development of fine motor skills comes later--four years olds are still working on gross motor skills (large movements with even the fingers). This alone is reason to encourage continued outdoor activity as without it, there might never be appropriate development for the kid and it could affect a variety of areas in his life.
A computer does not prevent or conflict with outdoor activity unless it is used inappropriately. In late November in the US the sun sets at around 5:00pm, but no four year old is ready for bed at that time. Sure, there are books and movies and craft projects and family time, but these are not always available/desirable/possible. A four year old can handle PBS Kids just fine, and there are times when it is the best choice.
Why in God's name would you give a computer to a 4-year-old? Give him a damn baseball or something, the last thing he needs in his formative years is to vegetate in front of a screen.
It's perfectly appropriate for a 4 year old to have access to a computer. There are plenty of times when it is not feasible to play baseball... Short winter days, rainy summer days, under-the-weather days, etc. Having a computer != "vegetate in front of a screen". There are plenty of things a little kid can do on a computer that are enriching. Of course he needs guidance. But he needs guidance in nearly every aspect of his life, just like every other four year old. You don't just give a kid a baseball and shove them out the door and expect them to have fun. Just like you don't just plop a kid down in front of a computer and expect them to learn anything.
Between PBS Kids, Club Penguin, et al, there is really no need to install or buy anything except for Flash. By the time he outgrows these games, it will be years down the road and he'll be able to figure out what to do next.
Say what you will about Flash, but there is a lot of pretty good content for kids out there.
So you're whining that you can't drive wrecklessly down a street and possibly kill people. You're the reason why we can't have nice things.
The reason we can't have nice things is not because people are human and make mistakes and do dumb things. The reason we can't have nice things is because recently the US has turned into a police state and a nanny state. Kids aren't allowed to walk to the park, zero-tolerance/three-strikes for utterly minor "crimes", and being treated like a criminal for wanting to travel around the country are all new things that have come to be over the last few decades. To pretty much any average US citizen (Helen Lovejoys aside) who is paying attention, this is an obvious and blatant turn for the worse.
People being human is not preventing you from having nice things. The current environment that is dehumanizing everybody indiscriminately is.
facebook came first... if it hadn't, would apple still have called it facetime? if the exact same service and user base as facebook.com existed for camerabook.com, would apple have called it cameratime?
No. "Face time" is an idiom that means "speak directly to someone who is in front of you." Eg, "I need to go spend some face time with my accountant." It has nothing to do with Facebook at all.
<quote>
<p>I've been thinking about that for years, but never said anything because I didn't want to give anyone any ideas.</p>
</quote>
I've been -saying- that for years and it still hasn't happened. I figured that if I saw the possibility within five minutes of seeing the line, anyone else would be able to see it without too much trouble. I've been suspecting that either the so-called 'threat' is far, far overblown or these terrorists are complete and total idiots.
Isn't this what happened at LAX in 2003 or so? It certainly happens in other places around the world. I was at a baseball game in NYC shortly after 9/11 with a friend who has spent time in Isreal, and the lines and crowds outside the security checkpoints at the stadium made him visibly upset.
That was probably their policy and they gave everyone a free Black Berry. Then a few Apple "Fanatics" started whining they wanted to user their UBER sweet iPhones and the company is being racist against their phones if they don't let them use it.
Or, since I already have a device capable of accessing the company exchange server, I consider it a waste and a burden to carry around another device. This is what I do. While I am not happy about the possibility of a remote wipe, on balance it is worth it to not lug another device/charger/etc. To mitigate the small possibility of a remote wipe, I perform backups. I can't think of a single piece of data on my phone that I couldn't live without, so the backups are really just a convenience so that I don't have to reassemble everything (music, photos, contacts, etc). If I lose a day's worth of new data, who cares? It would only be notes or phone numbers or texts. None of that is critical, and if it was, I would immediately copy it off the phony by emailing it to myself or similar. Hell, I would do this even if no one could remotely wipe my phone, because there is always the possibility that I would lose the thing or accidentally destroy it.
