I've got to say, the users you have worked with sound a bit more competent than average. The usual response to this will be "why does my battery run out all the time? And what the hell are these two bars?" Understand that the average user's IQ drops 30 points and they develop a kind of situational ADD whenever they are confronted with the problem of working with a computer. I've met geniuses (this isn't sarcasm) who couldn't figure out on their own how to log out of Windows the first time because it never occurred to them that you would click a button marked "start" to shut something down. The idea of an average user figuring out how to use "top" is laughable. Do a quick survey of your aunts and uncles (throw out anyone who has ever written a computer program as a bias in the sample): how many of them know how to use "Task Manager" on Windows or "Activity Monitor" on the Mac? I'd guess less than 10%.
90% of software falls into three categories:
Software written by people who enjoy tinkering with stuff and have no constraints on what they release: it tends to be powerful as hell and about as hard to fly as an F-22.
Software written by people who enjoy tinkering with stuff but are constrained by market inertia and the lack of vision among their marketing people: it tends to be irregular and only moderately reliable, rather easier to use, but also rather limited in its robustness, with more the appearance of capability than its actuality.
Software written by people who enjoy tinkering with stuff but are constrained by consideration of what works well with the lowest common denominator user: it tends to be rather reliable and very easy to use, but is far too constricting for those who enjoy tinkering with stuff and doesn't have the appearance of capability that attracts the business buyer.
Think of these as three points on a triangle rather than as a flat line with two extremes and one median (you should recognize the influence of Stephenson's "In the beginning [. ..]"; if you don't, it's worth reading right away - my categories are obviously parallel to Stephenson's tank, station wagon, and sleek euro sedan, or the traditional Linux, Windows, and Macintosh - or on the other hand, Gentoo, Xandros, and Ubuntu) . The sweet spot is the space between 1 and 3 - if you can build something that looks simple and is easy to use if you are just going to work with the basic features, but responds to an expert hand by making more and more powerful options available (without burying those capabilities too deeply), you've got the perfect device.
In operating systems, I think we're beginning to see the three major players all start to move this way - Linux distributions are trying to incorporate more surface simplicity and deal with the hell of dependencies and device drivers that make them so difficult for the average user to set up and maintain, while hiding the configurability of the user interface just deeply enough that it won't distract the average joe; Apple by adopting BSD and incorporating a terminal, and gradually adding such obvious features as multiple desktop spaces; and Microsoft with its half-baked attempts to simplify configuration and clean up and simplify their user interfaces (which aren't working very well, in my opinion: Windows Search is a prime example), and their on-again, off-again overtures to the command-line set (not just Monad/PowerShell, but also WinFS).
With a smart phone / communication device, the balance tilts slightly more toward 3 than 1. You have less space for the user interface, and so need to keep the number of controls to a minimum so you don't overwhelm the user. You also have to remember that the average users will have a hard time distinguishing the way state is handled in an application: if they're not very good with computers, they will expect all user applications to suspend when not visible but still retain all their data in the state it held
Apparently, 60% of women need to realize that, frustrating as men's behavior might be, they solve plenty of problems by just thinking. If you really like your friend Todd because he's such a sweet guy and he never lechs out or anything, but he constantly seems to ignore your attempts to sleep with him, then you can safely assume that Todd is either totally gay or is simply being nice and not pervy to the point that he may well be dismissing the hints rather than risk creeping you out. I suggest talking to him about it, and not being so damned obtuse.
Eminently sensible. Unfortunately, such behavior would destroy the universe as we know it.
There's more overhead for something like "top" to tell which background app is draining all the power (rather than just a battery meter that tells you that the power is draining). And then how do you set up such an application for the average joe user?
In my state, both are mandatory - the latter thanks to our former Republican governor and erstwhile presidential candidate, Mr. Romney. And we are doing ok.
I've got bad news for you, Tony. Computer Science IS math, and if you're good at it, you'd probably be good at math if you applied yourself. Understand that regexes are just a kind of function that takes symbols rather than digits, and returns either true or false.
The problem is all the legacy data drifting around out there on old machines that use crypto systems that can be trivially broken. If you can find a dump of old hard drives that weren't very carefully wiped because "all the data was encrypted," you might have a gold mine.
Yeah, except 7.5 billion years ago, it was a lot closer (expanding universe, you know), so it's much less than 15 billion years ago. Well, maybe not *much* less, since the rate of expansion is accelerating... my brain hurts.
