Did you miss CES when a dozen Android tablets were announced? Did you not notice the multiple android tablets that were released this month and last month?
Yes and yes.
How come when Apple does something people take notice. But when a hundred others go through more traditional channels such as trade shows people who think they are industry insiders don't have a clue?
Perhaps because the Apple device is worth noting, while the others are not? Just a wild guess, mind you, but it all goes back to a succinct quote above:
StreetStealth: Apple's model will always compromise developer flexibility when user experience is at stake. Google's model will always compromise user experience when developer flexibility is at stake.
The Apollo program was unique in many ways. One of which is that you can look up at night and see the moon. I'm all in favor of establishing a permanent base on the moon: the idea that you might live up on that white ball sparks imagination. It would provide a good testbed for true deep space manned exploration, as well as a good launching/supply pad for such missions. Mars will NOT duplicate the moon experience: it doesn't have the "look up and see" component, and I think a permanent colony will be far more inspiring to folks than the "Wow, an astronaut set foot on object X and made a speech!". The idea that we can LIVE long-term somewhere other than Earth is inspiring -- the idea that we might commute there is even more inspiring -- and the idea that we can follow up on exploration (the Moon) with settlement is also inspiring.
BUT, robotic missions can be inspiring, too. Think of the Mars rovers, Hubble, Voyager, etc, which all spark the imagination. You just have to pick the right kinds of missions, which would not all be "make a radar map of object X" -- useful for science no doubt, but not very "I'm going to become an engineer/scientist/space-worker".
Read science fiction and see how often manned exploration is preceded by robotic exploration. And you'll also often find commercial interests, too: mining colonies, etc, and NASA can provide the seed for commercial interests. (Which will then take on a life of their own, beyond NASA's budget.)
That's a good insight. I'm a statistics professor, and some of the problems I see are a) people generally get exposed to a single course in statistics; b) they're usually mathematically unprepared for it; c) so much gets squeezed into that one opportunity that heads are exploding;...
I'd add that the head 'sploding part, for me, was probability. I wasn't really able to overcome probability's counter-intuitive nature in the first half of Probability & Statistics, so I managed to create a really-sketchy-but-pulled-my-class-grade-average-up-from-dismal picture of statistics that turned burned me on my next two or three exposures to stats in other areas... I was well into graduate school before I finally started getting it.
Not only is it touting vaporware "iPad killers", but it's touting Linux-based coming-to-a-store-near-you iPad killers. Actually, retrofitted Linux-based, no-keyboard iPad killers which will have desktop GUIs.
But wait, there's more: people will buy them rather than the iPad because they want to do the kinds of things you'd do on desktops or laptops with keyboards.
I'll probably lose Karma over this one... I'm usually not this sarcastic, but this thread is so laughable... it's like some kind of super-hero movie where you see 100 kamikaze's on bicycles riding towards Godzilla with shouts of victory on their lips.
All those hours of reading Slashdot and watching movies with all kinds of stuff being blown up, and I didn't put 2 and 2 together to get RDX-powered nanotubes. I feel like I missed my calling.
This is one power-generation technology, however, where you do NOT want a device that goes to 11.
When the driver says they have their foot on the brake, they are just plain wrong. The human motor system is not perfect, and it doesn't always do what it is told.'
This was true with Audi in the 80's,...
I think the key here was that the brake/gas pedals were not well-designed. Or rather, were designed for a racing technique called, I believe, heel-n-toe shifting. This made it way easier than necessary to accidentally hit the accelerator when you meant to hit the brake. At least that's my understanding of how it worked out in the end. Both sides were essentially wrong: the drivers had in fact hit the gas pedal, but Audi had an easy-to-mess-up design.
The Toyota problems, to the extent that they were actually due to floor mats getting stuck, would also be poor design. There's no need to have the gas pedal reach close to the floor, where a mat might catch on it. Nor to have the behind-the-pedal mechanisms within reach of a severely-jammed-forward mat, either. Perhaps 30 years ago, when things were mechanical and they needed some leverage, but not today.
Reminds me of Phineas and Ferb when you hear, "In hindsight, I question the decision to put a self-destruct button on this device in the first place."
