Why do so many people run their Windows apps with maximized windows all the time then? The thing is that most people (I mean most "normal" people) do *not* like to see multiple things at a time. They want to see only one thing at a time and that's the thing they're currently looking at or working with.
And I have to say in most cases I agree with them. There are cases where it is really useful to see more than one thing at a time, but this mostly limited to real work. In reality the teeming complexity of user interfaces is just a sign of the developers being lazy and thinking "let the user sort out this mess".
But if it is going to be a color eInk reader with similar friendliness as the iPhone, then there might be hope.
This is impossible right now. E-ink is far to slow to even allow pixel-wise scrolling, let alone direct visual feedback on a touchscreen. You just can't implement a decent user interface with an e-ink screen, color or not. This may change sooner or later, of course.
But give me an oversized iPhone or iPod touch with 6-8 hours on a charge and Stanza (and other apps of course) and I'm happy.
Here's an interesting speed comparison of: A full-size QWERTY keyboard, the Apple iPhone 3G’s software QWERTY keyboard (2009), the Palm Treo 650’s hardware QWERTY keyboard (2004), pen and paper, the Apple Newton MessagePad 2100’s handwriting recognition (1997), and the Palm Vx’s Graffiti (1999).
The full-size keyboard was fastest, the iPhone keyboard (in portrait orientation) was second (about one third slower), than came the rest (order as above). At least in this test the iPhone keyboard was faster than both the Palm Treo hardware keyboard *and* pen and paper.
And how will they determine if this gets stuck in some local optimum for certain concepts, and thus stops to learn anything relevant at all about any one given concept or topic?
The report is low on details and high on hype. There are no current algorithms that don't require heavy parameter tuning and constant monitoring to get right. Switching one on for a few years and hoping does not strike me as an exciting story.
I'm pretty sure you didn't become what you are by your parents just switching you on and hoping for a few years... I'm quite certain that there was a bit of heavy parameter tuning and constant monitoring required, too.
And believe me, most kids so unlucky to miss this part also get stuck in a local optimum.
This guy should distribute this as a VirtualBox machine or so. Do I really want to *boot* into something that is just a browser without an OS and without apps? Gimme something to use and to play with on the side and I may have fun with it. Pulling my teeth would be more fun than booting into Chrome on a real machine, sorry.
Oh, and as a minor matter, languages are difficult enough from a syntactic dimension, and the symantics of it (in order to understand a statement, you have to understand the ones prior, the context or framing that may have switched, the built up assumptions that maybe can be discarded, maybe not, etc...) make for a truly fantastically dificult problem.
And still, every newborn human masters all of this without having the faintest explicit knowlegde about anything of this and still learns it within a few years. Is an AI meant to be like a newborn baby (which is in no way intelligent) or like an adult? Most (or all) people become intelligent without knowing how intelligence works or what it is. It's just that everything that doesn't work gets discarded very soon. You start to imitate and to try out what works and what gets results and what not.
Perhaps we need just some evolution in code, code trying to understand and survive in the world of data. Have them fight and eat each other and have the fittest survive.
When I first read about Cyc I immediately thought that this is the way to go. And this was before the WWW took off. While I don't think that knowing about the world is all that's needed for AI, I think that without knowing about the world you can't have any AI or at least none you'd recognize.
Intelligence (as we know it) is mostly about interacting with and understanding your environment and having some environment being accessible to something remotely intelligent is a good start. Every living being is just a point in space and time, relating to everything around it and still being different from its surroundings, trying to survive and to understand what's going on.
I have no doubt that any real AI will be born with and out of all the networked information we're collecting like crazy. Or it may never be born, of course. AI is hard.
Try to see which characters (they're all unique) these are and position your cursor between them in a hurry with a proportional and a fixed width font: il[I|]
Anytime you see some coder craning towards the screen with narrowed eyes when selecting something, he's probably using a proportional font. Proportional fonts are better for reading prose, are not good for reading code and are terrible for editing code. Much of this is personal preferences and a few things (like 0 and O looking similar) can be fixed, but a few things are real. Editing characterwise will always be easier when the characters occupy the same space regardless of their actual width.
IMHO everyone should use a fixed width font for editing, even if it's not code. It's just much easier.
Whatever you have ever said or done will continue to be used against you for the rest of your life. That is the world this kind of thinking creates. It creates fear to think or act. Privacy is ultimately about liberty.
Well, while I'm not exactly thinking you're wrong... but isn't liberty more about being able to stand up for what you've done and said and not so much about being able to hide and run from it?
