Apple's next generation internet enabled feminine hygiene product, the iMaxiPad.
The small groups model works only so long as capital isn't accumulating. Once individuals or groups can accumulate wealth (a.k.a., capital) and the resulting power, they have the means to undermine the egalitarian, common-good morality of these small groups. BTW, these sorts of small groups are what Marx and Engels called primitive communism.
IOW, Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely
General Mills has their own country now? No, wait, that would be the Chex Repubic.
Which would matter if wealth were absolute. It isn't though, it's relative. By medieval standards almost everyone in the US today is "wealthy." But no one cares. What matters is how much wealth you have compared to others now.
By the time technology gets around to making what GP has available to the underclass of developing nations, the upper middle classes of the developed industrialized nations will have much, much more, so technology buys you nothing here.
Social problems rarely have technological solutions because their causes are tied up in the evolutionary selective pressures underlying our social systems, not a lack of available technology. Lords were lords in medieval times because men like dominating and controlling other men, not because we hadn't yet invented the cell phone. Wealth and power are entirely about differentiation, not meeting some absolute standard. All of this flows from the biological purpose of accumulating wealth and power, which is mate competition. Men like dominating and controlling other men because in previous generations such men got more mating opportunities (women preferred them) and they left more descendants than men who didn't. Women prefer such men because in previous generations such women, through their wealthy, powerful mates, had access to more resources, so when times got hard and resources were scarcer, more of their children survived to reproduce.
We are descended largely from men and women who prefer having more resources and power than others. Advancing technology to provide today's notion of "wealth" to tomorrow's underclass will not change these innate preferences, nor will it make what is considered wealthy today the equivalent of what is considered wealthy in the future.
HEPA Filter = High Efficiency Particulate Air Filter
not HIPA
Just to be clear, many of these laws only apply inside the region that promulgates them. So, for example, Kraft can legally sell in the US what they call Parmesan cheese which is made in the US, but it would be illegal to sell such a cheese made in the US as Parmesan in Europe where the term Parmesan is a very restricted designation.
Ireland is 74% Roman Catholic, not Protestant.
Ireland is an independent nation, not part of the UK. You were possibly thinking of Northern Ireland?
Cell phone cameras and video? Of course it would not only get out, it would be all over the internet within minutes. Remember, we're talking about the TSA here. They can't even keep from posting their own internal procedures manual on the internet, and now you think they can control the personal communications of everyone in an airport terminal.
He was shot because he was a brown man in a white man's country. Running or not, there's no way an unarmed white brit gets shot just because he is running from police.
I'd venture a guess that the whole reason this is being researched by DARPA is because of the high number of casualties caused by roadside bombs. If an insurgent enemy knows that you must transport personnel and materiel via existing roads, it makes it easy to target you without being seen. The US wants an engagement where they know where the enemy is. The US doesn't want an engagement where the enemy knows where they are (i.e., on the road) but the enemy can himself remain hidden while inflicting damage.
If you have a vehicle that allows you to choose a more unpredictable path (i.e., not always use roads) then an insurgent enemy has one of their most effective weapons taken from them. In effect, a vehicle like this would force an insurgent enemy to come out into the open to attack it. This is a good thing if, like the US, you have superior weapons, logistics, communication, air support, etc. The enemy must reveal their position, for example, to fire an RPG, and experience shows that when they reveal their position, they die.
This is not news in any way. Apple's platforms (Mac and iPhone) have been successful for precisely the same reason. They exploit open source for the infrastructure (OS and developer tool chain) and layer proprietary applications on top for profitability.
No offense intended to the great nation of Uruguay, but why would giant robotic aliens give a rat's ass about Montevideo of all places?
Certainly if what you want is confirmation of your existing biases, yes.
Oh, you want real, fact-checked journalism, not editorial rants?
FOX?
ha, ha haaa, ahh, haa haaa... oh, I can't breathe I'm laughing so hard!
really, my eyes are tearing, it's so funny to think anyone thinks FOX presents actual news.
Hint: CNN is moving right because the mass video market is right leaning, not because reality is farther to the right than CNN's reporting was. Giving a biased audience what it wants to hear is not fact-checked, balanced, news reporting. We have a word for giving a closed minded, biased audience what they want to hear:
its called pandering.
The problem is that the FCC gutted the requirement that broadcast networks run their news divisions as a community service, even if this was at a loss. Once network news divisions became profit centers rather than pro-bono losses, they were financially required to present as news that which people wanted to see, not what is actually true. (i.e., corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize profit - they can't run their news division at a loss without the risk of shareholder lawsuit).
