Have you ever tried using your newfangled idevice in real life? I see some morons holding it in one hand and trying to type with the other and it gets pretty hilarious from them.
Have you ever tried watching a standard two hour movie while holding it in your one hand all the time?
I'll let you in on the dirty secret of the iPad: some of us have trained ourselves -- through years of practice -- to sit. That allows us to use two hands, or rest it on our knee, or lap, or the arm of the couch, or a table, or to use it in a wide variety of comfortable, natural postures that are impossible with a keyboard-driven device.
Have you ever tried transferring your music/movie collection to it?
Yes, yes I have. Slower than I'd like, but it works great.
Have you ever tried using it without a data plan?
Yes. I got the 3G and didn't have a data plan for the first month+. At work, I had to walk about 100 feet to where I could pick up the public WiFi. At home, I have good coverage (802.11n). There are hotspots all over the place, and many things, like photos, documents, calendars, do not require a full-time internet connection. But I digress. What's your point again?
Have you ever tried using it browsing flash sites?
I've never found a site that was Flash-only that I found useful.
Have you ever tried installing anything not available on apple site?
Have you ever tried to get root access?Have you ever tried to get root access?
Because... why? I've got a laptop at home, where I edit videos, compile Open Source software, do statistical analysis, etc. The iPad's something different.
Yes, it's shiny, but that's about it, no mater how you may want to believe (and convince others) with vague "have you ever used it?" line.
And for all the faults of N900, you can all of above.
Wow, you managed to avoid answering the question, though I assume from the ignorance of your counter-questions that the answer is "No". In terms of the N900, if you're comparing a postcard-sized screen and a miniscule battery life to an iPad, well... You've managed to drive the nail in your own coffin, then have it slammed into the ground with a pile driver, then had 50 tons of concrete dumped on it. Rather redundant, but amusing.
I totally agree that end users don't care about the process, and let's be honest: how exactly will they ever be able to tell if they're even affected or not. (Other than pr0n-lovers, of course.) If you read the survey, it turns out that 83% of the respondents said that the App Approval Process was not an issue or was only a minor issue. Which is reasonable, if perhaps 10-15% of purchasers are either developers or software anarchists.
The apps ask you when they first want access to Location, which is not really new.
The new thing is when you go to Settings -> General -> Location Services (which might fool you into thinking it only sets Yes/No), where you'll see all apps that use Location Services and you can turn them off and on by hand. A little arrow head next to the app indicates it's used your Location in the last 24 hours. An app won't be in this section without having asked to use Location Services first, but it's really nice to be able to track and revoke Location permissions after the initial ask.
If "At least they tell you..." is correct, you CAN opt out at any time by not allowing an app to access your location. You can refuse the first time. You can go to the new settings area and turn it off on a per-app basis, and it will show you which apps have requested your location in the last 24 hours.
Perhaps Apple intends to go beyond this, but if not, you have absolute control and can tell exactly what apps are asking and how often. Not bad.
You act as if we are more religious ("more Fundamentalist Christian", I suspect you'd say) today than 50 years ago, and it's the rising tide of religion that's lapping at and undermining the walls of Science. All you have to do is consider best seller lists (something like 3 atheist books in the last couple of years), the banning of religion from public schools and libraries, etc, to understand that it is atheism (or perhaps agnosticism) that has dramatically increased in the last 50 years.
Not implying any causation. Simply pointing out that this whole subthread that it's religion causing the problem is wildly off the mark.
The real answer is that we as a nation have spent too much time and effort channeling promising scientists into Wall Street ("Rocket scientists" or "quants"), or MBA's, or the law, instead of hard science. (On a personal note, I think that atheistic vendettas, such as yours, are discouraging people of faith from entering science, where they have happily contributed for centuries, "superstitious" though they may have been.)
My usage may be a little high because I was out of the country on vacation. I was also auditioning a lot of apps, etc, and the accommodations had very short-range Wi-fi, so I used 3G a lot.
Last, I was using a GPS program everywhere I drove, and since it could get 3G it was downloading tiles all the time, as I drove, as I zoomed in and out, etc, etc.
I'm still going to leave 3G off in the US for a few months to save some money after the iPad (and apps) purchase, but I'm beginning to believe that the new plan -- while absolutely bait-and-switch-ish and typical horrible AT&T -- is reasonable and for most users about the same or a little cheaper than the unlimited plan.
On a recent trip overseas, I was able to use a SIM and try out the 3G (haven't tried it in the US yet). I was on vacation, so probably spent as more time online than I would off-vacation, but my average was 100MB per day. At that rate, that's 3GB per month, which would be about $30 in the new plan. Makes me nervous, but perhaps it really is a bit of a money-saver on average.
Sorry, what's "enjoyable" about being forced to buy all your software from *ONE* place and only being *ALLOWED* to download what you are told you can download.
Ignoring the fact that it works and does what I want, conveniently and well? I admit you got me there.
As mostly Linux user, I will give Microsoft credit where it's due - you can run a Microsoft OS and throw on pretty much whatever free or commercial apps on it that you like, plus I understand from MS developer friends that they give away a lot of freebies to aid developers on Windows.
Unlike Steve The Control Freak Jobs...
Same with MacOS: I have R, Virtualbox (Linux, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7), along with the full and free (included on every MacOS DVD) developer tools on my laptop.
Not the case with my iPad or iPhone, admittedly. Not the case with Windows 7 Mobile, either. Not absolutely the case with Android (if the cellphone manufacturer or cell carrier want to restrict you). And not worth using a Windows-Mobile-pre-7 device/OS to take advantage of it on the Microsoft side of the house.
