There are other ways to manage security and combat piracy without draconian rules, you know. Other companies have been doing it for years. Apples way is, well, quite possibly the worst way for both developers and users. Take a look at the options available on BlackBerry, for example. They seem to be able to manage security without imposing absurd rules or forcing users to only use their app store. Their app store does have a number of simple options for developers to mitigate piracy that are non-intrusive to the end user, something other platforms may what to emulate.
Apple's way is not only bad for consumers and developers, it's also lazy and insecure. Android may not offer developers much protection, but it is absolutely no worse than what developers have been dealing with since, well, before Apple even existed.
For developers, piracy is a fact of life. Get used to it or find a way to mitigate losses caused by it. If it's major concern for you, try switching to a platform that already takes piracy seriously, unlike iOS and Android.
I was kind of hoping for some pin-based contraption. I mean image based is obviously the better way to do it, but still..
Pin-based contraption? Easy there Hollerith, it's not 1890 any more! Put down that abacus, we're not dropping pins through holes in to cups of mercury these days.
Check out the IBM 2501 -- it's optical, sweet-cheeks -- You can't do >500 cards/minute with one of your antique mechanical reader! Get with the times!
Should every summary take the time to explain every term that someone might not know?
Does every article about the iPhone need to explain that it's a smartphone product produced by Apple? (Apple is a California based company that produces computers and some consumer electronics. A smartphone is a cellular telephone based on a mobile computer, typically integrating features found in other portable computing and other personal electronics products. A cellular telephone is... a network is... )
If you don't know what a memristor is, first turn in your geek card, then punch the term in to HotBot. (HotBot was a popular search engine in the late 1990's. A search engine is... )
OODB's are a gigantic failure. They were introduced for one reason only: for vendors to cash in on the OOP hype.
None of the promises made by proponents of OOP (vendors, that is, later to be parroted by the ignorant) turned out to be true -- it was just easier to spot the faults in OODB's.
Had we listened to all that research done in the 1980's, we could have skipped the mess that is OOP and its equally useless cousin, OODB, altogether.
Probably because they're very likely illiterate and, consequently, can't make use of text messaging services.
Deaf schools need to be held to a standard -- any standard. The majority of HS graduates from our nations top schools for the deaf are reading at a 3rd-grade level. That's just unacceptable. It may also explain why unemployment in the deaf community is so high.
Either that or they're lazy shitheads who think it's just tops being deaf, don't see it as a disability, and refuse any and all medical and educational options for themselves and their children that would allow them to more easily interact with the "hearing world". (In children young enough, hearing, speech, and language development can easily match that of children who were not born deaf with, for example, a cochlear implant. Naturally, the "deaf community" hates that that particular technology is presented to parents of deaf children.)
It's probably a mix. I'll bet that a good bit of the negative stuff comes from a small but *cough* vocal minority.
No, the better usability of a capacitive touchscreen is not subjective.
Lol, call me when you learn the difference between subjective and objective.
I think I've made my point about the deficiencies of capacitive touch screens. I honestly don't understand your position that because you can work around their limitations with additional effort over alternatives they're better for all use cases.
I sketch and write a lot, so to me what's on the specs sheets is irrelevant as long as it doesn't get in my way.
Ah, but as we've seen on your video, it does get in the way! I know, you think that because with additional effort the limitations can be overcome for writing tasks that the technology is somehow better for the task that a technology that does not require additional effort to complete the task it's somehow better.
It's pretty obvious that I'm not going to get anywhere here. Enjoy zooming in on everything.
That's subjective, not objective. The difference is precision, however, is objective. It's no wonder you're having so much trouble here as such simple concepts seem to be completely beyond your reach.
Well, this is a waste of my time. The objective facts are that capacitive touch screens are significantly less precise compared to the older technology are are, consequently, not well suited to tasks such as handwriting recognition.
As I thought I made clear before, that you can sort-of accomplish the same task by piling on additional steps and complexity does not in any way make the two technologies equivalent or just as well suited to the same sorts of tasks.
But Go ahead and believe whatever nonsense you want. I learned a long time ago that it's impossible to reason with religious people.
Odd, I came the the exact opposite conclusion. It looked like you had to go out of your way to manage simple tasks like hand-writing a note. Consider performing the same tasks in the video to the equivalent with a resistive touch screen and the differences should be obvious.
Remember "can be done" is absolutely not the same as "can be done well". What that video shows is how much additional effort is necessary to accomplish those sorts of tasks -- not how "easily" it can be done -- on a capacitive touch screen.
