Yeah, it's essential. There are just too many common tasks to which tablets would be uniquely well-suited if they had a proper stylus. The flood of useless fat-finger styluses that appeared shortly after the iPad's introduction, and the zillions of apps that are clearly designed with a stylus in mind are a testament to that.
Yes, Jobs was wrong. Horribly wrong. So wrong, that he's set the whole tablet market back a few years. We'll see a few more product refreshes before manufactures catch-on and see real stylus support as the norm.
That the product was successful despite this obvious flaw is irrelevant to the fact that Jobs was unimaginably wrong about the stylus.
Take a look at the first iPhone -- incomplete, lacking features common to even dumbphones, no third-party apps -- it was a complete joke by any measure. Yet it was wildly successful. Does that mean Jobs was right to NOT include features like MMS or allow third-party apps? Of course not! Apps are all anyone talks about these days. It's the only reason to even consider buying an iOS device. Clearly, Jobs was wrong there just as he was wrong about the necessity of the stylus to tablet products.
You're confused. iOS hasn't exactly aged well. At present, it's one of the least usable mobile OS's on the market.
I'll refer you to things like the absurd number of functions crammed in to the home button as an easy example. There are plenty of other iOS UI and usability failures which I'll happily let other users point out.
I've been saying the same thing for a while now. Apples UI hasn't aged gracefully. Any claims they could have made about simplicity and ease-of-use in the past are long gone. Just take a look at their ridiculous suite of gestures, and the absurd number of functions crammed in to the home button. Compare that to the gesture suite on a tablet like the PlayBook and it's immediately obvious how poor the iOS UI really is.
Android, WebOS, BBOS,... just about everyone, really... caught up to iOS a long time ago. Hell, even RIM left them so far behind on the tablet front I don't see how Apple could possibly catch-up.
They're running on brand alone at this point. They're exactly where RIM was back in 2007, the clear leader; leaving all others to fight for a distant second place.
They're acting like the memes about RIM suggest as well, releasing the same product over and over with a few minor updates. (Well, to be fair, RIM did try a number of different form factors with various degrees of success between 2006-2010 and Apple is doing much less than that.)
Unless Apple steps up their game, they'll suffer the same fate -- but in a saturated, not a growing, market in 2015.
While the population is over 300 million, not all of those people own computers. In fact, a good number of the more recent additions mostly just droll on the keyboard.:)
I can type faster than I write on a keyboard, even a good cell-phone keyboard. However, I can't type faster than I write on a touch-screen keyboard.
I don't know that handwriting recognition is the answer as it wasn't very good in the PDA days. I tried out a lightscribe pen and was very impressed with how well it handled printed text, so it may very well be an option.
Handwriting or not, a good stylus is essential to the tablet "experience". Jobs was unimaginably wrong on that one. Here's hoping that future tablets take a cue from the Galaxy Note. I'd bet that good stylus product from Microsoft or RIM could easily take-out a second-rate tablet like iPad.
Indeed. Though if the goal of writing is to communicate an idea, and that intention was carried out successfully, I'm still forced to agree with the parent. It's pretty obvious that he meant "conflict-of-interest" and not "bias". Why else would he intentionally leave us with that impression? Some kind of strange trap?
It seems much more likely to me that it's just a simple mistake, and not some super-grammar-troll-fu. After all, people do make mistakes. Hell, I've even seen people admit mistakes on the internet. Even I, as arrogant as I am, acknowledged a mistake I made a couple days ago. A mistake, even on Slashdot, is not the end of the world. Fighting over it just distracts from the conversation.
(i) who says it's false, other than you and Samsung? The fact that you need to assume a conclusion to support your argument implies that you've got a hole in it.
That's called "begging the question". The parent, however, isn't doing that at all.
See, he's not arguing that the allegation is false. (That's assumed as, he suggests, the falsity of Apple's claims about the F700 have already been established.) He's arguing that the evidence that establishes the falsity of Apple's claims should be admissible. A fun bit -- that the allegations are false is completely irrelevant to his argument. He included it, it seems, for some rhetorical punch -- likely because he's not actually making a formal argument.
He would only be begging the question if the truth of one of the premises of his argument depended on the truth of the conclusion: that evidence is admissible.
You'd think that Slashdotters would have a basic understanding of formal logic.
Sorry, I've got to go with the other guy here. I can't see any other way to interpret your post other than you mean the Judge has a conflict-of-interest. Why would you use the term in that sort of rhetorical construct otherwise?