Clarke originally stated on the Third Law - the name was a riff on Newton's Third Law. Later on he backfilled the other two from comments he had made elsewhere. The only really important one is Clarke's Third Law.
The consumer *can* dictate what software gets installed on their device - there's nothing here that limits the jailbreaker software. These are limitations to what kind of software you can *write* using their SDK and sell *through their store*.
Speaking as a smug Apple fanboy: the reason you don't hear about people with eePCs getting stopped by TSA isn't because it never happens - it's because ASUS doesn't have as good marketing people as Apple does. "Hey, some guy just blogged that he got held up by TSA because they didn't think his Macbook Air was a real computer! Priceless! Let's get it on Digg and Slashdot!"
Yeah, from what I understand, a lot of folks will "acknowledge" drinking one beer at lunch when they are pressed about their alcohol use after an accident (including hunting accidents).
I don't condone drinking before handling a gun, but I think it's a bit of a stretch to accuse Cheney of being intoxicated. Law enforcement agreed:
The Kenedy County Sheriff's Department, which interviewed Cheney about the accident Sunday morning, concluded there was "no alcohol or misconduct involved in the incident."
after the shooting at 5:30 pm on Saturday. Yeah, always believe everything people tell the police, especially if they are powerful and the only evidence that could possibly be found against them would depend upon the word of their good shooting buddies.
You don't get it, do you? It was only character assassination IF THE POPE DID ADVOCATE THE HELIOCENTRIC POSITION. The imprimatur implied that he did not.
And by the way, I'm not a history nut... I was *trained as an historian*. As in grad school; though this is not my period. As others have already pointed out, the 95 Theses (the beginning of the Protestant Reformation) were nailed to the door in 1517, and the Dialogue Concerning the Two Main Systems of the World was published in 1632, so it's pretty hard to say that anyone held a view of the Galileo trial (in 1633) *until* the Protestant Reformation. Hell, even the very late English Reformation was well under way by 1536, when Anne Boleyn died, and one could pick at the latest the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the very END of the English Reformation (though most would say it was a done deal by 1603, the accession of James I after the death of Elizabeth). Now, this is the kind of mistake anyone could make, but you need to be a little more careful about the didactic tone in a posting in which you make such a fundamental error.
One other point: the Dialogo was written in Italian, like most of Galileo's scientific works (the Nuncius Siderius is an execption), and so the character's name is Simplicio; if the Dialogo had been written in Latin, the name would have been Simplicius, and probably not Simplicitus, which would have been too unsubtle.
But let's also make it clear: the book was not placed on the Index because the Church was upset about its imprimatur being placed on the book; it was placed on the Index (and it was upset about its imprimatur being placed on the book) because of the *content.* The further you go into the background of the Galileo trial, the more you can see that it was all about a political struggle within the Church between theological reactionaries and theological liberals . . . and the liberals lost, big time.
It was. Probably #8. They were quail hunting in South Texas.
Everyone likes to make jokes about this unfortunate situation. But, unless you've been quail hunting and know what every person has to do to hunt safely, it's just a joke that depends on the listener being just as ignorant.
I'd think that an external battery charger that takes AAs would be better than a removable battery. The reason I dislike the non-removable battery is because all batteries fail sooner or later.
Woz designed the floppy disk controller for the Apple II. He has plenty of experience with embedded systems. What he doesn't have much experience with is consumer expectations for commodity devices like the iPhone - how to find the sweet spot of usability and affordability. After all, he himself has admitted that e.g. he added the sound and graphics capabilities that he added to the Apple II without knowing whether anyone would even use them!
The argument is that you could use 3G and a bigger battery, or 3G and a stripped down browser, &c., but those would effect the feel of the device (it's size in the pocket) or its expense or its usability in a way that might make the iPhone less desirable right now. Jobs might well have been telling the truth when he said that their modeling and research suggested that given the 3G network that existed last year in the US, and the battery usage you'd have seen on an 8 GB iPhone last year, that 3G would have been a negative for user experience.
Me, I happen to like the Air as a second computer; but since I'm looking for a desktop replacement laptop, am unlikely to buy an Air. But if you have a Mac Pro or iMac at home, the MacBook Air would be a pretty good traveling satellite machine.
The problem is that there are fundamental conflicts between many of those "religious modes of thought." I don't mean merely differences of dogma, but methodological differences, too. Some of them *must* be invalid.
These are the people who don't want to be in town while the Taliban is there because they're afraid of being bombed (and probably also afraid of what the Taliban will do to them). They'll want to take their cell phones with them for safety.