Privacy is *also* about liberty, but liberty is not only about doing and saying things in the dark where nobody looks. It also means being able to do and say things in the open with your name attached and not having to fear anything. If it were different, walking around with our faces covered and never talking to anyone would be the ultimate liberty.
I think liberty lives in the tension between privacy and daring to expose yourself and fight for your right to do that and still not be bothered by others for it. The right of standing up and showing your face and speaking up is as important as the right of having privacy.
Seems like people are really bitching that e-readers can't be used for video. My question is why did you buy an e-READER if you wanted to watch VIDEO? You should have bought a laptop.
It's not only about video. If you have any user interface a bit more complex than a few buttons around the device you'll need a touchscreen. And with a touchscreen you NEED visual feedback. E-ink is just too slow for that. Even simple things like scrolling through lists totally sucks with e-ink.
Have a look at the Plastic Logic Que reader. The user interface is just unusable. E-ink is fine for just looking at things, but as soon as you have to interact with a device in more ways than just turning a page, it starts to suck with no end.
2009 was the year of the netbook, 2010 will be the year of the tablet. The problem is, tablets are so niche... and the normal consumer doesn't know.
This is both witty and silly. If you really think that 2011 people will return to the good old shrunken IBM PC with a fresh coat of paint, you're missing something. The last century was the century of the PC and this will change. Tablets are the future of "computing" at least as far as the consumers are concerned and this means about 90-95% of the population. Tablets are here to stay and this is only the beginning. In ten years people will look at keyboards and think "unbelievable!". There will be still keyboards, of course. Programmers, secretaries and writers will use them. Nobody else, though.
It won't be the year of the tablet, it will be the first year of the tablet and this will only stop with speech recognition becoming the main method of interaction with machines. At least I hope so. Maybe the fscking future is finally here, it took long enough.
I swear that sometimes the future is stupidly obvious and these big dumb corporations adamantly try to refuse it.. A $1000 tablet may be a temporary success... but the future is cheap 'netbook' tablets like in Star Trek TNG. The point of a tablet PC is to offer a computing platform that removes the need for paper. Paper is cheap. A dual-screen tablet is the stupidest of the stupid moronic stupid things Microsoft would do..
Excuse me, but you don't get it. People don't want a "computing platform". People care a shit for "computing". People want apps and games and music and movies and newspapers and magazines. As long as you have to call it a computer, it will fail. Believe me, people are sick of computers. They love what they can *do* with them and this is not computing. It's the net (and this means: connecting to other people) and content and fun they're after. The best hard- and software is useless without easy and one-tap access to things and people.
As long as you think hardware and software is important, you're wrong. It's important as air and water, but once they can breath and drink, people don't want better and faster air and water, they want other things. Then they care for the air and water only if it smells and has the wrong color.
...why Microsoft seems to think it's in competition with Apple. Microsoft built itself on being a software company and has only recently - within the last decade - ventured significantly into the hardware market (Xbox, Zune, now the tablet, etc).
Apple, meanwhile, has traditionally been the opposite - a hardware company that occasionally ventures into the software industry (arguably the only software they make is variations of OS X for all their hardware devices).
Hardware and software increasingly only matters in so far that you don't notice it and it doesn't get in the way. What's much more important is the ecosystem: How much effort have you to put into your device to get things on it? To buy an app or a game or music or a movie or a book or a magazine? If it requires more than a single tap you've lost. People (and I mean PEOPLE, not geeks) are sick of PCs and license numbers and virus-scanners and a thousand of ways to buy things and to make sure they work. People want a package, with the actual hardware just being the interface to it and the technology as invisible as possible.
If you need to know what format something is in or what resolution your screen has or on what kind of CPU your device runs, you're a geek and in the minority. People want to have things just work. They want a one-stop shop, which has their CC number and where they can buy some cheap software or a song or whatever by just doing it and never waste a single thought about how it works and what the files are named and where there are.
Apple has all this. They have worked on it for years, they are known for it and if they can get the publishers onto the wagon (with magazines and books and newspapers) and people can buy the NYT and Vogue and whatever as easy as they can buy an app or a song, both the publishers and the people will LOVE it.
It's not about the hardware and the software anymore. These are necessary (and may be hard), but they are not enough. Throwing the best hardware and the best OS at the people and nothing more is useless.
If MS and HP now announce nothing than a tablet with Windows 7 on it and some colorful UI on top, they'll not only have lost, they'll have proved that they don't even understand the problem they're facing. I can't imagine that they're that dumb, so I hope there's more to that.