I am beginning to suspect that a lot of people in this thread have daddy issues, and Steve Jobs comes triggers that. Don't use an iPad/iPod/iPhone and you'll be alright.
Years ago, I had the unenviable task of seeing that email got from our UNIX-based network to our WIndows-based managers. I ended up having to shove all of their email through a UNIX box with a less-popular MTA on it that could be configured to literally spoon-feed email down to the gateway to Windows. I mean, dribble the email and guaranteeing that only one connection was ever open at any time.
And still the gateway corrupted data... we eventually got their tech gurus out to our site and finally their head guru -- over strong objections from his team -- was able to see what was going on and "fix" it so that we were merely reduced to single-threaded spoon-feeding and not also data corruption.
Did the management object to this? Nope. They decided that they wanted to replace UNIX servers with Windows NT servers when they came out.:-(
Sorry, but shipping crap that may or may not get fixed later on is how the entire industry works.
Actually, no. And the iPad is a good example. Quite a few no-brainer things were left out because they could not get them right: camera (there's a hole there for it, it's just not there), stock app, weather app, Book/PDF markup, printing, over-the-air sync'ing, etc. What is delivered is elegant and works well.
Yes, there are bugs. I have had apps crash. (Though interestingly, perhaps because of the lack of multi-tasking at this point, I've not lost any data.) No software is perfect, and certainly there will always be the tension between the suits -- who want to ship -- and the coders -- who often want perfection. But Microsoft did set the bar very high in terms of shipping software that is as close to useless, unusable, and outdated as possible yet still getting customers to buy it. I've gone with x.0 releases on many (non-MS) products over the years and NOT been burned (okay, on the iPad, I waited for the x.0.1, i.e. the 3G). It's not as widespread as you make out.
I never would have thought I'd be in this place. I love linux. I want computers to be open.
And Apple COMPUTERS are open. Full and free set of developer tools included on every MAC OS DVD. I have a whole host of open software on my laptop, ranging from R to Virtualbox. It depends on what you call a "computer" and what that means in terms of how you use it, how you interface with it, and what it does.
And now I really want Microsoft to stand up and push back against the closed Apple iPad model. I want them to come out really hard, and push something more open, and I want them to run ads explaining why Apple's way is a bad idea.
Apple is delivering an incredible and unique experience NOW. Microsoft, Linux, Android, etc, will not deliver a comparable experience this year (though there will be first-attempt slates based on these, just not comparable)... perhaps next year, eh? Meanwhile, I have four different book/research-paper apps, three comms/network apps, a RPN calculator, multiple drawing apps, multiple photo editing apps, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program (VGA output, too), photos, movies, music, multiple Twitter clients (and multiple other-social-media clients), games, flight tracking, GPS, multiple network sync/disk options, games out the wazoo, email, web browsing, task list managers, calendar, etc, etc. All on my iPad. Now.
It has a long battery life, incredible build quality and beauty, a wonderful feel, is totally natural to interface with, and I use it all day long. Apple's way is a "bad idea", how exactly?
Yes, yes, open is good. I just joined the OpenStreetMap site today, for example. But "open" is not necessarily as open as you think: cellphone restrictions on Android devices, for example, or the inability to upgrade an Android device to the latest OS, or apps being removed from the Android store, though people claimed that could never happen. And "closed" is not necessarily too closed for intended applications.
The whole point is that the iPad is not a computer in the traditional sense of the word. Just as your car is not a computer, even though it has an incredible number of CPUs in it and multiple networks connecting them. Who knows, perhaps iMacs will become iPad-like computers, with full MacOS, including developer tools, on it? But iPads are a different KIND of device and waiting years for open, general-purpose computers to look and feel a lot like an iPad doesn't really make sense. (And to repeat myself in a more metaphorical way, "'Open', you keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means."
The island not being purgatory ends up being a technicality. They used the Alt, which WAS purgatory, to push aside what happened on-island, marginalizing it and eliminating the need to explain and ground it. Sort of like why you need the extra clause in the Asimov's First Law ("or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm"): if you didn't have it, the robot could simply drop a heavy rock on you, allowing it to kill you through the inaction of not stopping it.
The writers dropped the Alt on the island and killed it. Now that I think about it, that's the loophole that MiB found: he could not kill Jacob, but he could enlist someone else to do so. The writers enlisted the over-clever Alt to kill the Island for them.
Re:Don't understand the hate
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No, it wasn't Kelvin lying. There were DARMA-issued vaccines there and the biohazard suits (useless against the radiation that might be the ACTUAL danger in the hatch).
True, he had a hole in his biohazard suit and took it off outside, knowing he was not in danger, but he didn't make up the sickness just to keep Desmond in the hatch.
Yes, but you don't need to go to the midicholians level to provide SOME explanation that grounds the show. As an analogy, The Lord of the Rings never explains HOW magic works. It just does. Nor does it explain HOW the One Ring works. BUT they do explain who made the One Ring (with a little how, but not much), why they made it, why it was important, and why it enabled the bad guy to not die as long as it survived.
Imagine if LotR had wimped out and said, "Well, we can't explain magic, so let's skip the whole how-it-was-made-and-by-whom part and simply have it be very important... Except at the end it will turn out to have not been important at all because it was the act of trying to destroy it that bound The Fellowship together and THAT's what mattered!" Would have made for a sucky ending.