My OS X install definitely has CVS although I'm not sure if it came with the OS or the dev tools.
I just picked up a mac last Friday, and I haven't installed the dev tools yet. It has svn, but not cvs. Older versions used to ship with cvs, IIRC, but not for a while. If you do an OS upgrade or migration assistant setup through the years, it's likely that cvs will be installed. But OS X does not ship with cvs anymore.
But does it work for them? If so, great! Why switch to something else if you have no real need for all those features?
It's not just about features, CVS is deeply broken (tagging/branching, directories, binary files, metadata, etc). Subversion is a drop-in replacement that fixes (most) of the problems and can be used in exactly the same workflow. The two are equivalent and one is less broken - it's kind of a no-brainer.
Also, OS X ships with svn, but not cvs. I'm not sure that if you install the dev tools if that will install cvs, but I tend to doubt it.
They are interesting, but with the cultural reference points being half a century ago, they are kind of hard to relate to like the kids half a century related to them. One of those "you had to be there" moments.
There are close to zero overt cultural reference points in The Beatles songs. Some of the early songs are stylistically dated, and some of them are technologically constrained, but the vast majority of their songs are timeless works of art that are significant in almost every way. (And, yes, there is the occasional "meh" song, even on their best albums.) You don't have to love them, but not paying attention to them solely because they are 50 years old is, I think, a mistake. There are many kids that I know who *love* The Beatles.
Getting these songs into the iTunes store is significant because it makes them accessible to a huge number of people that otherwise would not bother, ie teenagers and boomers. I don't know a single teenager who would actually go to a record store or order a cd off of amazon, and I don't know many boomers who have figured out how to rip their cds.
I already have every Beatles album on my phone, so this event doesn't directly matter at all to me. But I am still happy about it. The Beatles are good for the universe.
I could not yet try Mathematica 8 out, but I hope one will be able to turn the feature on and off. A switch like in "perl -w" should be built in.
Mathematica is first of all also a programming language, especially for Mathematics and colloquial language is not precise.
It could be be frustrating if wrong syntax still produces reasonable results.
Incorrect, but working code might become the standard if one does not notice. Its like with memory allocation errors in C produced by incorrect
code which still compiles. It will haunt the programmer in the long term.
I'm not in the field, so I've never seen anyone use Mathematica. But math is a continuum from colloquial to formal. Any tool that allows folks to play around with math in an informal, yet computationally sound way is a good thing. There is nothing wrong with VB and C coexisting -- it is a good thing to have different tools and abstractions available to the laymen and the experts.
Isn't the entire point of twitter communicating with a large audience? If no one knows who you are, then what's the point?
I don't care about the dude behind @ShitMyDadSays (the Twitter account, not the absolutely horrendous TV show) but I love what he puts out there (I follow him by RSS though). Hell, a lot of the people I follow on Twitter I don't know anything about but I find what they have to say interesting.
YMMV.
I suspect that a lot of folks agree completely with what you said, but the guy you responded to was making the converse point -- if you are someone who a lot of people are interested in, and you use twitter, there is pretty much no point if you don't tell anyone. Reading through Steve Ballmer's tweets just reinforces the notion that the endeavor is completely pointless. He was probably just trying it out to "stay in touch with what the kids are doing." There is really nothing to see here.
What good did it do? Again, the people actually following and receiving those messages WANTED to see them. I don't generally like or use twitter much myself but that is a huge benefit twitter has as a communications channel, in that it's immune from sent spam
I frequently see re-tweets of tweets that I'm not interested in seeing via people that I follow. So it's not exactly pub-sub -- messages can and do leak across explicit "follows".
be sure the site is using SSL (also always a good idea.)
It's not always easy to do this. You could easily verify that a login page is ssl, but you don't know where you are going to get 302ed to after you submit that form.
I wish browsers had a way to temporarily disable plain http for such occasions. In the meantime there is always software firewalls I guess.
