I have no doubt that you will be able to buy several sub-$100 tablets later this year, running Android. They will be mostly crap (slow hardware, small batteries, resistive touchscreens), but they will be there. The markets in Asia and especially China are huge.
It also finally allows to make a device with no moving parts at all, which is much easier to seal and less prone to break. I have no doubt that a tablet is much better suited to what the OLPC project wants to do.
Apple is the one making the copies not the developer. So apple would need to give out the source.
Hmm. If someone sells binaries of GPL code via ebay, ebay has to supply the source and if the developer does it instead, ebay does not comply with the GPL?
No, because Apple is the problem. If Wal-Mart didn't let the router company include a source CD with the router, you'd go after Wal-Mart along with the router company. The developers of this app I have little doubt want to comply with the GPL but Apple won't let them, a bit like Wal-Mart prohibiting the inclusion of source code.
I don't get this. According to the GPL you can give away or sell a binary as you like as long as you give the buyer also access to the source code. So if the developer just points to the source at some website all would be fine, I think. Or what is wrong with this?
Well, for me the difference is that a fucking smartphone is something I do not want to invest even minutes in to tinker with.
And Apple's control isn't required to achieve that. You can use an Android phone as if it were an iPhone and have a very similar experience. It's true that the UI isn't quite as polished, but that's orthogonal to being open.
Android is much more open, yes. But then you (or at least the majority of users) will have Google inhaling all of your data day and night. Google will see what you search for and what you mail to whom and which maps you look at and what your calendar contains...
If you're using Google's services, they see that regardless of what OS you're running. And there's no requirement to use their services with Android. Granted, they do make it easy to do so.
Rest assured that most Android users *will* use all Google services they offer and pre-load. Say, 95% of them.
Tentacles, orifices. They don't need to get everyone, most are enough. "Open" has more than one meaning, I guess.
No surprise this year. Jobs himself: check. New iPhone model: check. New firmware version: check. All is "déjà vu" ! The only possible surprise would be "OS4 for iPhone2G" (they said "no !"; now they should say "yes !").
Well, there may be the iPhone on Verizon and there still is something about that fucking large datacenter Apple has just finished to build. I have the suspicion that Apple will be announcing something about that. Like cloud storage and streaming and syncing for all of your music and data.
Depends. I can respect that from a usability standpoint, it's an impressive device. I like the UI, and it works well. HOWEVER, from a simple political perspective, the iPhone is just WRONG. They way it's locked down is repulsive to many on a site that is heavily frequented by people involved in a movement (OSS) that stipulates that users should have absolute control over their systems.
It's akin to having almost everything you could want but living as a slave, versus living as a free man with much less. I'm willing to accept a slightly lower standard of living if it means maintaining my freedom to do and act as I wish. Most people here seem to have similar views.
Yeah, but: Most people using an Android phone let Google have their email and their address book and their search history and their calendar data and the places they go... I mean, yes, this is different from "absolute control over the soft- and hardware" but is this really better? It is absolute control over all your digital life.
Google is whispering "We are not evil..." while inserting tentacles in every orifice of your life. And then people are shouting "Yes, Android is open, fuck Apple!" and let Google insert another tentacle into another orifice. Great.
As long as I can't avoid using Google for lots of things I prefer to use Apple for other things. Both are disliking the other more than enough to make sure that this is the best way for me to keep in control as far as possible.
I'm pretty sure that Android has still some major public recoil waiting for it. Google is begging for it.
I replaced my Ubuntu desktop and laptop with a Mac Mini 2 years ago
Mac OS X is a great OS because it both "just works" and lets you tinker when you want to. It's baffling to me that Apple has convinced so many people that they have to keep an iron grip in order to provide usability, when half of their product line is a counterexample.
Well, for me the difference is that a fucking smartphone is something I do not want to invest even minutes in to tinker with. I surely wouldn't tolerate that kind of iron grip on a computer. But a phone is something that goes into my pocket and goes out again only to use it.
I have to say that a while ago I realized that I just can't handhold every bit on every digital device I'm using. So I opted to source parts of this out, so to say. Let others take care of that. Iron grip? Yeah, maybe. Better than me having to keep an iron grip on dozens of rather unimportant devices all the time.