And, to be honest, midicholians are silly because the first image that comes to mind is tiny elves that live inside of people. If they'd instead been tied in to string theory (channeling through multiple, imperceptible dimensions) and the electro-chemical-magnetic energy that nerve cells generate, it'd have at least been sci-fi-acceptable. Throw in a splash of life depending on quantum mechanics, which the force affects (collapsing states), and you've got yourself something interesting and not laughable.
As another analogy, it's like an artist refusing to paint to the edge of the canvas because you'd never be fooled at the edges anyhow, so why bother? Why not leave the white canvas and be done with it?
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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Lost Ends
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· Score: 4, Insightful
On the other hand, is there any explanation that could ever be awesome enough? Even if they had it all intricately planned out ahead of time, explaining things *always* makes them seem rather ordinary. "Who is Jacob?" is a great mystery. Then you get the explanation, "Oh, he's just some kind of a weird mystical all-knowing protector of the island, and therefore protector of the entire world." Now that's not ordinary at all, but once you know it, it's not interesting either.
Very true. For example, the Silmarillion could never be as interesting as The Lord of the Rings, because it spelled out the back story that was only hinted at in LotR.
BUT, you can resolve things LotR-style. Imagine if you saw Frodo sailing away at the end of the movie and you did not know about the knife wound he received, you did not know exactly what that stupid ring did or why it was important, you knew nothing about who survived the war... It's all about the Fellowship bonding and out of that group Frodo is special enough to take a boat off of Middle Earth with Gandalf. That's what Lost did last night.
The secret is to let the explanation fade with distance: They showed us a lot about Jacob and MiB, give us a couple more glimpses of why their "mother" was so murderous, and then a quick glimpse of her predecessor (and a hint at how it all started), and a quick glimpse of Hurley's successor. The Guardianship fades into the mists of time, but it IS anchored there: it is real and continuous and it matters (to the planet and all its current and future inhabitants).
Similarly, give us a glimpse into the special people (Desmond, Walt, Faraday and his mom) and some of their differences. Maybe Faraday was special because of his experiments, his mom, though, might've been special by birth and we could see a glimpse that there had been others like her who "watched" (though that's not the proper word) time, but she had failed her duty because she killed her own son and thus wanted to lock people in to Purgatory for eternity while she experiended being his mother. Why not drop a hint that it is these mysterious people who guided the first Guardian to the island, and it was they who intertwined people's lives pre-Island and the Guardian could only see who WOULD come to the island, and could not actually call anyone. Leave loose ends, but have them fade into the mists of time and space.
You don't have to explain the special people. They simply operate outside of the normal rules of time and space and have some unexplained tie to the heart of the island. They hover at the margins, doing work that may have a higher purpose than the island or this planet -- who knows -- while the Guardian is a non-special person who sets rules (though imply that the some of the special people have veto power) and actively manages the island. Explain this Jacob who we've longed to know about since his name was first mentioned, but leave some mystery as to his role in the BIG picture.
Similarly, they made a point of having everyone on the island be totally confused and wrong most of the time. Desmond thought he'd see his wife when he went down into the heart. Jack thought he was a weapon. MiB thought he'd destroy the island and he (MiB) could then escape, though he did not apparently understand it would de-smokify him. So they need to SHOW us a few things so that we KNOW they're true, not just hear them from confused people (including the non-omniscient Jacob). When the heart of the island went out, we could have seen people start to get nosebleeds, animals dying, perhaps flash to San Francisco and see an earthquake. Let us know that the island's heart IS important, and it's not a matter of Jacob being confused in this, as he was in other things.
As it is, the island seems absolutely unimportant. Recorking it was simply the thing that Jack needed to do to get full marks on his test, and it's not clear if anything would have happened other than the island sinking due to earthquake if he had not recapped it.
The tail (Alt) wagged the dog
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I loved the show, and most of the final episode was incredible writing. But in the end, I think they made the classical mistake of writers: they got too attached to a clever piece of work and could not diminish or delete it.
It feels like they had to top the change from flashbacks to flash-forwards of previous seasons, and they came up with a clever idea: flash-sideways and the Alt. Which took on a life of its own and twisted the show from something deeper than Friends, Scrubs, or MASH into basically a serious Seinfeld with guns. And the last few minutes of the show turns into a train wreck.
They turned the events and mechanisms of the show into Friends-like escapades that only served the purpose of allowing bonding to take place, or perhaps created baggage that needed to be handled in the Alt. And in doing so, they pulled out the legs from under themselves: the island was a circus, or perhaps a TV show within a TV show, with the cast and crew going out for beers after the final wrap, and deciding to move together to a commune. It was all a dream, in some sense, like the Wizard of Oz, intended only to make the heart grow fonder so they could be reunited in the afterlife.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea that it's not what you do, but how you do it and what you become that matters. I personally do believe in an eternal afterlife, and in light of eternity, 80 years of life are like a dream or like your first day in the 5th grade: very important at the time, but condensed down to a few memories as an adult. But they needed to land the plane, as it were, on the Island/physics side of the equation as well, and they did not.
They let the tail wag the dog, and thus broke their contract with the viewers. Yes, yes, leave unanswered questions so people are still espousing theories 10 years from now. No, don't try to explain how the energy feeds life. But do give more insights into the extensive Egyptian construction on the island -- including symbols on the "cork" at the island's heart. Do give a few screen seconds to Eloise and her son and perhaps Desmond (and Walt) to address a little about "specialness". Do delve a bit into Jacob's choice of rules, his use (or not) of machines like the Lighthouse, and what effect the island -- and its uncorking -- actually had on the world. (Not just words, which don't carry much weight in light of the revelations we have gotten.) Drop a hint about how Hurley's reign and rules differed form Jacob's, and perhaps how far back the line of guardians went. Did Jacob actually bring people to the island, or simply see that they would come? Did Jacob create the pre-Island overlapping in people's lives that we saw in the flashbacks, or was that a higher-level "fate" that had already entwined them and Jacob simply took advantage of this? Let us know that the island's guarding was still a serious and ongoing responsibility -- that it mattered at the time and still matters, in this world. Etc, etc.