And let me add one thing: Free Software and open hardware standards are important, but in the future free content and free standards to exchange content will be more important. If you're a real geek you *might* be wise to give up tinkering with hard- and software and start to tinker with content. And if this means to buy a Mac or an iPhone or an iSlate or whatever, do so and use the time you win by not fighting your devices to write and to create music and other things not being meaningful only to computers and other geeks. If we lose the people, we lose everything.
And they're only doing it because of the incessant, unfounded rumors that tablets are going to be the next big market.
It's not tablets. It's tablets with an entire ecosystem for apps and content attached. Hardware with just an OS and a few apps on it is lame nowadays.
People have learned with the iPhone that having a device *and* a store *and* some cool company caring for all this is the thing. Like it or not. Geeks buy gadgets. People buy packages, because they're sick of naked gadgets and having to fight them and make them into something usable.
I don't like to say it, but selling cheap gadgets to geeks is becoming economically unsound. Compared to all the consumers out there they're a minority. Expect dozens of tablets coming in 2010 and going half a year later with no traces left. And expect Apple to swipe that market empty. I hate it, but naked hardware is just useless for the majority of people. They want something they can buy and unwrap and use for years, with things pushed to them and them having just to nod or tap "Buy" or "Update" and be done with it and have fun. The PC and its spirit of tinkering and building and nursing along is DEAD. People want to buy things as they buy TV sets and a cable contract and channels to zap around in.
Consumers are called consumers because they consume. If you're wise join in and use your time to create content instead of playing with your hard- and software, because free content will become much more important than open hardware or free software. Learn that now and don't waste your time by fighting windmills while chasing the latest $200 hardware with nothing you can do with it but tinkering.
There's more to that -- did you notice that *all* the animals have six limbs and only the Na'vi have four? Looks to me as if they didn't originate there at all. They came from elsewhere and if you want to have a nice plot, they probably destroyed their home planet, got to Pandora and, having learned their lesson all too well, engineered themselves and the life there to get along perfectly without any visible technology needed anymore.
In the sequel Sully will then discover the old Na'vi spacecraft hidden away somewhere and use it to fight back the returning Earthlings...
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the sequels. I went and saw Avatar a second time after I read up a bit about the background and found it to be an extremely well executed SF movie then. Best I've seen in a long time, really. The story is not really original, but most stories aren't.
Really? Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s a good while back before the first iPod was released to the market and iTunes was launched. I mean, Napster was up and running since around 1999 and, way before that, IRC was swarming with channels dedicated to transferring MP3 albums through DCC file transfers.
Come on... Everyone? Geeks, yes. Today you can buy iTunes gift cards in gas stations all over the world and people know what these are good for.
It's incredible what selection bias can do. If you were part of it and the people around you were part of it, you think it was everyone. It wasn't. This was an extremely limited thing and iTunes and the iPod changed that. As long as you don't understand that even dragging downloaded mp3-files to a player attached as an USB mass-storage device is something that most people will never bother with, you're still living in a fantasy world. There is a lesson in that and believe me, most people in the computer industry haven't learned that yet.
Somehow the stupid things never seem to be calibrated to my eye height, so I always have to push above or below the buttons on the screen to get them to work. I can't even imagine what blind people do. At least the old school things had braille on them, and (I assume) the audio prompts you got through headphones would tell them which button to hit. What do they do now? "Press five inches over, three inches down to make a withdraw. Press five inches over, FOUR inches down to..."
You'll be surprised, but the iPhone is pretty much loved by blind or sight-impaired people. It's one of the very few phones that work for them and Apple has put much effort into this. Its accessibility is second to none. This is just another thing your average phone manufacturer has not even recognized as a problem worth to be solved.
First, it may be worthwhile to ask what's actually the problem: Is there really a lack of free (as in speech) software for Android or is there just a lack of commercial software for Linux? I don't know the numbers, but there are *many* commercial applications out there for other systems and not so many for Linux. Maybe it's not Android that's special but Linux.
Second, and this is important, the difference between Android and Linux is that with Android there is a *market* for commercial software. If you have a good idea and have written a good piece of software and then have the choice to either give it away for free or (with not so much more effort) *sell* it and get some money for all the time you have put into it, all Free Software enthusiasm suddenly is just one vector among others. And since the times aren't that lush and many developers just like a bit of additional income...
