My biggest complaints are that I cannot simply send an image to my machine without using iPhoto, or access files for storage and such particularly over Bluetooth. Not being able to use it as a modem is pretty crappy as well!
That aside, it is a cool phone. Although I would not have purchased an iPod as a separate product, having one is not bad. But again, I purchased an iPod Shuffle instead of a flash drive, and am sort of bothered that I cannot use a $500 product to do the job of a $25 flash drive.
I've been reading a bit about scientific tools, "Thing Knowledge" and such, and find that often the tools and the understanding evolve in parallel. One could ask, is the thing the knowledge? Does the ultimate mathematical symbolism, best express the understanding? My impression is that much of the future of computation is going to come from sources other than mathematics. This doesn't imply that we don't need maths, particularly if we don't yet have the tools to express heuristics as process.
Frankly, we barely have a rhetoric for computing and what the ultimate goals will be in the future. How do we process images? How do we communicate with them? How do we type Mandarin? We have a lot of looking back historically to find the future. Perhaps, the question is, what is more important to the future of computing, algorithms or heuristics? I suppose that I'm in the heuristics camp as well.
I remember going to buy my grandfather's first CD player in 84, a Meridien, where we listened to Sonny Rollins in a sound room. As a designer of audio equipment for RCA and such and an owner of the most expensive tube amps money could buy -- Marantz Golds, Macintosh, etc... -- he was really awed by the dynamic range. Early CDs where engineered well and while an ear could pick out certain digital characteristics, the dynamic range made up for a lot. The bass was amazing.
Vinyl and tape degrade, as well as distort the music, and are rarely played optimally. The CD made up for certain limitations and provided new ones. Unfortunately, the labels began forcing the volume into the upper ends of the dynamic range later, resulting in weird dynamics. This isn't the fault of the media however.
It may not be entirely profitable, or necessary, at the moment, but imagine a city the size of NYC screwed due to oil flow issues. Most of our agriculture is so dependent upon oil, that functioning in the event of restrictions, or continuing in the event of permanent problems could pose enormous problems.
I have been looking at these issues in Chicago, and am busy working on and ecological urban center, and community, focusing on exploring issues like these. I group it under manufacturing as opposed to simply agriculture. Making stuff in the city/urban areas, and training people to do so, will become incredibly important in the future, IMHO...
OS X doesn't cost anything extra, and the laptops are pretty damn nice, not to mention competitively priced. Load Bootcamp and install what you wish right along side. You could probably get help with the installation at the Genius Bar.
It would be nice if Apple had a group of standard installations, including Vista. Just download what you need, and pay for the license where required. It would make great business sense for corporate scenarios. A friend's trial support firm is switching to Windows from the Mac in order to standardize, but refuse to buy a Mac so that she can dual boot where required. What short sightedness!
I have never, in twenty five years of using Apple products had a failure, unless the machine was desperately old, and that turned out to be a battery! Whereas, the only Dell I ever owned, had a hard drive failure within months. Hence no more Dell's! At least get a Lenovo... Aside from the marginal cost differences, I cannot understand why people buy them, and subsequently Dell's poor service.
I take it as more of a focus on competition, but YMMV. There are lots of browsers, and while I do wish that Safari would get kicked to the curb, how exactly is Apple supposed to work with a project that reacts to a presentation in such a manner? My opinion is that they would like to peel away some Windows/IE users, rather than peel away FF users. What's wrong with that? They sell hardware.
I use FireFox on my MacBook. I wish it were a bit more stable at times. I like WebKit. Opera was nice, but not always usable on various sites. I hear OmniWeb is nice. With FF market share increasing every day, why are they complaining about Apple?
The design considerations for the iPhone specify: "iPhone User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3"
I thought OSS was primarily interested in open standards and interoperability with OS applications? An open playing field, rather than market share...
What it is simply control machinery. Much of biology is the combination of essentially different cellular functionality. Requiring it to be either, or, simplifies the process beyond recognition. What if to conserve cellular space, the sequence controlled the assembly of material? It is neither simply data, nor simply machinery, but both.
The beuaty of nature is its ability to create and vary in a controlled and impossibly complex manner. My bet is that the sequence is like the CNC controls on a milling machine, or the layering controls in a rapid prototyping machine, and the cellular building blocks are like the cutting or layering of material.
Examples of codependent cellular systems abound creating a seemingly single life form but combining into life, like us.
There are certainly issues with Firefox on OS X, but I prefer to run it very simply as a means to make the web a viable place for applications and standards based browsing in the future. Rarely now do I come across a site that tells me that Explorer is needed to access the content.