Really, 5 minutes less of flash sideways per episode this season and 5 more minutes of flashback could have grounded the island and delivered on the major island questions, while allowing for the Purgatory Alt to seem a reward for a significant, good fight. As it is, Frodo has sailed from the Grey Havens and we still don't really know what the One Ring did and why it was important to destroy it, we have no idea what might follow, or if this big war was even necessary or if it was simply a mysterious skit.
Define "well". It's not clear what effect the island REALLY has on the planet -- Jacob turns out to be a guy obsessed with his mistake with his brother, even down to creating rules about not leaving the island which were completely arbitrary. (And arbitrarily violated as well.) Does the island really matter? Is it really worth protecting? Who knows.
And what kinds of things could the caretaker do? Again, it seems there's some power over life and healing, but other than that, it's not even clear that Jacob actually called anyone or had the power to do so. Even "his" lighthouse was probably built by someone else and may not have been used by him at all.
If they'd bothered to ground the island a bit, with a few key explanations and hints, the Alt/purgatory/end would have been great. As it stands, it looks to me like the Alt was a super-clever idea they got to puzzle us a second time (like when they started flash forwards and we wondered how they could possible come true), and then the tail wagged the dog and the main storyline suffered so that the Alt could be clever.
Funny flight you were on, where the 0.1% of users with those devices managed to dominate the 99.9% of travelers who use some form of laptop. You are such a tool.
I imagine the previous poster was talking about people who whipped out devices in the lounge or on the plane. No doubt, many more people on the flight OWN a laptop, but how many chose to take it with them and of those how many chose to pull it out? When you think about it that way, yes, smartphones, Kindles, and iPads will be more highly represented than you make it out to be.
The idea that 99.9% of travelers use a laptop/netbook is rather tool-ish, don't you think?
I fly ALL the time with my 17inch MacBook Pro in coach. Never any problems with it fitting on the seats.
You must fly on much fancier airlines than I do. My 17" Macbook will not open fully on the seatback tray in front of me. I have to basically balance it V-like on my lap, half-closed to get it to fit. It's a carpal-tunnel nightmare that's convinced me a nice-sized laptop is not useful for air travel.
The iPad will be WAY easier, and will last an entire day of international travel with no plugging in. (I'll carry the charger in my carry on, and may plug in if it's convenient, but I won't have to.) Oh, and you don't have to remove an iPad from your carry on bags at security, either.
In one sense, I agree about consumer choice, and in one sense I don't.
I agree, in that lock-in for lock-in sake is Evil (tm).
I disagree, in that apps can mess up the user experience unwittingly and the hardware/OS gets blamed, and this is more of a problem the smaller (and hence more limited in terms of battery/speed) a device is. For example, there was a recent quote from someone in the Android camp about poor battery life on some Android phones, and one of their points was third-party apps using too much airtime. (The person also criticized the phone manufacturers for making batteries too small, but that's a whole other Android problem.) This poor battery life perception was not isolated and it had stuck to particular models, and I imagine Jobs wants to avoid this kind of thing at almost all costs.
Tablets are fun, show-off things that you use to waste time (though just like netbooks, they really suck for gaming). But you can actually get work done on a netbook and a good one will cost you less, too. Sorry, tablet fans, but that's how it is. They may be super cool to you and you think that you paid 500 bucks for a great thing, but you know in your heart that you paid 500 bucks for a goof-off device.
Not unless you count ALL web browsing as a waste, most email, and perhaps reading in general. Let's see, I also have spreadsheets that I keep (and maintain) on my iPad, To Do lists, Keynote presentations (admittedly created on my Mac), a calculator, financial information programs, sketchpad, and a thousand research PDFs (Papers), and yes, games. Sure, I won't be running R on my iPad, but I can easily do my thinking and research on it... And goof-off when I need to.
All in a convenient form-factor, free from the awkward, desktop-inspired keyboard, narrow-view screen, and short battery life of a netbook. Freedom from the desktop/laptop/netbook awkwardness is a feature.
It appears that many on/. simply have no imagination. They cannot see that form-factor can be a feature or a drawback. They imagine all computing tasks as desktop or pseudo-desktop (laptop/netbook) tasks and do not even notice that laptops/netbooks have a poor form factor for many tasks, and the iPad has an incredible form factor. So they perceive no gain, only loss, but that's a failure of imagination that many non-/.-ers do not suffer from.
Many of us can use a laptop for extended editing, for compiling, for video editing, for running statistics with R, but can also see the benefit of browsing the web, or working with our calendar, doing email, adding some data to a spreadsheet, or reading a book with a different (superior) interface and form factor -- even a different posture.
Not sure that the concept's a good idea -- as you say very expensive, and for what targets -- but I don't think it would be mistaken for a nuclear launch. I imagine a nuclear strike' would involve dozens (hundreds?) of launches from land and sea, with planes scrambled and a military on high alert. As long as they don't try to use it salvo-style (like cruise missiles), I imagine it would look more like a military satellite launch than a nuclear strike.
Still, it does sound like something that's not such a good idea, but since it CAN be done, someone's going to have to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever tried using your newfangled idevice in real life? I see some morons holding it in one hand and trying to type with the other and it gets pretty hilarious from them.
