Yeah, and *none* of these being even remotely qualified or even sane enough for the job. Who's willing to throw his very existence away for a few weeks or months on Mars just has no idea what he's actually talking about and very probably has many other illusions as well. You're not really thinking that you can successfully train someone to do the year-long transfer flight to Mars just to die there? You'd risk that they would be *begging* to do just a fly-around and come back instead after they've been through this. Everyone sane enough to manage that task would be too sane to do a one-way mission.
It's got nothing to do with pr0n, it's got everything to do with the fact that some people want a URL bar to act as a Bar with URLs, and the Firefox Design Team wants the "Location" bar to deal with "everything you ever visited, ever, with ever-changing menus".
As a matter of fact, I *never* use the dropdown. It's much faster to just keep on typing in what I started to type than to look at the dropdown and decide what I meant to type and select it. Still I like the dropdown since very rarely I might not know the exact URL and then the list comes in handy. So I really like the "everything" style here.
Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows and Office, and it's bad UI practice today in Firefox. Unfortunately, it's such a clever bad idea that it'll never go away.
There are clever ideas badly implemented and better implemented. Context sensitive menus aren't always bad.
Why does everybody act like Chrome OS will somehow be locked down to just running Chrome and using webapps into it? Just because the original blog post emphasised on the webapps part doesn't mean it will be any less functional than your favourite distro.
Well, it won't come with X11 but use its own windowing system. As far as GUIs go this will cut out quite a few of "normal" Linux apps...
Of course it doesn't work this way because there will always be a minority of people trying to get away from what they've done or who switch identities to be able to plot and steel and murder without being caught. And the more complex and mobile a society becomes the less you can rely on people not being able to exploit this. Nowadays and in the future this means that "leave me alone as long as I leave you alone" won't work anymore (if it ever did).
But it did work. It's only recently that we have even had the technology necessary to have this kind of (relatively) secure ID card and the databases that would make it actually useful. Somehow, we managed to get along prior to having this capability. Just think of America during the late 18th century. Back then you could commit a crime, skip town, and effectively disappear. Hand-sketched "WANTED" posters were about the most technologically sophisticated method of finding someone. There were no federal crime databases, so you could have a criminal record and move to another state and tell any employer "I have no criminal record" and they would have no effective way to prove otherwise.
But this isn't the 18th century anymore. Think about it. Not paying your bills (instead of running away without paying in a store), credit card fraud and thousands more things are only possible *now*. And easily possible. Things like that might not have been a problem back then, but today single persons can crash the economy of a small country. And they often do.
There is a serious lack of inability to understand a sentiment. The best expression of that sentiment known to me is found in the Tao de Ching, chapter 57:
The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men's weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.
Therefore the sage says:
I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy peace and people become honest.
I do nothing and people become rich.
I have no desires and people return to the good and simple life.
Yeah, I love this, too. But we are far beyond that. The "simple life" would exclude cars, computers, the Internet, credit cards, moving freely around all over the world and most other things we take for granted. I think you seriously overestimate the will of the people to go back to a simple and truthful life. They are willing to take almost everything for a bit of comfort and security and stability. What you're doing is preaching for the people being different, but they aren't.
That this is so nearly impossible for us to imagine today is the real problem. The Founding Fathers understood this and their beliefs about freedom, what we often label "Libertarianism" today in order to make it sound like just another option, embodies this realization when it's correctly understood and not merely parroted or preached.
The world is moving on. Even the US has moved on. You can't have the values and mindsets of a rural and small-scale world and the global village of today at the same time. What works (ideally) in the former won't save you in the latter. In fact it will kill you. Give people a free hand in a world of easy opportunities and enough of them will prefer easy power over easy living.
