We use skype a lot for voice conferencing. A lot of times I use my iPhone for it and like the new version that works over 3G. Just about everyone we deal with has a video camera in their laptop top or computer. It rarely ever gets used.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about this whole mobile video conferencing. Now instead of the assholes with the earpieces, we're going to see people holding out their arms not paying attention to where they are walking and being even bigger douches. And this goes for Driod users with this features too.
If it only had the capabilities: a decent amount of memory, proper graphics with hardware-accelerated video and HDMI out to a proper screen, USB ports for a keyboard, bluray and storage.
A built in Bluray player on a tablet..........I think what you're looking for is called a laptop.
Frankly it is to the point now where I should hand in my geek card because I'm understanding why people like Apple's approach. When I go home, I don't want to deal with crap. I do enough at that at work. When I'm at home I just want things to work. Over the past 8 years, I've not had any problems with Apple's DRM. Yes it maybe there, but it has never inconvenienced me. And that's the point. A lot of people around here object because of philosophical reasons, but to the average user, so long as it works as they expect and doesn't get in their way, they don't care.
I bought an iPad 3G and gave my MacBook Pro to a new developer we hired at work. Over the past year I've found that all I was using the laptop for was email, skype, and writing proposals. And most of the time I was using my iPhone for email and skype. (we do voice conferencing not video usually). I was already using iWork more than Office these days, but I still have a Mac Mini at home and at the office. So I bought two docking stations (one for the office and one for home) and I really like the iPad so far.
There is a lot of truth here. And it can even be self regulation. Just look at PA-DSS. I wonder how many people here know that if they are running an e-commerce site with any OSS shopping cart and directly accepting credit cards they have to stop as of July 1st. There is no FOSS shopping cart application that is PA-DSS certified by Visa et. al. The only thing that comes close is Magento Enterprise edition ($9000). The Community Edition is not nor ever will be.
We forked an opensource point of sale application that has just passed compliance and now waiting for the paperwork to go through to be certified. Total cost, about USD 85,000. $20,000 for QSA, another $1250 for certification, and the rest to hire programmers because the documentation requirements on how an application is developed does not fit with the normal "community" development model opensource uses.
I know a lot of companies complained about the PCI requirements because it is expensive. We're a small shop with a half people on staff total and it's us over a year to get PCI-Level I and PA-DSS certifications. With one of our products, we've seen three competitors drop out of the market. They were extremely small up starts with only a couple people and suddenly found they couldn't meet the requirements. We proved it can be done by a small shop, but we burned over $200,000 in cash doing it.
And a lot of those subsidies are then paid out by the "Big agro" companies to individual farmers when they sell their grain to the ag company. The largest collector of subsidies, last I knew and it was a couple years ago was (assuming still is) Riceland. Riceland is a Coop. When we booked and sold our rice and soybeans through Riceland, the check they sent us included any federal farm subsidies. We've since built our own grain storage and now sell to whomever is paying the most at that time at the river, whether it be Cargill, Riceland, or ADM, but when they cut us a check, that check includes any federal farm subsides.
I consider Social Security to be a ponzi scheme. I would much rather opt out and put the 7.5% plus the 7.5% my company pays for socal security into my 401k or IRA because I already know that Social Security isn't going to be there when I would eligible in 35 years.
And a "meritocracy" will last how many generations? I'm guessing just one. Just look at how politics has become the family business. i.e Kennedy's, Bush's, Clintons, Pauls, Carnahans, Blunts, Daly's, etc..
It's like when I complain about federal income taxes and people reply with: "Taxes pay for your fire and police and schools."
Well, the funding for my local fire, police, and school district come from the local property taxes and sales taxes I pay. Both of which require a vote at a local election to increase. And I don't mind paying those taxes because at the local level I at least get the chance to vote on the issue. And usually I don't vote against reasonable increases, but at the same time when I see waste I can attend a local meeting and voice an opinion about it. (For instance, our local fire department is way over funded. There is no reason why the fire captains need a brand new $70k SUV every year while some of the breathing equipment "needs upgrading".)
