Let's turn down the heat a notch. I work in a publishing company maintaining a collection of newsletter style websites, my colleagues use the term SEO rather a lot, we've employed at least one SEO consultant. This is my experience of what SEO is:
My company publishes free content that it also syndicates, for free. Anyone who wants to can republish our content, as long as they link back to us. This isn't particularly unusual, especially as my employer sells premium products on the back of the free stuff (one in every few articles is, in fact, an ad, ultimately.)
What it found were a number of issues with this, not the least of which is that many times if you searched for our content on Google, one of the syndicated copies would be first on the list, and our sites would be way further down in the list.
A quick look at Google Webmasters also showed that we were getting a lot of hits for stuff that had nothing to do with us, while not getting hits for things that we did have.
What went wrong and what did we do to fix it? Well, once you have a site that's gotten over a particular size and which has rather a lot of complexity (and we have multiple such sites), inevitably the site starts to gather rather a lot of crud. SEO, in this context, means taking a step back and figuring out where the problems are in the site. Sometimes they're obvious - bad uses of tags, a lack of meta data - and sometimes they're not - a lack of semantic HTML is a common problem and extremely easy to do by accident.
And that's what we've been doing. No-one's ever recommended link farms to us (and we'd fire any consultant who does - link farms are a great way to get permanently banned from Google.)
When you hire an SEO consultant, you might hire a kooky black-hat person (and when I was building sites for clients, I had clients who'd come to me saying they'd been in touch with a "consultant" who promised to make their site #1 in 24 hours...) but that doesn't mean all SEO consultants are going to be like that, not least because that's a great way for an SEO to lose business in the long run.
Going through your site and ensuring that it uses semantic mark-up, that it has proper meta data, etc, is something that ultimately improves visibility. And it's very easy to not do by accident. It's also very easy to only half do if you think you know what you're doing but actually your skills lie in data manipulation, or cosmetic web design, or converting video formats, or whatever.
As I said, this is my experience. And as I said, yes, I've had people come to me (outside of my employer) asking whether they should work with rather dubious SEOs. But in normal parlance, SEO is a fairly reasonable activity, and actually, all the things that legitimate SEOs recommend are stuff that helps the web rather than damages it.
(Yes, I know about third party candidates. Unfortunately, our elections are set up in such a way that the only real effect third party candidates can have is to siphon support away from the mainstream candidate they most resemble... which means that voting third party makes it less likely that the third party's policy goals will be realized. Sad, but true.)
Not exactly. Short term, yes, that's absolutely true. Long term it can have an affect in that the major parties need to take votes from the smaller parties to win.
I think Nader's run in 2000 was spectacularly badly timed. Clinton may have been center right, but there was no evidence that Gore was in any practical way - and all available evidence showed Bush was extreme right, as his subsequent administration showed. I think a Nader run in 2012 though would be absolutely right (if it wasn't for the fact he discredited himself by running in 2000.) We're facing an extreme right Democrat who ran as a liberal, and a Republican who will not be any better - but probably isn't going to be any worse either.
Now, think about the numbers the way the pundits and wonks do. Let's pretend that Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination, and Paul Krugman runs as the spoiler candidate.
If Krugman doesn't run, the votes might look like this: 20,000,000 Obama, 20,100,000 Romney. Romney wins.
What's happened? Well, in both cases the spoiler didn't really change the outcome, although he'll be blamed for it anyway.
Regardless though, the Democrats are going to see an issue here: Had they courted Krugman's voters, they could have gotten up to 20,400,000 votes in total, easily defeating Romney. This is regardless of whether they think they would have beaten Romney if Krugman hadn't stood.
And what's the real effect Krugman had on the presidential race? Well, he's gotten a whole bunch of people to vote who otherwise wouldn't have done, around 390,000 extra people voted in this election. These are people who are demonstrating a willingness to turn up to the polls to vote if someone who represents them is willing to stand. A sane policy wonk has to consider the possibility that people they don't represent aren't going to vote for them anyway, but will stay at home in disgust.
That's why you shouldn't write off third party candidates. It's not that there's no chance Paul Krugman (or whoever you want) will become President, it's that they provide an opportunity to tell the major parties "You guys disgust me, if you actually want to me to vote for you, start representing my interests." Something that really cannot be done in any other way.
And lest you think Nader had no effect in 2000, ask yourself why Obama ran as a liberal in 2008. Because he did. I remember.
if you actually go to a Tea Party event (if you ever visit this country), you'd see a pretty even mix of both dems and repubs.
Southern Democrats perhaps.
The perception of them as right wing kooks is due to the fact that that's how the Tea Party presents itself - "second amendment solutions" and cheering on death to name but two high profile examples; and because it's kooky (not to mention cruel) to be cutting safety nets and throwing people out of work during a recession, something the TP is advocating.
I personally can't remember the last time I heard from Nancy Pelosi or the CBC, and the only time I've seen Harry Reid on TV has been talking about a legislative event. I don't doubt all three have mentioned the Tea Party, but it's not from them that people are forming their opinions.
The Tea Party are a bunch of far right whackjobs. They may seem "moderate" to someone who agrees with them, but on any rational level they're advocating the worst possible policies at the worst possible time, and for apparently the worst possible reasons.
For the love of @&$!: being in favor of "states rights" does not make you a civil libertarian. (Hell, in my book, it doesn't make you a libertarian either, but for some reason rather a lot of states rights people call themselves that, so I'm not going to get into that argument.)
Ron Paul is perfectly happy for your right of free association to be taken away, for you to be required to support a particular religion, and for fundamental decisions about your body to be taken away from you, as long as it's your state doing it, not the Federal Government.
I'm fairly sure steam can be hotter than 100C, just as ice can be colder than 0C, and water can be any temperature between 0C and 100C. All figures assume 1000 millibars of pressure, obviously - allow that to change and, well, you can be even more flexible.
Nothing I'm writing here should be read as implying I think there's anything in the story, I'm just saying, steam, well, it's H2O in gas form, and gaseous H2O can get pretty hot.
Just as someone can copy Android and make a closed version (including Google), the same is true of OpenBSD. I *dare* you to tell Theo that he's producing a non-free operating system!
I consider an operating system whose users are granted certain rights to be free, regardless of whether someone can make their own proprietary version. Should the latter happen, it's the proprietary fork that's non-free, not the original version.
