How many people back then actually thought the Mac (or the GUI) would change computing? Well, it certainly did, but for quite a while very many people (among them most of the computer geeks) thought it was an inferior, silly way to deal with computers.
I think in the long run maybe it won't be Siri as such that will be revolutionary, but natural language recognition of course will change things. Not by controlling a computer as such (this would be as saying that a GUI would revolutionize entering CLI commands by clicking keys on an on-screen keyboard) but by actually interacting with data and data processing resources and networks out there without consciously interacting with a computer at all. The computer will be realized fully only when you aren't aware at all that you're actually using a computer.
You don't need to praise Apple for what they're doing. I'm just happy that ANYONE has the balls to introduce such technology, even in its humble beginnings, to the masses.
BTW, Siri also kicks in if you just hold the iPhone to your ear without being in a call (via the proximity sensor), which makes using it not as awkward as many seem to think.
Yesterday it was iTunes 10.5, the first 4Ss are delivered and Siri hits the servers back home, now iOS 5 is delivered to millions of iPhones, iPod touches and iPads, OS X 10.7.2 (with iCloud support) is going out right now (all 800 MB of it), an iPhoto update for iCloud, iCloud itself is going online which means the first real traffic for their brandnew datacenters...
If you can joke and sneer about that right now you have never been part of a big critical software rollout. If they can pull through this they certainly did more right than wrong. Very different than RIM who seem to be melting away right now.
I just don't get it. Why targetting only fringe minorities with these phones?... while leaving Apple to scoop up the other 80% (or more) of customers. How idiotic
Android smartphones are out-selling iPhones by 2:1. Perhaps they know something about the market that you don't.
Again, as I said: Normal people buy either cheap Android phones or iPhones.
Come on, I'm not a Fanboi. I'm just wondering why Google is doing what it is doing and why there is no Android-equivalent to the iPhone.
I got a blackberry playbook a couple weeks back (a present, or I wouldn't have it). I have to say, I'm underwhelmed with the 3rd party applications. It could just be the playbook and maybe an Android tablet would have programs that are more mature, but I doubt it. The stuff I see on my playbook feels like throw backs to the old applications you could get for PDAs (remember those?) Yes, there's a way to do whatever you want to do on it, but you've got to 'manage expectations'...
You mean there're no such apps like GhostGuitar for the PlayBook? Who would have thought that.
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but honestly I think that these huge screens are totally idiotic if you really want to go mainstream with a phone. See, half of your potential customers are women (which tend to have smaller hands) and not too few will be teenagers.
Is the Nexus line really branded as a 'mainstream' product? I figured it's targeted at the gadget-crazy that would find the extra real estate useful. That seems to be Android's niche anyway -- more male, more techie, more left-brained.
Yeah, what I was saying. What I'm wondering is: why? Leaving the mainstream to Apple and fighting over the scraps (sorry) does not sound like a strategy for success to me. Don't get me wrong, it's great to have phones for male techie left-brained people who seem to actually want a tablet computer that just about fits into their pockets. But somehow more and more every fucking decent Android phone seems to be such a phone, leaving the other 80% of the population for Apple to scoop up.
(I'm not a girl and I *am* a techie, but I'm also a typical city-dweller with no car. I use busses and trams and subways and trains every day. I'm lugging around bags or pushing a bike very often. A phone I can't use one-handed safely is just totally out for me. And if I look around this seems to be rather the rule than an exception.)
No doubt. But still: Is NOT targeting the majority with your latest and greatest phone a wise move? I mean, this thing is meant to be THE Android Smartphone by Google(TM). Why not targeting it smack at the middle of the mainstream right up against the iPhone? How can you be successful if about all the Android phones that are better than "halfway usable" are fighting over the big-handed technophile geeks, leaving the majority of potential customers to either buy second rate cheap Android phones or an iPhone? How silly is that?
As The Onion headlined a few days ago: "Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies". How apt.
Yeah, maybe. But this wasn't my point. I agree that 3.5" may be too small or too large for certain people and then it's good to have a choice. Nothing to argue here. I'm not saying that there should be only one phone or one screen size for everyone. Choice is good. Nothing wrong with that.
But I think that Apple just has totally nailed it for the majority of the population with that screen size. Not for everyone, but for most. What I'm wondering then is why Google/Samsung are putting up that phone with a screen that does not target the majority. Why do they do this? I just don't get it. Why targetting only fringe minorities with these phones? Do they not want to sell that phone to as many people as possible? Why? It's almost as if they had already accepted that they have to pick up the crumbs that the iPhone leaves for them. Hard to imagine, really. Or they really just don't know what they're doing. Or what? As I said, I don't get it. It's almost as if all modern Android phones with halfway decent hardware are fighting over the same minority of big-handed male geek technophiles with big pockets while leaving Apple to scoop up the other 80% (or more) of customers. How idiotic.