Safari is not bad, Webkit is nothing if not cool, but ultimately a better solution is available. I wish that Apple would simply help merge Webkit into Mozilla, and ditch the browser fragmentation game. Goodness knows that Mozilla could use some interface help.
Alas, Steve simply wants a solid Apple platform, but I agree that Safari is doing little to pull Windows users across. But, what if iTunes ran as a plugin within Safari, and you could access your music at work? Or, your documents? What if the recent exploits where an indication that more is going on in the browser than anticipated?
Sort of amazing that this was so long ago. I had an education version of the Apple II (Bell and Howell) with a floppy. If we want to emulate the possibilities of something like this, a real concerted effort at platform development needs to happen. The concept of print graphics (I'm a designer) is not long for the world, and frankly neither is the concept of a personal computer. The platform is the network (sorry Sun you missed it.).
Framing thought around computing is the future, and it is platform independent. Imagine if Google were untied from the server and existed in code or essentially tags. Processing would become a commodity. Processing would again become personal. This is the problem. In 1977 we thought of computing and programming as personal. Information a a personal responsibility. Today we outsource to platform vendors.
Tomorrow we define. Define content. Define a context. And, define a connection scenario.
There a lot of opinions about software, some like free, some like open, some like to look at developer communities. I like it when people create my products and care bout them, and this is not restricted to software. X11 allows most things to run, when you have the knowledge to do so. Complaining about it not working is like complaining that Linux just doesn't work out of the box. Duh!
But, paying people for cool software allows more of it to be made. It allows my needs to be met. Developers listen. Stuff like BBEdit, Transmit, Coda, and graphics tools like VueScan allow me to do the things that I would like in the way that I would like. It may not be worth money to somebody else, but making a living is always a nice thing. If I had a choice between a computer and a car, it would be the computer, so paying for it is kind of necessary.
Additionally, VueScan for example allows me to purchase the software once for its life span, and avoid the upgrade hell of Epson and Silverfast (%$$##%@!). Everybody wants something for nothing which is how MS became such a dominant player. Crime begins at the personal level in my opinion, and so does anti-competitive business behavior. Free is not always good, but open is.
The Etymotics are really great! Even the lower end version... The ear insert is most definitely an acquired taste however.
Most of my music is encoded at 128 but I am in the process of taking may favorites and recoding at 256. Lossless is great but the space savings are pretty helpful.
Like the Psion Netbook this thing is for a pretty limited market. It would likely function best running something like Sales Force or SAP-ish stuff. But, those markets often require specific functionality as well, like barcode readers.
It will be interesting to see how Palm created the interface to the Linux core.
Why the hell don't these free market aficionados also become interested in efficiency. Various uses of spectrum could free up lots of space for competition. Or, is it competition that is the problem? Particularly, to those donating to these folks...
It would make sense that he run something like Processing (processing.org) or Flash to develop the demo. Why would somebody develop an underlying OS for interaction design purposes. The choice between Java and ActionScript would make me cringe at presentation time however!
Adobe font library: around $10k (I'm legal) CS 3: $1000 Office: $300-ish Macbook: $2000-ish Various software like BBEdit: $500-ish Back up drive: $500
The upgrade to CS 3 kitchen sink will add a grand. Crazy I may be. But I also make decent money, and am not going to complain about how much my tools cost. Your mileage may vary...
The details look suspiciously mac like, and I would much rather have a tough shell than a screen on the outside so that I can carry it without a sleeve. I'm jitter enough thanks to my Blackberry!
One day I'm hoping for that Powerbook 2400 replacement...
But, increasingly laptops are in the hands of the Creative Directors. I have one. Sure we can attach other displays, but you get used to working on what you use continually. Callibrating a screen not capable of being relly calibrated is the issue.
Color is in the mind in my opinion, and I design with an understanding of the end result, but when colors look entirely different on a screen it can be frustrating.
I'd like to say, that getting accurate color is really important in my job. Approximate is not really good enough. I had thought that my display was not correct with a lot of Pantone colors, and this makes me wonder about the part in my machine. People pay for what they consider to be the best displays, and Apple's have aways been very good.
When you've got over $15K in your laptop and software, $10 or $20 on screen is really the last place to compromise. Well, that and your chair.
Somebody's losing a job over this one, IMHO. Nothing like pissing off your most devoted market!
