Personally, I think far too many people have got lost in all the hype & marketing over tablets without stopping to think about the possibility that maybe they're just gimmicks anyway, whether iPad or Galaxy Tab.
Smartphones provide a lot in the way of communications, IM and playing music, their weaknesses are down to the screen sizes if you want to play a reasonably good game or watch some video.
A notebook or netbook has the bigger screen to do that, plus it has they have tactile keyboards so you can do serious work on them - something a tablet is not very good at.
So whilst a tablet would fit somewhere between a smartphone and netbook, it clearly is unable to replace either which means it just becomes a third device to carry around with you. And I thought the whole premise behind portability was being able to carry around less.
Why would anyone care about how one looked to one's enemies? Surely, by the very definition of "enemy", one is not seen in a particularly good light by them anyway and they're hardly going to be objective in their opinions about one.
And I'm sorry that you consider me your enemy but if that's a problem to you then I'm afraid I'm not a personality therapist so I'm afraid you're going to have to go find one yourself. So good luck with that.
I've often thought about a similar technique for email addresses - namely, the mail service provider charges you a nominal fee of a few dollars/pounds/euros to set up an email account and then refunds you the money after, say, using the account for a year. Surely something like that would cut down on the amount of spam generated from temporary Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail accounts.
I don't know you from Adam and therefore don't care that you're having a bad day and feeling a bit grumpy with the rest of the world either.
But just for the record, my computer knowledge started with programming on Commodore Amigas and doing system support work during mid- to late-80s on DEC PDP-11s running RSX-11 and IBM x86 servers running SCO UNIX - so I actually worked on UNIX before I ever even touched a Windows PC. And by the immaturity of your comments, that was probably around the time you were in nappies...
I've also run Linux for nigh-on 18 years, I was a Red Hat Certified Engineer in 2000 and my full-time job is doing security analysis and hardening of Linux-based telecoms servers - believe it or don't believe it, I don't care.
But I'm not a zealot. A computer is a tool and you use the best tool for the job. Period.
Don't make us look like zealots, there's no harm in being a realist.
I work with Red Hat systems every day, it's the platform OS of virtually all the telephony server products we do in my company, whether it's the actual voice switch, voicemail, interactive response servers, etc. Red Hat displaced commercial UNIXes on those platforms, Linux has had huge penetration in the server and embedded space but on "workhorse" servers like these, it's unlikely Windows would ever be used anyway.
I also use Linux most of the time at home, for what I need a desktop to do it does about 80% of it as good as Windows does. But the fact is I still use Windows a bit of the time for the occasional game and because I need to open Word docs, Excel sheets, etc. Yes, LibreOffice does a good job but if I've been sent an Office doc that I need to edit and send back to a lot of people, I'm not going to risk introducing compatibility issues in the process - I'm human, lazy and just want to get stuff done as easily as possible.
But Red Hat is not going to make big inroads into the Enterprise because whether you or I like it or net, Microsoft Exchange and Office are the de-facto standards for most companies.
I do accept that it might change in the future if the business world goes more to cloud computing and lower-powered portable devices like tablets, then there's a possibility of displacing Microsoft's grip in that area, in which case Red Hat might then have the opportunity to "ride the wave" and provide software and services on those platforms.
I think what is going to be really interesting is to see what this does to PC gaming from the perspective of non-Windows operating systems.
APUs are clearly a step forward in the direction of putting powerful graphics processing on portable devices, an area where Microsoft and Windows has very little marketshare at the moment.
Therefore, this surely must bring DirectX's domination in the PC gaming market into question - will this therefore result in more commercial games being developed around OpenGL, thus making cross-platform games much easier to develop?
It's probably a little dangerous to make that assumption because whenever I've looked inside a laptop, the CPU is soldered to the motherboard, not plugged into a socket as in a desktop.
Besides which, inside a laptop you have much less free space for heat dissipation and many of them already run reasonably hot - giving you the option of plugging in a faster CPU that generates more heat may end up frying some of the other internal components, that brings things like manufacturer warranties into question.
APUs are a next logical step in portability and compactness. I like desktops PCs as much as the next guy but with APU technology, desktops are one step closer to their eventual demise.