No, the point is it doesn't show the user what to do to return to where he came from before. Having another screen half turn, half slide in from two directions at once gives you no fucking clue how to go back. You're just staring confused and dazzled at what's going on on the screen. A good UI should help the user to get some spatial orientation by relating to physical models.
Just with the difference that this time the hardware is rather like "do more with more". The CPU/GPU combination of the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4S is everything else than slow.
One company can not compete with 10+ in terms of hardware innovation. Apple can release a phone maybe once a year, there's a new Android super-phone out every 3 months, and lesser new Android phones even more often.
Which just leads to people waiting for the next superphone, then waiting for its price to drop a third within two months and then still not buying it, because until then the next superphones got pre-announced. Or finally get one and then see it drop and drop in price and newer and newer models being annonced while their own phone doesn't get updated anymore and feels like four years old half a year later...
Only geeks can think model avalanches are what people want. Most people want, if they spend lots of money on such a thing or are locked into a contract for two years, some peace of mind and not the nagging feeling that what they got will be forgotten history after half a year that nobody cares for anymore. What Apple does is just sane model management that you need to do if you want people to part with their money. And if the iPhone 4S indeed has got the same CPU/GPU combination as the iPad2 it will blow the competition out of the water anyway, very much as the iPad (which is still at least as twice as fast as all other tablets even by naked benchmarks -- look at anandtech.com for details).
Even with 4.3" about three quarters of the population won't be able to reach all points across the screen with their thumb when using the phone one-handed without balancing it on three fingers. And not many people will like a phone that NEEDS both hands to use it.
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but honestly I think that these huge screens are totally idiotic if you really want to go mainstream with a phone. See, half of your potential customers are women (which tend to have smaller hands) and not too few will be teenagers.
And then have a line of three or four small buttons (on or off the screen) on the very bottom of the face and a screen that stretches 4.3 inches across to the top. Using this thing while walking and carrying something with the other hand is like eating soup with a fork.
And no, I'm not trolling here. These things are great for males with large hands or for geeks who usually sit down over anything resembling a computer anyway and would love it to have foot switches, too. But how can those companies just walk over the needs of major parts of the population and expect to be sucessful with this? I just don't get it. Or of course Google and Samsung are purposefully limiting their target group to a certain part of the population, because... yes, why would they do that? Any ideas?
At least some speculation in the media has been that some or all of BofA's system problems may be due to self-inflicted system load increase in the form of large number of online account inquiries and cancellations prompted by the debit card service fee.
Does the browser really try to scroll? On e-ink? Madness!
This is not a problem with web pages, it's a problem with this browser. It should paginate web pages and page instead of scroll through them. Problem solved.
It already IS "super cheap and awesome", really. SpaceX is the first private company to have flown a craft to orbit and return it again. And after Russia, the US and China as nations/states the fourth at all. OK, fifth if you count the subscale demonstrator ESA flew decades ago. And all of this on a budget that wouldn't be enough for NASA or ESA to even build a launchpad, not to speak of a launcher and a capsule (and two launchpads as SpaceX built).
I'm not saying that SpaceX is able to do miracles, but it already did some things that are fucking awesome and cheap, yes.
The DC-X failure happened because they were on a shoestring budget, couldn't afford neither redundancy in the pneumatic lines for leg deployment nor someone checking twice (someone forgot to connect a line before launch)...
What do you think would have happened to the Space Shuttle if they had treated the hardware the same way? *Everything* operated like DC-X would fail. There is no room for amateurs in spaceflight, period.
In videogames, developers have long depended on the hits for both profit and paying for the other titles. Each title is a calculated gamble, and if you lose, well, you just move on to the next one.
It's sad for the small developer who puts heart, soul, and savings into a single title, but they should be told that going in, they only have a 1 in 5 chance of just breaking even, let alone squeezing out a profit for all their trouble.
But this is not exactly a random gamble, you know. While you surely need some luck, someone putting his heart and soul and knowledge into an iOS app/game has a much better chance to get some decent earnings out of it than the average clueless programmer. There are lots and lots of apps and games that nobody buys because they very plainly aren't worth a penny. And the apps that sell really well usually deserve it.
As far as software titles go, iOS easily is the most level playing field in existence yet.
No Skype, Fring or anything (no mic, no camera). No Google apps, so no navigation, no email (without third-party apps) and calendaring. No mobile internet at all.