I'm pretty sure webOS doesn't run a GNU userland either. Now, Maemo does (and I assume Meego does too) - albeit with that awful Busybox crap, but even then, would you want to run Maemo apps under Android or vice versa? Without making one OS a clone of the other (which would defeat the purpose of having two operating systems in the first place) it'd get fairly nasty very quickly.
I'd also take issue with your description of Android as having a non-FOSS userspace. With the exception of Honeycomb (which is a one off, and not something Google actually wants adopted long term), and optional libraries to access Google's own services (hardly part of the user space) every part of Android is open source, generally licensed either under the GPL or Apache licence. If you don't believe me, download it, and see for yourself.
That really depends on what version of Android it was and whether it contains enough generic Android to have a post-Honeycomb system built upon it.
The Google Android developers forum thread on the subject does contain comments implying that the Android version shipped may be a version used at the factory to test the hardware. This would imply a heavily customized version, and wouldn't imply anything else (ie it could be pre-Froyo, and could be barely usable.)
I would want to know more about what was shipped before making any assumptions about how useful the system might be, to me or reverse engineers, or indeed, whether it's a prank.
Amazon isn't producing a tablet, not in the iPad sense anyway (and definitely not in the Windows 8 sense.) This is a web-enabled media player. The range of media has expanded a little over what we're used to, but first and foremost it's a low cost device that does to videos, music, and games what the Kindle does to books.
In this universe, the iPad is essentially an irrelevance. The functionality overlaps with the iPad, sure, but the iPad is intended to more of a personal hub, not just for playing the above, but also as a communications center and a little bit of a creativity thing. I don't happen to think the iPad is a particularly good implementation of that (but what do I know? The sodding thing has sales through the roof...) but it's not exactly the same thing.
The whole "It's an iPad killer" thing is from a media that's hell bent on pushing that story despite the fact that Amazon has just changed their line up to be almost identical to their existing competitor, Barnes and Noble, and that the specs, price, and capabilities, of Amazon's device isn't remotely close to the iPad. I think we're going to have to wait for Windows 8, and the tablet iMac, before we see the real iPad killers. This isn't it, any more than a refrigerator or a car stereo is an iPad killer.
That's my view anyway, but what do I know. The only time I've predicted a runaway success in the consumer electronics sphere in the last decade was the Wii.
No, the release schedules are just the icing on the cake. Firefox is pissing off core supporters by being crap. A browser that hogs 70% of your memory *by design* (because, y'know, that seems right for a rich-text viewer, right? And who needs to run productivity applications at the same time as a browser anyway?!) and ends up actually using more due to massive memory leaks, is close to unusable.
Right now I can't actually run Yahoo Mail. I have 4G on this baby, and 4G on the Windows box upstairs, and I can't run Yahoo Mail under Firefox unless I close it as soon as I've finished with it. Because if I run it, and don't close the tab, my PCs will be reduced to crawling, memory swapping, crapola within two hours.
Mozilla: listen. You know all those changes you made since 3.6? Fuck 'em. Seriously. You want to fix this, it's quite simple. Roll Firefox back to 3.6, and look into a more sane way of introducing the changes you've made since. Yes, I know it means Firefox will no longer implement one or two standards that haven't taken off yet, but it means your browser will actually become relevant again.
Please, for the love of God, swallow your pride and do it.
My take: Javascript's a language, not an API. The "limitations" people keep droning on about in regard to Javascript are actually limitations of the API provided by standard browsers. Simply allowing developers to enter things like <script type="text/actionscript"> are not going to help because ActionScript, Python, Perl, DOS Batch, and VBScript are all going to be limited by the API the browser gives them, and there's no reason to suppose it's going to be better by virtue of being supported by a different language.
The issue right now is the W3C, who quite honestly seem to never quite know what they're doing. I hate to say it, but if Netscape had survived, was still the standard browser, and was continuing the "Add one feature every minor release" policy, then while there'd be a hell of a lot of kludges in Netscape 57, we'd probably have a more capable platform overall. I'm not sure we'd need Flash.
Apple doesn't have an edge because it doesn't have a non-toy tablet yet. [I hope I'm not offending anyone using the term "toy", please read this in full before reacting!] That's the problem. I think Apple will have a non-toy tablet in the medium term, I know that's where they want to take Mac OS X, and I suspect the iMac will become a tablet in the medium term.
But it's very important to understand that the only "tablets" out there right now that aren't toys are running Windows, and they generally suck. What makes Windows 8 interesting is that it takes the lessoned learned from the iPad/etc, and creates something that's both usable and useful.
Yes, in many ways it's like 1983. In 1983 Apple was leading the market with the Apple II. The Apple II was a home computer. It had a limited role in the "serious" space that IBM/Microsoft was making headway in, and had some interesting applications like Visicalc that could be considered proofs of concept - much as the iPad version of iWork is. But the Apple II wasn't open enough (in the sense only Apple could make them), it wasn't powerful enough (no more than 64k of RAM without paging, with an operating system that barely qualified as one), it wasn't available in a configuration useful for the business desktop.
So while Apple lead the home computer market at that point, it was never going to win the personal computer market. Apple is "leading" the tablet market right now, but with a device that's more to look at than use. Nobody in their right mind will buy an iPad, or anything like it, to use as their primary computer. I'm not saying "toy" to be insulting, I'm using the term to explain the major difference between what's produced now, and what's coming down the pipe, not just from Dell/HP/other companies that work with Microsoft, but also from Apple themselves. The devices called "tablets" today, that aren't the awful stylus-Windows thingies, aren't something that'll ever displace the PC. The stuff Windows 8 is designed for really will.
When will Apple produce the tablet iMac? I don't know. I'm guessing it'll be after Windows 8. And even if came out earlier, Windows has the huge advantage of being the primary OS on "serious" computers right now. Just as Mac OS X hasn't challenged the dominance of Windows XP/Vista/7, and the original Mac didn't challenge the dominance of the MS DOS PC, I just don't see Apple overthrowing Windows in the near future. The change to a different form factor is not going to be enough to do that.