Let me give you a real world scenario, rather than your somewhat speculative comments.
I'm in the UK, my provider is Vodafone, and I recently got a free upgrade from them so I went from a Google Nexus One (which incidentally had stock apps on it when originally sent to me) to a HTC Desire Z (for the keyboard) where the only non-standard thing I've noticed on it was a Vodafone bootup logo for about 10 seconds - if anything, I was quite shocked at how bereft it actually was of apps straight out of the box. So I've yet to see any of these crap-ware loaded phones of which you speak.
The new phone is my main private/business phone and will stay with the standard Android ROM and any official updates. The older Nexus One is still very useful, I've just thrown 32GB MicroSD cards into both phones so I now have a nice load of portable music/video storage - what I will do with that phone is buy a cheap Pay As You Go SIM with some data allowance on it and then try out some hacked ROMs because I like fiddiling with stuff. Ultimately, if a piece of malware gets on it then the best it can do is use up the £10-odd PAYG credit that will be on the phone.
Yes, I'm very computer savvy, already a fiddler and this way it gives more opportunity to fiddle without too much risk to myself. People who don't know the risks of what they're doing when it comes to flashing custom ROMs simple shouldn't do it.
The problem is that there are two types of tax evasion - the corporate tax evasion and the "black market" amongst just about everyone else.
It's the corporate tax evasion that is by far the biggest sum of money and has happened because our governments have been too lenient on corporations. When our infrastructure was based around communities with small local companies and traders, around 40% of the money that was spent with them was recycled back into the local community. (e.g. the grocer would have his van serviced by the local mechanic)
With the rise of corporations, especially huge chain stores, less than 10% of the money they take goes back into the local community - and it all gets sunk into offshore accounts and other tax-avoidance schemes.
Unfortunately, they have the governments in the palms of their hands because the moment a government threatens to tax them more, they just threaten to go trade in another country and put thousands on the unemployment figures.
I went through a phase of having to do Tax Returns because, for a short period of time, my wife and I had our own company that we used to rent a flat through (to take advantage of the then available "loophole" where a company could earn £20,000 p.a. before being subject to tax), we were directors of the company and therefore had to do the Returns.
It was absolute HELL, every year we did them! The missus is a qualified accountant and used to do both our returns and they were always right. But every year the Inland Revenue disagreed with them and my missus had to spend hours on the phone with them explaining why their figures were wrong and hers were correct - and every year they eventually agreed and that was it until the next year.
In fact, on one particular occasion when the IR's figures were vastly different to what the missus has sent, we actually had an IR manager say to us "the only reason I can account for the difference is our data entry person was looking at someone's else's Return when she tapped in the figures into the computer".
When we sold the flat and wound up the company, we were no longer obligated to do Returns and told the IR to stop sending them - so now we're just on PAYE through our salaried employment, much simpler!
Incidentally, I have a few American colleagues and apparently you need a degree in hyper-mathematics to understand their taxation system, ours in simpler in comparison.
The irony is this also applies to pretty much *anyone* who gets excited over *anything* like this. For example, what part of your brain do you think lights up when you find a study that reinforces your idea that Apple fans are religious zealots? Hmm...?
Anyone that queues up overnight for a new Apple device, the latest Harry Potter book or the latest sequel of Modern Warfare (or whatever it's called) is clearly someone who is extremely materialistic and/or requires constant personality reinforcement by trying to impress their peers by being the "first on the block" to own something. A well-adjusted normal person does not bow to hype and advertising.
I actually find the religious fervour of Apple fanbois both amusing and sad at the same time because historians in the future will use them as an example to show how our society became utterly materialistic.
Or when you get into a "holy war" over Unity in Ubuntu?
Okay, so here's how I read this statement - you are trying to justify the religious fervour you yourself know exists within the Apple community (maybe you yourself know you are a fanboi zealot) by trying to give something else outside of that an equal footing. But if you actually knew Linux as well as you *think* you do, you'd realise that this is just one of those things that happens with Linux because of how open the development of it is.
Ubuntu is NOT the be-all-and-all of Linux, it's ONE distribution that caters for people who want an novice-level entry into Linux, and while I don't use it myself, it's very good at doing that job. However, lots of people also use Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora, Puppy, etc. etc. and because they're all free you can dual-boot them or VM them until your heart's content. Mark Shuttleworth is clearly aiming Ubuntu at a specific target market but most Linux people just let him get on with it because there's plenty of other choice.