I'm sorry. The fondle interface is just not a good fit for a great deal of otherwise obvious uses for slab-like mobile computers. Jobs was absolutely wrong about the stylus -- as the market for even the very poor fat-finger type stylus products shows.
I'm not sure what the video was trying to demonstrate -- it very clearly shows the problems and how poor solutions to writing on a capacitive touch-screen truly are. Take a look at 6:20 or so when he's writing. Full screen, giant letters, poor response from the unit. Contrast that with, well, writing on a resistive touchscreen.
There are clear and obvious problems with capacitive touch screens. I don't know why everyone is so quick to defend them -- we ought to be demanding better solutions, not lobbying for a technology clearly inadequate for use-cases to which tablets and slab-phones would otherwise be uniquely well-suited.
Indeed, you must. I'd consider that a (poor) solution to a problem caused by capacitive touch screens -- not a benefit offered by the technology.
With a stylus, small targets are no problem. Even something like the optical trackpad on BlackBerry phones is faster and more intuitive than pinch-to-zoom-because-my-target-is-too--small. (Of course, the optical trackpad is advantaged over the stylus in this instance as it retains single-handed use, which you lose with both the stylus and the pinch-to-zoom gesture.)
But, if you prefer the ruggedness of being able to have a solid Gorilla Glass touchscreen, the ease of tapping icons, scrolling with flicks and pinch/zoom with multi-touch, resistive can't handle the task.
Well, I don't recall too many smashed displays on older Palms like I see on today's insta-break Gorilla Glass displays. I'm not sure "rugged" is the right word -- it's more "scratch resistant" than anything else.
I've mentioned elsewhere, that while tapping over-sized icons and pinch to zoom are fine features, you give up far too much in exchange. (I didn't mention scrolling with flicks as it seems silly to me. A stylus and a scroll bar are far more efficient when moving to the top or bottom of a page, or quickly jumping to a specific part of a long document. Flicking is fun, but is otherwise less precise and far less efficient. I don't know how many times I've been annoyed by the very slow process scrolling gesture while trying to get to the top of a page.)
I'm not arguing the benefits of a resistive touch screen over a modern digitizer -- I even acknowledged its superiority of resistive touch screens in my earliest reply.
I'm arguing that a resistive touch screen is superior for pen-style inputs to a capacitive touch screen in every respect -- For example: it's less expensive in terms of cost, computation, and power-use and offers dramatically higher-precision than capacitive screens.
I further argue that the benefits that capacitive touch screens bring to slab devices are insufficient to overcome the drawbacks they bring with them -- nearly all of which are related to the poor precision they offer, to say nothing of the poor response of the technology to a broad class of user. (Women in particular have difficulty with capacitive touchscreens as their hands tend to be smaller and cooler than a mans hands.)
The biggest benefit capacitive touch screens offer is Mutli-touch, which doesn't offer much over "pinch-to-zoom" (games would be the only other benefit). Sure, Apple's products rely heavily on muti-touch gestures, but that's a result of poor UI decisions made for early iOS products. Taping onscreen targets is a mix -- you no longer need a pen, but you also need significantly larger targets.
Now, in exchange for those few benefits you give up precision making tasks like writing and drawing, clicking small targets (like on a web page), repositioning a text-cursor and selecting text, and other tasks which require high-precision more complicated, slower, and otherwise needlessly difficult.
A capacitive touch screen is clearly inferior to a resistive touch screen if your needs require precision.
Newer technologies like we're seeing in products like the Galaxy Note are undoubtedly going to play a significant role in the future, if the touch screen fad continues. A point to which I did not disagree.
I disagree. Back when PDAs were all-the-rage I wrote constantly on those old resistive touchscreens -- it made up the majority of my PDAs use! Tablets offer the opportunity to write more than just short-notes, and the capacitive touchscreen makes even that simple task difficult and frustrating.
Sketching out diagrams, taking meeting notes, etc. are all much better served by a resistive touchscreen or with a Wacom-style digitizer pen.
We've given up far too much utility in exchange for the very few extras gained by "modern" capacitive touchscreens. The Galaxy Note is on the right track. I expect we'll look back on that product as visionary in the future.
Resistive touch screens are awesome for precision. If I wanted a tablet for writing or drawing, I'd be stupid to opt for a capacitive touch screen over a resistive touch screen.
RIM has a patent on a hybrid resistive-capacitive touchscreen, which is really the best of both worlds. Finger fondling capacitive screen, cheap stylus friendly resistive touch screen. The Galaxy Note uses a more feature-rich Wacom digitizer which is awesome. It's a shame that they're the only company that understands how useful a stylus can be on a slab.