For the device it is, the battery life is not bad. I do about 2 hours of web surfing on EDGE a day, an hour on the telephone, and read about 30 emails on mine, and I can usually get through a day and a half on the battery. One can also get battery-based rechargers for iPods that I'm sure would also work on an iPhone, which is in fact less expensive than a spare cell battery, so the "non-user-replaceable-battery" is a nonissue for travel (face it, if you're carrying a cell phone for a few weeks with few opportunities to recharge, you're going to want a recharger that takes standard batteries like AAs, not a spare cell phone battery). If you're going to travel someplace with a lot of cellphone access, you will probably be able to get an iPhone International travel plan for it looks like less than $70/month for voice + 50 MB of EDGE, and with ~$5.50/MB overage in their main service area (most of Europe, India, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Canada and Mexico, Australia and New Zealand, and Egypt), plus ~$11-$22 / MB outside the service area (your charges if you don't have one of these plans would be a lot worse). Also, if you have free WiFi, your usage there is obviously not an AT&T matter.
If you're just traveling around the main cities in these countries and staying in hotels or with friends and family, an iPhone with a good hard case would be a good choice; it takes care of web access, email, cell phone, and a very mediocre digital camera with a music player and photo album. The Google maps are good, but the location feature isn't good enough for navigation, so get a cheap GPS that can handle good world-wide maps (a lot of the decent cheap GPS units in the US only have NA maps available).
That said . . .
If you are going to be traveling on your own in small towns in these countries, or anywhere in Africa (including most of Egypt, I would imagine - never been there), South America, or Asia away from the Pacific or Indian Ocean coastlines, yes, follow Tony Hoyle's advice and buy a cheap unlocked GSM international phone with a USB charge socket and buy a pre-paid SIM in every country you visit. In many of those countries, you won't have EDGE, and even if you do, the AT&T international roaming plan won't do you any good. The iPhone is going to be a major pickpocket magnet, and it has your SIM in it - the headache of cleaning up after a stolen iPhone isn't worth it. It will mark you as a filthy rich Westerner (rather than just a rich Westerner), so haggling will go less smoothly. Also buy a battery-based USB recharger. I think the eePC might be a good choice for laptop, too; just make sure you encrypt everything on the disk. Again, a cheap small GPS would work, and a small Canon or Nikon point-and-shoot.
Vinge is a retired CS/Math professor and he's involved with the Free Software Foundation (often on their awards committees). He definitely understands trusted computing.
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I've got to say, the users you have worked with sound a bit more competent than average. The usual response to this will be "why does my battery run out all the time? And what the hell are these two bars?" Understand that the average user's IQ drops 30 points and they develop a kind of situational ADD whenever they are confronted with the problem of working with a computer. I've met geniuses (this isn't sarcasm) who couldn't figure out on their own how to log out of Windows the first time because it never occurred to them that you would click a button marked "start" to shut something down. The idea of an average user figuring out how to use "top" is laughable. Do a quick survey of your aunts and uncles (throw out anyone who has ever written a computer program as a bias in the sample): how many of them know how to use "Task Manager" on Windows or "Activity Monitor" on the Mac? I'd guess less than 10%.
90% of software falls into three categories:
Think of these as three points on a triangle rather than as a flat line with two extremes and one median (you should recognize the influence of Stephenson's "In the beginning [. . .]"; if you don't, it's worth reading right away - my categories are obviously parallel to Stephenson's tank, station wagon, and sleek euro sedan, or the traditional Linux, Windows, and Macintosh - or on the other hand, Gentoo, Xandros, and Ubuntu) . The sweet spot is the space between 1 and 3 - if you can build something that looks simple and is easy to use if you are just going to work with the basic features, but responds to an expert hand by making more and more powerful options available (without burying those capabilities too deeply), you've got the perfect device.
In operating systems, I think we're beginning to see the three major players all start to move this way - Linux distributions are trying to incorporate more surface simplicity and deal with the hell of dependencies and device drivers that make them so difficult for the average user to set up and maintain, while hiding the configurability of the user interface just deeply enough that it won't distract the average joe; Apple by adopting BSD and incorporating a terminal, and gradually adding such obvious features as multiple desktop spaces; and Microsoft with its half-baked attempts to simplify configuration and clean up and simplify their user interfaces (which aren't working very well, in my opinion: Windows Search is a prime example), and their on-again, off-again overtures to the command-line set (not just Monad/PowerShell, but also WinFS).