I have worked for myself for over a dozen years, and have spoken with clients about internal positions, the jumping through hoops is increasingly not worth the effort. Even when they do pay six-figures, though they often don't want to, I can make that sitting around on my ass for three months out of the year. I have a blog, which is easily Google-able, and I'm pretty certain that this has affected one such discussion. But, why exactly do I not want to be myself? Why subjugate my entire life to an employer? What do I get out of this besides a paycheck?
There are plenty of meaningful positions outside of the financial sector. And, given the population dynamics, and the number of people in the high-end who no longer wish to be somebodies "stepford" employee, employers will increasingly have to deal with less than HR standards. I still work for the same people, and they pay me more than if I were an employee. I often do their managers jobs so that they can leave at 5:00. But, I'm for all practical purposes unemployable given my opinionated (yet political) nature.
You forgot the greatest augmentation of all. How would anybody survive without society and social interaction? Living in a cabin in Montana and purchasing bullets does not count!
My take is that we are going to go through an enormous re-urbanization soon for a variety of reasons. Cities are already the engines that drive entire regions. We may find ourselves increasingly relying on others' intellectual specializations. Think of a city as a giant brain and you as a neuron.
The issue seems to be dynamics rather than specifics. My understanding for 20 years or so was that global warming would bring more violent weather, rather than more consistently bad weather.
Also, with respect to the warming is good for life argument, the Earth has most certainly been warmer, and likely more violent weather-wise. Our distinct problem is that we have virtually eliminated the possibility of more life spawning by killing its potential habitat and introducing toxic waste of various forms.
I wrote an article 15 years or so ago arguing that global warming wasn't the biggest issue, but rather that desertification and the elimination of biodiversity was. Whether we can live in a world without a functional ecology is going to be something we quickly find out. If it's warmer doesn't really matter, unless you are in a stressed area. My opinion is that a lot of people are going to perish, but as usual YMMV. As if they already are not perishing! It may simply be more permanent for many regions.
Predicting those regions is like predicting the weather!
Slashdot Mirror
My biggest complaints are that I cannot simply send an image to my machine without using iPhoto, or access files for storage and such particularly over Bluetooth. Not being able to use it as a modem is pretty crappy as well!
That aside, it is a cool phone. Although I would not have purchased an iPod as a separate product, having one is not bad. But again, I purchased an iPod Shuffle instead of a flash drive, and am sort of bothered that I cannot use a $500 product to do the job of a $25 flash drive.
GPS would have been nice as well...
I've been reading a bit about scientific tools, "Thing Knowledge" and such, and find that often the tools and the understanding evolve in parallel. One could ask, is the thing the knowledge? Does the ultimate mathematical symbolism, best express the understanding? My impression is that much of the future of computation is going to come from sources other than mathematics. This doesn't imply that we don't need maths, particularly if we don't yet have the tools to express heuristics as process.
Frankly, we barely have a rhetoric for computing and what the ultimate goals will be in the future. How do we process images? How do we communicate with them? How do we type Mandarin? We have a lot of looking back historically to find the future. Perhaps, the question is, what is more important to the future of computing, algorithms or heuristics? I suppose that I'm in the heuristics camp as well.
Thank goodness the FCC has ensured that there is plenty of competition in the industry!
I remember going to buy my grandfather's first CD player in 84, a Meridien, where we listened to Sonny Rollins in a sound room. As a designer of audio equipment for RCA and such and an owner of the most expensive tube amps money could buy -- Marantz Golds, Macintosh, etc... -- he was really awed by the dynamic range. Early CDs where engineered well and while an ear could pick out certain digital characteristics, the dynamic range made up for a lot. The bass was amazing.
Vinyl and tape degrade, as well as distort the music, and are rarely played optimally. The CD made up for certain limitations and provided new ones. Unfortunately, the labels began forcing the volume into the upper ends of the dynamic range later, resulting in weird dynamics. This isn't the fault of the media however.
It may not be entirely profitable, or necessary, at the moment, but imagine a city the size of NYC screwed due to oil flow issues. Most of our agriculture is so dependent upon oil, that functioning in the event of restrictions, or continuing in the event of permanent problems could pose enormous problems.
I have been looking at these issues in Chicago, and am busy working on and ecological urban center, and community, focusing on exploring issues like these. I group it under manufacturing as opposed to simply agriculture. Making stuff in the city/urban areas, and training people to do so, will become incredibly important in the future, IMHO...
OS X doesn't cost anything extra, and the laptops are pretty damn nice, not to mention competitively priced. Load Bootcamp and install what you wish right along side. You could probably get help with the installation at the Genius Bar.