Am I wrong? Well, here's a few ways in which I might be:
The preview of Windows 8 felt kludgy on the desktop. It might be that there's a reaction against it there in much the same way as the first version of Vista was unpopular, and it'll take Microsoft time to fix that
Early tablets might not be powerful enough to run a full operating system efficiently, resulting in a system that ends up being the worst of all worlds, too slow to work well on the desktop when hooked up to a keyboard and monitor, and too bloated to work well when it's being used as a tablet. I don't think that's very likely, but it's possible.
People might revolt against the entire touch UI concept, preferring to use a desktop interface using mice and pointers where possible. I think that's quite possible, especially right now when we're still trying to figure out how to make it work. The first Mac suffered from much the same problem, having what was a horrible awkward to use UI, suffering the problems of being first.
You're right on the "going out of style" thing, it didn't look right when I wrote it.
Microsoft has had many successes over the last few years. They finally did beat GEM. They did kill Netscape for all intents and purposes. They haven't taken over the server market, but they do have a seriously large proportion of the market.
In all of these cases, their dominance was done partially by producing a "good enough" product (although personally I always thought Windows was considerably better than GEM, and many argue that IE4 was better than Netscape), and partially by making use of their existing dominance on the desktop.
And they really are doing this in spades this time. The next "desktop" operating system is also a tablet operating system. Indeed, the major complaint I have with the system is that it doesn't work that well as a desktop system. Using it with a mouse is fairly horrible, although there's plenty of time for Microsoft to fix that.
I think MS will dominate the tablet market because:
They're the only company producing a tablet operating system that isn't a "toy". That is, it's not stripped down, it's not locked down, the same applications run on the desktop and the tablet UI, it's realistic to suppose you can by a Windows 8 tablet and make it your only computer
Users of existing Windows operating systems (7, XP, etc) will, ultimately, upgrade to Windows 8 or its successors. Unless Microsoft does something stupid and makes it the next Vista, The platform is going to have overwhelming support. But, you know, even Vista is a poor comparison - most Windows users are using "version 2" of Vista now anyway, and it, Windows 7, is well liked. Even if Windows 8 is a flop, Windows 9 would likely not be.
They're implementing the same new UI across both Windows 8 and their mobile operating systems, and they're ensuring the UI is comfortable in both environments.
Microsoft will not ultimately be the only company doing this, given Apple has already indicated they intend to move Mac OS X in that direction. But the real concern to me is that the platforms I use and love don't seem to "get it". I'm hoping the Windows 8 preview will be a wake-up call. Perhaps Google and Canonical need to talk.
I really wouldn't write off Windows Phone quite yet. I don't think it's Nokia that's going to save the platform, I think it's their desktop platform that's likely to do so. Spent yesterday playing with Windows 8 (the desktop/tablet) operating system, and... well, if they can fix it so the OS isn't another Vista, then I'm trying to figure out where any rival to Microsoft fits.
Basically, with Windows 8 you'll see touch-based desktops, tablets that aren't toys (ie you'll be able to do real work on them, and even make them your primary machines), and that leaves... well, if your phone OS acts just like your PC OS, but not in a bad way, then why wouldn't you see that as desirable?
I've never wanted an iPad, or even a Honeycomb tablet, but I can see myself wanting a post-W8 tablet - a real computer, running a real operating system, with a touchscreen UI for when I'm on the road, and the ability to hook up to a large screen and keyboard for when I'm not. My problem right now is that the people I want to produce the operating system for that device - Canonical/Google - are going in totally the wrong direction, Google focusing on stripped down mobile operating systems, and Ubuntu still clinging to the mouse like it's going out of style.
The market is different right now to 1992. And it's worth remembering that in 1989, OS/2 was the "future" (even though it wasn't that popular), and Windows was a flop that was being roundly beaten by GEM, as well as a large group of non-PC systems.
Right now the market is completely immature. There's no "serious" (ie non-toy) tablet with a proper touchscreen UI available, for instance. You cannot, seriously, base predictions about who's going to be successful two years from now on market share today. And I'd say that Microsoft has a very, very, very good chance of owning this, unless its rivals get their acts in gear.
I suspect the problem with it is the latency. It's still only 20% faster than regular eInk, according to that site. For an eReader, that's fine. For a tablet, that pretty much is built around a UI designed to show fluid movement in response to user actions, it's not really going to work.
e-Ink's not going anywhere. BN has had a tablet out for a while, and they're still releasing new e-Ink models. So I wouldn't worry about it.
And in the longer term it'll be interesting to see what comes of the OLPC's screen, which was a dual mode back-lit + color/ambient light + monochrome thing. Personally, I think that's the way to go if this whole "Tablets and eReaders are the same thing yo" mindset really becomes standard, but never having seen the OLPC I don't know how well it worked in practice.
I'm writing this on an LCD tablet which, unlike a kindle, is useful for reading the web, watching video etc.
I'm writing this on a laptop, which unlikely a Kindle or a tablet, is useful for reading the web, watching video, and writing content. That doesn't mean I'd say the three are comparable devices, and while a small minority might see the three as competitors, I don't think it's a universal sentiment.
Yes, in many cases people feel the need to make choices between two largely unrelated devices. Someone might choose a PC over a games console, or vice versa. Someone might choose a TV over a monitor or vice versa. Nonetheless, for the majority of users of either device, they're not in the same category. As yourself this:
Are Kindles selling (and they are, extremely well) because:
They're the easiest to use e-readers out there?
They're fast and have enormous functionality?
They're cheap?
They have a screen people love, and a battery life measured in months?
It isn't (1) or (2) because in both cases, they utterly suck in both categories. (3) can't be the case either - they only dropped below $200 in the last year, and even at that price they're not exactly impulse buy. It's all about (4). You may not care, but Kindles are selling because enough people do.
I don't think it's impossible to produce an Android tablet that could replace the Kindle, but it'd need to address that need. I'd really be interested to see how well the OLPC's screen is, as that managed to combine luminescent color and ambient, high resolution, very low power, monochrome in one screen. That might be enough to produce a good e-reader, that's also a good tablet. But we'll see!
Depends on whether 3G/Wifi is on or not. It usually lasts about two weeks with moderate use if wireless is on. If wireless is off, well, in my experience the battery life is measured in months.
The HP Touchpad may well be selling just because it's something selling at $100 that's perceived to be worth $400. Or it might be selling because people think it'll sell for $250 on eBay. Or many other reasons. Add to that the fact that non-geeks don't seem to be talking about is as geeks are (in my neck of the woods at least), and you can't really rush to judgment based upon the Touchpad alone. That's why the jury is out.