With a smart phone / communication device, the balance tilts slightly more toward 3 than 1. You have less space for the user interface, and so need to keep the number of controls to a minimum so you don't overwhelm the user. You also have to remember that the average users will have a hard time distinguishing the way state is handled in an application: if they're not very good with computers, they will expect all user applications to suspend when not visible but still retain all their data in the state it held
Eminently sensible. Unfortunately, such behavior would destroy the universe as we know it.
There's more overhead for something like "top" to tell which background app is draining all the power (rather than just a battery meter that tells you that the power is draining). And then how do you set up such an application for the average joe user?
In my state, both are mandatory - the latter thanks to our former Republican governor and erstwhile presidential candidate, Mr. Romney. And we are doing ok.
I've got bad news for you, Tony. Computer Science IS math, and if you're good at it, you'd probably be good at math if you applied yourself. Understand that regexes are just a kind of function that takes symbols rather than digits, and returns either true or false.
The problem is all the legacy data drifting around out there on old machines that use crypto systems that can be trivially broken. If you can find a dump of old hard drives that weren't very carefully wiped because "all the data was encrypted," you might have a gold mine.
Yeah, except 7.5 billion years ago, it was a lot closer (expanding universe, you know), so it's much less than 15 billion years ago. Well, maybe not *much* less, since the rate of expansion is accelerating... my brain hurts.
Short stories: "Rescue Party" is one you missed. "The Sentinel," of course. "Take a Deep Breath." "Transit of Earth." "The Lion of Commarre."
Clarke originally stated on the Third Law - the name was a riff on Newton's Third Law. Later on he backfilled the other two from comments he had made elsewhere. The only really important one is Clarke's Third Law.
I'd interpret this in a way that would allow an SSH-only shell. I'm guessing they don't want to leave any doors to the cellphone network open.
The consumer *can* dictate what software gets installed on their device - there's nothing here that limits the jailbreaker software. These are limitations to what kind of software you can *write* using their SDK and sell *through their store*.
Speaking as a smug Apple fanboy: the reason you don't hear about people with eePCs getting stopped by TSA isn't because it never happens - it's because ASUS doesn't have as good marketing people as Apple does. "Hey, some guy just blogged that he got held up by TSA because they didn't think his Macbook Air was a real computer! Priceless! Let's get it on Digg and Slashdot!"
Cheney acknowledged drinking one beer at lunch, before starting the hunt at 3:00 PM. The accident occurred about 5:50 PM:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/15/cheney/index.html
Yeah, from what I understand, a lot of folks will "acknowledge" drinking one beer at lunch when they are pressed about their alcohol use after an accident (including hunting accidents).
I don't condone drinking before handling a gun, but I think it's a bit of a stretch to accuse Cheney of being intoxicated. Law enforcement agreed:
The Kenedy County Sheriff's Department, which interviewed Cheney about the accident Sunday morning, concluded there was "no alcohol or misconduct involved in the incident."
after the shooting at 5:30 pm on Saturday. Yeah, always believe everything people tell the police, especially if they are powerful and the only evidence that could possibly be found against them would depend upon the word of their good shooting buddies.
You don't get it, do you? It was only character assassination IF THE POPE DID ADVOCATE THE HELIOCENTRIC POSITION. The imprimatur implied that he did not.
And by the way, I'm not a history nut ... I was *trained as an historian*. As in grad school; though this is not my period. As others have already pointed out, the 95 Theses (the beginning of the Protestant Reformation) were nailed to the door in 1517, and the Dialogue Concerning the Two Main Systems of the World was published in 1632, so it's pretty hard to say that anyone held a view of the Galileo trial (in 1633) *until* the Protestant Reformation. Hell, even the very late English Reformation was well under way by 1536, when Anne Boleyn died, and one could pick at the latest the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the very END of the English Reformation (though most would say it was a done deal by 1603, the accession of James I after the death of Elizabeth). Now, this is the kind of mistake anyone could make, but you need to be a little more careful about the didactic tone in a posting in which you make such a fundamental error.
One other point: the Dialogo was written in Italian, like most of Galileo's scientific works (the Nuncius Siderius is an execption), and so the character's name is Simplicio; if the Dialogo had been written in Latin, the name would have been Simplicius, and probably not Simplicitus, which would have been too unsubtle.
So you're telling us that the enterprise market is all about appearances? Think about it - that IS what you're telling us.