Have you ever tried watching a standard two hour movie while holding it in your one hand all the time?
I'll let you in on the dirty secret of the iPad: some of us have trained ourselves -- through years of practice -- to sit. That allows us to use two hands, or rest it on our knee, or lap, or the arm of the couch, or a table, or to use it in a wide variety of comfortable, natural postures that are impossible with a keyboard-driven device.
Have you ever tried transferring your music/movie collection to it?
Yes, yes I have. Slower than I'd like, but it works great.
Have you ever tried using it without a data plan?
Yes. I got the 3G and didn't have a data plan for the first month+. At work, I had to walk about 100 feet to where I could pick up the public WiFi. At home, I have good coverage (802.11n). There are hotspots all over the place, and many things, like photos, documents, calendars, do not require a full-time internet connection. But I digress. What's your point again?
Have you ever tried using it browsing flash sites?
I've never found a site that was Flash-only that I found useful.
Have you ever tried installing anything not available on apple site?
Have you ever tried to get root access?Have you ever tried to get root access?
Because... why? I've got a laptop at home, where I edit videos, compile Open Source software, do statistical analysis, etc. The iPad's something different.
Yes, it's shiny, but that's about it, no mater how you may want to believe (and convince others) with vague "have you ever used it?" line.
And for all the faults of N900, you can all of above.
Wow, you managed to avoid answering the question, though I assume from the ignorance of your counter-questions that the answer is "No". In terms of the N900, if you're comparing a postcard-sized screen and a miniscule battery life to an iPad, well... You've managed to drive the nail in your own coffin, then have it slammed into the ground with a pile driver, then had 50 tons of concrete dumped on it. Rather redundant, but amusing.
I totally agree that end users don't care about the process, and let's be honest: how exactly will they ever be able to tell if they're even affected or not. (Other than pr0n-lovers, of course.) If you read the survey, it turns out that 83% of the respondents said that the App Approval Process was not an issue or was only a minor issue. Which is reasonable, if perhaps 10-15% of purchasers are either developers or software anarchists.
The headline is extremely misleading.
Hidden secrets. Mysterious secrets. Enigmatic secrets.
The apps ask you when they first want access to Location, which is not really new.
The new thing is when you go to Settings -> General -> Location Services (which might fool you into thinking it only sets Yes/No), where you'll see all apps that use Location Services and you can turn them off and on by hand. A little arrow head next to the app indicates it's used your Location in the last 24 hours. An app won't be in this section without having asked to use Location Services first, but it's really nice to be able to track and revoke Location permissions after the initial ask.
Never used a Magic Mouse, I see. They're incredible.
If "At least they tell you..." is correct, you CAN opt out at any time by not allowing an app to access your location. You can refuse the first time. You can go to the new settings area and turn it off on a per-app basis, and it will show you which apps have requested your location in the last 24 hours.
Perhaps Apple intends to go beyond this, but if not, you have absolute control and can tell exactly what apps are asking and how often. Not bad.
You act as if we are more religious ("more Fundamentalist Christian", I suspect you'd say) today than 50 years ago, and it's the rising tide of religion that's lapping at and undermining the walls of Science. All you have to do is consider best seller lists (something like 3 atheist books in the last couple of years), the banning of religion from public schools and libraries, etc, to understand that it is atheism (or perhaps agnosticism) that has dramatically increased in the last 50 years.
Not implying any causation. Simply pointing out that this whole subthread that it's religion causing the problem is wildly off the mark.
The real answer is that we as a nation have spent too much time and effort channeling promising scientists into Wall Street ("Rocket scientists" or "quants"), or MBA's, or the law, instead of hard science. (On a personal note, I think that atheistic vendettas, such as yours, are discouraging people of faith from entering science, where they have happily contributed for centuries, "superstitious" though they may have been.)
My usage may be a little high because I was out of the country on vacation. I was also auditioning a lot of apps, etc, and the accommodations had very short-range Wi-fi, so I used 3G a lot.
Last, I was using a GPS program everywhere I drove, and since it could get 3G it was downloading tiles all the time, as I drove, as I zoomed in and out, etc, etc.
I'm still going to leave 3G off in the US for a few months to save some money after the iPad (and apps) purchase, but I'm beginning to believe that the new plan -- while absolutely bait-and-switch-ish and typical horrible AT&T -- is reasonable and for most users about the same or a little cheaper than the unlimited plan.
On a recent trip overseas, I was able to use a SIM and try out the 3G (haven't tried it in the US yet). I was on vacation, so probably spent as more time online than I would off-vacation, but my average was 100MB per day. At that rate, that's 3GB per month, which would be about $30 in the new plan. Makes me nervous, but perhaps it really is a bit of a money-saver on average.
Sorry, what's "enjoyable" about being forced to buy all your software from *ONE* place and only being *ALLOWED* to download what you are told you can download.
Ignoring the fact that it works and does what I want, conveniently and well? I admit you got me there.
As mostly Linux user, I will give Microsoft credit where it's due - you can run a Microsoft OS and throw on pretty much whatever free or commercial apps on it that you like, plus I understand from MS developer friends that they give away a lot of freebies to aid developers on Windows.
Unlike Steve The Control Freak Jobs...
Same with MacOS: I have R, Virtualbox (Linux, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7), along with the full and free (included on every MacOS DVD) developer tools on my laptop.