Surely not a bad media-tablet and surely cheap, but a tablet computer this is not.
Looks to me as if it would require some major tinkering to turn it into something fun and useful and you'll still have no 3G, no camera and no microphone.
is strapping yourself to (or sitting against) a good-sized nuke. With a remote in your hand to fire it. As soon as you do that you will be vaporized before anything happening even reaches your nerves, much less your brain. One moment you're there, the next you're just vapor as part of a rapidly expanding mushroom cloud.
the Amazon tablet will be more lucky. When I read 'A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle,' sounds exactly what HP needed to do.
The redacting that was done by The Guardian and others was just a reasonable thing to do, but it had one disadvantage: They published only selected and redacted cables and such you couldn't look for certain things by yourself. There's been more interesting stuff in the past centuries than The Guadian or Der Spiegel would recognize.
What's now possible is others sieving through these cables and I'm pretty sure that people will find interesting things. While it's not really a good thing for names of informants being published all this centralized knowledge and decisionmaking about what is good for the public to know is really getting on my nerves lately.
It's the fscking Explorer they have bolted it on. The same with Office: The ribbon is actually not a bad idea, but if the whole app is just a pile of functionality with no rhyme or reason to it, the ribbon just feels bad. The fact that the whole UI design is bland and confusing (especially since everything seems to be colored areas and text and pale symbols with no clear definition of what is content and what is tools) doesn't help of course.
Since XP Microsoft seems to be on a rampage to make every window look like a webpage where you have to hover over, click, double-click, right-click and drag everything to find out what happens.
Running is probably one of the worst forms of exercise for improving health, since it causes long term joint/leg problems, and tends to cause muscle wasting as your body consumes muscle to maintain glucose levels... but the exercise doesn't use muscles in a way that induces a hypertrophic response.
It seems that just walking a lot is the best. The problem is that it takes time and when you can't integrate this into your daily life (like walking instead of driving) spending an hour a day or so on walking around is a lot.
There's a study that shows that prostate cancer can be prevented or massively delayed by brisk walking three hours a week.
Anyway, I think our bodies are evolutionary adapted to a certain lifestyle and this certainly involves quite a bit of getting around and exercising. It's not that exercise extends life, *not* exercising shortens life.
Slashdot Mirror
How many people back then actually thought the Mac (or the GUI) would change computing? Well, it certainly did, but for quite a while very many people (among them most of the computer geeks) thought it was an inferior, silly way to deal with computers.
I think in the long run maybe it won't be Siri as such that will be revolutionary, but natural language recognition of course will change things. Not by controlling a computer as such (this would be as saying that a GUI would revolutionize entering CLI commands by clicking keys on an on-screen keyboard) but by actually interacting with data and data processing resources and networks out there without consciously interacting with a computer at all. The computer will be realized fully only when you aren't aware at all that you're actually using a computer.
You don't need to praise Apple for what they're doing. I'm just happy that ANYONE has the balls to introduce such technology, even in its humble beginnings, to the masses.
If you're interested in what Siri can understand and act on: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/05/iphone-4s-what-can-you-say-to-siri/
BTW, Siri also kicks in if you just hold the iPhone to your ear without being in a call (via the proximity sensor), which makes using it not as awkward as many seem to think.
Yesterday it was iTunes 10.5, the first 4Ss are delivered and Siri hits the servers back home, now iOS 5 is delivered to millions of iPhones, iPod touches and iPads, OS X 10.7.2 (with iCloud support) is going out right now (all 800 MB of it), an iPhoto update for iCloud, iCloud itself is going online which means the first real traffic for their brandnew datacenters...
If you can joke and sneer about that right now you have never been part of a big critical software rollout. If they can pull through this they certainly did more right than wrong. Very different than RIM who seem to be melting away right now.
Android smartphones are out-selling iPhones by 2:1. Perhaps they know something about the market that you don't.
Again, as I said: Normal people buy either cheap Android phones or iPhones.
Come on, I'm not a Fanboi. I'm just wondering why Google is doing what it is doing and why there is no Android-equivalent to the iPhone.
I got a blackberry playbook a couple weeks back (a present, or I wouldn't have it). I have to say, I'm underwhelmed with the 3rd party applications. It could just be the playbook and maybe an Android tablet would have programs that are more mature, but I doubt it. The stuff I see on my playbook feels like throw backs to the old applications you could get for PDAs (remember those?) Yes, there's a way to do whatever you want to do on it, but you've got to 'manage expectations'...
You mean there're no such apps like GhostGuitar for the PlayBook? Who would have thought that.
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but honestly I think that these huge screens are totally idiotic if you really want to go mainstream with a phone. See, half of your potential customers are women (which tend to have smaller hands) and not too few will be teenagers.