I agree with you that we might just have missed the sweet spot years (centuries) ago. But I don't think there's a way back. We're moving forward and for now preaching solutions of yesterday is just sentimentality. Your quote from the Tao de Ching was probably sentimental even back then, yearning for a world that had vanished or had never existed at all except in the memories of old men dreaming of the rosy worl
This reminds me of the only sane answer to the piracy whining of the music industry: Don't want people copying and distributing your music? Don't produce music! Problem solved. (Or find other ways to profit from people marketing and distributing your stuff without requiring money for it -- there *must* be ways to profit from people working for nothing.)
No, really. As long as the only answer to individual people complaining about abuse of data they publish on facebook (or whereever) seems to be "don't publish things you don't want others to know" this is the only answer you can give Big Content likewise.
... is that *actually* we all would like to have a government that does not know anything about us and doesn't care who we are and what we do as long as we don't act as criminals or work in sensible areas.
This is a very simple thing to understand: As long as you don't mess around with your neighbours they don't need to know anything about you. As long as you don't mess around with your larger community it does not need to know anything about you. As long as you don't mess around with your government it does not need to know anything about you. In an ideal world you could be born, live and die without your government even knowing about you as long as you don't try to do something that harms the government or the community the government cares for.
Of course it doesn't work this way because there will always be a minority of people trying to get away from what they've done or who switch identities to be able to plot and steel and murder without being caught. And the more complex and mobile a society becomes the less you can rely on people not being able to exploit this. Nowadays and in the future this means that "leave me alone as long as I leave you alone" won't work anymore (if it ever did).
So, yes: There is no way around databases of citizens, identity cards and all this shit. The sooner we accept this, the better. Because once you have accepted this you can start to look at the real problem and the real problem is securing all this against abuse and tampering both by the government and interested third parties. The real problem is not someone knowing everything about you, the real problem is *you* knowing nothing about everyone else and the government (or corporations) having both the power and the freedom to abuse what they have.
And there are no simple solutions to all these problems. Todays highly virtualized, mobile and complex societies create totally new problems which need new solutions. We're not made for this and we have no build-in solutions to these problems. Every solution the ape in you suggests is probably wrong. Don't trust your first thoughts. We are building this world as we go and we can only try to do it as best as we can.
I really wouldn't mind if this would lead to a minimal accepted standard of what a "good" ad is: No animation or even flash, no sound or music, limited size (both in pixels and bytes), limited amount of ads per page, clear indication that it actually is an ad. *Then* add an option to ABP to allow these "good ads".
When I'm now and then browsing the web without an ad-blocker I'm totally shocked what's going on out there. Some pages are not only taking ages to load, they're actually unreadable and the content is so well hidden among all this flashing, moving, changing and talking stuff that I can't imagine this is in the best interest of all. Getting some sane standards here would be a real godsend. I certainly don't mind an ad here and there if I can rely on them behaving themselves.
But just having a flag that causes ABP not to block the ad is like a spam blocker respecting an email header not to block that spam. Totally insane, if you ask me.
To be fair, for some people their daily commute is just about the only time when they're really alone and have nothing to do other than driving, listening to music and being lazy. Depending on your work and family this time may be a gift from the gods.
our towns and cities are designed the way they are because that is what has worked.
This is one place where you're wrong. Cities and towns are designed the way they are in this country because there was a conscious decision decades ago to build our infrastructure that way. People sat down and said, "Do we want to build our cities and towns to support cars, or do we want to support pedestrians, bikes, trains and other public transportation?" And then they decided on cars.
Interestingly one thing you can see in Europe are towns and cities in which the basic layout is still from the middle ages and which are mostly *not* fit for heavy car traffic. If you look at Amsterdam it even has these channels which were built for transporting cargo and the rest of the city is not. And now look at how pedestrians and bicycles work there in a way that seems to freak out people who just can't imagine an average mom going shopping with two childs on her bike without thinking anything of it or a guy in a suit and with a briefcase in one hand cycling to work.
There has to be a reason that you see this all the time in Amsterdam and hardly ever in the US.