It is sad that what most people want to watch as "news" is not actually true, but there is and always has been a corrective to this: require that that which is labelled "news" actually be fact checked and balanced, and require networks to provide such real news as one of the requirements for holding a broadcast license.
Return news divisions to their former status - i.e., one of the community service requirements for the granting of a broadcast license - and we will return to the days of responsible, fact-checked, balanced journalism.
You obviously don't understand Murdock very well if you think that Government funded journalism would be his dream.
Hint: we already have government funded journalism - it's called The News Hour on your local PBS and CPB funded public television station. This is what government funded journalism looks like - fact-checked, truly balanced (not merely in name only like FOX), with no fear of taking on strong vested financial interests, and bureaucratic government interests.
Now, compare the content of the News Hour with the content of FOX News. Is the News Hour even remotely like anything Murdock's FOX would put on the air?
Governrnent funded journalism is Rupert Murdock's worst nightmare, not his fantasy, because more government funded journalism would mean more of those independently verified, pesky facts that contradict FOX's loudly trumpeted, absurdly biased bullshit.
it is the electorate's stupidly steadfast refusal to recognize that their "representative government" has been sold to the highest bidder that is to blame, not "the government".
Please mode parent up as insightful!
As you suggest, free markets can only self-regulate price, not policy. Otherwise you never would have been able to buy slaves in the free market.
CPB, PBS? How has the fact that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS, created by an act of congress and funded by federal tax dollars, in any way stopped public television stations from covering stories critical of Federal Government officials?
If anything, the CPB via PBS stations has funded some of the toughest critics - of the lead up to the Iraq war, the contested 2000 election, etc. - so much so that the right tried very hard to get the CPB and PBS entirely de-funded.
Even the US Congress is more than capable of creating a non-profit, private corporation that funds real, fact-checked, investigative journalism. If this is the only way we can continue to have such reporters, whether they are published in print or on the net, then we should certainly do so.
Such an entity - a hypothetical Corporation for Public Newsgathering - could also fund investigative bloggers. The only criterion would be original, investigative, fact-checked news content, whether published on paper or on-line.
People like you are worse than matter!
People like you are worse than Hatter!
I do remember when Google entered the internet search market. Google gained search share precisely because that market was not being well served by the existing search engines. Google's results were better (thanks to PageRank) which is why more and more users switched to Google as their primary search engine.
In the case of notebook/netbook OSes, the current crop of mainstream contenders (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) has more functionality than ChromeOS, which makes it very unlikely to displace the current mature offerings. This strategy, of providing a more poorly functioning offering, is exactly the opposite of how Google came to dominate Web search.
ChromeOS appears to be motivated entirely by wishful thinking. "We (Google) wish that the only thing users wanted to do is use web apps cause then we could sell more ads, so lets make an OS that only does the cloud!" It's a lame attempt at vendor lock-in in the guise of convenience.
Unfortunately for Google, in the case of ChromeOS, less is less.
Or you could just print it for the cost of about 2 cents and have a hard copy which you really don't care if it gets splattered with tomato sauce. ChromeOS is a cloud solution in search of a problem. Thing is, cloud capabilities are a small proper subset of general purpose laptop/netbook capabilities, so why chain yourself to a crippled platform?
I get it that such limitations might work for the extremely light usage crowd (grandma and people who like to pretend to be working adults by using social media sites, etc.) but for real working adults, the cloud (sans local data retention under user control) is a catastrophic, organization-wide, data loss incident waiting to happen. But adding local data stores to the cloud just makes it a regular old OS with lame web apps and online backup, something which is already available in the current crop of mature, polished, debugged, mainstream OSes like Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
From the article on the "low power" neurogrid chip (page 3):
Just a few miles down the road, at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, a computer scientist named Dharmendra Modha recently used 16 digital Blue Gene supercomputer racks to mathematically simulate 55 million neurons connected by 442 billion synapses. The insights gained from that impressive feat will help in the design of future neural chips. But Modha’s computers consumed 320,000 watts of electricity, enough to power 260 American households. By comparison, Neurogrid’s 1 million neurons are expected to sip less than a watt.
So 5 orders of magnitude less power than current digital designs. Note however that they compute in a fundamentally different way - i.e., probabilistically, not deterministically. Since this is how real neurons work, the non-determinism is not a problem for such uses.
btw, they achieve this low power consumption by not generating a voltage spike until a certain threshold of much lower voltage (and much more variable) signals has accumulated in a capacitor. By contrast, digital devices effectively generate a voltage spike for every clock cycle, which of course requires far more power.