And while I'm still not really sure where all of this will be going, I'm somewhat happy that Apple is trying it this way. Someone has to try it. Either it works or it does not work but we need to know if such an iron grip can help to manage such devices good enough to have a safe and secure environment without the users having to nurse the things along (which they wouldn't do anyway, not if we're talking about the mass-market).
And with Google and Apple you're between a rock and a hard place anyway. Android is much more open, yes. But then you (or at least the majority of users) will have Google inhaling all of your data day and night. Google will see what you search for and what you mail to whom and which maps you look at and what your calendar contains...
Apple may try to keep an iron grip on the soft- and hardware you're using, but Google inserts dozens of soothing tentacles into every orifice of your digital life.
There ARE no legal implications. Citizens are NOT required to prevent other citizens from engaging in crimes, nor are they required to detect/or even watch out for it. If someone leaves a wifi open, then no one can tell if a crime has been done and that does NOT mean the person that left the wifi open committed a crime.
Right, but as soon as someone uses an open WiFi AP to do something illegal the owner of that AP can and will be required to secure it and then the open AP is gone. That's it.
Lets up the status even more. How about a public library that offers free wifi?
Nothing of this is or was illegal. It was just terribly unsure what happens if someone uses such a service for illegal things.
By the way, free WiFi here in Germany is very much getting rarer month by month. No one really knows how to handle the legal implications and in more and more places there is no free WiFi anymore.
So you could get two iPod Touches, or a Dell Laptop AND Dell Netbook, Sony Netbook, or two ePC Netbooks for this money?
I can tell you from personal experience that even keeping *one* EeePC netbook happy in the long run is more than I'm willing to take for a device for browsing the web and checking my mail and reading books and watching a movie.
Mind you, I'm *not* getting an iPad (yet), I have enough devices to use. But I can fully understand everyone who does. If you're not a programmer or a computer enthusiast (whatever this is) an iPad is an obvious choice. Everyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot. It gives you 95% of whatever you may need for 0% of the effort and your valuable time. If this isn't a good deal, I don't know.
In the UK you can (and many people do) sue for some "suitable time of use" and this is about two or three years for a piece of technology. So regardless of warranty you can (and again, if you try you *can*) get Apple and others to replace a computer that fails within the first two to three years.
In Germany this is three years by law, by the way. You may have to sue, but if you didn't break the thing by yourself you will win.
Netbooks came into existence BECAUSE they were inexpensive, there was no "AND". A "netbook" was an inexpensive, no-frills notebook and was not different in any other way.
Except that they ran Linux instead of Windows and had small SSDs instead of HDs. Which was the reason they were called "netbooks" -- not enough HD space to store much data and just a handful of apps mainly to access the net. Appliances instead of computers. *That* was the original netbook. If you really think the original EeePC was just a small laptop you've never used one.
I find it interesting that people have forgotten that already. Now the iPad comes along, does what netbooks tried to do and everyone is wondering why people buy such a thing... In fact the iPad is closer to the original netbook idea than any netbook you can buy today.
Nah, most of the/. crowd is formed of IT admins, programmers, and engineers, whose environment is saturated with computers and probably do not need a device that has less functionality than the one they sit in front of all day long. For the basic end-user, it's a nifty device. You're just getting a biased opinion here.
No, the *real* IT admins, programmers and engineers whose environment is saturated with computers anyway love the iPad, because it is something they can just use for a change. No real IT admin wants to use a real computer for casual things if he can get away with something more simple instead. If you really can't get enough of computers even in your free time you must be fairly fresh to the job.
Who's hating the iPad are all those people who pretend to be IT professionals and who just hate the thought of something people can just use, because they love to aimlessly tinker around with computers and pretend to be experts. That's the/. crowd today. At least it seems so.
If Apple pursues this Gizmodo should do discovery on Apple's emails to confirm it wasn't a publicity stunt.
The most annoying thing about this whole thing is the free press Apple is getting out of it. Fuck them.
I don't know if I like Apple but I do surely know now that I don't like Gizmodo. Or people selling stuff found in a bar without asking the bartender about the owner.