I'm thinking you're going to have to wait a long, long time for an e-book reader from Apple.
There have been some different noises from Apple recently. May be connected with the fact that ebook readers and books sell like hot cakes in the App Store. And: I've read about 70 books meanwhile on a mobile Apple device (iPod touch), so...
As to flipping back and forth between sections rapidly. That sounds like a limitation in traditional books. Unless you're saying that it's impossible for e-book readers to display two pages simultaneously?
No, the trouble is just with the slowness of the displays right now. And with two pages the screen gets a bit tight.
Why? The Kindle is too expensive for just a dedicated reader and the thing is just too slow. Yes, people are pretending it doesn't matter, but it does. Especially with textbooks you just *need* to browse a few pages forth and back and a Kindle drives you up the wall in no time here.
I'm fully expecting a 10" tablet (think oversized iPod touch) from Apple, with a perfect touchscreen and the iPhone OS. While this thing won't have the nice screen and great battery life as the Kindle, it will be much more flexible, faster and will have an user interface that does not suck. For a similar price.
While I can see that some people will prefer a dedicated reader, most people won't be able to resist the temptation to also have a choice of apps, games, email, a browser, calendar, movies, music and so on with them. If Apple does it right, all the netbook and Kindle craze will just have paved the way for them to march in and conquer as they did with the iPod.
He has a point. Macbook discoloration (pre-unibody), case chipping (pre-unibody, and this has happened to mine as well), as well as razor-sharp edges on all unibody macbooks. That and the overuse of heat paste, the general heat problems, screen backlighting unevenness... these are things I haven't seen on my dell, oddly enough.
And still, try to sell a Dell laptop after two or three years and compare that to what you get for a MacBook after two or three years...
The trouble is that as soon as you have arbitrary apps deciding to run in the background, you have to look *very* closely what they do. Because if you don't, these apps will suck at your battery until it is empty.
And most normal users most certainly don't want to have to do that. At least with the appstore apps you can rely on them to stop doing anything as soon as you return to the home screen or click the phone "off". And Apple has done a really good job when it comes to power management. You may easily overlook this fact on an iPhone, but if you look at the iPod touch this thing runs (sleeps) for weeks if you press the off button. Having apps running in the background and then return to an empty battery two hours (or one day) later surely is *not* in the interest of the users. Constantly having to check for (and kill) running apps in some task-manager is no solution either.
Say what you will about Apple, but power management is one thing they are very serious about, not only with the iPhone. The new MacBook is able to even put most netbooks to shame when it comes to minimum power draw and this is not due to magic but just to lots of hard work and smart hard- and software. I've seen my MacBook drawing about 6 watts from the battery with WiFi on, display on 50% and writing things. This is outright impressive, they must have some really clever people working on that while most other hardware vendors just don't care and either stuff fat batteries into their machines or give you two hours of battery life. Limitations like "no background apps on the iPhone" are there for a good reason, so be careful what you wish for.
Just throw away every comment that contains any URL. A bit unfriendly, yes, but spam with no URL in it is rare and apart from very technical or Internet-centric applications users cope well with this.
I am a non-violent person (as are most of us). I believe more can be resolved with intelligent, logical discussion then could ever be resolved with violence, but I also believe that when the system is broken you cannot work within it.
Yeah, quite a while ago someone said we were in a time where it's too late to work from within the system but too early to just shoot the bastards. I fear we have moved on a bit since then.
Well they wouldn't be the first ones who've felt they've found the divine in an opiate induced euphoria.
Which is a quite sane (and often used) way of leaving this world for terminal cancer sufferers, especially as the suppression of the breathing reflex with opiates is a welcome thing when you can hardly breath anyway (due to airway obstruction by cancer). Sadly, this is often hindered by stupid laws and directions wrt opiate use even in terminal ill patients. Giving the terminal ill free access to opiates would be better for them than any religion, I think.