Is the Nexus line really branded as a 'mainstream' product? I figured it's targeted at the gadget-crazy that would find the extra real estate useful. That seems to be Android's niche anyway -- more male, more techie, more left-brained.
Yeah, what I was saying. What I'm wondering is: why? Leaving the mainstream to Apple and fighting over the scraps (sorry) does not sound like a strategy for success to me. Don't get me wrong, it's great to have phones for male techie left-brained people who seem to actually want a tablet computer that just about fits into their pockets. But somehow more and more every fucking decent Android phone seems to be such a phone, leaving the other 80% of the population for Apple to scoop up.
(I'm not a girl and I *am* a techie, but I'm also a typical city-dweller with no car. I use busses and trams and subways and trains every day. I'm lugging around bags or pushing a bike very often. A phone I can't use one-handed safely is just totally out for me. And if I look around this seems to be rather the rule than an exception.)
No doubt. But still: Is NOT targeting the majority with your latest and greatest phone a wise move? I mean, this thing is meant to be THE Android Smartphone by Google(TM). Why not targeting it smack at the middle of the mainstream right up against the iPhone? How can you be successful if about all the Android phones that are better than "halfway usable" are fighting over the big-handed technophile geeks, leaving the majority of potential customers to either buy second rate cheap Android phones or an iPhone? How silly is that?
As The Onion headlined a few days ago: "Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies". How apt.
Yeah, maybe. But this wasn't my point. I agree that 3.5" may be too small or too large for certain people and then it's good to have a choice. Nothing to argue here. I'm not saying that there should be only one phone or one screen size for everyone. Choice is good. Nothing wrong with that.
But I think that Apple just has totally nailed it for the majority of the population with that screen size. Not for everyone, but for most. What I'm wondering then is why Google/Samsung are putting up that phone with a screen that does not target the majority. Why do they do this? I just don't get it. Why targetting only fringe minorities with these phones? Do they not want to sell that phone to as many people as possible? Why? It's almost as if they had already accepted that they have to pick up the crumbs that the iPhone leaves for them. Hard to imagine, really. Or they really just don't know what they're doing. Or what? As I said, I don't get it. It's almost as if all modern Android phones with halfway decent hardware are fighting over the same minority of big-handed male geek technophiles with big pockets while leaving Apple to scoop up the other 80% (or more) of customers. How idiotic.
No, the point is it doesn't show the user what to do to return to where he came from before. Having another screen half turn, half slide in from two directions at once gives you no fucking clue how to go back. You're just staring confused and dazzled at what's going on on the screen. A good UI should help the user to get some spatial orientation by relating to physical models.
Just with the difference that this time the hardware is rather like "do more with more". The CPU/GPU combination of the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4S is everything else than slow.
One company can not compete with 10+ in terms of hardware innovation. Apple can release a phone maybe once a year, there's a new Android super-phone out every 3 months, and lesser new Android phones even more often.
Which just leads to people waiting for the next superphone, then waiting for its price to drop a third within two months and then still not buying it, because until then the next superphones got pre-announced. Or finally get one and then see it drop and drop in price and newer and newer models being annonced while their own phone doesn't get updated anymore and feels like four years old half a year later...
Only geeks can think model avalanches are what people want. Most people want, if they spend lots of money on such a thing or are locked into a contract for two years, some peace of mind and not the nagging feeling that what they got will be forgotten history after half a year that nobody cares for anymore. What Apple does is just sane model management that you need to do if you want people to part with their money. And if the iPhone 4S indeed has got the same CPU/GPU combination as the iPad2 it will blow the competition out of the water anyway, very much as the iPad (which is still at least as twice as fast as all other tablets even by naked benchmarks -- look at anandtech.com for details).
Even with 4.3" about three quarters of the population won't be able to reach all points across the screen with their thumb when using the phone one-handed without balancing it on three fingers. And not many people will like a phone that NEEDS both hands to use it.
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but honestly I think that these huge screens are totally idiotic if you really want to go mainstream with a phone. See, half of your potential customers are women (which tend to have smaller hands) and not too few will be teenagers.
And then have a line of three or four small buttons (on or off the screen) on the very bottom of the face and a screen that stretches 4.3 inches across to the top. Using this thing while walking and carrying something with the other hand is like eating soup with a fork.
And no, I'm not trolling here. These things are great for males with large hands or for geeks who usually sit down over anything resembling a computer anyway and would love it to have foot switches, too. But how can those companies just walk over the needs of major parts of the population and expect to be sucessful with this? I just don't get it. Or of course Google and Samsung are purposefully limiting their target group to a certain part of the population, because... yes, why would they do that? Any ideas?