But at the federal level I pay my taxes so the money can be used to bail out whatever group has their hand out this week? The other thing I can't get over is the belief that the government always has to get bigger at all levels and when we had all this great growth in the first half of the last decade, they expanded government at all levels spending everything they took in and more. Whatever happened to establishing an emergency fund for when lean times occur? I know tax revenues are down. Guess what our revenues are down and we had to buckle down and keep expenses down, and even float on reserve cash we had for a few months. If we have to do that as a private business, what makes government any different?
Our front end has been PHP for a while because it was popular and we could find developers easily. And when we were in the development, speed and the ability to find programmers was a primary concern. However now we've added all the functionality needed and it's a mature/stable product, but in the last 18 months we've noticed quite a few of these "You shouldn't use thisFunction() because it is deprecated". Every couple months when we upgraded PHP to the latest version it seemed like we'd start seeing new warnings that some function we'd been using for years was being deprecated. The last straw for me was the deprecation of split(). We were spending more time for maintenance than what we wanted to commit to the project at this stage so we ended up porting the frontend to Perl. The backend had been Perl based since 1999/2000 and the last time we had to do any updates to those scripts was adding functionality in 2006.
I know Perl is not sexy these days, but we use it a lot for things that we need done but don't want to spend a lot of time on maintenance. And I catch flack from some of the programmers who always want to use whatever "new hotness" is this year. But I'll take stable and mature any day of the week.
Depends. If google itself releases a Chrome Tablet and competes directly with Android, then their entire platform could be in trouble. Other companies that invested in Android may go "Whoo, wait a minute. Now you're competing AGAINST us DIRECTLY? Hmmm, what is some other opensource phone OS we can use?"
Checks are only used within the United States these days. Europe, a person company gives you a routing number and account number. You go to the bank, fill out a sheet of paper with that number, hand it to a teller along with your account information and ID, and they make the electronic transfer. I won't say it eliminates fraud but it cuts down on it.
However, I'm not sure what you can do to "solve" the privacy problem. We looked at Google Docs especially for a recent joint venture with a company on the other side of the country. But all it would take is for someone to slip up on the view settings and folks could see our notes, plans, and documents. Plus Google indexes all that stuff. Is it likely they would sell that information to a competitor? Not likely under current management, but what about 5 years from now? I know we talked to our lawyers about it and they pretty well said stay clear of Google and host it ourselves if you want to be safe.
I'm glad we bought our iPad 3G's at work so we're grandfathered in on the Unlimited plans. But I know on my iPhone that I've never used more than 600MB in a month ever. Even while listening to AOL Radio or Pandora streaming I've still only average between 500 - 600MB. Now with tethering that might change.
Android Market makes sure your app is only visible to those devices where it will run correctly, by filtering your app from devices which don't have the features you listed.
I've seen this a lot with friends who have different android phones. Friend A with HTC: "Hey try this really cool app". Friend B with Motorola: "What App? I can't find it anywhere in the market place." My understanding is that the app doesn't even show up if their phone is not compatible, it's invisible. I guess they don't want a bunch of apps that when you bring up the page says, "Sorry your phone is not compatible".
I also know from the QA side of the house that you can have the same phone hardware with 2 different OSs depending on the carrier. Usually we don't have major problems, but there can be glitches and bugs that are introduced. And then there is the speed of the upgrades. With the iPhone we looked at one major update per year. When we started working with Android last year it was 1.5 (which had been our for a while on the G1) and 1.6. Then suddenly it was 2.0, then 2.1, now 2.2 all the last 9 months or so. Apple has generally release a new OS every year with a minor.1 release shortly there after. Same with blackberry.
I saw it too, and same thing. Safari wouldn't do anything with the click. But I'm running Safari Ad Block, Flash Block, and a couple other plug ins that may have stopped it.
The first iBook I bought went back for a new Logic board. This 12.1" powerbook has had 1 new battery about 3 years ago, but it's now over 6 years old. 1 Battery, 4 power supplies, but the power supplies are my fault. (I kept knocking them off a high table onto a ceramic tile floor at least twice a day. Only so many times you can do that).