Having two elementary-school-aged kids, I have observed that the quality/ergo/comfort of furniture is mostly irrelevant to kids. I do not know why this is, perhaps because of a different weight:surface area ratio, or some similar physiological difference. My son's mattress is a "kids" mattress, and it is the most uncomfortable mattress I have ever been on. But he sleeps fine, and he's unable to talk about the difference between his mattress and my mattress. My daughter does her homework at the dinner table, in the most unergonomic way possible. I help her get more comfortable and rearrange things to be better, but I often get the feeling that I do so in vain since she happily completes her homework either way.
So I find it dubious that a kids aeron would make a big difference in a child's ability to learn or focus. But what do I know? I'm curious if there is more data on this.
I was on a flight next to someone with an early prototype, and it does indeed look like a nice UI. I was a little baffled by the lack of UI labels, but the guy seemed to have no problem getting around.
The apps that I saw looked solid. But, on the other hand I'm curious about how well the browser is going to work. It ships with something like IE7 AFAIK, and it seems like it's not going to be a great experience. Are sites really going to have a mobile-webkit version and a mobile-ie version of their content? That seems crazy to me, but I'm looking forward to seeing how it will work out. Scanning the Engadget coverage of the announcement, it looks like they didn't even mention the browser, let alone demo it.
I don't know if I had RSI or what, but I had pain in my wrists and forearms at the end of the day while I used a thinkpad (both with and without a decent ibm 101 keyboard). I am very sensitive to ergonomics -- I have a really nice chair, a really nice desk, the best lighting I can afford.
I switched to a Mac Book Pro, and I never had any pain with the trackpad, even in the most awkward postures. The Apple 101 keyboard is also great for my ergonomics while I'm at my desk.
Still, I had wrist pain after sitting at my desk using my fancy MS mouse all day. I recently got the external Apple trackpad, and my mouse has been collecting dust ever since. I have zero pain even after a long day or a long week. The stuff is expensive, it takes some getting used to (the built-in trackpad and the external trackpad only work well if you grok their gestures). But it is well worth it for me.
Yeah, and you won't either, because Apple rejected it.
The app is called "Camera+", and it is an outstanding app. It fixes many of the feature omissions in the standard iOS camera app, and it's a joy to use if you understand photography. Apple rejected a particular version of the app, but you can still get it and try it without this "controversial" feature.
I used a version of this app while the volume button functioned as the shutter button. It was kind of neat, but it was far from a deal breaker that it was removed.
I feel bad for the devs who, I believe, worked on two separate hacks to get this working only to be forced to eventually give up. I've been there, and it sucks to have a vision that is impossible to finish for reasons outside your control.
On the other hand I can understand the guidelines. On my phone, it's not even labeled as a "volume" button, it just has a "+" on it. But I, the user, know that's the way to control volume. If apps start screwing with that, I am going to lose confidence that I will be able to silence my phone while running some random app, and I do not want that at all.
It's a solid script, and the visuals are great. But it's a shallow rendering of a story, copying all the idioms of Hollywood. My son heard the movie as I was watching it, and he walked in and asked, "Are you watching Narnia?"
If a short film of this quality can be produced without Hollywood right now, imagine what will appear a few more years down the road.
Nothing. Hollywood doesn't fit into this equation. Hollywood deals with talent and business, not software. Hollywood already uses a great deal of FOSS, and I doubt this movie will change a future audience's experience at all.
Kudos to them nonetheless, it's a fun few minutes of flick.
Right, and that attitude has really killed Apple's computer products.. Oh wait, perhaps not.:)
Perhaps we forget our history, the now defunct Apple Computers?
Apple Inc is making the same mistakes as Apple Computers, Apple Computers made three big mistakes:
1. Made something that was expensive and not any better then its competitors, they called it the Lisa and was built because one man dictated how everything should work.
2. Isolated their core audience, the Lisa got hackers offside, so they switched to the new IBM offerings and businesses went with them.