Fun fact, as there was no gap between the stripes to help keep the colors from overlapping, it made the logo difficult and costly to print. Apple's president, Mike Scott, called it "the most expensive bloody logo ever designed".
It's especially funny, as the stripes were only there to keep the logo from looking "like a cherry tomato", according to the designer.
I don't know that they were the first computer company with a rainbow logo. The colorful fruit was designed late in 1976, though I can't find any appearance before 1977 (Someone with better google-fu can check that for me).
Atari was using a rainbow theme in their logo, along with a zillion other tech companies, like RCA, around the same period. With the number of computer companies that popped up in the 1970's, and the popularity of the rainbow motif at the time, it's not difficult to image that some other computer company used a rainbow logo earlier.
I don't know that we could crown any company "the first computer company with a rainbow logo" with any degree of confidence.
Indeed, I figure that's why my post was modded down. We're very likely in complete agreement, though I understand the visceral reaction to anything that appears superficially as anti-science. I'm certainly not anti-science, though I do get frustrated sometimes with the nonsense from the science cheerleaders. Of course, offering anything like a correction is immediately assumed to be anti-science in the hostile environment that is the internet!
You may have seen this yourself, where an anti-AGW advocate is (rightly) verbally beaten in the winter for offering some record temperatures as evidence for their side, but nothing but praise for the pro-AGW advocate in the summer when they offer the same argument. Pointing out that the argument is bad no matter which position it supports to the poster offering it in the summer gets you labeled as an anti-science nut.
Not published = Trash is a statement whose truth can't really accurately be assessed
Here I disagree. I'd say that we can assess the validity of the statement, at least in one direction. Here, we need only a single counter example. That is, an unpublished study that is not trash. I'm sure you've already thought of a few. When I offered the Wakefield example (the wrong direction), I mistakenly thought that !A->B<=>A->!B, an easy error to make as !A<->B<=>A<->!B. (I won't try to defend that error as I think it's pretty clear what the parent meant, regardless of their choice of operator.)
I agree that published work can be garbage; we see it all the time, and I just cited a good example of it. But to ignore hundreds of iterations on the data both through peer review AND experimental reproduction is just putting your head in the sand.
Who said you should ignoring the literature? I certainly didn't imply that. My object was to the parents assertion, as summarized in the post title, "Not Published = Trash" which is quite clearly nonsense.
Though I should point out, as you hint at, that journals seem quite reluctant to publish replications, despite the importance of replication to the process of science!
I don't mean to dismiss publishing, it's very important! Though it's also important to understand the problems with publishing as it is today, if for no other reason than to avoid nonsense claims like those made by the parent.
I just wrote on a napkin, "The world is flat". Clearly that's as good as peer-reviewed science because of Andrew Wakefield.
You've missed the point. The point was, at risk of repeating myself, that it is irrational to reject the claims made in the article because it wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal. The correlate, of course, is that it is equally irrational to accept the claims made in an article solely on the basis of it being published in a peer-reviewed journal.
You don't have to accept the claims, but they need to stand or fall on their own merits, not those of the author or how he chose to make his findings public. That is, the claims aren't invalid just because of where they were published. That doesn't make any sense, yet it is precisely what the parent is claiming.
Published or Unpublished is not a reliable indicator of quality or reliability. Google Andrew Wakefield for a great example of published rubbish.
On the other side, you'll find that there is much more to publishing than the quality of the research. Publishing is quite political, and journals are often reluctant to publish controversial findings. Further, larger / more prestigious journals are extraordinarily reluctant to publish a paper if the author hasn't already published enough in the past, again, regardless of the papers actual quality. Yes, that's actually the reason they'll give for rejecting a paper!
So fuck you and your bullshit reasons for rejecting the articles claims. Be honest and let the findings stand or fall on their own merit, not your opinion of the author or how he decided to make his findings available.
Because it's awkward and unnecessary? Because it makes one-handed use impossible?
It's pretty obvious at this point that Apple dropped the ball. Their UI just couldn't keep up with the times.
They need to make some dramatic changes if they want to continue to compete in the mobile space. I'm confident that they're all-too-painfully aware of the current problems and are planning to fix them in future releases. That doesn't change the state of things now, however.
I think we can all agree that iOS, while designed for a touch-only interface, hasn't held up well. Just take a look at how may functions are crammed in to the home button! Hardly the intuitive! The same can be said for their ridiculous suite of gestures. (Five-finger swipe? Really?) Even RIM got the basic gestures right, with a rather nice set of simple and intuitive gestures which, for the most part, require but a single finger. It's hard to imagine for some, but RIM has crushed Apple in tablet UI design. How sad is that for Apple?