It would be nice if Apple had a group of standard installations, including Vista. Just download what you need, and pay for the license where required. It would make great business sense for corporate scenarios. A friend's trial support firm is switching to Windows from the Mac in order to standardize, but refuse to buy a Mac so that she can dual boot where required. What short sightedness!
I have never, in twenty five years of using Apple products had a failure, unless the machine was desperately old, and that turned out to be a battery! Whereas, the only Dell I ever owned, had a hard drive failure within months. Hence no more Dell's! At least get a Lenovo... Aside from the marginal cost differences, I cannot understand why people buy them, and subsequently Dell's poor service.
I take it as more of a focus on competition, but YMMV. There are lots of browsers, and while I do wish that Safari would get kicked to the curb, how exactly is Apple supposed to work with a project that reacts to a presentation in such a manner? My opinion is that they would like to peel away some Windows/IE users, rather than peel away FF users. What's wrong with that? They sell hardware.
I use FireFox on my MacBook. I wish it were a bit more stable at times. I like WebKit. Opera was nice, but not always usable on various sites. I hear OmniWeb is nice. With FF market share increasing every day, why are they complaining about Apple?
The design considerations for the iPhone specify:
"iPhone User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3"
I thought OSS was primarily interested in open standards and interoperability with OS applications? An open playing field, rather than market share...
What it is simply control machinery. Much of biology is the combination of essentially different cellular functionality. Requiring it to be either, or, simplifies the process beyond recognition. What if to conserve cellular space, the sequence controlled the assembly of material? It is neither simply data, nor simply machinery, but both.
The beuaty of nature is its ability to create and vary in a controlled and impossibly complex manner. My bet is that the sequence is like the CNC controls on a milling machine, or the layering controls in a rapid prototyping machine, and the cellular building blocks are like the cutting or layering of material.
Examples of codependent cellular systems abound creating a seemingly single life form but combining into life, like us.
There are certainly issues with Firefox on OS X, but I prefer to run it very simply as a means to make the web a viable place for applications and standards based browsing in the future. Rarely now do I come across a site that tells me that Explorer is needed to access the content.
Safari is not bad, Webkit is nothing if not cool, but ultimately a better solution is available. I wish that Apple would simply help merge Webkit into Mozilla, and ditch the browser fragmentation game. Goodness knows that Mozilla could use some interface help.
Alas, Steve simply wants a solid Apple platform, but I agree that Safari is doing little to pull Windows users across. But, what if iTunes ran as a plugin within Safari, and you could access your music at work? Or, your documents? What if the recent exploits where an indication that more is going on in the browser than anticipated?
It almost doesn't seem like Slashdot! This thread is bizarre in its rationality and reasoned response. WTF!
And, as Daring Fireball stated, the book you buy from 37signals has a name plate in it. The horror!
Sort of amazing that this was so long ago. I had an education version of the Apple II (Bell and Howell) with a floppy. If we want to emulate the possibilities of something like this, a real concerted effort at platform development needs to happen. The concept of print graphics (I'm a designer) is not long for the world, and frankly neither is the concept of a personal computer. The platform is the network (sorry Sun you missed it.).
Framing thought around computing is the future, and it is platform independent. Imagine if Google were untied from the server and existed in code or essentially tags. Processing would become a commodity. Processing would again become personal. This is the problem. In 1977 we thought of computing and programming as personal. Information a a personal responsibility. Today we outsource to platform vendors.
Tomorrow we define. Define content. Define a context. And, define a connection scenario.
There a lot of opinions about software, some like free, some like open, some like to look at developer communities. I like it when people create my products and care bout them, and this is not restricted to software. X11 allows most things to run, when you have the knowledge to do so. Complaining about it not working is like complaining that Linux just doesn't work out of the box. Duh!
But, paying people for cool software allows more of it to be made. It allows my needs to be met. Developers listen. Stuff like BBEdit, Transmit, Coda, and graphics tools like VueScan allow me to do the things that I would like in the way that I would like. It may not be worth money to somebody else, but making a living is always a nice thing. If I had a choice between a computer and a car, it would be the computer, so paying for it is kind of necessary.
Additionally, VueScan for example allows me to purchase the software once for its life span, and avoid the upgrade hell of Epson and Silverfast (%$$##%@!). Everybody wants something for nothing which is how MS became such a dominant player. Crime begins at the personal level in my opinion, and so does anti-competitive business behavior. Free is not always good, but open is.