To answer Steve Jobs' question, "Who wants a stylus?": just about everybody. (No, those fat fake rubber finger "stylus" things don't count. They don't even come close.)
Indeed. A sizable portion of my own library can't be pirated or purchased in an electronic format. I imagine it's the same for everyone else who doesn't just blindly collect as many books as they can.
My guess is that they buy a lot of cheap new-release paperback sci-fi / fantasy books -- and didn't actually replace their entire library, just the books they really liked.
Funny, they're still in use in the office across the hall from mine. The girls there use it to fill out certain forms (printed on NCR paper) that never made it to the computer age.
Apparently they're still in common use. You can buy a brand-new typewriter at places like Office Max and Staples.
A quick check doesn't show anything as solid and reliable as my old IBM Selectric II, but they're new typewriters all the same.
You're confusing "assembled" with "influential". That doesn't even make sense.
As for the ridiculous criticism of the AIM-65's display, remember that it was not uncommon in to the 1980's, at least on portable computers. Compared to the popular SIM and KIM units of the time, the AIM-65's display was top-notch. It was also FAR more "complete" a system (why this makes you think it's influential, I'll never know) than the Apple I.
On the Apple I, you forget your history. About 200 were made and were not all sold assembled nor sold with a display, case, keyboard, power supply, etc. It was very much a bag of parts. I'm not sure you could even buy it pre-assembled (unlike other kit computers at the time), I'd have to dig around a bit to find out.
As for it's influence, I can't find any. The Apple I at the time was just another no-name kit computer with a tiny production run. Hardly any were produced, and it certainly didn't set any trends in the industry or spark a revolution and pioneer an entire industry like the Altair 8800.
Why am I even arguing this? Go read a damn history book. The only reason anyone gives a shit about the Apple I is Apples place in computer history, not because of that particular unit! As you seem to think that the Altair wasn't influential at all, you CLEARLY need a history lesson!
Slashdot Mirror
There are other ways to manage security and combat piracy without draconian rules, you know. Other companies have been doing it for years. Apples way is, well, quite possibly the worst way for both developers and users. Take a look at the options available on BlackBerry, for example. They seem to be able to manage security without imposing absurd rules or forcing users to only use their app store. Their app store does have a number of simple options for developers to mitigate piracy that are non-intrusive to the end user, something other platforms may what to emulate.
Apple's way is not only bad for consumers and developers, it's also lazy and insecure. Android may not offer developers much protection, but it is absolutely no worse than what developers have been dealing with since, well, before Apple even existed.
For developers, piracy is a fact of life. Get used to it or find a way to mitigate losses caused by it. If it's major concern for you, try switching to a platform that already takes piracy seriously, unlike iOS and Android.
I was kind of hoping for some pin-based contraption. I mean image based is obviously the better way to do it, but still..
Pin-based contraption? Easy there Hollerith, it's not 1890 any more! Put down that abacus, we're not dropping pins through holes in to cups of mercury these days.
Check out the IBM 2501 -- it's optical, sweet-cheeks -- You can't do >500 cards/minute with one of your antique mechanical reader! Get with the times!
Should every summary take the time to explain every term that someone might not know?
Does every article about the iPhone need to explain that it's a smartphone product produced by Apple? (Apple is a California based company that produces computers and some consumer electronics. A smartphone is a cellular telephone based on a mobile computer, typically integrating features found in other portable computing and other personal electronics products. A cellular telephone is ... a network is ... )
If you don't know what a memristor is, first turn in your geek card, then punch the term in to HotBot. (HotBot was a popular search engine in the late 1990's. A search engine is ... )
OODB's are a gigantic failure. They were introduced for one reason only: for vendors to cash in on the OOP hype.
None of the promises made by proponents of OOP (vendors, that is, later to be parroted by the ignorant) turned out to be true -- it was just easier to spot the faults in OODB's.
Had we listened to all that research done in the 1980's, we could have skipped the mess that is OOP and its equally useless cousin, OODB, altogether.
And with that, the parent's point is made...
Very sad.
Probably because they're very likely illiterate and, consequently, can't make use of text messaging services.
Deaf schools need to be held to a standard -- any standard. The majority of HS graduates from our nations top schools for the deaf are reading at a 3rd-grade level. That's just unacceptable. It may also explain why unemployment in the deaf community is so high.
Either that or they're lazy shitheads who think it's just tops being deaf, don't see it as a disability, and refuse any and all medical and educational options for themselves and their children that would allow them to more easily interact with the "hearing world". (In children young enough, hearing, speech, and language development can easily match that of children who were not born deaf with, for example, a cochlear implant. Naturally, the "deaf community" hates that that particular technology is presented to parents of deaf children.)