The MacBook I had is now 3 years old and still being used by a friend of mine with no problems other than a new battery she got. (18 - 24 months is the life of any battery on any laptop regardless of brand).
Having worked around a lot of apples now for 10 years, the folks that generally had hardware problems had hardware problems with the IBM, DELL, or HP's they were using before. I found that most often there was a correlation between the user and how they used/treated the devices. That being said, we did run across a bad unit now and then. But nothing compared to the HP's and Dell laptops the apple's replaced. Circa 2007 we were seeing a failure rate of nearly 25% of all our HP laptops within 13 months.
Believe me, "It just works." I bought my Dad an iMac a couple years ago. Once he got used to quitting programs as opposed just hitting the red X and dragging and dropping programs to install them I've not had to field a single phone call the past couple years. I'm no longer spending an evening wiping his computer and reinstalling because he got a virus or spyware of some kind. And it only took him about a week to make that transition between christmas and new years.
Re:then apple needs a desktop midtower at $800-$10
on
Why Apple Is So Sticky
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· Score: 2, Informative
You can run dual monitors with an iMac. They have a mini DVI output just like a Mac Mini. I know quite a few graphics artists that recently went from older g5 towers to 24" and now 27" iMacs. Some still use their old monitors with an adaptor as a second monitor. Others find the 27" screens has plenty of real estate.
Personally I replaced my G5 tower with a Mac Mini. Since I'm not editing video any more, I found the Mac Mini has plenty of horse power and ram for what I need. Hell I use my iPad more than anything now.
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We use skype a lot for voice conferencing. A lot of times I use my iPhone for it and like the new version that works over 3G. Just about everyone we deal with has a video camera in their laptop top or computer. It rarely ever gets used.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about this whole mobile video conferencing. Now instead of the assholes with the earpieces, we're going to see people holding out their arms not paying attention to where they are walking and being even bigger douches. And this goes for Driod users with this features too.
People retrieving wounded on a battlefield have to be wearing a red cross or crescent to fall under the convention. Same with any vehicles.
If it only had the capabilities: a decent amount of memory, proper graphics with hardware-accelerated video and HDMI out to a proper screen, USB ports for a keyboard, bluray and storage.
A built in Bluray player on a tablet..........I think what you're looking for is called a laptop.
Frankly it is to the point now where I should hand in my geek card because I'm understanding why people like Apple's approach. When I go home, I don't want to deal with crap. I do enough at that at work. When I'm at home I just want things to work. Over the past 8 years, I've not had any problems with Apple's DRM. Yes it maybe there, but it has never inconvenienced me. And that's the point. A lot of people around here object because of philosophical reasons, but to the average user, so long as it works as they expect and doesn't get in their way, they don't care.
I bought an iPad 3G and gave my MacBook Pro to a new developer we hired at work. Over the past year I've found that all I was using the laptop for was email, skype, and writing proposals. And most of the time I was using my iPhone for email and skype. (we do voice conferencing not video usually). I was already using iWork more than Office these days, but I still have a Mac Mini at home and at the office. So I bought two docking stations (one for the office and one for home) and I really like the iPad so far.
Everyone wants a piece of Google's cash pie.
It happens on all levels when you become successful. Both as a business and personally.
There is a lot of truth here. And it can even be self regulation. Just look at PA-DSS. I wonder how many people here know that if they are running an e-commerce site with any OSS shopping cart and directly accepting credit cards they have to stop as of July 1st. There is no FOSS shopping cart application that is PA-DSS certified by Visa et. al. The only thing that comes close is Magento Enterprise edition ($9000). The Community Edition is not nor ever will be.
We forked an opensource point of sale application that has just passed compliance and now waiting for the paperwork to go through to be certified. Total cost, about USD 85,000. $20,000 for QSA, another $1250 for certification, and the rest to hire programmers because the documentation requirements on how an application is developed does not fit with the normal "community" development model opensource uses.