3. Sued Microsoft using a dubious suit when they could not compete.
Now Apple Inc made mistake #1 already, they learned from mistake number #2 but picked the wrong audience, the "in" crowd are a fickle bunch which will change their minds as soon as the next big thing(TM) comes along and they've thrown themselves head first into #3 by suing HTC. This last reason says it all, Apple is unable to compete with other manufacturers so they are suing them to prevent anyone else from getting a competitive advantage and ultimately its a losing battle as 1. HTC is Taiwanese and can tell Apple and US laws to sod off (Europe, Asia and China are larger markets then the US) and 2. Apple will have to sue everyone in the end.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
1) There is essentially no competition in the iPod thouch/iPad market. There is the dell streak, which is more expensive than the iPad, and there are a bunch of crappy andriod mp3 players. Nothing else is shipping. The HP Slate looks like a travesty (It has a "ctrl-alt-delete" hardware button!). The Blackberry PlayBook won't be released for a long time, and while it looks pretty good, they don't mention battery life at all. And it has no 3g/etc radio at all. And it has no SDK outside of Webkit and Flash. My bet is that PlayBook will cost more than the iPad too, but we'll see. The iPhone is expensive, but it's hard to argue that it's not any better than other stuff on the market. It's probably worse in some narrow ways, but on the whole, the iPhone 4 is not worse than everything else out there. Not by a mile.
2) What is this "in" crowd you speak of? People I know who have Apple stuff include a 70 year old grandmother who loves her iPad (and couldn't work a Dell PC to save her life), a knucklehead MBA type who replaced his blackberry with an iPhone, and most of the people I know who develop software. Sure, I'm certain there are a lot of iPhones in Williamsburg, but you'd have a hard time convincing me that Apple is selling to a niche group of hipsters with berets or fixies. Apple makes incredibly nice devices that anyone from a four-year-old to a hundred-year-old can use and not feel like an idiot. And they sell hundreds of millions of them.
3) I can't really comment on this, because I think the field is changing so rapidly and I guess I choose to not really care. I hate software patents, and I realize that Apple plays it's cards pretty aggressively in this subject. I'm not smart enough to understand what Apple's multi-touch patent is about, but there are other multi-touch devices out there. What, specifically, are you referring to here?
The vision that Mark Zuckerberg talks about is using Facebook as a personal computing/communication platform. The way I read this is not that the Facebook app would be front and center, but rather that you would buy a phone, take it out of the box, log into Facebook, and have all your contacts in your address book, all your bookmarks in your browser, all your photos in your photo app, etc. I imagine this could extend to regular PCs/tablets/laptops too.
It's not for me, but I can kind of see the point. Lots of people struggle to set up a phone or computer, so having all the data that a normal person uses day-to-day be portable across the devices that a normal person uses is not a bad idea. The success will depend entirely on the implementation and how it works over time. I suspect Facebook knows this and will not sabotage their investment by taking any shortcuts. But who knows.
In any case, there's pretty much no chance that a traditional Facebook app such as Farmville will be beeping at you in the middle of the night. That's not the point of this endeavor at all.
Just to reply to myself and add one more thing -- If this is indeed the vision for some of Facebook's future efforts, then there is the obvious potential pain point of storing and porting non-Facebook data. If this means that Facebook opens up and competes on features/ui/speed/etc rather than on lock-in and network effect, that is a good thing.
The vision that Mark Zuckerberg talks about is using Facebook as a personal computing/communication platform. The way I read this is not that the Facebook app would be front and center, but rather that you would buy a phone, take it out of the box, log into Facebook, and have all your contacts in your address book, all your bookmarks in your browser, all your photos in your photo app, etc. I imagine this could extend to regular PCs/tablets/laptops too.
It's not for me, but I can kind of see the point. Lots of people struggle to set up a phone or computer, so having all the data that a normal person uses day-to-day be portable across the devices that a normal person uses is not a bad idea. The success will depend entirely on the implementation and how it works over time. I suspect Facebook knows this and will not sabotage their investment by taking any shortcuts. But who knows.
In any case, there's pretty much no chance that a traditional Facebook app such as Farmville will be beeping at you in the middle of the night. That's not the point of this endeavor at all.
Slashdot Mirror
development of fine motor skills comes later--four years olds are still working on gross motor skills (large movements with even the fingers). This alone is reason to encourage continued outdoor activity as without it, there might never be appropriate development for the kid and it could affect a variety of areas in his life.