Third (I hate to say this): The FOSS community isn't static. There are veterans now, people who have put much time and effort into code and managing things and some of them would like to make some money now for a change without having to feel guilty about it. There *are* people who suddenly buy a Mac and start to develop iPhone apps and dream of getting rich or code Android apps and hope to make some money on the side. I mean, there *is* such a thing like a burn-out syndrome even with FOSS developers. Thinking "I've started to hate all this stuff a long time ago, now let's just pretend it's business and make some money" is not that rare a thing to happen. Linux can eat you and you may want to eat back.
Fourth: The iPhone started all this. All of a sudden having a great idea for a cool app (or even a killer app) and writing it and making money from coding away in your basement became a meme. And what the hell, everyone does it, so try to sell what you got. With Linux and traditional Unix FOSS sharing was what everyone did. Now it's selling. Don't pretend that you're immune against group pressure or bills piling up on your desk.
Fifth: This is an exploding market and keeping your knowledge to yourself instead of giving your well documented sources away and have others standing on your shoulders is only natural. I mean, only very few of those apps are in any way pushing the state of the art. It's just applied industriousness and having others learn from your code and make money while you don't even get the fame is lame. Linux is a cult, Android is just Google and even if Goggle is not evil, it's about money and not about freedom.
Sixth: All of this is bullshit. FOSS is here to stay and if there are 1000 fart apps for every useful piece of Open Software noone cares a shit. In the worst case it's like with FOSS on Windows just with Linux beneath it instead of Windows. No reason to whine, surely.
But what others here have said about the hardware lock-in is true. This is a very real problem and sooner or later the time will be ripe for Open Hardware. Without that FOSS will be just a service for Google and people thinking "I can't live with this but I can try to live off it" will rule and this is not the dumbest approach.
Oh, and the smart-phone using population is different from PC-users. For one, it's much larger. But it's also much more interested in just using and consuming instead of tinkering and creating. There is a lesson to learn from that: Open Content will become more important than Open Software.
And of course only about 3 people will read all of this and I'll have wasted half an hour of my time (currently worth about $35 if I had been working instead) for free. And still.
There were book readers before the e-ink displays came around, but very few people used them because they suffered from 2 major drawbacks. The first was the power consumption of their displays meant that you had to plug them in and let them charge on a daily or twice daily basis. People already have to charge their cell phones on a daily basis, but charging one twice a day when you use it a lot is pretty annoying, and a huge amount of power is spent on the display when a cell phone is being used.
But e-ink isn't the only solution to that problem. Look at Pixel Qi which are starting to produce *now* displays with 1/2 or less the power draw of an LCD screen and full color (with backlight, b/w without backlight) and video capabilities. Make sure to see the videos of an Acer netbook with such an display. IMHO e-ink will be very soon something nobody wants to have anymore (except in very special applications).
PDF is very poor for eBooks, because it doesn't have enough information regarding the significance of content on a page and the page size is hard-wired into the document, so for example PDF text doesn't reflow well if you change the font size on a reader, header and footer information get messed up, tabular information is a no-hoper on an eReader at anything but native page size and so on.
Rest assured that exactly this (full control over the presentation on the device) is what they want. And I even think that most consumers want this. Even books are not just data. PDF on a device with a nice large color display is just a natural fit. I don't know if I should like this, but this is *not* the Internet. This is a purely commercial thing fueled by publishers trying to make money from it. You can feel lucky if they leave out animated ads (and they'd be silly to leave them out).
"theres no reason to waste any time with the text"
even if its a work of pure firction (which then why the code?) the ability to imagine is one of the few things that separates us from animals and is a very redeeming and valuable thing. works of fiction have motivated and inspired people for thousands of years. this one has never had that opportunity.
Duh, this is not an encoded work of anything -- all of it is made up. The script, the characters, the "words"... there is no content and no meaning, it's just pure art. Of course you can never prove this as a matter of principle, but the evidence is beyond sane doubt.
Have you ever looked at that book? Look at the pictures and you'll know that there's nothing to decode. It's just phantasizing, all made up. There's no reason to waste any time with the text, especially since many people have tried and nobody found any kind of sense in it.
It amazes me how much hardware and power has to be thrown at the problem to solve it while nature can create a self-organizing machine that only requires material input of raw mice and lasagna.
On the other hand, give us as long as evolution for the cat and we will probably create something more cunning and evil than a cat, running on raw sunlight.
Ick. Why must all Apple shortcuts be so difficult to type? Steve Jobs must be a contortionist, or a sadist, or both.
You can change that to whatever you want.
Tongue-in-cheek, but really. Something that I'd use so often should be less difficult to reach.