Did you see how much it costs to buy a congress critter! Nearly nothing. You could raise that much before noon.
WTF, these people are selling their souls for peanuts. What we need is an "open" lobbying fund.
The Etymotics are really great! Even the lower end version... The ear insert is most definitely an acquired taste however.
Most of my music is encoded at 128 but I am in the process of taking may favorites and recoding at 256. Lossless is great but the space savings are pretty helpful.
Like the Psion Netbook this thing is for a pretty limited market. It would likely function best running something like Sales Force or SAP-ish stuff. But, those markets often require specific functionality as well, like barcode readers.
It will be interesting to see how Palm created the interface to the Linux core.
Why the hell don't these free market aficionados also become interested in efficiency. Various uses of spectrum could free up lots of space for competition. Or, is it competition that is the problem? Particularly, to those donating to these folks...
It would make sense that he run something like Processing (processing.org) or Flash to develop the demo. Why would somebody develop an underlying OS for interaction design purposes. The choice between Java and ActionScript would make me cringe at presentation time however!
It is just about nine months since: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65
But like rearing a child, we'll see the person in 5 to seven years... Or, in a month when the iPhone is released.
Adobe font library: around $10k (I'm legal)
CS 3: $1000
Office: $300-ish
Macbook: $2000-ish
Various software like BBEdit: $500-ish
Back up drive: $500
The upgrade to CS 3 kitchen sink will add a grand. Crazy I may be. But I also make decent money, and am not going to complain about how much my tools cost. Your mileage may vary...
The details look suspiciously mac like, and I would much rather have a tough shell than a screen on the outside so that I can carry it without a sleeve. I'm jitter enough thanks to my Blackberry!
One day I'm hoping for that Powerbook 2400 replacement...
But, increasingly laptops are in the hands of the Creative Directors. I have one. Sure we can attach other displays, but you get used to working on what you use continually. Callibrating a screen not capable of being relly calibrated is the issue.
Color is in the mind in my opinion, and I design with an understanding of the end result, but when colors look entirely different on a screen it can be frustrating.
I'd like to say, that getting accurate color is really important in my job. Approximate is not really good enough. I had thought that my display was not correct with a lot of Pantone colors, and this makes me wonder about the part in my machine. People pay for what they consider to be the best displays, and Apple's have aways been very good.
When you've got over $15K in your laptop and software, $10 or $20 on screen is really the last place to compromise. Well, that and your chair.
Somebody's losing a job over this one, IMHO. Nothing like pissing off your most devoted market!
I have worked for myself for over a dozen years, and have spoken with clients about internal positions, the jumping through hoops is increasingly not worth the effort. Even when they do pay six-figures, though they often don't want to, I can make that sitting around on my ass for three months out of the year. I have a blog, which is easily Google-able, and I'm pretty certain that this has affected one such discussion. But, why exactly do I not want to be myself? Why subjugate my entire life to an employer? What do I get out of this besides a paycheck?
There are plenty of meaningful positions outside of the financial sector. And, given the population dynamics, and the number of people in the high-end who no longer wish to be somebodies "stepford" employee, employers will increasingly have to deal with less than HR standards. I still work for the same people, and they pay me more than if I were an employee. I often do their managers jobs so that they can leave at 5:00. But, I'm for all practical purposes unemployable given my opinionated (yet political) nature.
Time to start another business!
You forgot the greatest augmentation of all. How would anybody survive without society and social interaction? Living in a cabin in Montana and purchasing bullets does not count!
My take is that we are going to go through an enormous re-urbanization soon for a variety of reasons. Cities are already the engines that drive entire regions. We may find ourselves increasingly relying on others' intellectual specializations. Think of a city as a giant brain and you as a neuron.
We are not nature.
The issue seems to be dynamics rather than specifics. My understanding for 20 years or so was that global warming would bring more violent weather, rather than more consistently bad weather.
Also, with respect to the warming is good for life argument, the Earth has most certainly been warmer, and likely more violent weather-wise. Our distinct problem is that we have virtually eliminated the possibility of more life spawning by killing its potential habitat and introducing toxic waste of various forms.
I wrote an article 15 years or so ago arguing that global warming wasn't the biggest issue, but rather that desertification and the elimination of biodiversity was. Whether we can live in a world without a functional ecology is going to be something we quickly find out. If it's warmer doesn't really matter, unless you are in a stressed area. My opinion is that a lot of people are going to perish, but as usual YMMV. As if they already are not perishing! It may simply be more permanent for many regions.
Predicting those regions is like predicting the weather!