It's a shame HP didn't hide the "fire sale" part of it, and, say, cut the price in half (eg to $200) for a couple of weeks before announcing its discontinuation. That would have given us a little more information on whether the problem is price or something else.
I'm not sure why you thought you put a jab at open source in there BTW. I was describing why I wouldn't get one, I never suggested that was a universal sentiment. That said, I'll make two important points here:
First, as general advice, anyone who tries a completely new platform that carries a severe risk of being completely discontinued without ensuring that a mechanism for third party support exists - ie that the code is open, is making a grave mistake. Take this as someone whose first computers were a Dragon 32, a Sinclair QL, and a Commodore Amiga.
Second, right now one thing that's holding tablets back is the fact that the "open source" operating systems available for that kind of form factor (essentially, Android 1.x and 2.x) aren't optimized for the system. That's why there's a lot of crap from ViewSonic, Archos, et al. Look at the hardware they sell, and it's not bad at all (at least, the hardware in the $200+ range), but the tablets are hampered by ugly half-assed UIs designed to replace the phone UIs on the versions of Android they're using. That's why Icecream Sandwich is so important, it'll be the first completely open tablet operating system that virtually any manufacturer can pick up and install.
Whether consumers care isn't the issue here, even though they should What matters here is getting a quality, affordable, usable tablet out there, and in this environment, I think that's going to be very difficult without an free and open operating system with a quality UI.
Damn straight. It always amazes me when people insist on putting the two in the same category. I don't think it would be impossible to produce a tablet that's a good e-Reader, but it'd need to pull off the same trick that, say, the One Laptop Per Child does, and have a dual mode screen. I don't know if the OLPC's screen is too low in quality, or if there are patent or other reasons why nobody's done it yet, but the bottom line is that there's no tablet out there with a non-eyestrain-inducing screen.
My other concern about the article is that it suggests low price is the only trick to getting tablets "out there". I think the jury's out on that right now, but fundamentally the device needs to usable and functional. Is Amazon the right company to do that? I don't think so, based on the Kindle, which is the major piece of hardware they have out right now. The Kindle is controlled using a dreadful keyboard, and using side buttons that are easily pressed by accident. The fonts are also utterly abysmal. The Kindle doesn't win any awards for usability, in my book. I suspect the new Nook is a better device, but as the damned thing is always running in a locked demo mode in stores I've been unable to really evaluate the thing.
I'm waiting this one out. My only major incentive to get a tablet right now is that as a software developer I absolutely need to be familiar with the environment. But the tablets available right now are not that. I really want to see the following:
Sub-$200 price for a "full" tablet - 10", 1024x768 or better, capacitive screen, webcam, HDMI
An open source, well supported, operating system (Icecream Sandwich I guess will solve that problem
A good user interface - from what I've seen, Honeycomb, iOS, and webOS seem decent, but there's a lot of garbage out there
Will Amazon produce that? I'm not seeing any evidence they will. I would imagine we're talking about a device more in line with the Nook Color. Moderate hardware (but not full tablet level), a customized semi-proprietary operating system, and a customized user interface by people who haven't proven to be that good at user interfaces, probably in the $200-300 range. It'll be aimed at those people who have avoided the Kindle because they think tablets are "better". But I might be surprised.
I'm not sure either are that hard, and I think people are over-thinking the whole thing.
Tablets are "selling" right now because... well, because they seem like they might be a nice idea, but in practice they don't really do a lot, and they're not that practical. Most people who get them don't really use them that often. And realistically, when they do, it's to browse the web.
Given that, virtually every tablet selling for above $250 or so (which, generally, are tablets that include capacitive touchscreen technology, decent sized screens, etc) is "better" than the iPad, in that 99% of them include Flash. You and I and the average Slashdotter can go in circles as to whether or not Flash is actually a good thing for the web, but there's a world of difference between whether a technology is a good idea, and whether having it available to a user benefits that user. A web browsing device that doesn't support Flash is, right now, a second class web browsing device.
So the question really is, given that, why are they not selling as well as the iPad?
Well, quite honestly, it's the marketing. It's an impressive device rather than a (right now) utilitarian one, and while Apple happens to have done a lot of good innovative work in the last decade and a half, they also have done an astonishing amount of marketing based upon brand image.
Remember that what restored Apple to profitability wasn't Mac OS X, or the iPod's scrollwheel UI, or Firewire. It was the rather weird decision to replace the case of their Beige G3 all-in-one with a retro-shaped translucent colored plastic, and to name the resultant product the iMac.
Like the iPad, the iMac - the first version - sold like hot cakes. It was bundled with Mac OS 8/9, which quite honestly was, at the time, an ugly, kludgy, unstable alien OS that only hard-core fans of the system had any love for. It required an Internet connection or external floppy drive (external hard disks weren't common at the time) to transfer files from it. It didn't even have an outstanding software base at the time, as most of the software world had given up on the Mac platform.
But it sold. It sold because Apple marketed the hell out of it, and concentrated on it as a device that looked nice rather than had some kind of specific functionality that you had to have.
Now, Apple's ads for the iPad do spend a lot of time concentrating on functionality, but it's notable that - step away from the RDF for a second - and virtually nothing it's advertised as doing is something it's particularly good at, at least compared to a comparatively priced laptop or a much, much, much, cheaper e-reader. Why do the ads look impressive? Because they concentrate on the look of the functionality rather than the functionality. Nothing you see is something that works better on an iPad, but virtually everything you see looks really slick and aesthetically amazing.
Beating Apple is going to be hard for the moment. The major decider will be whether tablets take off in general. Once they become things everyone's accustomed to, I think the importance of functionality will become more of an issue. Until then, if it's going to be a beauty contest, and right now it is, you can't expect the supermodel to lose against the greasy engineer.
Well, the Nook Color isn't really an e-reader, it's a tablet that's designed by BN to cater for the "It needs to be color" and "Isn't an iPad also a good way to read books rather than a one-trick-pony e-reader" complaints by people who really haven't used an e-reader. I think it's telling that Amazon has, thus far, seen no reason to release a "Kindle Color", and that BN has actually both kept the original e-Ink Nook on sale, and has released a new e-Ink reader, while not really developing the Nook Color further.