Not the case with my iPad or iPhone, admittedly. Not the case with Windows 7 Mobile, either. Not absolutely the case with Android (if the cellphone manufacturer or cell carrier want to restrict you). And not worth using a Windows-Mobile-pre-7 device/OS to take advantage of it on the Microsoft side of the house.
I am beginning to suspect that a lot of people in this thread have daddy issues, and Steve Jobs comes triggers that. Don't use an iPad/iPod/iPhone and you'll be alright.
I feel your pain.
Years ago, I had the unenviable task of seeing that email got from our UNIX-based network to our WIndows-based managers. I ended up having to shove all of their email through a UNIX box with a less-popular MTA on it that could be configured to literally spoon-feed email down to the gateway to Windows. I mean, dribble the email and guaranteeing that only one connection was ever open at any time.
And still the gateway corrupted data... we eventually got their tech gurus out to our site and finally their head guru -- over strong objections from his team -- was able to see what was going on and "fix" it so that we were merely reduced to single-threaded spoon-feeding and not also data corruption.
Did the management object to this? Nope. They decided that they wanted to replace UNIX servers with Windows NT servers when they came out. :-(
Sorry, but shipping crap that may or may not get fixed later on is how the entire industry works.
Actually, no. And the iPad is a good example. Quite a few no-brainer things were left out because they could not get them right: camera (there's a hole there for it, it's just not there), stock app, weather app, Book/PDF markup, printing, over-the-air sync'ing, etc. What is delivered is elegant and works well.
Yes, there are bugs. I have had apps crash. (Though interestingly, perhaps because of the lack of multi-tasking at this point, I've not lost any data.) No software is perfect, and certainly there will always be the tension between the suits -- who want to ship -- and the coders -- who often want perfection. But Microsoft did set the bar very high in terms of shipping software that is as close to useless, unusable, and outdated as possible yet still getting customers to buy it. I've gone with x.0 releases on many (non-MS) products over the years and NOT been burned (okay, on the iPad, I waited for the x.0.1, i.e. the 3G). It's not as widespread as you make out.
I never would have thought I'd be in this place. I love linux. I want computers to be open.
And Apple COMPUTERS are open. Full and free set of developer tools included on every MAC OS DVD. I have a whole host of open software on my laptop, ranging from R to Virtualbox. It depends on what you call a "computer" and what that means in terms of how you use it, how you interface with it, and what it does.
And now I really want Microsoft to stand up and push back against the closed Apple iPad model. I want them to come out really hard, and push something more open, and I want them to run ads explaining why Apple's way is a bad idea.
Apple is delivering an incredible and unique experience NOW. Microsoft, Linux, Android, etc, will not deliver a comparable experience this year (though there will be first-attempt slates based on these, just not comparable)... perhaps next year, eh? Meanwhile, I have four different book/research-paper apps, three comms/network apps, a RPN calculator, multiple drawing apps, multiple photo editing apps, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program (VGA output, too), photos, movies, music, multiple Twitter clients (and multiple other-social-media clients), games, flight tracking, GPS, multiple network sync/disk options, games out the wazoo, email, web browsing, task list managers, calendar, etc, etc. All on my iPad. Now.
It has a long battery life, incredible build quality and beauty, a wonderful feel, is totally natural to interface with, and I use it all day long. Apple's way is a "bad idea", how exactly?
Yes, yes, open is good. I just joined the OpenStreetMap site today, for example. But "open" is not necessarily as open as you think: cellphone restrictions on Android devices, for example, or the inability to upgrade an Android device to the latest OS, or apps being removed from the Android store, though people claimed that could never happen. And "closed" is not necessarily too closed for intended applications.
The whole point is that the iPad is not a computer in the traditional sense of the word. Just as your car is not a computer, even though it has an incredible number of CPUs in it and multiple networks connecting them. Who knows, perhaps iMacs will become iPad-like computers, with full MacOS, including developer tools, on it? But iPads are a different KIND of device and waiting years for open, general-purpose computers to look and feel a lot like an iPad doesn't really make sense. (And to repeat myself in a more metaphorical way, "'Open', you keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means."
The island not being purgatory ends up being a technicality. They used the Alt, which WAS purgatory, to push aside what happened on-island, marginalizing it and eliminating the need to explain and ground it. Sort of like why you need the extra clause in the Asimov's First Law ("or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm"): if you didn't have it, the robot could simply drop a heavy rock on you, allowing it to kill you through the inaction of not stopping it.
The writers dropped the Alt on the island and killed it. Now that I think about it, that's the loophole that MiB found: he could not kill Jacob, but he could enlist someone else to do so. The writers enlisted the over-clever Alt to kill the Island for them.
No, it wasn't Kelvin lying. There were DARMA-issued vaccines there and the biohazard suits (useless against the radiation that might be the ACTUAL danger in the hatch).
True, he had a hole in his biohazard suit and took it off outside, knowing he was not in danger, but he didn't make up the sickness just to keep Desmond in the hatch.
Yes, but you don't need to go to the midicholians level to provide SOME explanation that grounds the show. As an analogy, The Lord of the Rings never explains HOW magic works. It just does. Nor does it explain HOW the One Ring works. BUT they do explain who made the One Ring (with a little how, but not much), why they made it, why it was important, and why it enabled the bad guy to not die as long as it survived.
Imagine if LotR had wimped out and said, "Well, we can't explain magic, so let's skip the whole how-it-was-made-and-by-whom part and simply have it be very important... Except at the end it will turn out to have not been important at all because it was the act of trying to destroy it that bound The Fellowship together and THAT's what mattered!" Would have made for a sucky ending.