To defend the parent, with the ridiculous mess that the iOS UI is now, a straight MacOS interface would be an improvement.
Well, I did copy it from the book. You can find reprints on Amazon, it's still quite popular.
I'll bet if you dig around you can find a PDF. You might check google books, you can usually read large portions there. The quotes I used are from Chapter 2.
Math is a means of describing the world. It is not entirely abstract. It can be balls or calories or dollars.
If I may quote Whitehead:
Suppose we project our imagination backwards through many. thousands of years, and endeavor to realize the simple-mindedness of even the greatest intellects in those early societies. Abstract ideas which to us are immediately obvious must have been, for them, matters only of the. most dim apprehension. For example take the question of number. We think of the number 'five' as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days. Thus in considering the relations of the number 'five' to the number 'three: we are thinking of two groups of things, one with five members and the other with three members. But we are entirely abstracting from any consideration of any particular entities, or even of any particular sorts of entities, which go to make up the membership of either of the two groups. We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the m.embers of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it. During a long period, groups of fishes will have been compared to each other in respect to their multiplicity, and groups of days to each other. But the first man who noticed the analogy between a group of seven fishes and a group of seven days made a notable advance in the history of thought.
More directly:
The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction. All you assert is, that reason insists on the admission that, if any entities whatever have any relations which satisfy such-and-such purely abstract conditions, then they must have other relations which satisfy other purely abstract conditions.
From Science And The Modern World Lowell Lectures, 1925
There are Algebras for Logic, you know. I don't know how you could get through a class in Logic, Philosophy, or even Rhetoric without Boolean Algebra. Not as well known here are Heyting Algebras.
I guess my point is that Algebra is a pretty broad term and, yes, it appears that a Political Science student would benefit from a study of Algebra.
Of course, I'd take it a bit further and suggest that they would very likely benefit from a strong mathematics background, including statistics. I don't see how this is even a question.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's essential. There are just too many common tasks to which tablets would be uniquely well-suited if they had a proper stylus. The flood of useless fat-finger styluses that appeared shortly after the iPad's introduction, and the zillions of apps that are clearly designed with a stylus in mind are a testament to that.
Yes, Jobs was wrong. Horribly wrong. So wrong, that he's set the whole tablet market back a few years. We'll see a few more product refreshes before manufactures catch-on and see real stylus support as the norm.
That the product was successful despite this obvious flaw is irrelevant to the fact that Jobs was unimaginably wrong about the stylus.
Take a look at the first iPhone -- incomplete, lacking features common to even dumbphones, no third-party apps -- it was a complete joke by any measure. Yet it was wildly successful. Does that mean Jobs was right to NOT include features like MMS or allow third-party apps? Of course not! Apps are all anyone talks about these days. It's the only reason to even consider buying an iOS device. Clearly, Jobs was wrong there just as he was wrong about the necessity of the stylus to tablet products.
You're confused. iOS hasn't exactly aged well. At present, it's one of the least usable mobile OS's on the market.
I'll refer you to things like the absurd number of functions crammed in to the home button as an easy example. There are plenty of other iOS UI and usability failures which I'll happily let other users point out.
I've been saying the same thing for a while now. Apples UI hasn't aged gracefully. Any claims they could have made about simplicity and ease-of-use in the past are long gone. Just take a look at their ridiculous suite of gestures, and the absurd number of functions crammed in to the home button. Compare that to the gesture suite on a tablet like the PlayBook and it's immediately obvious how poor the iOS UI really is.
Android, WebOS, BBOS, ... just about everyone, really ... caught up to iOS a long time ago. Hell, even RIM left them so far behind on the tablet front I don't see how Apple could possibly catch-up.
They're running on brand alone at this point. They're exactly where RIM was back in 2007, the clear leader; leaving all others to fight for a distant second place.
They're acting like the memes about RIM suggest as well, releasing the same product over and over with a few minor updates. (Well, to be fair, RIM did try a number of different form factors with various degrees of success between 2006-2010 and Apple is doing much less than that.)
Unless Apple steps up their game, they'll suffer the same fate -- but in a saturated, not a growing, market in 2015.
While the population is over 300 million, not all of those people own computers. In fact, a good number of the more recent additions mostly just droll on the keyboard. :)
As has been pointed out over and over again, This Does Not Affect BES Users.
Everyone else is just as insecure as they always were. If you want security in India, RIM is still your only real choice.
More details here
I can type faster than I write on a keyboard, even a good cell-phone keyboard. However, I can't type faster than I write on a touch-screen keyboard.