For what it's worth, that is why I don't use the Alt-F4 shortcut to close a window from the keyboard. I use either Ctrl-W (where it's supported, e.g. Windows Explorer or [insert web browser of choice here]) or Alt-Space, C – either of which are a breeze to type, even if my right hand is resting on the mouse.
You should be fine on a Mac then, because Command-W for closing a window works *always*;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Why do so many people run their Windows apps with maximized windows all the time then? The thing is that most people (I mean most "normal" people) do *not* like to see multiple things at a time. They want to see only one thing at a time and that's the thing they're currently looking at or working with.
And I have to say in most cases I agree with them. There are cases where it is really useful to see more than one thing at a time, but this mostly limited to real work. In reality the teeming complexity of user interfaces is just a sign of the developers being lazy and thinking "let the user sort out this mess".
This is impossible right now. E-ink is far to slow to even allow pixel-wise scrolling, let alone direct visual feedback on a touchscreen. You just can't implement a decent user interface with an e-ink screen, color or not. This may change sooner or later, of course.
But give me an oversized iPhone or iPod touch with 6-8 hours on a charge and Stanza (and other apps of course) and I'm happy.
Here's an interesting speed comparison of: A full-size QWERTY keyboard, the Apple iPhone 3G’s software QWERTY keyboard (2009), the Palm Treo 650’s hardware QWERTY keyboard (2004), pen and paper, the Apple Newton MessagePad 2100’s handwriting recognition (1997), and the Palm Vx’s Graffiti (1999).
The full-size keyboard was fastest, the iPhone keyboard (in portrait orientation) was second (about one third slower), than came the rest (order as above). At least in this test the iPhone keyboard was faster than both the Palm Treo hardware keyboard *and* pen and paper.
http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2010/01/18/input.php
And how will they determine if this gets stuck in some local optimum for certain concepts, and thus stops to learn anything relevant at all about any one given concept or topic?
The report is low on details and high on hype. There are no current algorithms that don't require heavy parameter tuning and constant monitoring to get right. Switching one on for a few years and hoping does not strike me as an exciting story.
I'm pretty sure you didn't become what you are by your parents just switching you on and hoping for a few years... I'm quite certain that there was a bit of heavy parameter tuning and constant monitoring required, too.
And believe me, most kids so unlucky to miss this part also get stuck in a local optimum.
This guy should distribute this as a VirtualBox machine or so. Do I really want to *boot* into something that is just a browser without an OS and without apps? Gimme something to use and to play with on the side and I may have fun with it. Pulling my teeth would be more fun than booting into Chrome on a real machine, sorry.
Oh, and as a minor matter, languages are difficult enough from a syntactic dimension, and the symantics of it (in order to understand a statement, you have to understand the ones prior, the context or framing that may have switched, the built up assumptions that maybe can be discarded, maybe not, etc...) make for a truly fantastically dificult problem.
And still, every newborn human masters all of this without having the faintest explicit knowlegde about anything of this and still learns it within a few years. Is an AI meant to be like a newborn baby (which is in no way intelligent) or like an adult? Most (or all) people become intelligent without knowing how intelligence works or what it is. It's just that everything that doesn't work gets discarded very soon. You start to imitate and to try out what works and what gets results and what not.
Perhaps we need just some evolution in code, code trying to understand and survive in the world of data. Have them fight and eat each other and have the fittest survive.
When I first read about Cyc I immediately thought that this is the way to go. And this was before the WWW took off. While I don't think that knowing about the world is all that's needed for AI, I think that without knowing about the world you can't have any AI or at least none you'd recognize.
Intelligence (as we know it) is mostly about interacting with and understanding your environment and having some environment being accessible to something remotely intelligent is a good start. Every living being is just a point in space and time, relating to everything around it and still being different from its surroundings, trying to survive and to understand what's going on.
I have no doubt that any real AI will be born with and out of all the networked information we're collecting like crazy. Or it may never be born, of course. AI is hard.
Try to see which characters (they're all unique) these are and position your cursor between them in a hurry with a proportional and a fixed width font: il[I|]
Anytime you see some coder craning towards the screen with narrowed eyes when selecting something, he's probably using a proportional font. Proportional fonts are better for reading prose, are not good for reading code and are terrible for editing code. Much of this is personal preferences and a few things (like 0 and O looking similar) can be fixed, but a few things are real. Editing characterwise will always be easier when the characters occupy the same space regardless of their actual width.
IMHO everyone should use a fixed width font for editing, even if it's not code. It's just much easier.
Whatever you have ever said or done will continue to be used against you for the rest of your life. That is the world this kind of thinking creates. It creates fear to think or act. Privacy is ultimately about liberty.