And, to be honest, midicholians are silly because the first image that comes to mind is tiny elves that live inside of people. If they'd instead been tied in to string theory (channeling through multiple, imperceptible dimensions) and the electro-chemical-magnetic energy that nerve cells generate, it'd have at least been sci-fi-acceptable. Throw in a splash of life depending on quantum mechanics, which the force affects (collapsing states), and you've got yourself something interesting and not laughable.
As another analogy, it's like an artist refusing to paint to the edge of the canvas because you'd never be fooled at the edges anyhow, so why bother? Why not leave the white canvas and be done with it?
On the other hand, is there any explanation that could ever be awesome enough? Even if they had it all intricately planned out ahead of time, explaining things *always* makes them seem rather ordinary. "Who is Jacob?" is a great mystery. Then you get the explanation, "Oh, he's just some kind of a weird mystical all-knowing protector of the island, and therefore protector of the entire world." Now that's not ordinary at all, but once you know it, it's not interesting either.
Very true. For example, the Silmarillion could never be as interesting as The Lord of the Rings, because it spelled out the back story that was only hinted at in LotR.
BUT, you can resolve things LotR-style. Imagine if you saw Frodo sailing away at the end of the movie and you did not know about the knife wound he received, you did not know exactly what that stupid ring did or why it was important, you knew nothing about who survived the war... It's all about the Fellowship bonding and out of that group Frodo is special enough to take a boat off of Middle Earth with Gandalf. That's what Lost did last night.
The secret is to let the explanation fade with distance: They showed us a lot about Jacob and MiB, give us a couple more glimpses of why their "mother" was so murderous, and then a quick glimpse of her predecessor (and a hint at how it all started), and a quick glimpse of Hurley's successor. The Guardianship fades into the mists of time, but it IS anchored there: it is real and continuous and it matters (to the planet and all its current and future inhabitants).
Similarly, give us a glimpse into the special people (Desmond, Walt, Faraday and his mom) and some of their differences. Maybe Faraday was special because of his experiments, his mom, though, might've been special by birth and we could see a glimpse that there had been others like her who "watched" (though that's not the proper word) time, but she had failed her duty because she killed her own son and thus wanted to lock people in to Purgatory for eternity while she experiended being his mother. Why not drop a hint that it is these mysterious people who guided the first Guardian to the island, and it was they who intertwined people's lives pre-Island and the Guardian could only see who WOULD come to the island, and could not actually call anyone. Leave loose ends, but have them fade into the mists of time and space.
You don't have to explain the special people. They simply operate outside of the normal rules of time and space and have some unexplained tie to the heart of the island. They hover at the margins, doing work that may have a higher purpose than the island or this planet -- who knows -- while the Guardian is a non-special person who sets rules (though imply that the some of the special people have veto power) and actively manages the island. Explain this Jacob who we've longed to know about since his name was first mentioned, but leave some mystery as to his role in the BIG picture.
Similarly, they made a point of having everyone on the island be totally confused and wrong most of the time. Desmond thought he'd see his wife when he went down into the heart. Jack thought he was a weapon. MiB thought he'd destroy the island and he (MiB) could then escape, though he did not apparently understand it would de-smokify him. So they need to SHOW us a few things so that we KNOW they're true, not just hear them from confused people (including the non-omniscient Jacob). When the heart of the island went out, we could have seen people start to get nosebleeds, animals dying, perhaps flash to San Francisco and see an earthquake. Let us know that the island's heart IS important, and it's not a matter of Jacob being confused in this, as he was in other things.
As it is, the island seems absolutely unimportant. Recorking it was simply the thing that Jack needed to do to get full marks on his test, and it's not clear if anything would have happened other than the island sinking due to earthquake if he had not recapped it.
I loved the show, and most of the final episode was incredible writing. But in the end, I think they made the classical mistake of writers: they got too attached to a clever piece of work and could not diminish or delete it.
It feels like they had to top the change from flashbacks to flash-forwards of previous seasons, and they came up with a clever idea: flash-sideways and the Alt. Which took on a life of its own and twisted the show from something deeper than Friends, Scrubs, or MASH into basically a serious Seinfeld with guns. And the last few minutes of the show turns into a train wreck.
They turned the events and mechanisms of the show into Friends-like escapades that only served the purpose of allowing bonding to take place, or perhaps created baggage that needed to be handled in the Alt. And in doing so, they pulled out the legs from under themselves: the island was a circus, or perhaps a TV show within a TV show, with the cast and crew going out for beers after the final wrap, and deciding to move together to a commune. It was all a dream, in some sense, like the Wizard of Oz, intended only to make the heart grow fonder so they could be reunited in the afterlife.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea that it's not what you do, but how you do it and what you become that matters. I personally do believe in an eternal afterlife, and in light of eternity, 80 years of life are like a dream or like your first day in the 5th grade: very important at the time, but condensed down to a few memories as an adult. But they needed to land the plane, as it were, on the Island/physics side of the equation as well, and they did not.
They let the tail wag the dog, and thus broke their contract with the viewers. Yes, yes, leave unanswered questions so people are still espousing theories 10 years from now. No, don't try to explain how the energy feeds life. But do give more insights into the extensive Egyptian construction on the island -- including symbols on the "cork" at the island's heart. Do give a few screen seconds to Eloise and her son and perhaps Desmond (and Walt) to address a little about "specialness". Do delve a bit into Jacob's choice of rules, his use (or not) of machines like the Lighthouse, and what effect the island -- and its uncorking -- actually had on the world. (Not just words, which don't carry much weight in light of the revelations we have gotten.) Drop a hint about how Hurley's reign and rules differed form Jacob's, and perhaps how far back the line of guardians went. Did Jacob actually bring people to the island, or simply see that they would come? Did Jacob create the pre-Island overlapping in people's lives that we saw in the flashbacks, or was that a higher-level "fate" that had already entwined them and Jacob simply took advantage of this? Let us know that the island's guarding was still a serious and ongoing responsibility -- that it mattered at the time and still matters, in this world. Etc, etc.