I don't know that handwriting recognition is the answer as it wasn't very good in the PDA days. I tried out a lightscribe pen and was very impressed with how well it handled printed text, so it may very well be an option.
Handwriting or not, a good stylus is essential to the tablet "experience". Jobs was unimaginably wrong on that one. Here's hoping that future tablets take a cue from the Galaxy Note. I'd bet that good stylus product from Microsoft or RIM could easily take-out a second-rate tablet like iPad.
Ah, it would appear it was lost on me!
Indeed. Though if the goal of writing is to communicate an idea, and that intention was carried out successfully, I'm still forced to agree with the parent. It's pretty obvious that he meant "conflict-of-interest" and not "bias". Why else would he intentionally leave us with that impression? Some kind of strange trap?
It seems much more likely to me that it's just a simple mistake, and not some super-grammar-troll-fu. After all, people do make mistakes. Hell, I've even seen people admit mistakes on the internet. Even I, as arrogant as I am, acknowledged a mistake I made a couple days ago. A mistake, even on Slashdot, is not the end of the world. Fighting over it just distracts from the conversation.
(i) who says it's false, other than you and Samsung? The fact that you need to assume a conclusion to support your argument implies that you've got a hole in it.
That's called "begging the question". The parent, however, isn't doing that at all.
See, he's not arguing that the allegation is false. (That's assumed as, he suggests, the falsity of Apple's claims about the F700 have already been established.) He's arguing that the evidence that establishes the falsity of Apple's claims should be admissible. A fun bit -- that the allegations are false is completely irrelevant to his argument. He included it, it seems, for some rhetorical punch -- likely because he's not actually making a formal argument.
He would only be begging the question if the truth of one of the premises of his argument depended on the truth of the conclusion: that evidence is admissible.
You'd think that Slashdotters would have a basic understanding of formal logic.
Sorry, I've got to go with the other guy here. I can't see any other way to interpret your post other than you mean the Judge has a conflict-of-interest. Why would you use the term in that sort of rhetorical construct otherwise?
Let's not forget XYZZY
Fun fact, as there was no gap between the stripes to help keep the colors from overlapping, it made the logo difficult and costly to print. Apple's president, Mike Scott, called it "the most expensive bloody logo ever designed".
It's especially funny, as the stripes were only there to keep the logo from looking "like a cherry tomato", according to the designer.
I don't know that they were the first computer company with a rainbow logo. The colorful fruit was designed late in 1976, though I can't find any appearance before 1977 (Someone with better google-fu can check that for me).
Atari was using a rainbow theme in their logo, along with a zillion other tech companies, like RCA, around the same period. With the number of computer companies that popped up in the 1970's, and the popularity of the rainbow motif at the time, it's not difficult to image that some other computer company used a rainbow logo earlier.
I don't know that we could crown any company "the first computer company with a rainbow logo" with any degree of confidence.
640x800 should be more than adequate for a game.
I tried to play that "New Super Mario Brothers" game not long ago. I couldn't see a damn thing.
Contrast, people. Contrast is important. The challenge should be playing the game, not seeing the game.
Posting to undo an accidental negative mod.
Indeed, I figure that's why my post was modded down. We're very likely in complete agreement, though I understand the visceral reaction to anything that appears superficially as anti-science. I'm certainly not anti-science, though I do get frustrated sometimes with the nonsense from the science cheerleaders. Of course, offering anything like a correction is immediately assumed to be anti-science in the hostile environment that is the internet!
You may have seen this yourself, where an anti-AGW advocate is (rightly) verbally beaten in the winter for offering some record temperatures as evidence for their side, but nothing but praise for the pro-AGW advocate in the summer when they offer the same argument. Pointing out that the argument is bad no matter which position it supports to the poster offering it in the summer gets you labeled as an anti-science nut.
Not published = Trash is a statement whose truth can't really accurately be assessed
Here I disagree. I'd say that we can assess the validity of the statement, at least in one direction. Here, we need only a single counter example. That is, an unpublished study that is not trash. I'm sure you've already thought of a few. When I offered the Wakefield example (the wrong direction), I mistakenly thought that !A->B<=>A->!B, an easy error to make as !A<->B<=>A<->!B. (I won't try to defend that error as I think it's pretty clear what the parent meant, regardless of their choice of operator.)
I agree that published work can be garbage; we see it all the time, and I just cited a good example of it. But to ignore hundreds of iterations on the data both through peer review AND experimental reproduction is just putting your head in the sand.