I know a lot of companies complained about the PCI requirements because it is expensive. We're a small shop with a half people on staff total and it's us over a year to get PCI-Level I and PA-DSS certifications. With one of our products, we've seen three competitors drop out of the market. They were extremely small up starts with only a couple people and suddenly found they couldn't meet the requirements. We proved it can be done by a small shop, but we burned over $200,000 in cash doing it.
And a lot of those subsidies are then paid out by the "Big agro" companies to individual farmers when they sell their grain to the ag company. The largest collector of subsidies, last I knew and it was a couple years ago was (assuming still is) Riceland. Riceland is a Coop. When we booked and sold our rice and soybeans through Riceland, the check they sent us included any federal farm subsidies. We've since built our own grain storage and now sell to whomever is paying the most at that time at the river, whether it be Cargill, Riceland, or ADM, but when they cut us a check, that check includes any federal farm subsides.
I consider Social Security to be a ponzi scheme. I would much rather opt out and put the 7.5% plus the 7.5% my company pays for socal security into my 401k or IRA because I already know that Social Security isn't going to be there when I would eligible in 35 years.
Download the AT&T app. You can log in, pay your bill, and see how much data, minutes, and texts you've used in this billing period.
And a "meritocracy" will last how many generations? I'm guessing just one. Just look at how politics has become the family business. i.e Kennedy's, Bush's, Clintons, Pauls, Carnahans, Blunts, Daly's, etc..
What is the solution? Having smart, well-informed people make the important, big decisions. How do we make that happen?
I believe that's called an Aristocracy.
It's like when I complain about federal income taxes and people reply with: "Taxes pay for your fire and police and schools."
Well, the funding for my local fire, police, and school district come from the local property taxes and sales taxes I pay. Both of which require a vote at a local election to increase. And I don't mind paying those taxes because at the local level I at least get the chance to vote on the issue. And usually I don't vote against reasonable increases, but at the same time when I see waste I can attend a local meeting and voice an opinion about it. (For instance, our local fire department is way over funded. There is no reason why the fire captains need a brand new $70k SUV every year while some of the breathing equipment "needs upgrading".)
But at the federal level I pay my taxes so the money can be used to bail out whatever group has their hand out this week? The other thing I can't get over is the belief that the government always has to get bigger at all levels and when we had all this great growth in the first half of the last decade, they expanded government at all levels spending everything they took in and more. Whatever happened to establishing an emergency fund for when lean times occur? I know tax revenues are down. Guess what our revenues are down and we had to buckle down and keep expenses down, and even float on reserve cash we had for a few months. If we have to do that as a private business, what makes government any different?
Our front end has been PHP for a while because it was popular and we could find developers easily. And when we were in the development, speed and the ability to find programmers was a primary concern. However now we've added all the functionality needed and it's a mature/stable product, but in the last 18 months we've noticed quite a few of these "You shouldn't use thisFunction() because it is deprecated". Every couple months when we upgraded PHP to the latest version it seemed like we'd start seeing new warnings that some function we'd been using for years was being deprecated. The last straw for me was the deprecation of split(). We were spending more time for maintenance than what we wanted to commit to the project at this stage so we ended up porting the frontend to Perl. The backend had been Perl based since 1999/2000 and the last time we had to do any updates to those scripts was adding functionality in 2006.
I know Perl is not sexy these days, but we use it a lot for things that we need done but don't want to spend a lot of time on maintenance. And I catch flack from some of the programmers who always want to use whatever "new hotness" is this year. But I'll take stable and mature any day of the week.
And guess what, you get the same "bait and switch" data plans with Android & Blackberry on AT&T since it applies to all their phones with data plans.
Depends. If google itself releases a Chrome Tablet and competes directly with Android, then their entire platform could be in trouble. Other companies that invested in Android may go "Whoo, wait a minute. Now you're competing AGAINST us DIRECTLY? Hmmm, what is some other opensource phone OS we can use?"
It's funny how that can work sometimes.