Really, 5 minutes less of flash sideways per episode this season and 5 more minutes of flashback could have grounded the island and delivered on the major island questions, while allowing for the Purgatory Alt to seem a reward for a significant, good fight. As it is, Frodo has sailed from the Grey Havens and we still don't really know what the One Ring did and why it was important to destroy it, we have no idea what might follow, or if this big war was even necessary or if it was simply a mysterious skit.
Define "well". It's not clear what effect the island REALLY has on the planet -- Jacob turns out to be a guy obsessed with his mistake with his brother, even down to creating rules about not leaving the island which were completely arbitrary. (And arbitrarily violated as well.) Does the island really matter? Is it really worth protecting? Who knows.
And what kinds of things could the caretaker do? Again, it seems there's some power over life and healing, but other than that, it's not even clear that Jacob actually called anyone or had the power to do so. Even "his" lighthouse was probably built by someone else and may not have been used by him at all.
If they'd bothered to ground the island a bit, with a few key explanations and hints, the Alt/purgatory/end would have been great. As it stands, it looks to me like the Alt was a super-clever idea they got to puzzle us a second time (like when they started flash forwards and we wondered how they could possible come true), and then the tail wagged the dog and the main storyline suffered so that the Alt could be clever.
Funny flight you were on, where the 0.1% of users with those devices managed to dominate the 99.9% of travelers who use some form of laptop. You are such a tool.
I imagine the previous poster was talking about people who whipped out devices in the lounge or on the plane. No doubt, many more people on the flight OWN a laptop, but how many chose to take it with them and of those how many chose to pull it out? When you think about it that way, yes, smartphones, Kindles, and iPads will be more highly represented than you make it out to be.
The idea that 99.9% of travelers use a laptop/netbook is rather tool-ish, don't you think?
What a hilarious load of shit.
I fly ALL the time with my 17inch MacBook Pro in coach. Never any problems with it fitting on the seats.
You must fly on much fancier airlines than I do. My 17" Macbook will not open fully on the seatback tray in front of me. I have to basically balance it V-like on my lap, half-closed to get it to fit. It's a carpal-tunnel nightmare that's convinced me a nice-sized laptop is not useful for air travel.
The iPad will be WAY easier, and will last an entire day of international travel with no plugging in. (I'll carry the charger in my carry on, and may plug in if it's convenient, but I won't have to.) Oh, and you don't have to remove an iPad from your carry on bags at security, either.
In one sense, I agree about consumer choice, and in one sense I don't.
I agree, in that lock-in for lock-in sake is Evil (tm).
I disagree, in that apps can mess up the user experience unwittingly and the hardware/OS gets blamed, and this is more of a problem the smaller (and hence more limited in terms of battery/speed) a device is. For example, there was a recent quote from someone in the Android camp about poor battery life on some Android phones, and one of their points was third-party apps using too much airtime. (The person also criticized the phone manufacturers for making batteries too small, but that's a whole other Android problem.) This poor battery life perception was not isolated and it had stuck to particular models, and I imagine Jobs wants to avoid this kind of thing at almost all costs.
Tablets are fun, show-off things that you use to waste time (though just like netbooks, they really suck for gaming). But you can actually get work done on a netbook and a good one will cost you less, too. Sorry, tablet fans, but that's how it is. They may be super cool to you and you think that you paid 500 bucks for a great thing, but you know in your heart that you paid 500 bucks for a goof-off device.
Not unless you count ALL web browsing as a waste, most email, and perhaps reading in general. Let's see, I also have spreadsheets that I keep (and maintain) on my iPad, To Do lists, Keynote presentations (admittedly created on my Mac), a calculator, financial information programs, sketchpad, and a thousand research PDFs (Papers), and yes, games. Sure, I won't be running R on my iPad, but I can easily do my thinking and research on it... And goof-off when I need to.
All in a convenient form-factor, free from the awkward, desktop-inspired keyboard, narrow-view screen, and short battery life of a netbook. Freedom from the desktop/laptop/netbook awkwardness is a feature.
It appears that many on /. simply have no imagination. They cannot see that form-factor can be a feature or a drawback. They imagine all computing tasks as desktop or pseudo-desktop (laptop/netbook) tasks and do not even notice that laptops/netbooks have a poor form factor for many tasks, and the iPad has an incredible form factor. So they perceive no gain, only loss, but that's a failure of imagination that many non-/.-ers do not suffer from.
Many of us can use a laptop for extended editing, for compiling, for video editing, for running statistics with R, but can also see the benefit of browsing the web, or working with our calendar, doing email, adding some data to a spreadsheet, or reading a book with a different (superior) interface and form factor -- even a different posture.
Not sure that the concept's a good idea -- as you say very expensive, and for what targets -- but I don't think it would be mistaken for a nuclear launch. I imagine a nuclear strike' would involve dozens (hundreds?) of launches from land and sea, with planes scrambled and a military on high alert. As long as they don't try to use it salvo-style (like cruise missiles), I imagine it would look more like a military satellite launch than a nuclear strike.
Still, it does sound like something that's not such a good idea, but since it CAN be done, someone's going to have to do it.