I appreciate the point about specialization, but that's kind of the point. At this point non-e-readers provide a sub-optimal reading experience. The types of screen needed for an Android or iOS UI - specifically those with high refresh rates - are simply not good for large amounts of text.
Which brings forth an additional irony - if tablets are supposed to be a way to put the web into a nice little panel you can sit with without the overheads of a giant laptop computer, then they're still not optimal even for that yet! The way I see tablets at this stage is that they're devices that aren't really good at anything. They're not good web browsing devices, they're not good e-readers, and they're absurdly large as communication devices or music players. Are they "good enough"? I'm sure some people feel that way, but I don't think they are for the majority yet even if they/appear/ to be before they're actually used.
So where do we go from here? I guess we go back to your point about specialization - we need a massive leap in terms of display technology in particular. Once that happens, once it happens, as in, not yet, I think we'll start to see the form factor become practical. I guess we're looking for color, 24fps+, eInk. Can that happen? Well, we've come a long way from supertwist LCD displays in the eighties, which had similar problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's turn down the heat a notch. I work in a publishing company maintaining a collection of newsletter style websites, my colleagues use the term SEO rather a lot, we've employed at least one SEO consultant. This is my experience of what SEO is:
My company publishes free content that it also syndicates, for free. Anyone who wants to can republish our content, as long as they link back to us. This isn't particularly unusual, especially as my employer sells premium products on the back of the free stuff (one in every few articles is, in fact, an ad, ultimately.)
What it found were a number of issues with this, not the least of which is that many times if you searched for our content on Google, one of the syndicated copies would be first on the list, and our sites would be way further down in the list.
A quick look at Google Webmasters also showed that we were getting a lot of hits for stuff that had nothing to do with us, while not getting hits for things that we did have.
What went wrong and what did we do to fix it? Well, once you have a site that's gotten over a particular size and which has rather a lot of complexity (and we have multiple such sites), inevitably the site starts to gather rather a lot of crud. SEO, in this context, means taking a step back and figuring out where the problems are in the site. Sometimes they're obvious - bad uses of tags, a lack of meta data - and sometimes they're not - a lack of semantic HTML is a common problem and extremely easy to do by accident.
And that's what we've been doing. No-one's ever recommended link farms to us (and we'd fire any consultant who does - link farms are a great way to get permanently banned from Google.)
When you hire an SEO consultant, you might hire a kooky black-hat person (and when I was building sites for clients, I had clients who'd come to me saying they'd been in touch with a "consultant" who promised to make their site #1 in 24 hours...) but that doesn't mean all SEO consultants are going to be like that, not least because that's a great way for an SEO to lose business in the long run.
Going through your site and ensuring that it uses semantic mark-up, that it has proper meta data, etc, is something that ultimately improves visibility. And it's very easy to not do by accident. It's also very easy to only half do if you think you know what you're doing but actually your skills lie in data manipulation, or cosmetic web design, or converting video formats, or whatever.
As I said, this is my experience. And as I said, yes, I've had people come to me (outside of my employer) asking whether they should work with rather dubious SEOs. But in normal parlance, SEO is a fairly reasonable activity, and actually, all the things that legitimate SEOs recommend are stuff that helps the web rather than damages it.
Not exactly. Short term, yes, that's absolutely true. Long term it can have an affect in that the major parties need to take votes from the smaller parties to win.
I think Nader's run in 2000 was spectacularly badly timed. Clinton may have been center right, but there was no evidence that Gore was in any practical way - and all available evidence showed Bush was extreme right, as his subsequent administration showed. I think a Nader run in 2012 though would be absolutely right (if it wasn't for the fact he discredited himself by running in 2000.) We're facing an extreme right Democrat who ran as a liberal, and a Republican who will not be any better - but probably isn't going to be any worse either.
Now, think about the numbers the way the pundits and wonks do. Let's pretend that Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination, and Paul Krugman runs as the spoiler candidate.
What's happened? Well, in both cases the spoiler didn't really change the outcome, although he'll be blamed for it anyway.
Regardless though, the Democrats are going to see an issue here: Had they courted Krugman's voters, they could have gotten up to 20,400,000 votes in total, easily defeating Romney. This is regardless of whether they think they would have beaten Romney if Krugman hadn't stood.
And what's the real effect Krugman had on the presidential race? Well, he's gotten a whole bunch of people to vote who otherwise wouldn't have done, around 390,000 extra people voted in this election. These are people who are demonstrating a willingness to turn up to the polls to vote if someone who represents them is willing to stand. A sane policy wonk has to consider the possibility that people they don't represent aren't going to vote for them anyway, but will stay at home in disgust.
That's why you shouldn't write off third party candidates. It's not that there's no chance Paul Krugman (or whoever you want) will become President, it's that they provide an opportunity to tell the major parties "You guys disgust me, if you actually want to me to vote for you, start representing my interests." Something that really cannot be done in any other way.
And lest you think Nader had no effect in 2000, ask yourself why Obama ran as a liberal in 2008. Because he did. I remember.
Southern Democrats perhaps.
The perception of them as right wing kooks is due to the fact that that's how the Tea Party presents itself - "second amendment solutions" and cheering on death to name but two high profile examples; and because it's kooky (not to mention cruel) to be cutting safety nets and throwing people out of work during a recession, something the TP is advocating.
I personally can't remember the last time I heard from Nancy Pelosi or the CBC, and the only time I've seen Harry Reid on TV has been talking about a legislative event. I don't doubt all three have mentioned the Tea Party, but it's not from them that people are forming their opinions.
The Tea Party are a bunch of far right whackjobs. They may seem "moderate" to someone who agrees with them, but on any rational level they're advocating the worst possible policies at the worst possible time, and for apparently the worst possible reasons.
For the love of @&$!: being in favor of "states rights" does not make you a civil libertarian. (Hell, in my book, it doesn't make you a libertarian either, but for some reason rather a lot of states rights people call themselves that, so I'm not going to get into that argument.)
Ron Paul is perfectly happy for your right of free association to be taken away, for you to be required to support a particular religion, and for fundamental decisions about your body to be taken away from you, as long as it's your state doing it, not the Federal Government.
