"With an iPad you'll carry 2kg of equipment, and you'd better not go too far from a power outlet."
The friggin' thing weighs a pound and a half and has a ten hour battery. Just what the hell are you carrying that weighs 4.4 pounds? And just how long were you planning on reading, anyway?
BTW, if I absolutely have to make a 16 hour transatlantic flight, and if I want to read for 16 hours straight (doubtful), I have a HyperMac Mini external battery that can double the time. Additional weight: eight ounces.
Try not to make up facts. Your arguments will carry more weight.
"The first iPod offered a few things that their competitors did not."
You forgot one of the most important parts. Apple licensed Toshiba's newest, smallest 1.8" hard drive, which meant that you could fit a huge number of songs into your back pocket. Every other hard-drive based player on the market at the time used full-sized notebook drives. That gave them terrible battery life plus the dimensions and weight equalling that of a small brick.
"The eInk stoff is no bullshit, it looks like real paper and is just so easy on the eyes..."
The idea that the eink is more comfortable on the eyes is another common assertion, and in my view it's also false to fact. I had two Kindles (G1 and G2) and sent both back. You want to really kill your eyes? Try reading the Kindle's fuzzy low-resolution low-contrast 75% gray text on a 25% gray background. It was so bad that the only way to make the text legible was to increase the font size... to the point where even my iPhone's screen displayed more words per "page".
So much for a dedicated reader.
The Kindle might be better if you spend most of your time standing outdoors and reading under the light of the noon sun, but forget reading indoors under anything other than optimum lighting conditions... unless, perhaps, you clip a silly-looking book light to it.
Then there's the slow refresh rate, the headache inducing let's-invert-the-entire-screen page turns, the...
Never mind. The ONLY thing e-ink had going for it was battery life, and today that's simply not enough. The sooner it's relegated to the technological scrap heap, the better for us all.
What it suggests to me is that your only real touch-screen smart phone choice if you're a Verizon customer, a Sprint customer, or a T-Mobile customer is... Android.
Windows 7 phones are still unavailable, and no one wants Windows 6.5. Blackberry hasn't upped their game either, and it shows. Palm's WebOS was a non-starter. As such, the majority of the people who buy Androids aren't choosing Android. It's simply the only thing left that the carriers are selling.
What will tell the tail is the day AT&T loses its exclusivity agreement, and the iPhone hits Verizon...
Really good netbooks.... are notebooks. Add enough features to a netbook (screen, processor, ram, disk, ports), and it's a notebook. And, one might add, at a notebook price. You don't get something for nothing.
Netbooks succeeded for a while because there were cheap as dirt, sturdy enough to last maybe a semester, and just barely good enough for a few basic tasks. Taking a few notes. Checking email and Facebook.
Now, cheaper and lighter notebooks are squeezing them out at the high end, and smart phones and tablets are going to hit them from below.
Actually, for many people the tips of fingers and palms do NOT secrete oils (nor sweat).
So how does the oil get there? We are (spare me the jokes) constantly touching ourselves. Most of the oil and grease and whatnot on your fingers comes from touching other parts of your body that are oily, like your nose, face, or hair, or from touching items in our environment like food.
You're the one that attempted to deflect his argument with a personal attack. If you're going to accuse someone else of ignorance, try not to expose your own in the process.
Exactly. The permissions system isn't some sort of panacea.
I mean, you could download an app that legitimately purports to send SMS or email messages as one of its functions. Like, say, a "social" RSS newsreader that exists to notify family and friends of interesting articles or stories.
You then approve it, give it access to your contacts and email and SMS, only to find out later on that it sends special "paid" messages like the one in the article.
Or spammed your entire contact list.
By approving the legitimate functionality, you approved the illegitimate functionality as well.
So, just writing this off by saying that the user needs to "understand permissions" isn't really an answer.
"Oh and why do you capitalize the 'middle east'? Is it a country now, worthy of promotion to a proper noun?"
Doesn't need to be a country. Region names are capitalized when they stand alone and are widely understood to designate a specific geographic (or geopolitical) area. e.g. Southern California, the Bay Area, the Middle East.
I have a friend who's always complaining about rude drivers who cut her off, honk at her, curse at her, and so on.
Later on, I had the occasion to ride with her as a passenger in her car... and found out why "everyone else" was so rude. She parked herself in the fast lane and backed up traffic for miles, her driving was distracted at best, she didn't signal, and she constantly made sudden, unpredictable lane changes.
Had another acquaintance who was constantly getting fired from jobs. Everyone he every worked for was a lousy boss. Always yelling and screaming and making unreasonable expectations. Like actually wanting work done.