(I still don't understand why you seem to want to tinker with "syncing" your computer for hours. I just turn on my computer, and it just works.)
I have never been able to use more than one machine over any length of time without running into infuriating situations of having some data only on the wrong one, especially if one of those machines isn't online all of the time. Over time I then tend to use only one computer and don't use the other(s) anymore.
Don't get me wrong: I think that for many or even most home/casual users "normal" laptops and desktop machines are overpowered and overprized. These people will be happy with using nothing but a netbook. But if you're a heavy (professional) user a netbook may easily add lots of hassle for not having to lug around another pound of computer.
You may not be in that target market, but at least now you know who they are. For many (most?) of us, the extra computing power of traditional laptops goes grossly underutilized, so why buy more than you need and get a less mobile computer in return?
Because we like to have no more computers to care for than absolutely necessary? Mind you, this is a thing most people only discover after they have bought a netbook, but time is money and having to care for another machine and keeping it in sync and updated and making sure all the data is on it when you need it sucks big time. Yeah, there is all this talk about "the cloud" but this is nothing than empty promises. Even trying to set up something halfway usable for some of your data costs you hours and hours of your time and you will still be missing something (passwords, bookmarks, documents, whatever) when you really need it.
If you have been through this once you'll try really hard to have one machine that does everything you need. If this can be a netbook, fine. If not, buy a good notebook instead. It may be a pound heavier or so, but at least it will do what you need.
Cause they already have a laptop but it's a pain to carry the thing around for your average meeting or what not. Plus, tons of people get them for college since they are cheap. The couple hundred bucks does make a difference. And they aren't really that underpowered. 2 years ago a mini9 would have been a perfectly good laptop.
The thing that many people seem to forget is that having another computer to care for is a major pain in the ass in the long run. Many people have changed to notebooks exactly because they wanted to be able to use just *one* computer both on the desktop and when away and a netbook reverses that. If you can't use a netbook as your main and only computer you have gained exactly nothing.
I'm getting the impression that while a lot of these things are sold, they're getting not so much use. For most people it's just another gadget. A toy to show off and to use at home now and then, not more.
I've tried lots of netbooks and really was keen on buying one, but then the thought of having to nurse another machine along and to sync apps and data and bookmarks and passwords and updates made me think different...
Maybe not really true, but true enough. Zooming is a pain and scaling existing OS X apps hardly works at all. Not impossible, but not good enough for Apple.
No, that's unlikely for two reasons. Firstly, the iPhone OS is just another distribution of OS X compiled for ARM devices. Second, the iPhone spends most of its time in sleep—it's like an iPod, and you don't actually shut it down unless you reset it or start from an empty battery, in which case it takes quite a while to boot.
Yes, but it has a power management clever enough to draw almost no power when it sleeps. My iPod touch can sleep for weeks... If Apple can implement this on a tablet with a slightly more complex and powerful UI you'll have your instant-on (or better instant-wake) device. Surely much better than all these netbooks which actually are nothing but pretty old-fashioned shrunken laptops...
So will it be a computer running a "traditional" OS with the whole Windows, Icons, Mouse Pointer interface or will Apple make it a big iPhone like device that hides a lot of that stuff under a (relatively) minimalist user interface?
If you take a decent resolution and a 10" screen, the OS X interface will *need* a stylus to make it usable and Apple won't release anything that needs a stylus. This is a very simple fact: Full OS X on a small touchscreen is just the wrong OS with the wrong UI. Period.
So it will be the iPhone OS, just with a higher resolution and probably more functionality (c&p, some file manager). This will mean there won't be any apps for it at first, but iPhone developers should be up to speed very soon with this.
f ever there was a time to send a large human crew on a career-length mission (maybe 30 - 40 years), this would be the one. High-acceleration supply/instrument packages could be sent before and after them. A serious commitment to zero-gravity construction could be undertaken.