A computer does not prevent or conflict with outdoor activity unless it is used inappropriately. In late November in the US the sun sets at around 5:00pm, but no four year old is ready for bed at that time. Sure, there are books and movies and craft projects and family time, but these are not always available/desirable/possible. A four year old can handle PBS Kids just fine, and there are times when it is the best choice.
Why in God's name would you give a computer to a 4-year-old? Give him a damn baseball or something, the last thing he needs in his formative years is to vegetate in front of a screen.
It's perfectly appropriate for a 4 year old to have access to a computer. There are plenty of times when it is not feasible to play baseball... Short winter days, rainy summer days, under-the-weather days, etc. Having a computer != "vegetate in front of a screen". There are plenty of things a little kid can do on a computer that are enriching. Of course he needs guidance. But he needs guidance in nearly every aspect of his life, just like every other four year old. You don't just give a kid a baseball and shove them out the door and expect them to have fun. Just like you don't just plop a kid down in front of a computer and expect them to learn anything.
Between PBS Kids, Club Penguin, et al, there is really no need to install or buy anything except for Flash. By the time he outgrows these games, it will be years down the road and he'll be able to figure out what to do next.
Say what you will about Flash, but there is a lot of pretty good content for kids out there.
So you're whining that you can't drive wrecklessly down a street and possibly kill people. You're the reason why we can't have nice things.
The reason we can't have nice things is not because people are human and make mistakes and do dumb things. The reason we can't have nice things is because recently the US has turned into a police state and a nanny state. Kids aren't allowed to walk to the park, zero-tolerance/three-strikes for utterly minor "crimes", and being treated like a criminal for wanting to travel around the country are all new things that have come to be over the last few decades. To pretty much any average US citizen (Helen Lovejoys aside) who is paying attention, this is an obvious and blatant turn for the worse.
People being human is not preventing you from having nice things. The current environment that is dehumanizing everybody indiscriminately is.
facebook came first... if it hadn't, would apple still have called it facetime? if the exact same service and user base as facebook.com existed for camerabook.com, would apple have called it cameratime?
No. "Face time" is an idiom that means "speak directly to someone who is in front of you." Eg, "I need to go spend some face time with my accountant." It has nothing to do with Facebook at all.
<quote> <p>I've been thinking about that for years, but never said anything because I didn't want to give anyone any ideas.</p> </quote> I've been -saying- that for years and it still hasn't happened. I figured that if I saw the possibility within five minutes of seeing the line, anyone else would be able to see it without too much trouble. I've been suspecting that either the so-called 'threat' is far, far overblown or these terrorists are complete and total idiots.
Isn't this what happened at LAX in 2003 or so? It certainly happens in other places around the world. I was at a baseball game in NYC shortly after 9/11 with a friend who has spent time in Isreal, and the lines and crowds outside the security checkpoints at the stadium made him visibly upset.
That was probably their policy and they gave everyone a free Black Berry. Then a few Apple "Fanatics" started whining they wanted to user their UBER sweet iPhones and the company is being racist against their phones if they don't let them use it.
Or, since I already have a device capable of accessing the company exchange server, I consider it a waste and a burden to carry around another device. This is what I do. While I am not happy about the possibility of a remote wipe, on balance it is worth it to not lug another device/charger/etc. To mitigate the small possibility of a remote wipe, I perform backups. I can't think of a single piece of data on my phone that I couldn't live without, so the backups are really just a convenience so that I don't have to reassemble everything (music, photos, contacts, etc). If I lose a day's worth of new data, who cares? It would only be notes or phone numbers or texts. None of that is critical, and if it was, I would immediately copy it off the phony by emailing it to myself or similar. Hell, I would do this even if no one could remotely wipe my phone, because there is always the possibility that I would lose the thing or accidentally destroy it.
My OS X install definitely has CVS although I'm not sure if it came with the OS or the dev tools.