It's probably a mix. I'll bet that a good bit of the negative stuff comes from a small but *cough* vocal minority.
No, that's not the only thing I argued. I give up. It's like I'm talking to a particularly stupid rock.
No, the better usability of a capacitive touchscreen is not subjective.
Lol, call me when you learn the difference between subjective and objective.
I think I've made my point about the deficiencies of capacitive touch screens. I honestly don't understand your position that because you can work around their limitations with additional effort over alternatives they're better for all use cases.
I sketch and write a lot, so to me what's on the specs sheets is irrelevant as long as it doesn't get in my way.
Ah, but as we've seen on your video, it does get in the way! I know, you think that because with additional effort the limitations can be overcome for writing tasks that the technology is somehow better for the task that a technology that does not require additional effort to complete the task it's somehow better.
It's pretty obvious that I'm not going to get anywhere here. Enjoy zooming in on everything.
That's subjective, not objective. The difference is precision, however, is objective. It's no wonder you're having so much trouble here as such simple concepts seem to be completely beyond your reach.
Cool. Thanks for that.
Well, this is a waste of my time. The objective facts are that capacitive touch screens are significantly less precise compared to the older technology are are, consequently, not well suited to tasks such as handwriting recognition.
As I thought I made clear before, that you can sort-of accomplish the same task by piling on additional steps and complexity does not in any way make the two technologies equivalent or just as well suited to the same sorts of tasks.
But Go ahead and believe whatever nonsense you want. I learned a long time ago that it's impossible to reason with religious people.
Odd, I came the the exact opposite conclusion. It looked like you had to go out of your way to manage simple tasks like hand-writing a note. Consider performing the same tasks in the video to the equivalent with a resistive touch screen and the differences should be obvious.
Remember "can be done" is absolutely not the same as "can be done well". What that video shows is how much additional effort is necessary to accomplish those sorts of tasks -- not how "easily" it can be done -- on a capacitive touch screen.
I'm sorry. The fondle interface is just not a good fit for a great deal of otherwise obvious uses for slab-like mobile computers. Jobs was absolutely wrong about the stylus -- as the market for even the very poor fat-finger type stylus products shows.
Lol, I suppose I must be holding it wrong!
I'm not sure what the video was trying to demonstrate -- it very clearly shows the problems and how poor solutions to writing on a capacitive touch-screen truly are. Take a look at 6:20 or so when he's writing. Full screen, giant letters, poor response from the unit. Contrast that with, well, writing on a resistive touchscreen.
There are clear and obvious problems with capacitive touch screens. I don't know why everyone is so quick to defend them -- we ought to be demanding better solutions, not lobbying for a technology clearly inadequate for use-cases to which tablets and slab-phones would otherwise be uniquely well-suited.
Indeed, you must. I'd consider that a (poor) solution to a problem caused by capacitive touch screens -- not a benefit offered by the technology.
With a stylus, small targets are no problem. Even something like the optical trackpad on BlackBerry phones is faster and more intuitive than pinch-to-zoom-because-my-target-is-too--small. (Of course, the optical trackpad is advantaged over the stylus in this instance as it retains single-handed use, which you lose with both the stylus and the pinch-to-zoom gesture.)
But, if you prefer the ruggedness of being able to have a solid Gorilla Glass touchscreen, the ease of tapping icons, scrolling with flicks and pinch/zoom with multi-touch, resistive can't handle the task.
Well, I don't recall too many smashed displays on older Palms like I see on today's insta-break Gorilla Glass displays. I'm not sure "rugged" is the right word -- it's more "scratch resistant" than anything else.
I've mentioned elsewhere, that while tapping over-sized icons and pinch to zoom are fine features, you give up far too much in exchange. (I didn't mention scrolling with flicks as it seems silly to me. A stylus and a scroll bar are far more efficient when moving to the top or bottom of a page, or quickly jumping to a specific part of a long document. Flicking is fun, but is otherwise less precise and far less efficient. I don't know how many times I've been annoyed by the very slow process scrolling gesture while trying to get to the top of a page.)
I'm not arguing the benefits of a resistive touch screen over a modern digitizer -- I even acknowledged its superiority of resistive touch screens in my earliest reply.
I'm arguing that a resistive touch screen is superior for pen-style inputs to a capacitive touch screen in every respect -- For example: it's less expensive in terms of cost, computation, and power-use and offers dramatically higher-precision than capacitive screens.