Dude, I carry all my terrorism plans on my old dumbphone, what good is that advice?!
Well, that explains the state of the economy.
I'm fairly sure steam can be hotter than 100C, just as ice can be colder than 0C, and water can be any temperature between 0C and 100C. All figures assume 1000 millibars of pressure, obviously - allow that to change and, well, you can be even more flexible.
Nothing I'm writing here should be read as implying I think there's anything in the story, I'm just saying, steam, well, it's H2O in gas form, and gaseous H2O can get pretty hot.
Just as someone can copy Android and make a closed version (including Google), the same is true of OpenBSD. I *dare* you to tell Theo that he's producing a non-free operating system!
I consider an operating system whose users are granted certain rights to be free, regardless of whether someone can make their own proprietary version. Should the latter happen, it's the proprietary fork that's non-free, not the original version.
I'm pretty sure webOS doesn't run a GNU userland either. Now, Maemo does (and I assume Meego does too) - albeit with that awful Busybox crap, but even then, would you want to run Maemo apps under Android or vice versa? Without making one OS a clone of the other (which would defeat the purpose of having two operating systems in the first place) it'd get fairly nasty very quickly.
I'd also take issue with your description of Android as having a non-FOSS userspace. With the exception of Honeycomb (which is a one off, and not something Google actually wants adopted long term), and optional libraries to access Google's own services (hardly part of the user space) every part of Android is open source, generally licensed either under the GPL or Apache licence. If you don't believe me, download it, and see for yourself.
That really depends on what version of Android it was and whether it contains enough generic Android to have a post-Honeycomb system built upon it.
The Google Android developers forum thread on the subject does contain comments implying that the Android version shipped may be a version used at the factory to test the hardware. This would imply a heavily customized version, and wouldn't imply anything else (ie it could be pre-Froyo, and could be barely usable.)
I would want to know more about what was shipped before making any assumptions about how useful the system might be, to me or reverse engineers, or indeed, whether it's a prank.
I don't think it's even that far.
Amazon isn't producing a tablet, not in the iPad sense anyway (and definitely not in the Windows 8 sense.) This is a web-enabled media player. The range of media has expanded a little over what we're used to, but first and foremost it's a low cost device that does to videos, music, and games what the Kindle does to books.
In this universe, the iPad is essentially an irrelevance. The functionality overlaps with the iPad, sure, but the iPad is intended to more of a personal hub, not just for playing the above, but also as a communications center and a little bit of a creativity thing. I don't happen to think the iPad is a particularly good implementation of that (but what do I know? The sodding thing has sales through the roof...) but it's not exactly the same thing.
The whole "It's an iPad killer" thing is from a media that's hell bent on pushing that story despite the fact that Amazon has just changed their line up to be almost identical to their existing competitor, Barnes and Noble, and that the specs, price, and capabilities, of Amazon's device isn't remotely close to the iPad. I think we're going to have to wait for Windows 8, and the tablet iMac, before we see the real iPad killers. This isn't it, any more than a refrigerator or a car stereo is an iPad killer.
That's my view anyway, but what do I know. The only time I've predicted a runaway success in the consumer electronics sphere in the last decade was the Wii.
No, the release schedules are just the icing on the cake. Firefox is pissing off core supporters by being crap. A browser that hogs 70% of your memory *by design* (because, y'know, that seems right for a rich-text viewer, right? And who needs to run productivity applications at the same time as a browser anyway?!) and ends up actually using more due to massive memory leaks, is close to unusable.
Right now I can't actually run Yahoo Mail. I have 4G on this baby, and 4G on the Windows box upstairs, and I can't run Yahoo Mail under Firefox unless I close it as soon as I've finished with it. Because if I run it, and don't close the tab, my PCs will be reduced to crawling, memory swapping, crapola within two hours.
Mozilla: listen. You know all those changes you made since 3.6? Fuck 'em. Seriously. You want to fix this, it's quite simple. Roll Firefox back to 3.6, and look into a more sane way of introducing the changes you've made since. Yes, I know it means Firefox will no longer implement one or two standards that haven't taken off yet, but it means your browser will actually become relevant again.
Please, for the love of God, swallow your pride and do it.
Do it now.
My take: Javascript's a language, not an API. The "limitations" people keep droning on about in regard to Javascript are actually limitations of the API provided by standard browsers. Simply allowing developers to enter things like <script type="text/actionscript"> are not going to help because ActionScript, Python, Perl, DOS Batch, and VBScript are all going to be limited by the API the browser gives them, and there's no reason to suppose it's going to be better by virtue of being supported by a different language.
The issue right now is the W3C, who quite honestly seem to never quite know what they're doing. I hate to say it, but if Netscape had survived, was still the standard browser, and was continuing the "Add one feature every minor release" policy, then while there'd be a hell of a lot of kludges in Netscape 57, we'd probably have a more capable platform overall. I'm not sure we'd need Flash.
Not if we don't get our shit together and put together an operating system that's as at home on a tablet as it is on a desktop.
Apple doesn't have an edge because it doesn't have a non-toy tablet yet. [I hope I'm not offending anyone using the term "toy", please read this in full before reacting!] That's the problem. I think Apple will have a non-toy tablet in the medium term, I know that's where they want to take Mac OS X, and I suspect the iMac will become a tablet in the medium term.
But it's very important to understand that the only "tablets" out there right now that aren't toys are running Windows, and they generally suck. What makes Windows 8 interesting is that it takes the lessoned learned from the iPad/etc, and creates something that's both usable and useful.
Yes, in many ways it's like 1983. In 1983 Apple was leading the market with the Apple II. The Apple II was a home computer. It had a limited role in the "serious" space that IBM/Microsoft was making headway in, and had some interesting applications like Visicalc that could be considered proofs of concept - much as the iPad version of iWork is. But the Apple II wasn't open enough (in the sense only Apple could make them), it wasn't powerful enough (no more than 64k of RAM without paging, with an operating system that barely qualified as one), it wasn't available in a configuration useful for the business desktop.
So while Apple lead the home computer market at that point, it was never going to win the personal computer market. Apple is "leading" the tablet market right now, but with a device that's more to look at than use. Nobody in their right mind will buy an iPad, or anything like it, to use as their primary computer. I'm not saying "toy" to be insulting, I'm using the term to explain the major difference between what's produced now, and what's coming down the pipe, not just from Dell/HP/other companies that work with Microsoft, but also from Apple themselves. The devices called "tablets" today, that aren't the awful stylus-Windows thingies, aren't something that'll ever displace the PC. The stuff Windows 8 is designed for really will.