A nice thing about Titan is that it has a thick atmosphere which is not breathable but otherwise fine for humans. You could build habitats that just need to be airtight and insulated, but not pressurized. Even large structures (like inflated domes or tents) should be easy. Together with the low gravity this makes it not only very easy to land but also to live there. Much better than Mars, actually. You can't have much solar power, but wind power should be no problem. Venturing outside would require really warm clothing and some oxygen, but no pressure suit.
And you could not only have flying cars there, you could even have flying bicycles;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and *none* of these being even remotely qualified or even sane enough for the job. Who's willing to throw his very existence away for a few weeks or months on Mars just has no idea what he's actually talking about and very probably has many other illusions as well. You're not really thinking that you can successfully train someone to do the year-long transfer flight to Mars just to die there? You'd risk that they would be *begging* to do just a fly-around and come back instead after they've been through this. Everyone sane enough to manage that task would be too sane to do a one-way mission.
As a matter of fact, I *never* use the dropdown. It's much faster to just keep on typing in what I started to type than to look at the dropdown and decide what I meant to type and select it. Still I like the dropdown since very rarely I might not know the exact URL and then the list comes in handy. So I really like the "everything" style here.
There are clever ideas badly implemented and better implemented. Context sensitive menus aren't always bad.
Why does everybody act like Chrome OS will somehow be locked down to just running Chrome and using webapps into it? Just because the original blog post emphasised on the webapps part doesn't mean it will be any less functional than your favourite distro.
Well, it won't come with X11 but use its own windowing system. As far as GUIs go this will cut out quite a few of "normal" Linux apps...
But it did work. It's only recently that we have even had the technology necessary to have this kind of (relatively) secure ID card and the databases that would make it actually useful. Somehow, we managed to get along prior to having this capability. Just think of America during the late 18th century. Back then you could commit a crime, skip town, and effectively disappear. Hand-sketched "WANTED" posters were about the most technologically sophisticated method of finding someone. There were no federal crime databases, so you could have a criminal record and move to another state and tell any employer "I have no criminal record" and they would have no effective way to prove otherwise.
But this isn't the 18th century anymore. Think about it. Not paying your bills (instead of running away without paying in a store), credit card fraud and thousands more things are only possible *now*. And easily possible. Things like that might not have been a problem back then, but today single persons can crash the economy of a small country. And they often do.
There is a serious lack of inability to understand a sentiment. The best expression of that sentiment known to me is found in the Tao de Ching, chapter 57:
The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men's weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.
Therefore the sage says:
I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy peace and people become honest.
I do nothing and people become rich.
I have no desires and people return to the good and simple life.
Yeah, I love this, too. But we are far beyond that. The "simple life" would exclude cars, computers, the Internet, credit cards, moving freely around all over the world and most other things we take for granted. I think you seriously overestimate the will of the people to go back to a simple and truthful life. They are willing to take almost everything for a bit of comfort and security and stability. What you're doing is preaching for the people being different, but they aren't.
That this is so nearly impossible for us to imagine today is the real problem. The Founding Fathers understood this and their beliefs about freedom, what we often label "Libertarianism" today in order to make it sound like just another option, embodies this realization when it's correctly understood and not merely parroted or preached.
The world is moving on. Even the US has moved on. You can't have the values and mindsets of a rural and small-scale world and the global village of today at the same time. What works (ideally) in the former won't save you in the latter. In fact it will kill you. Give people a free hand in a world of easy opportunities and enough of them will prefer easy power over easy living.
I agree with you that we might just have missed the sweet spot years (centuries) ago. But I don't think there's a way back. We're moving forward and for now preaching solutions of yesterday is just sentimentality. Your quote from the Tao de Ching was probably sentimental even back then, yearning for a world that had vanished or had never existed at all except in the memories of old men dreaming of the rosy worl
This reminds me of the only sane answer to the piracy whining of the music industry: Don't want people copying and distributing your music? Don't produce music! Problem solved. (Or find other ways to profit from people marketing and distributing your stuff without requiring money for it -- there *must* be ways to profit from people working for nothing.)