I just picked up a mac last Friday, and I haven't installed the dev tools yet. It has svn, but not cvs. Older versions used to ship with cvs, IIRC, but not for a while. If you do an OS upgrade or migration assistant setup through the years, it's likely that cvs will be installed. But OS X does not ship with cvs anymore.
But does it work for them? If so, great! Why switch to something else if you have no real need for all those features? It's not just about features, CVS is deeply broken (tagging/branching, directories, binary files, metadata, etc). Subversion is a drop-in replacement that fixes (most) of the problems and can be used in exactly the same workflow. The two are equivalent and one is less broken - it's kind of a no-brainer.
Also, OS X ships with svn, but not cvs. I'm not sure that if you install the dev tools if that will install cvs, but I tend to doubt it.
They are interesting, but with the cultural reference points being half a century ago, they are kind of hard to relate to like the kids half a century related to them. One of those "you had to be there" moments.
There are close to zero overt cultural reference points in The Beatles songs. Some of the early songs are stylistically dated, and some of them are technologically constrained, but the vast majority of their songs are timeless works of art that are significant in almost every way. (And, yes, there is the occasional "meh" song, even on their best albums.) You don't have to love them, but not paying attention to them solely because they are 50 years old is, I think, a mistake. There are many kids that I know who *love* The Beatles.
Getting these songs into the iTunes store is significant because it makes them accessible to a huge number of people that otherwise would not bother, ie teenagers and boomers. I don't know a single teenager who would actually go to a record store or order a cd off of amazon, and I don't know many boomers who have figured out how to rip their cds.
I already have every Beatles album on my phone, so this event doesn't directly matter at all to me. But I am still happy about it. The Beatles are good for the universe.
I could not yet try Mathematica 8 out, but I hope one will be able to turn the feature on and off. A switch like in "perl -w" should be built in. Mathematica is first of all also a programming language, especially for Mathematics and colloquial language is not precise. It could be be frustrating if wrong syntax still produces reasonable results. Incorrect, but working code might become the standard if one does not notice. Its like with memory allocation errors in C produced by incorrect code which still compiles. It will haunt the programmer in the long term.
I'm not in the field, so I've never seen anyone use Mathematica. But math is a continuum from colloquial to formal. Any tool that allows folks to play around with math in an informal, yet computationally sound way is a good thing. There is nothing wrong with VB and C coexisting -- it is a good thing to have different tools and abstractions available to the laymen and the experts.
Isn't the entire point of twitter communicating with a large audience? If no one knows who you are, then what's the point?
I don't care about the dude behind @ShitMyDadSays (the Twitter account, not the absolutely horrendous TV show) but I love what he puts out there (I follow him by RSS though). Hell, a lot of the people I follow on Twitter I don't know anything about but I find what they have to say interesting.
YMMV.
I suspect that a lot of folks agree completely with what you said, but the guy you responded to was making the converse point -- if you are someone who a lot of people are interested in, and you use twitter, there is pretty much no point if you don't tell anyone. Reading through Steve Ballmer's tweets just reinforces the notion that the endeavor is completely pointless. He was probably just trying it out to "stay in touch with what the kids are doing." There is really nothing to see here.
Too bad Oracle now owns the BEA implementation of java too
BEA never wrote a JVM. They bought JRocket shortly before being acquired by Oracle.
What good did it do? Again, the people actually following and receiving those messages WANTED to see them. I don't generally like or use twitter much myself but that is a huge benefit twitter has as a communications channel, in that it's immune from sent spam
I frequently see re-tweets of tweets that I'm not interested in seeing via people that I follow. So it's not exactly pub-sub -- messages can and do leak across explicit "follows".
be sure the site is using SSL (also always a good idea.)
It's not always easy to do this. You could easily verify that a login page is ssl, but you don't know where you are going to get 302ed to after you submit that form.
I wish browsers had a way to temporarily disable plain http for such occasions. In the meantime there is always software firewalls I guess.
That's funny, GPS on my base model iPad works great.
And won't work in the boonies.
The iPad wifi "GPS" is based on wifi points, and can work somewhat in the city, just like the original iPhone did.
There is no dedicated GPS chip in either.