When will Apple produce the tablet iMac? I don't know. I'm guessing it'll be after Windows 8. And even if came out earlier, Windows has the huge advantage of being the primary OS on "serious" computers right now. Just as Mac OS X hasn't challenged the dominance of Windows XP/Vista/7, and the original Mac didn't challenge the dominance of the MS DOS PC, I just don't see Apple overthrowing Windows in the near future. The change to a different form factor is not going to be enough to do that.
Am I wrong? Well, here's a few ways in which I might be:
That's what I think anyway.
You're right on the "going out of style" thing, it didn't look right when I wrote it.
Microsoft has had many successes over the last few years. They finally did beat GEM. They did kill Netscape for all intents and purposes. They haven't taken over the server market, but they do have a seriously large proportion of the market.
In all of these cases, their dominance was done partially by producing a "good enough" product (although personally I always thought Windows was considerably better than GEM, and many argue that IE4 was better than Netscape), and partially by making use of their existing dominance on the desktop.
And they really are doing this in spades this time. The next "desktop" operating system is also a tablet operating system. Indeed, the major complaint I have with the system is that it doesn't work that well as a desktop system. Using it with a mouse is fairly horrible, although there's plenty of time for Microsoft to fix that.
I think MS will dominate the tablet market because:
Microsoft will not ultimately be the only company doing this, given Apple has already indicated they intend to move Mac OS X in that direction. But the real concern to me is that the platforms I use and love don't seem to "get it". I'm hoping the Windows 8 preview will be a wake-up call. Perhaps Google and Canonical need to talk.
I really wouldn't write off Windows Phone quite yet. I don't think it's Nokia that's going to save the platform, I think it's their desktop platform that's likely to do so. Spent yesterday playing with Windows 8 (the desktop/tablet) operating system, and... well, if they can fix it so the OS isn't another Vista, then I'm trying to figure out where any rival to Microsoft fits.
Basically, with Windows 8 you'll see touch-based desktops, tablets that aren't toys (ie you'll be able to do real work on them, and even make them your primary machines), and that leaves... well, if your phone OS acts just like your PC OS, but not in a bad way, then why wouldn't you see that as desirable?
I've never wanted an iPad, or even a Honeycomb tablet, but I can see myself wanting a post-W8 tablet - a real computer, running a real operating system, with a touchscreen UI for when I'm on the road, and the ability to hook up to a large screen and keyboard for when I'm not. My problem right now is that the people I want to produce the operating system for that device - Canonical/Google - are going in totally the wrong direction, Google focusing on stripped down mobile operating systems, and Ubuntu still clinging to the mouse like it's going out of style.
The market is different right now to 1992. And it's worth remembering that in 1989, OS/2 was the "future" (even though it wasn't that popular), and Windows was a flop that was being roundly beaten by GEM, as well as a large group of non-PC systems.
Right now the market is completely immature. There's no "serious" (ie non-toy) tablet with a proper touchscreen UI available, for instance. You cannot, seriously, base predictions about who's going to be successful two years from now on market share today. And I'd say that Microsoft has a very, very, very good chance of owning this, unless its rivals get their acts in gear.
I suspect the problem with it is the latency. It's still only 20% faster than regular eInk, according to that site. For an eReader, that's fine. For a tablet, that pretty much is built around a UI designed to show fluid movement in response to user actions, it's not really going to work.
e-Ink's not going anywhere. BN has had a tablet out for a while, and they're still releasing new e-Ink models. So I wouldn't worry about it.
And in the longer term it'll be interesting to see what comes of the OLPC's screen, which was a dual mode back-lit + color/ambient light + monochrome thing. Personally, I think that's the way to go if this whole "Tablets and eReaders are the same thing yo" mindset really becomes standard, but never having seen the OLPC I don't know how well it worked in practice.
I'm writing this on a laptop, which unlikely a Kindle or a tablet, is useful for reading the web, watching video, and writing content. That doesn't mean I'd say the three are comparable devices, and while a small minority might see the three as competitors, I don't think it's a universal sentiment.
Yes, in many cases people feel the need to make choices between two largely unrelated devices. Someone might choose a PC over a games console, or vice versa. Someone might choose a TV over a monitor or vice versa. Nonetheless, for the majority of users of either device, they're not in the same category. As yourself this:
Are Kindles selling (and they are, extremely well) because:
It isn't (1) or (2) because in both cases, they utterly suck in both categories. (3) can't be the case either - they only dropped below $200 in the last year, and even at that price they're not exactly impulse buy. It's all about (4). You may not care, but Kindles are selling because enough people do.
I don't think it's impossible to produce an Android tablet that could replace the Kindle, but it'd need to address that need. I'd really be interested to see how well the OLPC's screen is, as that managed to combine luminescent color and ambient, high resolution, very low power, monochrome in one screen. That might be enough to produce a good e-reader, that's also a good tablet. But we'll see!
Depends on whether 3G/Wifi is on or not. It usually lasts about two weeks with moderate use if wireless is on. If wireless is off, well, in my experience the battery life is measured in months.
The HP Touchpad may well be selling just because it's something selling at $100 that's perceived to be worth $400. Or it might be selling because people think it'll sell for $250 on eBay. Or many other reasons. Add to that the fact that non-geeks don't seem to be talking about is as geeks are (in my neck of the woods at least), and you can't really rush to judgment based upon the Touchpad alone. That's why the jury is out.
It's a shame HP didn't hide the "fire sale" part of it, and, say, cut the price in half (eg to $200) for a couple of weeks before announcing its discontinuation. That would have given us a little more information on whether the problem is price or something else.
I'm not sure why you thought you put a jab at open source in there BTW. I was describing why I wouldn't get one, I never suggested that was a universal sentiment. That said, I'll make two important points here:
First, as general advice, anyone who tries a completely new platform that carries a severe risk of being completely discontinued without ensuring that a mechanism for third party support exists - ie that the code is open, is making a grave mistake. Take this as someone whose first computers were a Dragon 32, a Sinclair QL, and a Commodore Amiga.