Stopped by a restaurant where he was employed once, and found him zoned out in the bathroom, still half drunk from a party the night before. Was fired about a week later, "Because the manager hated me!"
Yep. Funny how the problem is always about all of those "other" people....
This isn't like an ISP overbooking a line and hoping that everyone doesn't decide to download a movie at the same time. If a hosting service says your account can have 10GB of storage, contractually they need to make sure 10GB of storage exists.
Even though most accounts don't need it.
One client of mine dramatically over-provisioned his database server. But then again, he expects at some point to break past his current customer plateau and hit the big time. Will he do so? Who can say?
It may be a bit wasteful to over-provision a server, but I can guarantee you that continually ripping out "just big enough" servers and installing larger ones is even more wasteful.
"It doesn't fucking matter what the Italians or anyone says. When a large group of people accept one thing as truth it really doesn't matter what an individual in that population or an entirely different group thinks."
Tell that to Galileo. At one point in time, a large group of people thought the world was flat. One individual thought differently, and said so.
Every endeavor is a pyramid: a few very successful people at the top, a bunch that make a decent living from it in the middle, and a bunch of pretenders at the bottom. ("I'm actually an actor," says the waiter.)
You can talk about talent and education and skill and so on, and those are important attributes. But the pure "drive" to succeed counts for a lot, and it's drive (coupled with the right set of tools) that can make you a success. It's drive that keeps you going when everyone else tells you that you should be a good little corporate drone.
You don't have to be a "star" to make a living doing what you love. Plenty of musicians, for example. You do, however, have to work your ass off.
Honesty counts too. Are you good enough? Can you be good enough? What does it take to be competitive in that arena?
Finally, you talk about "getting things done". There are two sides to that equation. Some people, who you may consider to be "drones", actually like business, or law, or medicine, or mechanics, or gardening, or cooking, or whatever. Those were their dreams, and they're living it.
Other people are stuck there, or never had a dream, or a passion, or a purpose. Never took a risk. Who listened to bitter people like you, who told them that the odds were against them, so why bother.
Do you really think they're happy? Do you really think that they WANT to be "sensible", and work as a greeter at Walmart the rest of their lives?
You only have one life. One. This is it. No replays. No resets. No do overs.
Or to borrow from Richard Bach, "Are you doing right now what you really want to do more than anything else in the world? If your answer is no, stop doing it, and hurl yourself into want you want most to do."
Fire, water damage, tornadoes, quakes, any naturalmdisaster. And theft, of coruse, All can damage of destroy your library.
With digital media, however, I can have MANY backups both at home and offsite. Your girlfriends story is more about her failure to do backups (on a Mac with Time Machine no less) than the dangers of ebooks.
You also forgot to consider another, much more common strike against physical books: moving them.
Because while most non-techno-nerds (e.g. your average users) usually only want to check mail and browse the web, they also have an annoying habit of needing to run Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Photoshop. And their kids want iTunes for their iPods, not to mention their wanting to play StarCraft, Gears, Halo, and a slew of other Windows-only games.
Tell them their brand-spanking-new Linux-based computer can't do so, and they tend to get just a little upset....
"...but they are masters at getting the product right..."
Sure, if give them enough time.
They only needed, what? Windows 1.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and now, Windows 7.
That's only 10 versions over 25 years... (grin)
Re:I Disagree with Some Parts of This Article
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
"Free TV is not dead. Get a $20 antenna, and you can get nice 1920x1080 HD TV off the air for *gasp* free."
Free??? Right. "Free" TV is paid for by advertising dollars, whose costs are factored into every product you buy. Palm and Sprint pay $20 million dollars for a Super Bowl ad, which results in a Pre and Sprint costing us that much more.
Not to mention the time you waste watching 20 minutes of advertising per hour of television.
TANSTAAFL (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.)
If, as you say, you really have the companies best interests at heart... then forget the book and hire an expert to come in, look things over, and make suggestions. If not do most of the work.
The "what book should I read" method has no business whatsoever in business. You're practically guaranteed at some point to piss off your boss, or lose your job, or, worse case, kill the company. ("What do you mean, our only backup of the customer database is corrupted???")
Slashdot Mirror
"With an iPad you'll carry 2kg of equipment, and you'd better not go too far from a power outlet."
The friggin' thing weighs a pound and a half and has a ten hour battery. Just what the hell are you carrying that weighs 4.4 pounds? And just how long were you planning on reading, anyway?
BTW, if I absolutely have to make a 16 hour transatlantic flight, and if I want to read for 16 hours straight (doubtful), I have a HyperMac Mini external battery that can double the time. Additional weight: eight ounces.
Try not to make up facts. Your arguments will carry more weight.