There would've been dozens of better ways to handle this, really. Gizmodo did what they could to screw this up. They're not only not innocent, they're idiots.
I wonder if the seams are functional, though. If the case is all metal, perhaps the seams are there for the antenna to use.
The case isn't all metal. The back is either plastic or ceramic.
The "seams" may be LED strips, designed to be visible from the front, the back and from the sides. Would make sense. Gizmodo would have been able to find out, though.
If you really try to look at the Courier videos with an analytic eye you can't fail to see that this is just about "how to look good in a video". The user interface looks breathtaking -- because it is. There is no reason nor rhyme to the UI, it's a show of things you'd never discover how to use them on a real device. Every gesture and every touch and everything else does something different on every screen. Everything of this is convenient in the very moment it is done, yes. Because it's just a show-off and made to look this way, not to work in any way.
If there was one thing that teached me that MS is totally without anything real to offer it was this video. It's a concept of an artist, not more. Basically it's an ad for something that doesn't exist and can't exist in this form.
"Personal Computer"...
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
In the US and in most developed countries about 80% of the population are using computers now. Who really thinks that glorified office machines like the IBM PC and its children are really "personal computers" anymore?
The personal computer of today is the iPhone or an Android gadget. Like it or not, but as soon as you're talking about such numbers it's not the potential of an universal machine that counts, but the practical usability of a simple device. It's the terminal in your pocket, not the server in your basement or the universal machine that is the "personal" in PC.
My god, I can't believe how self-serving computer-geeks have become. Nine out of ten geeks today are just defending their self-described superiority and fear nothing more than devices end-users can actually use without becoming experts. I'm reading (and writing in) Slashdot since ages, but meanwhile I nearly get more out of discussing the iPad with a random girl than scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no doubt that you will be able to buy several sub-$100 tablets later this year, running Android. They will be mostly crap (slow hardware, small batteries, resistive touchscreens), but they will be there. The markets in Asia and especially China are huge.
Here is an iPad-clone for $73.
It also finally allows to make a device with no moving parts at all, which is much easier to seal and less prone to break. I have no doubt that a tablet is much better suited to what the OLPC project wants to do.
Apple is the one making the copies not the developer. So apple would need to give out the source.
Hmm. If someone sells binaries of GPL code via ebay, ebay has to supply the source and if the developer does it instead, ebay does not comply with the GPL?
No, because Apple is the problem. If Wal-Mart didn't let the router company include a source CD with the router, you'd go after Wal-Mart along with the router company. The developers of this app I have little doubt want to comply with the GPL but Apple won't let them, a bit like Wal-Mart prohibiting the inclusion of source code.
I don't get this. According to the GPL you can give away or sell a binary as you like as long as you give the buyer also access to the source code. So if the developer just points to the source at some website all would be fine, I think. Or what is wrong with this?
And Apple's control isn't required to achieve that. You can use an Android phone as if it were an iPhone and have a very similar experience. It's true that the UI isn't quite as polished, but that's orthogonal to being open.
If you're using Google's services, they see that regardless of what OS you're running. And there's no requirement to use their services with Android. Granted, they do make it easy to do so.
Rest assured that most Android users *will* use all Google services they offer and pre-load. Say, 95% of them.
Tentacles, orifices. They don't need to get everyone, most are enough. "Open" has more than one meaning, I guess.
No surprise this year. Jobs himself: check. New iPhone model: check. New firmware version: check. All is "déjà vu" ! The only possible surprise would be "OS4 for iPhone2G" (they said "no !"; now they should say "yes !").
Well, there may be the iPhone on Verizon and there still is something about that fucking large datacenter Apple has just finished to build. I have the suspicion that Apple will be announcing something about that. Like cloud storage and streaming and syncing for all of your music and data.
Depends. I can respect that from a usability standpoint, it's an impressive device. I like the UI, and it works well. HOWEVER, from a simple political perspective, the iPhone is just WRONG. They way it's locked down is repulsive to many on a site that is heavily frequented by people involved in a movement (OSS) that stipulates that users should have absolute control over their systems.