At least some speculation in the media has been that some or all of BofA's system problems may be due to self-inflicted system load increase in the form of large number of online account inquiries and cancellations prompted by the debit card service fee.
Priceless.
Does the browser really try to scroll? On e-ink? Madness!
This is not a problem with web pages, it's a problem with this browser. It should paginate web pages and page instead of scroll through them. Problem solved.
The Shuttle landing gear is spring/gravity deployed with a pyro backup.
It already IS "super cheap and awesome", really. SpaceX is the first private company to have flown a craft to orbit and return it again. And after Russia, the US and China as nations/states the fourth at all. OK, fifth if you count the subscale demonstrator ESA flew decades ago. And all of this on a budget that wouldn't be enough for NASA or ESA to even build a launchpad, not to speak of a launcher and a capsule (and two launchpads as SpaceX built).
I'm not saying that SpaceX is able to do miracles, but it already did some things that are fucking awesome and cheap, yes.
The DC-X failure happened because they were on a shoestring budget, couldn't afford neither redundancy in the pneumatic lines for leg deployment nor someone checking twice (someone forgot to connect a line before launch)...
What do you think would have happened to the Space Shuttle if they had treated the hardware the same way? *Everything* operated like DC-X would fail. There is no room for amateurs in spaceflight, period.
If things just were that easy...
In videogames, developers have long depended on the hits for both profit and paying for the other titles. Each title is a calculated gamble, and if you lose, well, you just move on to the next one.
It's sad for the small developer who puts heart, soul, and savings into a single title, but they should be told that going in, they only have a 1 in 5 chance of just breaking even, let alone squeezing out a profit for all their trouble.
But this is not exactly a random gamble, you know. While you surely need some luck, someone putting his heart and soul and knowledge into an iOS app/game has a much better chance to get some decent earnings out of it than the average clueless programmer. There are lots and lots of apps and games that nobody buys because they very plainly aren't worth a penny. And the apps that sell really well usually deserve it.
As far as software titles go, iOS easily is the most level playing field in existence yet.
It's not the lacking camera, it's the lacking camera and microphone that bothers me. Especially the microphone.
No Skype, Fring or anything (no mic, no camera). No Google apps, so no navigation, no email (without third-party apps) and calendaring. No mobile internet at all.
Surely not a bad media-tablet and surely cheap, but a tablet computer this is not.
Looks to me as if it would require some major tinkering to turn it into something fun and useful and you'll still have no 3G, no camera and no microphone.
is strapping yourself to (or sitting against) a good-sized nuke. With a remote in your hand to fire it. As soon as you do that you will be vaporized before anything happening even reaches your nerves, much less your brain. One moment you're there, the next you're just vapor as part of a rapidly expanding mushroom cloud.
A bit messy in a way, though.
the Amazon tablet will be more lucky. When I read 'A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle,' sounds exactly what HP needed to do.
The redacting that was done by The Guardian and others was just a reasonable thing to do, but it had one disadvantage: They published only selected and redacted cables and such you couldn't look for certain things by yourself. There's been more interesting stuff in the past centuries than The Guadian or Der Spiegel would recognize.
What's now possible is others sieving through these cables and I'm pretty sure that people will find interesting things. While it's not really a good thing for names of informants being published all this centralized knowledge and decisionmaking about what is good for the public to know is really getting on my nerves lately.
It's the fscking Explorer they have bolted it on. The same with Office: The ribbon is actually not a bad idea, but if the whole app is just a pile of functionality with no rhyme or reason to it, the ribbon just feels bad. The fact that the whole UI design is bland and confusing (especially since everything seems to be colored areas and text and pale symbols with no clear definition of what is content and what is tools) doesn't help of course.
Since XP Microsoft seems to be on a rampage to make every window look like a webpage where you have to hover over, click, double-click, right-click and drag everything to find out what happens.
Running is probably one of the worst forms of exercise for improving health, since it causes long term joint/leg problems, and tends to cause muscle wasting as your body consumes muscle to maintain glucose levels... but the exercise doesn't use muscles in a way that induces a hypertrophic response.
It seems that just walking a lot is the best. The problem is that it takes time and when you can't integrate this into your daily life (like walking instead of driving) spending an hour a day or so on walking around is a lot.
There's a study that shows that prostate cancer can be prevented or massively delayed by brisk walking three hours a week.
Anyway, I think our bodies are evolutionary adapted to a certain lifestyle and this certainly involves quite a bit of getting around and exercising. It's not that exercise extends life, *not* exercising shortens life.