Checks are only used within the United States these days. Europe, a person company gives you a routing number and account number. You go to the bank, fill out a sheet of paper with that number, hand it to a teller along with your account information and ID, and they make the electronic transfer. I won't say it eliminates fraud but it cuts down on it.
However, I'm not sure what you can do to "solve" the privacy problem. We looked at Google Docs especially for a recent joint venture with a company on the other side of the country. But all it would take is for someone to slip up on the view settings and folks could see our notes, plans, and documents. Plus Google indexes all that stuff. Is it likely they would sell that information to a competitor? Not likely under current management, but what about 5 years from now? I know we talked to our lawyers about it and they pretty well said stay clear of Google and host it ourselves if you want to be safe.
I'm glad we bought our iPad 3G's at work so we're grandfathered in on the Unlimited plans. But I know on my iPhone that I've never used more than 600MB in a month ever. Even while listening to AOL Radio or Pandora streaming I've still only average between 500 - 600MB. Now with tethering that might change.
meh. Potato, potawto, it's all relative.
Android Market makes sure your app is only visible to those devices where it will run correctly, by filtering your app from devices which don't have the features you listed.
I've seen this a lot with friends who have different android phones. Friend A with HTC: "Hey try this really cool app". Friend B with Motorola: "What App? I can't find it anywhere in the market place." My understanding is that the app doesn't even show up if their phone is not compatible, it's invisible. I guess they don't want a bunch of apps that when you bring up the page says, "Sorry your phone is not compatible".
I also know from the QA side of the house that you can have the same phone hardware with 2 different OSs depending on the carrier. Usually we don't have major problems, but there can be glitches and bugs that are introduced. And then there is the speed of the upgrades. With the iPhone we looked at one major update per year. When we started working with Android last year it was 1.5 (which had been our for a while on the G1) and 1.6. Then suddenly it was 2.0, then 2.1, now 2.2 all the last 9 months or so. Apple has generally release a new OS every year with a minor .1 release shortly there after. Same with blackberry.
"Cloud Computing" is just Timeshare 2.0.
I saw it too, and same thing. Safari wouldn't do anything with the click. But I'm running Safari Ad Block, Flash Block, and a couple other plug ins that may have stopped it.
Well, if it were an european swallow, it would be running GSM. But you see it is sprint, which uses CDMA based technology and so.....
The first iBook I bought went back for a new Logic board. This 12.1" powerbook has had 1 new battery about 3 years ago, but it's now over 6 years old. 1 Battery, 4 power supplies, but the power supplies are my fault. (I kept knocking them off a high table onto a ceramic tile floor at least twice a day. Only so many times you can do that).
The MacBook I had is now 3 years old and still being used by a friend of mine with no problems other than a new battery she got. (18 - 24 months is the life of any battery on any laptop regardless of brand).
Having worked around a lot of apples now for 10 years, the folks that generally had hardware problems had hardware problems with the IBM, DELL, or HP's they were using before. I found that most often there was a correlation between the user and how they used/treated the devices. That being said, we did run across a bad unit now and then. But nothing compared to the HP's and Dell laptops the apple's replaced. Circa 2007 we were seeing a failure rate of nearly 25% of all our HP laptops within 13 months.
Believe me, "It just works." I bought my Dad an iMac a couple years ago. Once he got used to quitting programs as opposed just hitting the red X and dragging and dropping programs to install them I've not had to field a single phone call the past couple years. I'm no longer spending an evening wiping his computer and reinstalling because he got a virus or spyware of some kind. And it only took him about a week to make that transition between christmas and new years.
You can run dual monitors with an iMac. They have a mini DVI output just like a Mac Mini. I know quite a few graphics artists that recently went from older g5 towers to 24" and now 27" iMacs. Some still use their old monitors with an adaptor as a second monitor. Others find the 27" screens has plenty of real estate.
Personally I replaced my G5 tower with a Mac Mini. Since I'm not editing video any more, I found the Mac Mini has plenty of horse power and ram for what I need. Hell I use my iPad more than anything now.