It's akin to having almost everything you could want but living as a slave, versus living as a free man with much less. I'm willing to accept a slightly lower standard of living if it means maintaining my freedom to do and act as I wish. Most people here seem to have similar views.
Yeah, but: Most people using an Android phone let Google have their email and their address book and their search history and their calendar data and the places they go... I mean, yes, this is different from "absolute control over the soft- and hardware" but is this really better? It is absolute control over all your digital life.
Google is whispering "We are not evil..." while inserting tentacles in every orifice of your life. And then people are shouting "Yes, Android is open, fuck Apple!" and let Google insert another tentacle into another orifice. Great.
As long as I can't avoid using Google for lots of things I prefer to use Apple for other things. Both are disliking the other more than enough to make sure that this is the best way for me to keep in control as far as possible.
I'm pretty sure that Android has still some major public recoil waiting for it. Google is begging for it.
Mac OS X is a great OS because it both "just works" and lets you tinker when you want to. It's baffling to me that Apple has convinced so many people that they have to keep an iron grip in order to provide usability, when half of their product line is a counterexample.
Well, for me the difference is that a fucking smartphone is something I do not want to invest even minutes in to tinker with. I surely wouldn't tolerate that kind of iron grip on a computer. But a phone is something that goes into my pocket and goes out again only to use it.
I have to say that a while ago I realized that I just can't handhold every bit on every digital device I'm using. So I opted to source parts of this out, so to say. Let others take care of that. Iron grip? Yeah, maybe. Better than me having to keep an iron grip on dozens of rather unimportant devices all the time.
And while I'm still not really sure where all of this will be going, I'm somewhat happy that Apple is trying it this way. Someone has to try it. Either it works or it does not work but we need to know if such an iron grip can help to manage such devices good enough to have a safe and secure environment without the users having to nurse the things along (which they wouldn't do anyway, not if we're talking about the mass-market).
And with Google and Apple you're between a rock and a hard place anyway. Android is much more open, yes. But then you (or at least the majority of users) will have Google inhaling all of your data day and night. Google will see what you search for and what you mail to whom and which maps you look at and what your calendar contains...
Apple may try to keep an iron grip on the soft- and hardware you're using, but Google inserts dozens of soothing tentacles into every orifice of your digital life.
There ARE no legal implications. Citizens are NOT required to prevent other citizens from engaging in crimes, nor are they required to detect/or even watch out for it. If someone leaves a wifi open, then no one can tell if a crime has been done and that does NOT mean the person that left the wifi open committed a crime.
Right, but as soon as someone uses an open WiFi AP to do something illegal the owner of that AP can and will be required to secure it and then the open AP is gone. That's it.
Or is that illegal in Germany?
Lets up the status even more. How about a public library that offers free wifi?
Nothing of this is or was illegal. It was just terribly unsure what happens if someone uses such a service for illegal things.
By the way, free WiFi here in Germany is very much getting rarer month by month. No one really knows how to handle the legal implications and in more and more places there is no free WiFi anymore.
So you could get two iPod Touches, or a Dell Laptop AND Dell Netbook, Sony Netbook, or two ePC Netbooks for this money?
I can tell you from personal experience that even keeping *one* EeePC netbook happy in the long run is more than I'm willing to take for a device for browsing the web and checking my mail and reading books and watching a movie.
Mind you, I'm *not* getting an iPad (yet), I have enough devices to use. But I can fully understand everyone who does. If you're not a programmer or a computer enthusiast (whatever this is) an iPad is an obvious choice. Everyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot. It gives you 95% of whatever you may need for 0% of the effort and your valuable time. If this isn't a good deal, I don't know.
Yeah, at the moment it looks as if you get an iPad cheaper in the UK if you wait a few days.
In the UK you can (and many people do) sue for some "suitable time of use" and this is about two or three years for a piece of technology. So regardless of warranty you can (and again, if you try you *can*) get Apple and others to replace a computer that fails within the first two to three years.
In Germany this is three years by law, by the way. You may have to sue, but if you didn't break the thing by yourself you will win.
Netbooks came into existence BECAUSE they were inexpensive, there was no "AND". A "netbook" was an inexpensive, no-frills notebook and was not different in any other way.