Who said you should ignoring the literature? I certainly didn't imply that. My object was to the parents assertion, as summarized in the post title, "Not Published = Trash" which is quite clearly nonsense.
Though I should point out, as you hint at, that journals seem quite reluctant to publish replications, despite the importance of replication to the process of science!
I don't mean to dismiss publishing, it's very important! Though it's also important to understand the problems with publishing as it is today, if for no other reason than to avoid nonsense claims like those made by the parent.
I just wrote on a napkin, "The world is flat". Clearly that's as good as peer-reviewed science because of Andrew Wakefield.
You've missed the point. The point was, at risk of repeating myself, that it is irrational to reject the claims made in the article because it wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal. The correlate, of course, is that it is equally irrational to accept the claims made in an article solely on the basis of it being published in a peer-reviewed journal.
You don't have to accept the claims, but they need to stand or fall on their own merits, not those of the author or how he chose to make his findings public. That is, the claims aren't invalid just because of where they were published. That doesn't make any sense, yet it is precisely what the parent is claiming.
Published or Unpublished is not a reliable indicator of quality or reliability. Google Andrew Wakefield for a great example of published rubbish.
On the other side, you'll find that there is much more to publishing than the quality of the research. Publishing is quite political, and journals are often reluctant to publish controversial findings. Further, larger / more prestigious journals are extraordinarily reluctant to publish a paper if the author hasn't already published enough in the past, again, regardless of the papers actual quality. Yes, that's actually the reason they'll give for rejecting a paper!
So fuck you and your bullshit reasons for rejecting the articles claims. Be honest and let the findings stand or fall on their own merit, not your opinion of the author or how he decided to make his findings available.
Because it's awkward and unnecessary? Because it makes one-handed use impossible?
It's pretty obvious at this point that Apple dropped the ball. Their UI just couldn't keep up with the times.
They need to make some dramatic changes if they want to continue to compete in the mobile space. I'm confident that they're all-too-painfully aware of the current problems and are planning to fix them in future releases. That doesn't change the state of things now, however.
I think we can all agree that iOS, while designed for a touch-only interface, hasn't held up well. Just take a look at how may functions are crammed in to the home button! Hardly the intuitive! The same can be said for their ridiculous suite of gestures. (Five-finger swipe? Really?) Even RIM got the basic gestures right, with a rather nice set of simple and intuitive gestures which, for the most part, require but a single finger. It's hard to imagine for some, but RIM has crushed Apple in tablet UI design. How sad is that for Apple?
To defend the parent, with the ridiculous mess that the iOS UI is now, a straight MacOS interface would be an improvement.
Well, I did copy it from the book. You can find reprints on Amazon, it's still quite popular.
I'll bet if you dig around you can find a PDF. You might check google books, you can usually read large portions there. The quotes I used are from Chapter 2.
That's a bit like saying calculus isn't essential to physics as every natural philosopher before Newton got along just fine without it. :)
We're a bit ahead of Aristotle, Bacon, and Descartes now.
Math is a means of describing the world. It is not entirely abstract. It can be balls or calories or dollars.
If I may quote Whitehead:
Suppose we project our imagination backwards through many. thousands of years, and endeavor to realize the simple-mindedness of even the greatest intellects in those early societies. Abstract ideas which to us are immediately obvious must have been, for them, matters only of the. most dim apprehension. For example take the question of number. We think of the number 'five' as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days. Thus in considering the relations of the number 'five' to the number 'three: we are thinking of two groups of things, one with five members and the other with three members. But we are entirely abstracting from any consideration of any particular entities, or even of any particular sorts of entities, which go to make up the membership of either of the two groups. We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the m.embers of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it. During a long period, groups of fishes will have been compared to each other in respect to their multiplicity, and groups of days to each other. But the first man who noticed the analogy between a group of seven fishes and a group of seven days made a notable advance in the history of thought.
More directly:
The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction. All you assert is, that reason insists on the admission that, if any entities whatever have any relations which satisfy such-and-such purely abstract conditions, then they must have other relations which satisfy other purely abstract conditions.
From Science And The Modern World Lowell Lectures, 1925
There are Algebras for Logic, you know. I don't know how you could get through a class in Logic, Philosophy, or even Rhetoric without Boolean Algebra. Not as well known here are Heyting Algebras.
I guess my point is that Algebra is a pretty broad term and, yes, it appears that a Political Science student would benefit from a study of Algebra.
Of course, I'd take it a bit further and suggest that they would very likely benefit from a strong mathematics background, including statistics. I don't see how this is even a question.