No, really. As long as the only answer to individual people complaining about abuse of data they publish on facebook (or whereever) seems to be "don't publish things you don't want others to know" this is the only answer you can give Big Content likewise.
... is that *actually* we all would like to have a government that does not know anything about us and doesn't care who we are and what we do as long as we don't act as criminals or work in sensible areas.
This is a very simple thing to understand: As long as you don't mess around with your neighbours they don't need to know anything about you. As long as you don't mess around with your larger community it does not need to know anything about you. As long as you don't mess around with your government it does not need to know anything about you. In an ideal world you could be born, live and die without your government even knowing about you as long as you don't try to do something that harms the government or the community the government cares for.
Of course it doesn't work this way because there will always be a minority of people trying to get away from what they've done or who switch identities to be able to plot and steel and murder without being caught. And the more complex and mobile a society becomes the less you can rely on people not being able to exploit this. Nowadays and in the future this means that "leave me alone as long as I leave you alone" won't work anymore (if it ever did).
So, yes: There is no way around databases of citizens, identity cards and all this shit. The sooner we accept this, the better. Because once you have accepted this you can start to look at the real problem and the real problem is securing all this against abuse and tampering both by the government and interested third parties. The real problem is not someone knowing everything about you, the real problem is *you* knowing nothing about everyone else and the government (or corporations) having both the power and the freedom to abuse what they have.
And there are no simple solutions to all these problems. Todays highly virtualized, mobile and complex societies create totally new problems which need new solutions. We're not made for this and we have no build-in solutions to these problems. Every solution the ape in you suggests is probably wrong. Don't trust your first thoughts. We are building this world as we go and we can only try to do it as best as we can.
I really wouldn't mind if this would lead to a minimal accepted standard of what a "good" ad is: No animation or even flash, no sound or music, limited size (both in pixels and bytes), limited amount of ads per page, clear indication that it actually is an ad. *Then* add an option to ABP to allow these "good ads".
When I'm now and then browsing the web without an ad-blocker I'm totally shocked what's going on out there. Some pages are not only taking ages to load, they're actually unreadable and the content is so well hidden among all this flashing, moving, changing and talking stuff that I can't imagine this is in the best interest of all. Getting some sane standards here would be a real godsend. I certainly don't mind an ad here and there if I can rely on them behaving themselves.
But just having a flag that causes ABP not to block the ad is like a spam blocker respecting an email header not to block that spam. Totally insane, if you ask me.
To be fair, for some people their daily commute is just about the only time when they're really alone and have nothing to do other than driving, listening to music and being lazy. Depending on your work and family this time may be a gift from the gods.
our towns and cities are designed the way they are because that is what has worked.
This is one place where you're wrong. Cities and towns are designed the way they are in this country because there was a conscious decision decades ago to build our infrastructure that way. People sat down and said, "Do we want to build our cities and towns to support cars, or do we want to support pedestrians, bikes, trains and other public transportation?" And then they decided on cars.
Interestingly one thing you can see in Europe are towns and cities in which the basic layout is still from the middle ages and which are mostly *not* fit for heavy car traffic. If you look at Amsterdam it even has these channels which were built for transporting cargo and the rest of the city is not. And now look at how pedestrians and bicycles work there in a way that seems to freak out people who just can't imagine an average mom going shopping with two childs on her bike without thinking anything of it or a guy in a suit and with a briefcase in one hand cycling to work.
There has to be a reason that you see this all the time in Amsterdam and hardly ever in the US.
"Nobody reads books anymore."
-Steve Jobs
I'm thinking you're going to have to wait a long, long time for an e-book reader from Apple.
There have been some different noises from Apple recently. May be connected with the fact that ebook readers and books sell like hot cakes in the App Store. And: I've read about 70 books meanwhile on a mobile Apple device (iPod touch), so...