Well, while I'm not exactly thinking you're wrong... but isn't liberty more about being able to stand up for what you've done and said and not so much about being able to hide and run from it?
Privacy is *also* about liberty, but liberty is not only about doing and saying things in the dark where nobody looks. It also means being able to do and say things in the open with your name attached and not having to fear anything. If it were different, walking around with our faces covered and never talking to anyone would be the ultimate liberty.
I think liberty lives in the tension between privacy and daring to expose yourself and fight for your right to do that and still not be bothered by others for it. The right of standing up and showing your face and speaking up is as important as the right of having privacy.
It's not only about video. If you have any user interface a bit more complex than a few buttons around the device you'll need a touchscreen. And with a touchscreen you NEED visual feedback. E-ink is just too slow for that. Even simple things like scrolling through lists totally sucks with e-ink.
Have a look at the Plastic Logic Que reader. The user interface is just unusable. E-ink is fine for just looking at things, but as soon as you have to interact with a device in more ways than just turning a page, it starts to suck with no end.
2009 was the year of the netbook, 2010 will be the year of the tablet. The problem is, tablets are so niche... and the normal consumer doesn't know.
This is both witty and silly. If you really think that 2011 people will return to the good old shrunken IBM PC with a fresh coat of paint, you're missing something. The last century was the century of the PC and this will change. Tablets are the future of "computing" at least as far as the consumers are concerned and this means about 90-95% of the population. Tablets are here to stay and this is only the beginning. In ten years people will look at keyboards and think "unbelievable!". There will be still keyboards, of course. Programmers, secretaries and writers will use them. Nobody else, though.
It won't be the year of the tablet, it will be the first year of the tablet and this will only stop with speech recognition becoming the main method of interaction with machines. At least I hope so. Maybe the fscking future is finally here, it took long enough.
I swear that sometimes the future is stupidly obvious and these big dumb corporations adamantly try to refuse it.. A $1000 tablet may be a temporary success... but the future is cheap 'netbook' tablets like in Star Trek TNG. The point of a tablet PC is to offer a computing platform that removes the need for paper. Paper is cheap. A dual-screen tablet is the stupidest of the stupid moronic stupid things Microsoft would do..
Excuse me, but you don't get it. People don't want a "computing platform". People care a shit for "computing". People want apps and games and music and movies and newspapers and magazines. As long as you have to call it a computer, it will fail. Believe me, people are sick of computers. They love what they can *do* with them and this is not computing. It's the net (and this means: connecting to other people) and content and fun they're after. The best hard- and software is useless without easy and one-tap access to things and people.
As long as you think hardware and software is important, you're wrong. It's important as air and water, but once they can breath and drink, people don't want better and faster air and water, they want other things. Then they care for the air and water only if it smells and has the wrong color.
Well, maybe you meant exactly this. Sorry then.
...why Microsoft seems to think it's in competition with Apple. Microsoft built itself on being a software company and has only recently - within the last decade - ventured significantly into the hardware market (Xbox, Zune, now the tablet, etc).
Apple, meanwhile, has traditionally been the opposite - a hardware company that occasionally ventures into the software industry (arguably the only software they make is variations of OS X for all their hardware devices).
Hardware and software increasingly only matters in so far that you don't notice it and it doesn't get in the way. What's much more important is the ecosystem: How much effort have you to put into your device to get things on it? To buy an app or a game or music or a movie or a book or a magazine? If it requires more than a single tap you've lost. People (and I mean PEOPLE, not geeks) are sick of PCs and license numbers and virus-scanners and a thousand of ways to buy things and to make sure they work. People want a package, with the actual hardware just being the interface to it and the technology as invisible as possible.
If you need to know what format something is in or what resolution your screen has or on what kind of CPU your device runs, you're a geek and in the minority. People want to have things just work. They want a one-stop shop, which has their CC number and where they can buy some cheap software or a song or whatever by just doing it and never waste a single thought about how it works and what the files are named and where there are.
Apple has all this. They have worked on it for years, they are known for it and if they can get the publishers onto the wagon (with magazines and books and newspapers) and people can buy the NYT and Vogue and whatever as easy as they can buy an app or a song, both the publishers and the people will LOVE it.
It's not about the hardware and the software anymore. These are necessary (and may be hard), but they are not enough. Throwing the best hardware and the best OS at the people and nothing more is useless.