I'd argue that the forking of OpenOffice into LibreOffice was a MUCH bigger Linux issue than Unity but even that has now pretty much resolved itself.
Or Google's new Arduino kit?
All I will say on that is I've yet to see anyone sat in a coffee shop posing with an Arduino board. You are clearly now clutching at straws for a justification of your rampant, frothy-mouthed fanboi-ism.
Or hell, for the perverse amongst us, when MS shows off their next version of Windows.
You're kidding me, right? When have you EVER seen ANYONE beat themselves into religious fervour over a new Windows OS (or, come to think of it, a new Linux kernel)? Most people I see are moaning about the fact that their new laptop hasn't come with the Windows XP installation that they are so used to or that their old software doesn't work - sure, they get over it and get used to Windows 7 (or whatever) in the end, but they're hardly fanatical about it.
Nope, sorry, you fanbois are out there in a league of your own. Steve Jobs, if anything, is a marketing genius that put Bill Gates to shame - in Macs and OS X he has created an exclusive, elitist little club for computer users who don't like Windows but don't have enough technical knowledge to use Linux, and for everything else he has created "cool" around the little silver Apple logo by turning iPhones and iPads into fashion accessories.
And if you don't accept that then I challenge you to scratch off the Apple logo on your Apple devices, just to prove to me that the branding, and the display of it openly, is not important to you.
Apple is a religious cult, Steve Jobs is their messiah-like leader. That's why they can make a comic about him and drooling fanbois will hand over their cash unquestionably.
Be honest, could you see a Steve Ballmer or Linux Torvalds comic working?
Sorry, but someone is not right in the head if they fork out $649 for a product that will be obsololete in a year, whether it's made by Apple or anyone else - although Apple ARE the yearly upgrade kings.
I don't know how it works in the US but here in the UK with the amount of competition there is in the mobile phone space, a smartphone contract with carriers like Orange and Vodafone is going to be a minimum of 18 months such that you're paying a reasonably low monthly charge, and probably a year into that contract you will be entitled to a free upgrade phone and, if you're lucky, get the carrier to give you the unlock codes for the old phone.
I also work for a US-centric company and when American colleagues come over here for meetings, invariably they are walking about with older unlocked phones and Pay-As-You-Go sims that they bought as soon as they arrived in the country, because that seems the cheapest way of making calls when outside your home country.
I find it constantly amusing that Apple survives today purely because Microsoft allowed it to. In which case you fanbois should show Microsoft much better respect than you seem to currently - how about going out to buy a Microsoft Mouse or Webcam occasionally, just as a little "Thank You" to them?
One question - why would a company as profitable as you say it was take the $150M from Microsoft in the first place then? I remember the uproar from the fanbois when it happened, it strikes me as a very stupid thing to do, from Apple's perspective, if it results in pissing off your users so much....unless, of course, they needed the money.
Oh, and the $1 billion you mentioned is a figure plucked from the air by you - it was $1.5b *revenue* not profit - big difference.
This sounds like a definite attempt at verbal "depth-charging" - i.e. slinging criticism at every OS you can hoping that you will get a bit from me. So let me help you out a bit.
I'm an 80% Linux / 20% Windows user with 30 years working and hobbying with computers. Never in all those years has it once crossed my mind to part with good money for anything made by Apple, and that is unlikely to change any time soon.
Now go ahead and do your worst. But understand that I treat a computing platform as a productivity and entertaimment tool, not a fashion accessory or religious motif.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think far too many people have got lost in all the hype & marketing over tablets without stopping to think about the possibility that maybe they're just gimmicks anyway, whether iPad or Galaxy Tab.
Smartphones provide a lot in the way of communications, IM and playing music, their weaknesses are down to the screen sizes if you want to play a reasonably good game or watch some video.
A notebook or netbook has the bigger screen to do that, plus it has they have tactile keyboards so you can do serious work on them - something a tablet is not very good at.
So whilst a tablet would fit somewhere between a smartphone and netbook, it clearly is unable to replace either which means it just becomes a third device to carry around with you. And I thought the whole premise behind portability was being able to carry around less.