As to flipping back and forth between sections rapidly. That sounds like a limitation in traditional books. Unless you're saying that it's impossible for e-book readers to display two pages simultaneously?
No, the trouble is just with the slowness of the displays right now. And with two pages the screen gets a bit tight.
Why? The Kindle is too expensive for just a dedicated reader and the thing is just too slow. Yes, people are pretending it doesn't matter, but it does. Especially with textbooks you just *need* to browse a few pages forth and back and a Kindle drives you up the wall in no time here.
I'm fully expecting a 10" tablet (think oversized iPod touch) from Apple, with a perfect touchscreen and the iPhone OS. While this thing won't have the nice screen and great battery life as the Kindle, it will be much more flexible, faster and will have an user interface that does not suck. For a similar price.
While I can see that some people will prefer a dedicated reader, most people won't be able to resist the temptation to also have a choice of apps, games, email, a browser, calendar, movies, music and so on with them. If Apple does it right, all the netbook and Kindle craze will just have paved the way for them to march in and conquer as they did with the iPod.
Just believe what you like, this is easier for both of us.
Computers are no "investment". But that most PC machines are virtually worthless after a few years and Macs still sell for good money is just a fact.
He has a point. Macbook discoloration (pre-unibody), case chipping (pre-unibody, and this has happened to mine as well), as well as razor-sharp edges on all unibody macbooks. That and the overuse of heat paste, the general heat problems, screen backlighting unevenness... these are things I haven't seen on my dell, oddly enough.
And still, try to sell a Dell laptop after two or three years and compare that to what you get for a MacBook after two or three years...
The trouble is that as soon as you have arbitrary apps deciding to run in the background, you have to look *very* closely what they do. Because if you don't, these apps will suck at your battery until it is empty.
And most normal users most certainly don't want to have to do that. At least with the appstore apps you can rely on them to stop doing anything as soon as you return to the home screen or click the phone "off". And Apple has done a really good job when it comes to power management. You may easily overlook this fact on an iPhone, but if you look at the iPod touch this thing runs (sleeps) for weeks if you press the off button. Having apps running in the background and then return to an empty battery two hours (or one day) later surely is *not* in the interest of the users. Constantly having to check for (and kill) running apps in some task-manager is no solution either.
Say what you will about Apple, but power management is one thing they are very serious about, not only with the iPhone. The new MacBook is able to even put most netbooks to shame when it comes to minimum power draw and this is not due to magic but just to lots of hard work and smart hard- and software. I've seen my MacBook drawing about 6 watts from the battery with WiFi on, display on 50% and writing things. This is outright impressive, they must have some really clever people working on that while most other hardware vendors just don't care and either stuff fat batteries into their machines or give you two hours of battery life. Limitations like "no background apps on the iPhone" are there for a good reason, so be careful what you wish for.
Just throw away every comment that contains any URL. A bit unfriendly, yes, but spam with no URL in it is rare and apart from very technical or Internet-centric applications users cope well with this.
I am a non-violent person (as are most of us). I believe more can be resolved with intelligent, logical discussion then could ever be resolved with violence, but I also believe that when the system is broken you cannot work within it.
Yeah, quite a while ago someone said we were in a time where it's too late to work from within the system but too early to just shoot the bastards. I fear we have moved on a bit since then.
Well they wouldn't be the first ones who've felt they've found the divine in an opiate induced euphoria.
Which is a quite sane (and often used) way of leaving this world for terminal cancer sufferers, especially as the suppression of the breathing reflex with opiates is a welcome thing when you can hardly breath anyway (due to airway obstruction by cancer). Sadly, this is often hindered by stupid laws and directions wrt opiate use even in terminal ill patients. Giving the terminal ill free access to opiates would be better for them than any religion, I think.