The GPS on my iPhone 4 doesn't work in the boonies, either. Or if it does work, it takes far too long to lock a signal making it essentially useless.
Having two elementary-school-aged kids, I have observed that the quality/ergo/comfort of furniture is mostly irrelevant to kids. I do not know why this is, perhaps because of a different weight:surface area ratio, or some similar physiological difference. My son's mattress is a "kids" mattress, and it is the most uncomfortable mattress I have ever been on. But he sleeps fine, and he's unable to talk about the difference between his mattress and my mattress. My daughter does her homework at the dinner table, in the most unergonomic way possible. I help her get more comfortable and rearrange things to be better, but I often get the feeling that I do so in vain since she happily completes her homework either way.
So I find it dubious that a kids aeron would make a big difference in a child's ability to learn or focus. But what do I know? I'm curious if there is more data on this.
Sent away.
I was on a flight next to someone with an early prototype, and it does indeed look like a nice UI. I was a little baffled by the lack of UI labels, but the guy seemed to have no problem getting around.
The apps that I saw looked solid. But, on the other hand I'm curious about how well the browser is going to work. It ships with something like IE7 AFAIK, and it seems like it's not going to be a great experience. Are sites really going to have a mobile-webkit version and a mobile-ie version of their content? That seems crazy to me, but I'm looking forward to seeing how it will work out. Scanning the Engadget coverage of the announcement, it looks like they didn't even mention the browser, let alone demo it.
I don't know if I had RSI or what, but I had pain in my wrists and forearms at the end of the day while I used a thinkpad (both with and without a decent ibm 101 keyboard). I am very sensitive to ergonomics -- I have a really nice chair, a really nice desk, the best lighting I can afford.
I switched to a Mac Book Pro, and I never had any pain with the trackpad, even in the most awkward postures. The Apple 101 keyboard is also great for my ergonomics while I'm at my desk.
Still, I had wrist pain after sitting at my desk using my fancy MS mouse all day. I recently got the external Apple trackpad, and my mouse has been collecting dust ever since. I have zero pain even after a long day or a long week. The stuff is expensive, it takes some getting used to (the built-in trackpad and the external trackpad only work well if you grok their gestures). But it is well worth it for me.
YMMV, etc etc.
I haven't used (or heard of) this app
Yeah, and you won't either, because Apple rejected it.
The app is called "Camera+", and it is an outstanding app. It fixes many of the feature omissions in the standard iOS camera app, and it's a joy to use if you understand photography. Apple rejected a particular version of the app, but you can still get it and try it without this "controversial" feature.
I used a version of this app while the volume button functioned as the shutter button. It was kind of neat, but it was far from a deal breaker that it was removed.
I feel bad for the devs who, I believe, worked on two separate hacks to get this working only to be forced to eventually give up. I've been there, and it sucks to have a vision that is impossible to finish for reasons outside your control.
On the other hand I can understand the guidelines. On my phone, it's not even labeled as a "volume" button, it just has a "+" on it. But I, the user, know that's the way to control volume. If apps start screwing with that, I am going to lose confidence that I will be able to silence my phone while running some random app, and I do not want that at all.
If a short film of this quality can be produced without Hollywood right now, imagine what will appear a few more years down the road.
Nothing. Hollywood doesn't fit into this equation. Hollywood deals with talent and business, not software. Hollywood already uses a great deal of FOSS, and I doubt this movie will change a future audience's experience at all.
Kudos to them nonetheless, it's a fun few minutes of flick.
Perhaps we forget our history, the now defunct Apple Computers? Apple Inc is making the same mistakes as Apple Computers, Apple Computers made three big mistakes: 1. Made something that was expensive and not any better then its competitors, they called it the Lisa and was built because one man dictated how everything should work. 2. Isolated their core audience, the Lisa got hackers offside, so they switched to the new IBM offerings and businesses went with them. 3. Sued Microsoft using a dubious suit when they could not compete. Now Apple Inc made mistake #1 already, they learned from mistake number #2 but picked the wrong audience, the "in" crowd are a fickle bunch which will change their minds as soon as the next big thing(TM) comes along and they've thrown themselves head first into #3 by suing HTC. This last reason says it all, Apple is unable to compete with other manufacturers so they are suing them to prevent anyone else from getting a competitive advantage and ultimately its a losing battle as 1. HTC is Taiwanese and can tell Apple and US laws to sod off (Europe, Asia and China are larger markets then the US) and 2. Apple will have to sue everyone in the end.