If MS and HP now announce nothing than a tablet with Windows 7 on it and some colorful UI on top, they'll not only have lost, they'll have proved that they don't even understand the problem they're facing. I can't imagine that they're that dumb, so I hope there's more to that.
And let me add one thing: Free Software and open hardware standards are important, but in the future free content and free standards to exchange content will be more important. If you're a real geek you *might* be wise to give up tinkering with hard- and software and start to tinker with content. And if this means to buy a Mac or an iPhone or an iSlate or whatever, do so and use the time you win by not fighting your devices to write and to create music and other things not being meaningful only to computers and other geeks. If we lose the people, we lose everything.
And they're only doing it because of the incessant, unfounded rumors that tablets are going to be the next big market.
It's not tablets. It's tablets with an entire ecosystem for apps and content attached. Hardware with just an OS and a few apps on it is lame nowadays.
People have learned with the iPhone that having a device *and* a store *and* some cool company caring for all this is the thing. Like it or not. Geeks buy gadgets. People buy packages, because they're sick of naked gadgets and having to fight them and make them into something usable.
I don't like to say it, but selling cheap gadgets to geeks is becoming economically unsound. Compared to all the consumers out there they're a minority. Expect dozens of tablets coming in 2010 and going half a year later with no traces left. And expect Apple to swipe that market empty. I hate it, but naked hardware is just useless for the majority of people. They want something they can buy and unwrap and use for years, with things pushed to them and them having just to nod or tap "Buy" or "Update" and be done with it and have fun. The PC and its spirit of tinkering and building and nursing along is DEAD. People want to buy things as they buy TV sets and a cable contract and channels to zap around in.
Consumers are called consumers because they consume. If you're wise join in and use your time to create content instead of playing with your hard- and software, because free content will become much more important than open hardware or free software. Learn that now and don't waste your time by fighting windmills while chasing the latest $200 hardware with nothing you can do with it but tinkering.
And now mod me down, please.
There's more to that -- did you notice that *all* the animals have six limbs and only the Na'vi have four? Looks to me as if they didn't originate there at all. They came from elsewhere and if you want to have a nice plot, they probably destroyed their home planet, got to Pandora and, having learned their lesson all too well, engineered themselves and the life there to get along perfectly without any visible technology needed anymore.
In the sequel Sully will then discover the old Na'vi spacecraft hidden away somewhere and use it to fight back the returning Earthlings...
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the sequels. I went and saw Avatar a second time after I read up a bit about the background and found it to be an extremely well executed SF movie then. Best I've seen in a long time, really. The story is not really original, but most stories aren't.
Come on... Everyone? Geeks, yes. Today you can buy iTunes gift cards in gas stations all over the world and people know what these are good for.
It's incredible what selection bias can do. If you were part of it and the people around you were part of it, you think it was everyone. It wasn't. This was an extremely limited thing and iTunes and the iPod changed that. As long as you don't understand that even dragging downloaded mp3-files to a player attached as an USB mass-storage device is something that most people will never bother with, you're still living in a fantasy world. There is a lesson in that and believe me, most people in the computer industry haven't learned that yet.
You'll be surprised, but the iPhone is pretty much loved by blind or sight-impaired people. It's one of the very few phones that work for them and Apple has put much effort into this. Its accessibility is second to none. This is just another thing your average phone manufacturer has not even recognized as a problem worth to be solved.
First, it may be worthwhile to ask what's actually the problem: Is there really a lack of free (as in speech) software for Android or is there just a lack of commercial software for Linux? I don't know the numbers, but there are *many* commercial applications out there for other systems and not so many for Linux. Maybe it's not Android that's special but Linux.
Second, and this is important, the difference between Android and Linux is that with Android there is a *market* for commercial software. If you have a good idea and have written a good piece of software and then have the choice to either give it away for free or (with not so much more effort) *sell* it and get some money for all the time you have put into it, all Free Software enthusiasm suddenly is just one vector among others. And since the times aren't that lush and many developers just like a bit of additional income...
Third (I hate to say this): The FOSS community isn't static. There are veterans now, people who have put much time and effort into code and managing things and some of them would like to make some money now for a change without having to feel guilty about it. There *are* people who suddenly buy a Mac and start to develop iPhone apps and dream of getting rich or code Android apps and hope to make some money on the side. I mean, there *is* such a thing like a burn-out syndrome even with FOSS developers. Thinking "I've started to hate all this stuff a long time ago, now let's just pretend it's business and make some money" is not that rare a thing to happen. Linux can eat you and you may want to eat back.