Reportedly the SDK is actually the "Touch" SDK, and includes both Touch and iPhone Apps.
But let's also make it clear: the book was not placed on the Index because the Church was upset about its imprimatur being placed on the book; it was placed on the Index (and it was upset about its imprimatur being placed on the book) because of the *content.* The further you go into the background of the Galileo trial, the more you can see that it was all about a political struggle within the Church between theological reactionaries and theological liberals . . . and the liberals lost, big time.
I'd think that an external battery charger that takes AAs would be better than a removable battery. The reason I dislike the non-removable battery is because all batteries fail sooner or later.
Woz designed the floppy disk controller for the Apple II. He has plenty of experience with embedded systems. What he doesn't have much experience with is consumer expectations for commodity devices like the iPhone - how to find the sweet spot of usability and affordability. After all, he himself has admitted that e.g. he added the sound and graphics capabilities that he added to the Apple II without knowing whether anyone would even use them!
The argument is that you could use 3G and a bigger battery, or 3G and a stripped down browser, &c., but those would effect the feel of the device (it's size in the pocket) or its expense or its usability in a way that might make the iPhone less desirable right now. Jobs might well have been telling the truth when he said that their modeling and research suggested that given the 3G network that existed last year in the US, and the battery usage you'd have seen on an 8 GB iPhone last year, that 3G would have been a negative for user experience.
Me, I happen to like the Air as a second computer; but since I'm looking for a desktop replacement laptop, am unlikely to buy an Air. But if you have a Mac Pro or iMac at home, the MacBook Air would be a pretty good traveling satellite machine.
That's Ptolemy, not Plato. Plato wasn't interested enough in astronomy to come up with epicycles.
The problem is that there are fundamental conflicts between many of those "religious modes of thought." I don't mean merely differences of dogma, but methodological differences, too. Some of them *must* be invalid.
These are the people who don't want to be in town while the Taliban is there because they're afraid of being bombed (and probably also afraid of what the Taliban will do to them). They'll want to take their cell phones with them for safety.
iPhone fanboy defense coming.
For the device it is, the battery life is not bad. I do about 2 hours of web surfing on EDGE a day, an hour on the telephone, and read about 30 emails on mine, and I can usually get through a day and a half on the battery. One can also get battery-based rechargers for iPods that I'm sure would also work on an iPhone, which is in fact less expensive than a spare cell battery, so the "non-user-replaceable-battery" is a nonissue for travel (face it, if you're carrying a cell phone for a few weeks with few opportunities to recharge, you're going to want a recharger that takes standard batteries like AAs, not a spare cell phone battery). If you're going to travel someplace with a lot of cellphone access, you will probably be able to get an iPhone International travel plan for it looks like less than $70/month for voice + 50 MB of EDGE, and with ~$5.50/MB overage in their main service area (most of Europe, India, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Canada and Mexico, Australia and New Zealand, and Egypt), plus ~$11-$22 / MB outside the service area (your charges if you don't have one of these plans would be a lot worse). Also, if you have free WiFi, your usage there is obviously not an AT&T matter.
If you're just traveling around the main cities in these countries and staying in hotels or with friends and family, an iPhone with a good hard case would be a good choice; it takes care of web access, email, cell phone, and a very mediocre digital camera with a music player and photo album. The Google maps are good, but the location feature isn't good enough for navigation, so get a cheap GPS that can handle good world-wide maps (a lot of the decent cheap GPS units in the US only have NA maps available).
That said . . .
If you are going to be traveling on your own in small towns in these countries, or anywhere in Africa (including most of Egypt, I would imagine - never been there), South America, or Asia away from the Pacific or Indian Ocean coastlines, yes, follow Tony Hoyle's advice and buy a cheap unlocked GSM international phone with a USB charge socket and buy a pre-paid SIM in every country you visit. In many of those countries, you won't have EDGE, and even if you do, the AT&T international roaming plan won't do you any good. The iPhone is going to be a major pickpocket magnet, and it has your SIM in it - the headache of cleaning up after a stolen iPhone isn't worth it. It will mark you as a filthy rich Westerner (rather than just a rich Westerner), so haggling will go less smoothly. Also buy a battery-based USB recharger. I think the eePC might be a good choice for laptop, too; just make sure you encrypt everything on the disk. Again, a cheap small GPS would work, and a small Canon or Nikon point-and-shoot.
Vinge is a retired CS/Math professor and he's involved with the Free Software Foundation (often on their awards committees). He definitely understands trusted computing.