Why would anyone care about how one looked to one's enemies? Surely, by the very definition of "enemy", one is not seen in a particularly good light by them anyway and they're hardly going to be objective in their opinions about one.
And I'm sorry that you consider me your enemy but if that's a problem to you then I'm afraid I'm not a personality therapist so I'm afraid you're going to have to go find one yourself. So good luck with that.
I've often thought about a similar technique for email addresses - namely, the mail service provider charges you a nominal fee of a few dollars/pounds/euros to set up an email account and then refunds you the money after, say, using the account for a year. Surely something like that would cut down on the amount of spam generated from temporary Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail accounts.
So be it - I'd rather be a Microsoft Shill than a Linux Zealot anyway.
I understand Apple have patented iTeleharmonium so keep quite or it will be patent hearing for you, young fellow me-lad!
I don't know you from Adam and therefore don't care that you're having a bad day and feeling a bit grumpy with the rest of the world either.
But just for the record, my computer knowledge started with programming on Commodore Amigas and doing system support work during mid- to late-80s on DEC PDP-11s running RSX-11 and IBM x86 servers running SCO UNIX - so I actually worked on UNIX before I ever even touched a Windows PC. And by the immaturity of your comments, that was probably around the time you were in nappies...
I've also run Linux for nigh-on 18 years, I was a Red Hat Certified Engineer in 2000 and my full-time job is doing security analysis and hardening of Linux-based telecoms servers - believe it or don't believe it, I don't care.
But I'm not a zealot. A computer is a tool and you use the best tool for the job. Period.
Mate,
Don't make us look like zealots, there's no harm in being a realist.
I work with Red Hat systems every day, it's the platform OS of virtually all the telephony server products we do in my company, whether it's the actual voice switch, voicemail, interactive response servers, etc. Red Hat displaced commercial UNIXes on those platforms, Linux has had huge penetration in the server and embedded space but on "workhorse" servers like these, it's unlikely Windows would ever be used anyway.
I also use Linux most of the time at home, for what I need a desktop to do it does about 80% of it as good as Windows does. But the fact is I still use Windows a bit of the time for the occasional game and because I need to open Word docs, Excel sheets, etc. Yes, LibreOffice does a good job but if I've been sent an Office doc that I need to edit and send back to a lot of people, I'm not going to risk introducing compatibility issues in the process - I'm human, lazy and just want to get stuff done as easily as possible.
But Red Hat is not going to make big inroads into the Enterprise because whether you or I like it or net, Microsoft Exchange and Office are the de-facto standards for most companies.
I do accept that it might change in the future if the business world goes more to cloud computing and lower-powered portable devices like tablets, then there's a possibility of displacing Microsoft's grip in that area, in which case Red Hat might then have the opportunity to "ride the wave" and provide software and services on those platforms.
I think what is going to be really interesting is to see what this does to PC gaming from the perspective of non-Windows operating systems.
APUs are clearly a step forward in the direction of putting powerful graphics processing on portable devices, an area where Microsoft and Windows has very little marketshare at the moment.
Therefore, this surely must bring DirectX's domination in the PC gaming market into question - will this therefore result in more commercial games being developed around OpenGL, thus making cross-platform games much easier to develop?
It's probably a little dangerous to make that assumption because whenever I've looked inside a laptop, the CPU is soldered to the motherboard, not plugged into a socket as in a desktop.
Besides which, inside a laptop you have much less free space for heat dissipation and many of them already run reasonably hot - giving you the option of plugging in a faster CPU that generates more heat may end up frying some of the other internal components, that brings things like manufacturer warranties into question.
APUs are a next logical step in portability and compactness. I like desktops PCs as much as the next guy but with APU technology, desktops are one step closer to their eventual demise.
...you go to a riot and occasionally a soccer match breaks out!
Let me give you a real world scenario, rather than your somewhat speculative comments.
I'm in the UK, my provider is Vodafone, and I recently got a free upgrade from them so I went from a Google Nexus One (which incidentally had stock apps on it when originally sent to me) to a HTC Desire Z (for the keyboard) where the only non-standard thing I've noticed on it was a Vodafone bootup logo for about 10 seconds - if anything, I was quite shocked at how bereft it actually was of apps straight out of the box. So I've yet to see any of these crap-ware loaded phones of which you speak.