Except that they ran Linux instead of Windows and had small SSDs instead of HDs. Which was the reason they were called "netbooks" -- not enough HD space to store much data and just a handful of apps mainly to access the net. Appliances instead of computers. *That* was the original netbook. If you really think the original EeePC was just a small laptop you've never used one.
I find it interesting that people have forgotten that already. Now the iPad comes along, does what netbooks tried to do and everyone is wondering why people buy such a thing... In fact the iPad is closer to the original netbook idea than any netbook you can buy today.
Nah, most of the /. crowd is formed of IT admins, programmers, and engineers, whose environment is saturated with computers and probably do not need a device that has less functionality than the one they sit in front of all day long. For the basic end-user, it's a nifty device. You're just getting a biased opinion here.
No, the *real* IT admins, programmers and engineers whose environment is saturated with computers anyway love the iPad, because it is something they can just use for a change. No real IT admin wants to use a real computer for casual things if he can get away with something more simple instead. If you really can't get enough of computers even in your free time you must be fairly fresh to the job.
Who's hating the iPad are all those people who pretend to be IT professionals and who just hate the thought of something people can just use, because they love to aimlessly tinker around with computers and pretend to be experts. That's the /. crowd today. At least it seems so.
They knew where the phone was when they bricked it using the "Find my iPhone" feature. Makes you wonder why did not ring the doorbell earlier.
Finding doesn't work with 4.0 beta yet (but bricking works).
If Apple pursues this Gizmodo should do discovery on Apple's emails to confirm it wasn't a publicity stunt.
The most annoying thing about this whole thing is the free press Apple is getting out of it. Fuck them.
I don't know if I like Apple but I do surely know now that I don't like Gizmodo. Or people selling stuff found in a bar without asking the bartender about the owner.
You're not the only person who has been thinking that, but your company is surely getting thinner every day.
The EFF fights for the right cause but is not automatically right. Just being a journalist does not mean you're allowed to deal with stolen goods.
By the way, the Gawker/Gizmodo guys obviously don't think they're journalists themselves:
"We don’t seek to do good,” says Denton, wearing a purplish shirt, jeans and a beard that resembles a three-day growth. “We may inadvertently do good. We may inadvertently commit journalism. That is not the institutional intention."
There would've been dozens of better ways to handle this, really. Gizmodo did what they could to screw this up. They're not only not innocent, they're idiots.
Apple's overall profit margin as reported two days ago was 41.7%.
Gross margin was 41.7 percent, up from 39.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
It's basically good old K&R C with a bit of Smalltalk-inspired object syntax on top of it. It is not as much as dumbed down as rather not dumbed up.
The case isn't all metal. The back is either plastic or ceramic.
The "seams" may be LED strips, designed to be visible from the front, the back and from the sides. Would make sense. Gizmodo would have been able to find out, though.
If you really try to look at the Courier videos with an analytic eye you can't fail to see that this is just about "how to look good in a video". The user interface looks breathtaking -- because it is. There is no reason nor rhyme to the UI, it's a show of things you'd never discover how to use them on a real device. Every gesture and every touch and everything else does something different on every screen. Everything of this is convenient in the very moment it is done, yes. Because it's just a show-off and made to look this way, not to work in any way.
If there was one thing that teached me that MS is totally without anything real to offer it was this video. It's a concept of an artist, not more. Basically it's an ad for something that doesn't exist and can't exist in this form.
In the US and in most developed countries about 80% of the population are using computers now. Who really thinks that glorified office machines like the IBM PC and its children are really "personal computers" anymore?
The personal computer of today is the iPhone or an Android gadget. Like it or not, but as soon as you're talking about such numbers it's not the potential of an universal machine that counts, but the practical usability of a simple device. It's the terminal in your pocket, not the server in your basement or the universal machine that is the "personal" in PC.
My god, I can't believe how self-serving computer-geeks have become. Nine out of ten geeks today are just defending their self-described superiority and fear nothing more than devices end-users can actually use without becoming experts. I'm reading (and writing in) Slashdot since ages, but meanwhile I nearly get more out of discussing the iPad with a random girl than scraping the bottom of the barrel here.