Second, right now one thing that's holding tablets back is the fact that the "open source" operating systems available for that kind of form factor (essentially, Android 1.x and 2.x) aren't optimized for the system. That's why there's a lot of crap from ViewSonic, Archos, et al. Look at the hardware they sell, and it's not bad at all (at least, the hardware in the $200+ range), but the tablets are hampered by ugly half-assed UIs designed to replace the phone UIs on the versions of Android they're using. That's why Icecream Sandwich is so important, it'll be the first completely open tablet operating system that virtually any manufacturer can pick up and install.
Whether consumers care isn't the issue here, even though they should What matters here is getting a quality, affordable, usable tablet out there, and in this environment, I think that's going to be very difficult without an free and open operating system with a quality UI.
Damn straight. It always amazes me when people insist on putting the two in the same category. I don't think it would be impossible to produce a tablet that's a good e-Reader, but it'd need to pull off the same trick that, say, the One Laptop Per Child does, and have a dual mode screen. I don't know if the OLPC's screen is too low in quality, or if there are patent or other reasons why nobody's done it yet, but the bottom line is that there's no tablet out there with a non-eyestrain-inducing screen.
My other concern about the article is that it suggests low price is the only trick to getting tablets "out there". I think the jury's out on that right now, but fundamentally the device needs to usable and functional. Is Amazon the right company to do that? I don't think so, based on the Kindle, which is the major piece of hardware they have out right now. The Kindle is controlled using a dreadful keyboard, and using side buttons that are easily pressed by accident. The fonts are also utterly abysmal. The Kindle doesn't win any awards for usability, in my book. I suspect the new Nook is a better device, but as the damned thing is always running in a locked demo mode in stores I've been unable to really evaluate the thing.
I'm waiting this one out. My only major incentive to get a tablet right now is that as a software developer I absolutely need to be familiar with the environment. But the tablets available right now are not that. I really want to see the following:
Will Amazon produce that? I'm not seeing any evidence they will. I would imagine we're talking about a device more in line with the Nook Color. Moderate hardware (but not full tablet level), a customized semi-proprietary operating system, and a customized user interface by people who haven't proven to be that good at user interfaces, probably in the $200-300 range. It'll be aimed at those people who have avoided the Kindle because they think tablets are "better". But I might be surprised.
I'm not sure either are that hard, and I think people are over-thinking the whole thing.
Tablets are "selling" right now because... well, because they seem like they might be a nice idea, but in practice they don't really do a lot, and they're not that practical. Most people who get them don't really use them that often. And realistically, when they do, it's to browse the web.
Given that, virtually every tablet selling for above $250 or so (which, generally, are tablets that include capacitive touchscreen technology, decent sized screens, etc) is "better" than the iPad, in that 99% of them include Flash. You and I and the average Slashdotter can go in circles as to whether or not Flash is actually a good thing for the web, but there's a world of difference between whether a technology is a good idea, and whether having it available to a user benefits that user. A web browsing device that doesn't support Flash is, right now, a second class web browsing device.
So the question really is, given that, why are they not selling as well as the iPad?
Well, quite honestly, it's the marketing. It's an impressive device rather than a (right now) utilitarian one, and while Apple happens to have done a lot of good innovative work in the last decade and a half, they also have done an astonishing amount of marketing based upon brand image.
Remember that what restored Apple to profitability wasn't Mac OS X, or the iPod's scrollwheel UI, or Firewire. It was the rather weird decision to replace the case of their Beige G3 all-in-one with a retro-shaped translucent colored plastic, and to name the resultant product the iMac.
Like the iPad, the iMac - the first version - sold like hot cakes. It was bundled with Mac OS 8/9, which quite honestly was, at the time, an ugly, kludgy, unstable alien OS that only hard-core fans of the system had any love for. It required an Internet connection or external floppy drive (external hard disks weren't common at the time) to transfer files from it. It didn't even have an outstanding software base at the time, as most of the software world had given up on the Mac platform.
But it sold. It sold because Apple marketed the hell out of it, and concentrated on it as a device that looked nice rather than had some kind of specific functionality that you had to have.
Now, Apple's ads for the iPad do spend a lot of time concentrating on functionality, but it's notable that - step away from the RDF for a second - and virtually nothing it's advertised as doing is something it's particularly good at, at least compared to a comparatively priced laptop or a much, much, much, cheaper e-reader. Why do the ads look impressive? Because they concentrate on the look of the functionality rather than the functionality. Nothing you see is something that works better on an iPad, but virtually everything you see looks really slick and aesthetically amazing.
Beating Apple is going to be hard for the moment. The major decider will be whether tablets take off in general. Once they become things everyone's accustomed to, I think the importance of functionality will become more of an issue. Until then, if it's going to be a beauty contest, and right now it is, you can't expect the supermodel to lose against the greasy engineer.
Well, the Nook Color isn't really an e-reader, it's a tablet that's designed by BN to cater for the "It needs to be color" and "Isn't an iPad also a good way to read books rather than a one-trick-pony e-reader" complaints by people who really haven't used an e-reader. I think it's telling that Amazon has, thus far, seen no reason to release a "Kindle Color", and that BN has actually both kept the original e-Ink Nook on sale, and has released a new e-Ink reader, while not really developing the Nook Color further.
I appreciate the point about specialization, but that's kind of the point. At this point non-e-readers provide a sub-optimal reading experience. The types of screen needed for an Android or iOS UI - specifically those with high refresh rates - are simply not good for large amounts of text.
Which brings forth an additional irony - if tablets are supposed to be a way to put the web into a nice little panel you can sit with without the overheads of a giant laptop computer, then they're still not optimal even for that yet! The way I see tablets at this stage is that they're devices that aren't really good at anything. They're not good web browsing devices, they're not good e-readers, and they're absurdly large as communication devices or music players. Are they "good enough"? I'm sure some people feel that way, but I don't think they are for the majority yet even if they /appear/ to be before they're actually used.
So where do we go from here? I guess we go back to your point about specialization - we need a massive leap in terms of display technology in particular. Once that happens, once it happens, as in, not yet, I think we'll start to see the form factor become practical. I guess we're looking for color, 24fps+, eInk. Can that happen? Well, we've come a long way from supertwist LCD displays in the eighties, which had similar problems.