I further argue that the benefits that capacitive touch screens bring to slab devices are insufficient to overcome the drawbacks they bring with them -- nearly all of which are related to the poor precision they offer, to say nothing of the poor response of the technology to a broad class of user. (Women in particular have difficulty with capacitive touchscreens as their hands tend to be smaller and cooler than a mans hands.)
The biggest benefit capacitive touch screens offer is Mutli-touch, which doesn't offer much over "pinch-to-zoom" (games would be the only other benefit). Sure, Apple's products rely heavily on muti-touch gestures, but that's a result of poor UI decisions made for early iOS products. Taping onscreen targets is a mix -- you no longer need a pen, but you also need significantly larger targets.
Now, in exchange for those few benefits you give up precision making tasks like writing and drawing, clicking small targets (like on a web page), repositioning a text-cursor and selecting text, and other tasks which require high-precision more complicated, slower, and otherwise needlessly difficult.
A capacitive touch screen is clearly inferior to a resistive touch screen if your needs require precision.
Newer technologies like we're seeing in products like the Galaxy Note are undoubtedly going to play a significant role in the future, if the touch screen fad continues. A point to which I did not disagree.
I disagree. Back when PDAs were all-the-rage I wrote constantly on those old resistive touchscreens -- it made up the majority of my PDAs use! Tablets offer the opportunity to write more than just short-notes, and the capacitive touchscreen makes even that simple task difficult and frustrating.
Sketching out diagrams, taking meeting notes, etc. are all much better served by a resistive touchscreen or with a Wacom-style digitizer pen.
We've given up far too much utility in exchange for the very few extras gained by "modern" capacitive touchscreens. The Galaxy Note is on the right track. I expect we'll look back on that product as visionary in the future.
Capacitive touch screen suck at precision.
Resistive touch screens are awesome for precision. If I wanted a tablet for writing or drawing, I'd be stupid to opt for a capacitive touch screen over a resistive touch screen.
RIM has a patent on a hybrid resistive-capacitive touchscreen, which is really the best of both worlds. Finger fondling capacitive screen, cheap stylus friendly resistive touch screen. The Galaxy Note uses a more feature-rich Wacom digitizer which is awesome. It's a shame that they're the only company that understands how useful a stylus can be on a slab.
To answer Steve Jobs' question, "Who wants a stylus?": just about everybody. (No, those fat fake rubber finger "stylus" things don't count. They don't even come close.)
Indeed. A sizable portion of my own library can't be pirated or purchased in an electronic format. I imagine it's the same for everyone else who doesn't just blindly collect as many books as they can.
My guess is that they buy a lot of cheap new-release paperback sci-fi / fantasy books -- and didn't actually replace their entire library, just the books they really liked.
Basically a straight up player that uses the file system without all of the "Library" bullshit
May others follow your example. Future generations will thank you.
Funny, they're still in use in the office across the hall from mine. The girls there use it to fill out certain forms (printed on NCR paper) that never made it to the computer age.
Apparently they're still in common use. You can buy a brand-new typewriter at places like Office Max and Staples.
A quick check doesn't show anything as solid and reliable as my old IBM Selectric II, but they're new typewriters all the same.
Whenever I hear the term "walled garden", all I can think about is Rappaccini's daughter.
Indeed, just like COBOL. It runs the world, you know. :)
From a guy who thinks the Altair 8800 hardly had any influence, I'm not surprised that you've confused "Apple I" with "SOL-20".
You're confusing "assembled" with "influential". That doesn't even make sense.
As for the ridiculous criticism of the AIM-65's display, remember that it was not uncommon in to the 1980's, at least on portable computers. Compared to the popular SIM and KIM units of the time, the AIM-65's display was top-notch. It was also FAR more "complete" a system (why this makes you think it's influential, I'll never know) than the Apple I.
On the Apple I, you forget your history. About 200 were made and were not all sold assembled nor sold with a display, case, keyboard, power supply, etc. It was very much a bag of parts. I'm not sure you could even buy it pre-assembled (unlike other kit computers at the time), I'd have to dig around a bit to find out.
As for it's influence, I can't find any. The Apple I at the time was just another no-name kit computer with a tiny production run. Hardly any were produced, and it certainly didn't set any trends in the industry or spark a revolution and pioneer an entire industry like the Altair 8800.
Why am I even arguing this? Go read a damn history book. The only reason anyone gives a shit about the Apple I is Apples place in computer history, not because of that particular unit! As you seem to think that the Altair wasn't influential at all, you CLEARLY need a history lesson!