"The first iPod offered a few things that their competitors did not."
You forgot one of the most important parts. Apple licensed Toshiba's newest, smallest 1.8" hard drive, which meant that you could fit a huge number of songs into your back pocket. Every other hard-drive based player on the market at the time used full-sized notebook drives. That gave them terrible battery life plus the dimensions and weight equalling that of a small brick.
"The eInk stoff is no bullshit, it looks like real paper and is just so easy on the eyes..."
The idea that the eink is more comfortable on the eyes is another common assertion, and in my view it's also false to fact. I had two Kindles (G1 and G2) and sent both back. You want to really kill your eyes? Try reading the Kindle's fuzzy low-resolution low-contrast 75% gray text on a 25% gray background.
It was so bad that the only way to make the text legible was to increase the font size... to the point where even my iPhone's screen displayed more words per "page".
So much for a dedicated reader.
The Kindle might be better if you spend most of your time standing outdoors and reading under the light of the noon sun, but forget reading indoors under anything other than optimum lighting conditions... unless, perhaps, you clip a silly-looking book light to it.
Then there's the slow refresh rate, the headache inducing let's-invert-the-entire-screen page turns, the...
Never mind. The ONLY thing e-ink had going for it was battery life, and today that's simply not enough. The sooner it's relegated to the technological scrap heap, the better for us all.
What it suggests to me is that your only real touch-screen smart phone choice if you're a Verizon customer, a Sprint customer, or a T-Mobile customer is... Android.
Windows 7 phones are still unavailable, and no one wants Windows 6.5. Blackberry hasn't upped their game either, and it shows. Palm's WebOS was a non-starter. As such, the majority of the people who buy Androids aren't choosing Android. It's simply the only thing left that the carriers are selling.
What will tell the tail is the day AT&T loses its exclusivity agreement, and the iPhone hits Verizon...
Really good netbooks.... are notebooks. Add enough features to a netbook (screen, processor, ram, disk, ports), and it's a notebook. And, one might add, at a notebook price. You don't get something for nothing.
Netbooks succeeded for a while because there were cheap as dirt, sturdy enough to last maybe a semester, and just barely good enough for a few basic tasks. Taking a few notes. Checking email and Facebook.
Now, cheaper and lighter notebooks are squeezing them out at the high end, and smart phones and tablets are going to hit them from below.
He doesn't care about getting caught. Being a petty thief is a matter of pride to him....
Actually, for many people the tips of fingers and palms do NOT secrete oils (nor sweat).
So how does the oil get there? We are (spare me the jokes) constantly touching ourselves. Most of the oil and grease and whatnot on your fingers comes from touching other parts of your body that are oily, like your nose, face, or hair, or from touching items in our environment like food.
You're the one that attempted to deflect his argument with a personal attack. If you're going to accuse someone else of ignorance, try not to expose your own in the process.
Exactly. The permissions system isn't some sort of panacea.
I mean, you could download an app that legitimately purports to send SMS or email messages as one of its functions. Like, say, a "social" RSS newsreader that exists to notify family and friends of interesting articles or stories.
You then approve it, give it access to your contacts and email and SMS, only to find out later on that it sends special "paid" messages like the one in the article.
Or spammed your entire contact list.
By approving the legitimate functionality, you approved the illegitimate functionality as well.
So, just writing this off by saying that the user needs to "understand permissions" isn't really an answer.
"Oh and why do you capitalize the 'middle east'? Is it a country now, worthy of promotion to a proper noun?"
Doesn't need to be a country. Region names are capitalized when they stand alone and are widely understood to designate a specific geographic (or geopolitical) area. e.g. Southern California, the Bay Area, the Middle East.
http://www.utexas.edu/visualguidelines/capitalization.html
Justice is a process that involves courts, trials, juries, and so on.
But the "revenge" you discussed would be served solely based on single person's whim. Yours. With no recourse. No counsel. And no justice.
I have a friend who's always complaining about rude drivers who cut her off, honk at her, curse at her, and so on.
Later on, I had the occasion to ride with her as a passenger in her car... and found out why "everyone else" was so rude. She parked herself in the fast lane and backed up traffic for miles, her driving was distracted at best, she didn't signal, and she constantly made sudden, unpredictable lane changes.
Had another acquaintance who was constantly getting fired from jobs. Everyone he every worked for was a lousy boss. Always yelling and screaming and making unreasonable expectations. Like actually wanting work done.
Stopped by a restaurant where he was employed once, and found him zoned out in the bathroom, still half drunk from a party the night before. Was fired about a week later, "Because the manager hated me!"
Yep. Funny how the problem is always about all of those "other" people....