The new phone is my main private/business phone and will stay with the standard Android ROM and any official updates. The older Nexus One is still very useful, I've just thrown 32GB MicroSD cards into both phones so I now have a nice load of portable music/video storage - what I will do with that phone is buy a cheap Pay As You Go SIM with some data allowance on it and then try out some hacked ROMs because I like fiddiling with stuff. Ultimately, if a piece of malware gets on it then the best it can do is use up the £10-odd PAYG credit that will be on the phone.
Yes, I'm very computer savvy, already a fiddler and this way it gives more opportunity to fiddle without too much risk to myself. People who don't know the risks of what they're doing when it comes to flashing custom ROMs simple shouldn't do it.
The problem is that there are two types of tax evasion - the corporate tax evasion and the "black market" amongst just about everyone else.
It's the corporate tax evasion that is by far the biggest sum of money and has happened because our governments have been too lenient on corporations. When our infrastructure was based around communities with small local companies and traders, around 40% of the money that was spent with them was recycled back into the local community. (e.g. the grocer would have his van serviced by the local mechanic)
With the rise of corporations, especially huge chain stores, less than 10% of the money they take goes back into the local community - and it all gets sunk into offshore accounts and other tax-avoidance schemes.
Unfortunately, they have the governments in the palms of their hands because the moment a government threatens to tax them more, they just threaten to go trade in another country and put thousands on the unemployment figures.
I went through a phase of having to do Tax Returns because, for a short period of time, my wife and I had our own company that we used to rent a flat through (to take advantage of the then available "loophole" where a company could earn £20,000 p.a. before being subject to tax), we were directors of the company and therefore had to do the Returns.
It was absolute HELL, every year we did them! The missus is a qualified accountant and used to do both our returns and they were always right. But every year the Inland Revenue disagreed with them and my missus had to spend hours on the phone with them explaining why their figures were wrong and hers were correct - and every year they eventually agreed and that was it until the next year.
In fact, on one particular occasion when the IR's figures were vastly different to what the missus has sent, we actually had an IR manager say to us "the only reason I can account for the difference is our data entry person was looking at someone's else's Return when she tapped in the figures into the computer".
When we sold the flat and wound up the company, we were no longer obligated to do Returns and told the IR to stop sending them - so now we're just on PAYE through our salaried employment, much simpler!
Incidentally, I have a few American colleagues and apparently you need a degree in hyper-mathematics to understand their taxation system, ours in simpler in comparison.
Yes, and you talked complete bollocks 4 days ago also...
I think you need to change your keyboard layout back to "QWERTY" from "BOLLOCKS" as it's outputting unintelligible gibberish currently.
The irony is this also applies to pretty much *anyone* who gets excited over *anything* like this. For example, what part of your brain do you think lights up when you find a study that reinforces your idea that Apple fans are religious zealots? Hmm...?
Utter claptrap and many of you ARE zealots - anyone who queues overnight on a pavement just to be at a new Apple store opening is a religious nutjob, full stop.
Anyone that queues up overnight for a new Apple device, the latest Harry Potter book or the latest sequel of Modern Warfare (or whatever it's called) is clearly someone who is extremely materialistic and/or requires constant personality reinforcement by trying to impress their peers by being the "first on the block" to own something. A well-adjusted normal person does not bow to hype and advertising.
I actually find the religious fervour of Apple fanbois both amusing and sad at the same time because historians in the future will use them as an example to show how our society became utterly materialistic.
Or when you get into a "holy war" over Unity in Ubuntu?
Okay, so here's how I read this statement - you are trying to justify the religious fervour you yourself know exists within the Apple community (maybe you yourself know you are a fanboi zealot) by trying to give something else outside of that an equal footing. But if you actually knew Linux as well as you *think* you do, you'd realise that this is just one of those things that happens with Linux because of how open the development of it is.