Fourth: The iPhone started all this. All of a sudden having a great idea for a cool app (or even a killer app) and writing it and making money from coding away in your basement became a meme. And what the hell, everyone does it, so try to sell what you got. With Linux and traditional Unix FOSS sharing was what everyone did. Now it's selling. Don't pretend that you're immune against group pressure or bills piling up on your desk.
Fifth: This is an exploding market and keeping your knowledge to yourself instead of giving your well documented sources away and have others standing on your shoulders is only natural. I mean, only very few of those apps are in any way pushing the state of the art. It's just applied industriousness and having others learn from your code and make money while you don't even get the fame is lame. Linux is a cult, Android is just Google and even if Goggle is not evil, it's about money and not about freedom.
Sixth: All of this is bullshit. FOSS is here to stay and if there are 1000 fart apps for every useful piece of Open Software noone cares a shit. In the worst case it's like with FOSS on Windows just with Linux beneath it instead of Windows. No reason to whine, surely.
But what others here have said about the hardware lock-in is true. This is a very real problem and sooner or later the time will be ripe for Open Hardware. Without that FOSS will be just a service for Google and people thinking "I can't live with this but I can try to live off it" will rule and this is not the dumbest approach.
Oh, and the smart-phone using population is different from PC-users. For one, it's much larger. But it's also much more interested in just using and consuming instead of tinkering and creating. There is a lesson to learn from that: Open Content will become more important than Open Software.
And of course only about 3 people will read all of this and I'll have wasted half an hour of my time (currently worth about $35 if I had been working instead) for free. And still.
There were book readers before the e-ink displays came around, but very few people used them because they suffered from 2 major drawbacks. The first was the power consumption of their displays meant that you had to plug them in and let them charge on a daily or twice daily basis. People already have to charge their cell phones on a daily basis, but charging one twice a day when you use it a lot is pretty annoying, and a huge amount of power is spent on the display when a cell phone is being used.
But e-ink isn't the only solution to that problem. Look at Pixel Qi which are starting to produce *now* displays with 1/2 or less the power draw of an LCD screen and full color (with backlight, b/w without backlight) and video capabilities. Make sure to see the videos of an Acer netbook with such an display. IMHO e-ink will be very soon something nobody wants to have anymore (except in very special applications).
PDF is very poor for eBooks, because it doesn't have enough information regarding the significance of content on a page and the page size is hard-wired into the document, so for example PDF text doesn't reflow well if you change the font size on a reader, header and footer information get messed up, tabular information is a no-hoper on an eReader at anything but native page size and so on.
Rest assured that exactly this (full control over the presentation on the device) is what they want. And I even think that most consumers want this. Even books are not just data. PDF on a device with a nice large color display is just a natural fit. I don't know if I should like this, but this is *not* the Internet. This is a purely commercial thing fueled by publishers trying to make money from it. You can feel lucky if they leave out animated ads (and they'd be silly to leave them out).
"theres no reason to waste any time with the text"
even if its a work of pure firction (which then why the code?) the ability to imagine is one of the few things that separates us from animals and is a very redeeming and valuable thing. works of fiction have motivated and inspired people for thousands of years. this one has never had that opportunity.
Duh, this is not an encoded work of anything -- all of it is made up. The script, the characters, the "words"... there is no content and no meaning, it's just pure art. Of course you can never prove this as a matter of principle, but the evidence is beyond sane doubt.
Have you ever looked at that book? Look at the pictures and you'll know that there's nothing to decode. It's just phantasizing, all made up. There's no reason to waste any time with the text, especially since many people have tried and nobody found any kind of sense in it.
It's still beautiful, mind you.
It amazes me how much hardware and power has to be thrown at the problem to solve it while nature can create a self-organizing machine that only requires material input of raw mice and lasagna.
On the other hand, give us as long as evolution for the cat and we will probably create something more cunning and evil than a cat, running on raw sunlight.
This is Control-F2 on OS X.
Ick. Why must all Apple shortcuts be so difficult to type? Steve Jobs must be a contortionist, or a sadist, or both.
You can change that to whatever you want.
Tongue-in-cheek, but really. Something that I'd use so often should be less difficult to reach.
For what it's worth, that is why I don't use the Alt-F4 shortcut to close a window from the keyboard. I use either Ctrl-W (where it's supported, e.g. Windows Explorer or [insert web browser of choice here]) or Alt-Space, C – either of which are a breeze to type, even if my right hand is resting on the mouse.
You should be fine on a Mac then, because Command-W for closing a window works *always* ;-)
NASA has decided to use imperial units for Ares / Project Constellation instead of metric units earlier this year.