"... unless it didn't. Third-party browsers could [sic] use third-party PDF rendering libraries."
Unless they didn't.
This isn't like an ISP overbooking a line and hoping that everyone doesn't decide to download a movie at the same time. If a hosting service says your account can have 10GB of storage, contractually they need to make sure 10GB of storage exists.
Even though most accounts don't need it.
One client of mine dramatically over-provisioned his database server. But then again, he expects at some point to break past his current customer plateau and hit the big time. Will he do so? Who can say?
It may be a bit wasteful to over-provision a server, but I can guarantee you that continually ripping out "just big enough" servers and installing larger ones is even more wasteful.
Your pick.
They needed this a couple of years ago. Too many OS X applications fail to recognize and support gestures.
Why? Because they were only supported on the MacBooks. Why bother if half the Mac universe can't use them?
Now Apple's desktops can finally catch up to the functionality that their notebooks have had for years.
In fact, this really should be the DEFAULT option for iMacs, Mac minis, and Pros. Reply
I don't know, but when it's attached to the airplane it is in fact migratory...
You're kidding, right? You could have hundreds of these things flying around a city and a power company wouldn't even register the line loss...
"It doesn't fucking matter what the Italians or anyone says. When a large group of people accept one thing as truth it really doesn't matter what an individual in that population or an entirely different group thinks."
Tell that to Galileo. At one point in time, a large group of people thought the world was flat. One individual thought differently, and said so.
Every endeavor is a pyramid: a few very successful people at the top, a bunch that make a decent living from it in the middle, and a bunch of pretenders at the bottom. ("I'm actually an actor," says the waiter.)
You can talk about talent and education and skill and so on, and those are important attributes. But the pure "drive" to succeed counts for a lot, and it's drive (coupled with the right set of tools) that can make you a success. It's drive that keeps you going when everyone else tells you that you should be a good little corporate drone.
You don't have to be a "star" to make a living doing what you love. Plenty of musicians, for example. You do, however, have to work your ass off.
Honesty counts too. Are you good enough? Can you be good enough? What does it take to be competitive in that arena?
Finally, you talk about "getting things done". There are two sides to that equation. Some people, who you may consider to be "drones", actually like business, or law, or medicine, or mechanics, or gardening, or cooking, or whatever. Those were their dreams, and they're living it.
Other people are stuck there, or never had a dream, or a passion, or a purpose. Never took a risk. Who listened to bitter people like you, who told them that the odds were against them, so why bother.
Do you really think they're happy? Do you really think that they WANT to be "sensible", and work as a greeter at Walmart the rest of their lives?
You only have one life. One. This is it. No replays. No resets. No do overs.
Or to borrow from Richard Bach, "Are you doing right now what you really want to do more than anything else in the world? If your answer is no, stop doing it, and hurl yourself into want you want most to do."
"....purpose was to drive Android forward ...."
And how, exactly, does failing to sell a significant number of phones drive ANYTHING forward?
Fire, water damage, tornadoes, quakes, any naturalmdisaster. And theft, of coruse, All can damage of destroy your library.
With digital media, however, I can have MANY backups both at home and offsite. Your girlfriends story is more about her failure to do backups (on a Mac with Time Machine no less) than the dangers of ebooks.
You also forgot to consider another, much more common strike against physical books: moving them.
Because while most non-techno-nerds (e.g. your average users) usually only want to check mail and browse the web, they also have an annoying habit of needing to run Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Photoshop. And their kids want iTunes for their iPods, not to mention their wanting to play StarCraft, Gears, Halo, and a slew of other Windows-only games.
Tell them their brand-spanking-new Linux-based computer can't do so, and they tend to get just a little upset....
"...but they are masters at getting the product right..."
Sure, if give them enough time.
They only needed, what? Windows 1.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and now, Windows 7.
That's only 10 versions over 25 years... (grin)
"Free TV is not dead. Get a $20 antenna, and you can get nice 1920x1080 HD TV off the air for *gasp* free."
Free??? Right. "Free" TV is paid for by advertising dollars, whose costs are factored into every product you buy. Palm and Sprint pay $20 million dollars for a Super Bowl ad, which results in a Pre and Sprint costing us that much more.
Not to mention the time you waste watching 20 minutes of advertising per hour of television.
TANSTAAFL (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.)
If, as you say, you really have the companies best interests at heart... then forget the book and hire an expert to come in, look things over, and make suggestions. If not do most of the work.
The "what book should I read" method has no business whatsoever in business. You're practically guaranteed at some point to piss off your boss, or lose your job, or, worse case, kill the company. ("What do you mean, our only backup of the customer database is corrupted???")