(I still don't understand why you seem to want to tinker with "syncing" your computer for hours. I just turn on my computer, and it just works.)
I have never been able to use more than one machine over any length of time without running into infuriating situations of having some data only on the wrong one, especially if one of those machines isn't online all of the time. Over time I then tend to use only one computer and don't use the other(s) anymore.
Don't get me wrong: I think that for many or even most home/casual users "normal" laptops and desktop machines are overpowered and overprized. These people will be happy with using nothing but a netbook. But if you're a heavy (professional) user a netbook may easily add lots of hassle for not having to lug around another pound of computer.
You may not be in that target market, but at least now you know who they are. For many (most?) of us, the extra computing power of traditional laptops goes grossly underutilized, so why buy more than you need and get a less mobile computer in return?
Because we like to have no more computers to care for than absolutely necessary? Mind you, this is a thing most people only discover after they have bought a netbook, but time is money and having to care for another machine and keeping it in sync and updated and making sure all the data is on it when you need it sucks big time. Yeah, there is all this talk about "the cloud" but this is nothing than empty promises. Even trying to set up something halfway usable for some of your data costs you hours and hours of your time and you will still be missing something (passwords, bookmarks, documents, whatever) when you really need it.
If you have been through this once you'll try really hard to have one machine that does everything you need. If this can be a netbook, fine. If not, buy a good notebook instead. It may be a pound heavier or so, but at least it will do what you need.
Cause they already have a laptop but it's a pain to carry the thing around for your average meeting or what not. Plus, tons of people get them for college since they are cheap. The couple hundred bucks does make a difference. And they aren't really that underpowered. 2 years ago a mini9 would have been a perfectly good laptop.
The thing that many people seem to forget is that having another computer to care for is a major pain in the ass in the long run. Many people have changed to notebooks exactly because they wanted to be able to use just *one* computer both on the desktop and when away and a netbook reverses that. If you can't use a netbook as your main and only computer you have gained exactly nothing.
I'm getting the impression that while a lot of these things are sold, they're getting not so much use. For most people it's just another gadget. A toy to show off and to use at home now and then, not more.
I've tried lots of netbooks and really was keen on buying one, but then the thought of having to nurse another machine along and to sync apps and data and bookmarks and passwords and updates made me think different...
Maybe not really true, but true enough. Zooming is a pain and scaling existing OS X apps hardly works at all. Not impossible, but not good enough for Apple.
No, that's unlikely for two reasons. Firstly, the iPhone OS is just another distribution of OS X compiled for ARM devices. Second, the iPhone spends most of its time in sleep—it's like an iPod, and you don't actually shut it down unless you reset it or start from an empty battery, in which case it takes quite a while to boot.
Yes, but it has a power management clever enough to draw almost no power when it sleeps. My iPod touch can sleep for weeks... If Apple can implement this on a tablet with a slightly more complex and powerful UI you'll have your instant-on (or better instant-wake) device. Surely much better than all these netbooks which actually are nothing but pretty old-fashioned shrunken laptops...
If you take a decent resolution and a 10" screen, the OS X interface will *need* a stylus to make it usable and Apple won't release anything that needs a stylus. This is a very simple fact: Full OS X on a small touchscreen is just the wrong OS with the wrong UI. Period.
So it will be the iPhone OS, just with a higher resolution and probably more functionality (c&p, some file manager). This will mean there won't be any apps for it at first, but iPhone developers should be up to speed very soon with this.
A nice thing about Titan is that it has a thick atmosphere which is not breathable but otherwise fine for humans. You could build habitats that just need to be airtight and insulated, but not pressurized. Even large structures (like inflated domes or tents) should be easy. Together with the low gravity this makes it not only very easy to land but also to live there. Much better than Mars, actually. You can't have much solar power, but wind power should be no problem. Venturing outside would require really warm clothing and some oxygen, but no pressure suit.
And you could not only have flying cars there, you could even have flying bicycles ;-)