Ubuntu is NOT the be-all-and-all of Linux, it's ONE distribution that caters for people who want an novice-level entry into Linux, and while I don't use it myself, it's very good at doing that job. However, lots of people also use Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora, Puppy, etc. etc. and because they're all free you can dual-boot them or VM them until your heart's content. Mark Shuttleworth is clearly aiming Ubuntu at a specific target market but most Linux people just let him get on with it because there's plenty of other choice.
I'd argue that the forking of OpenOffice into LibreOffice was a MUCH bigger Linux issue than Unity but even that has now pretty much resolved itself.
Or Google's new Arduino kit?
All I will say on that is I've yet to see anyone sat in a coffee shop posing with an Arduino board. You are clearly now clutching at straws for a justification of your rampant, frothy-mouthed fanboi-ism.
Or hell, for the perverse amongst us, when MS shows off their next version of Windows.
You're kidding me, right? When have you EVER seen ANYONE beat themselves into religious fervour over a new Windows OS (or, come to think of it, a new Linux kernel)? Most people I see are moaning about the fact that their new laptop hasn't come with the Windows XP installation that they are so used to or that their old software doesn't work - sure, they get over it and get used to Windows 7 (or whatever) in the end, but they're hardly fanatical about it.
Nope, sorry, you fanbois are out there in a league of your own. Steve Jobs, if anything, is a marketing genius that put Bill Gates to shame - in Macs and OS X he has created an exclusive, elitist little club for computer users who don't like Windows but don't have enough technical knowledge to use Linux, and for everything else he has created "cool" around the little silver Apple logo by turning iPhones and iPads into fashion accessories.
And if you don't accept that then I challenge you to scratch off the Apple logo on your Apple devices, just to prove to me that the branding, and the display of it openly, is not important to you.
Apple is a religious cult, Steve Jobs is their messiah-like leader. That's why they can make a comic about him and drooling fanbois will hand over their cash unquestionably.
Be honest, could you see a Steve Ballmer or Linux Torvalds comic working?
The short answer is: because people want it.
Sorry, but someone is not right in the head if they fork out $649 for a product that will be obsololete in a year, whether it's made by Apple or anyone else - although Apple ARE the yearly upgrade kings.
I don't know how it works in the US but here in the UK with the amount of competition there is in the mobile phone space, a smartphone contract with carriers like Orange and Vodafone is going to be a minimum of 18 months such that you're paying a reasonably low monthly charge, and probably a year into that contract you will be entitled to a free upgrade phone and, if you're lucky, get the carrier to give you the unlock codes for the old phone.
I also work for a US-centric company and when American colleagues come over here for meetings, invariably they are walking about with older unlocked phones and Pay-As-You-Go sims that they bought as soon as they arrived in the country, because that seems the cheapest way of making calls when outside your home country.
I would actually do my best to return it.
After all, if you're that deluded to buy an iPhone in the first place then you probably need every "help-up" in life that you can get.
For every backstreet boys, there's a Portishead.
You do realise you are not making it any better, don't you?
Not at all.
I find it constantly amusing that Apple survives today purely because Microsoft allowed it to. In which case you fanbois should show Microsoft much better respect than you seem to currently - how about going out to buy a Microsoft Mouse or Webcam occasionally, just as a little "Thank You" to them?
One question - why would a company as profitable as you say it was take the $150M from Microsoft in the first place then? I remember the uproar from the fanbois when it happened, it strikes me as a very stupid thing to do, from Apple's perspective, if it results in pissing off your users so much. ...unless, of course, they needed the money.
Oh, and the $1 billion you mentioned is a figure plucked from the air by you - it was $1.5b *revenue* not profit - big difference.
This sounds like a definite attempt at verbal "depth-charging" - i.e. slinging criticism at every OS you can hoping that you will get a bit from me. So let me help you out a bit.
I'm an 80% Linux / 20% Windows user with 30 years working and hobbying with computers. Never in all those years has it once crossed my mind to part with good money for anything made by Apple, and that is unlikely to change any time soon.
Now go ahead and do your worst. But understand that I treat a computing platform as a productivity and entertaimment tool, not a fashion accessory or religious motif.
And, since you are so eager to use the term yourself, anti-Apple fanboi.
Thanks. I take that as a compliment.
Erm, you get modded -1 Troll or -1 Off-Topic, both of which are negative attributes.
Therefore you need to accept you are wrong and have lost.