I have no idea what you are talking about. 1) There is essentially no competition in the iPod thouch/iPad market. There is the dell streak, which is more expensive than the iPad, and there are a bunch of crappy andriod mp3 players. Nothing else is shipping. The HP Slate looks like a travesty (It has a "ctrl-alt-delete" hardware button!). The Blackberry PlayBook won't be released for a long time, and while it looks pretty good, they don't mention battery life at all. And it has no 3g/etc radio at all. And it has no SDK outside of Webkit and Flash. My bet is that PlayBook will cost more than the iPad too, but we'll see. The iPhone is expensive, but it's hard to argue that it's not any better than other stuff on the market. It's probably worse in some narrow ways, but on the whole, the iPhone 4 is not worse than everything else out there. Not by a mile.
2) What is this "in" crowd you speak of? People I know who have Apple stuff include a 70 year old grandmother who loves her iPad (and couldn't work a Dell PC to save her life), a knucklehead MBA type who replaced his blackberry with an iPhone, and most of the people I know who develop software. Sure, I'm certain there are a lot of iPhones in Williamsburg, but you'd have a hard time convincing me that Apple is selling to a niche group of hipsters with berets or fixies. Apple makes incredibly nice devices that anyone from a four-year-old to a hundred-year-old can use and not feel like an idiot. And they sell hundreds of millions of them.
3) I can't really comment on this, because I think the field is changing so rapidly and I guess I choose to not really care. I hate software patents, and I realize that Apple plays it's cards pretty aggressively in this subject. I'm not smart enough to understand what Apple's multi-touch patent is about, but there are other multi-touch devices out there. What, specifically, are you referring to here?
The vision that Mark Zuckerberg talks about is using Facebook as a personal computing/communication platform. The way I read this is not that the Facebook app would be front and center, but rather that you would buy a phone, take it out of the box, log into Facebook, and have all your contacts in your address book, all your bookmarks in your browser, all your photos in your photo app, etc. I imagine this could extend to regular PCs/tablets/laptops too.
It's not for me, but I can kind of see the point. Lots of people struggle to set up a phone or computer, so having all the data that a normal person uses day-to-day be portable across the devices that a normal person uses is not a bad idea. The success will depend entirely on the implementation and how it works over time. I suspect Facebook knows this and will not sabotage their investment by taking any shortcuts. But who knows.
In any case, there's pretty much no chance that a traditional Facebook app such as Farmville will be beeping at you in the middle of the night. That's not the point of this endeavor at all.
Just to reply to myself and add one more thing -- If this is indeed the vision for some of Facebook's future efforts, then there is the obvious potential pain point of storing and porting non-Facebook data. If this means that Facebook opens up and competes on features/ui/speed/etc rather than on lock-in and network effect, that is a good thing.
The vision that Mark Zuckerberg talks about is using Facebook as a personal computing/communication platform. The way I read this is not that the Facebook app would be front and center, but rather that you would buy a phone, take it out of the box, log into Facebook, and have all your contacts in your address book, all your bookmarks in your browser, all your photos in your photo app, etc. I imagine this could extend to regular PCs/tablets/laptops too.
It's not for me, but I can kind of see the point. Lots of people struggle to set up a phone or computer, so having all the data that a normal person uses day-to-day be portable across the devices that a normal person uses is not a bad idea. The success will depend entirely on the implementation and how it works over time. I suspect Facebook knows this and will not sabotage their investment by taking any shortcuts. But who knows.
In any case, there's pretty much no chance that a traditional Facebook app such as Farmville will be beeping at you in the middle of the night. That's not the point of this endeavor at all.