Actually, you don't process and throw away information. You are not Sensing and then Compressing, you are Compressed Sensing, so you take in less data in the first place.
A canonical example is a 1-pixel camera that uses a grid of micro-mirrors, each of which can be set to reflect onto the pixel or not. By setting the grid randomly, you are essentially doing a Random Projection of the data before it's recorded, so you are Compressed Sensing. With a sufficient number of these 1-pixel images, each with a different random mirror setup you can reproduce the original image to some level of accuracy, using fewer bits than a JPEG/etc of similar quality. Unlike JPEG, you are not taking in a full set of data, then compressing, so it takes LESS processing power, not more.
So you save in image transmission bandwidth if the sensor is, say, orbiting Jupiter. And you save energy expended in compressing the image. And you could perhaps afford to make a VERY expensive single pixel imager that has an incredibly wide frequency range, which might be prohibitively expensive, or even impossible to fabricate in a larger array.
Personally, I think there's a lot of hype to CS, but it's definitely not the same as JPEG/Wavelet/etc compression after taking a full-resolution image.
It's the experience that you've NOT had that the netbook is missing. Try sharing a netbook presentation with someone. Or, say, showing them photos on it. The shape and the low-viewing-angle screen make it more like passing a pair of binoculars back and forth than actually sharing something. Imagine reading through and highlighting PDFs on a netbook -- landscape screen only, and useless keyboard sticking out at an awkward angle -- versus on the iPad.
The iPad lets you interface with it as you would a notepad or a book, while a netbook is simply a shrunk-down desktop with a built-in desk. Yes, if you can't think of using an electronic device that doesn't work like your desktop and doesn't offer (scaled-down) desktop apps and accessories, the iPad simply won't do. But for its intended uses, the way you are able to physically interface with it is "magical".
In addition to changing the physical form factor, they've also "sushi-fied" the interface. Previous flops in this space were due to desktop OS's being put onto "tablets" and they required desktop metaphors, which at a minimum requires a high-resolution pointing device -- in most cases a pen. The iPad, in addition to a better form factor for the device, has changed the UI so it doesn't require a physical keyboard or high-rez pointing device, just as sushi is cut in such a way that it does not require knife and fork.
The iPhone offered new things in a phone, things the average consumer didn't realize were possible. The iPad offers... what?
The iPhone was widely criticized in there here parts because it provided nothing NEW, and in fact did not provide "standard" things that other phones had offered for quite some time. You accidentally hit the nail on the head with the second part of your sentence: "... didn't realize were possible." The fact is the "more featureful" phones were a pain-in-the-butt to use. Yeah, my previous phone had text messaging, but I rarely used it. Yeah, my previous phone had voicemail, but it sucked. Yeah, my previous phone could surf the web -- and the phone's menus were designed to get you to accidentally access the web, to make them more money. About the only NEW thing the iPhone did was to have visual voicemail... AND a great user interface that made all of the other features easily accessible.
The iPad offers a different way of interfacing with your information than a desktop/laptop. Yes, in some ways it's just a big iPhone, but that's a good thing for a device that emphasizes content over pocketability. At the same time, it doesn't dictate your posture and its orientation as a desktop/laptop do, and that can make it more comfortable for you and also allow collaborative use in a way that laptops/netbooks simply don't. Sharing an iPad with someone at your table is more like sharing a stack of photos or drawing on a notepad than passing around the binoculars, I mean laptop.
It's all about the interface, not a long list of features... just as the iPhone was. Except it's a lot more about the physical interface -- literally your posture, your motions, how you hold it, and how you interface with it -- than about the onscreen UI, which is basically building on what the iPhone did.
I'm sure the iPad will find an audience and will sell by the truckload, but come on...are they really claiming that people won't pay for a netbook, but they will pay the same price for something with half the functionality and none of the openness, just because it's pretty?
Yeah, when you turn form factor and how you interface with something into "pretty", it sounds pretty lame. That, of course, doesn't make it lame.
The fact is, a netbook is a tiny laptop, which in turn is a desktop with a convenient hinge joining the keyboard and screen. They use a desktop metaphor, have desktop-like physical constraints on how you use them, and probably use a desktop OS. Which is fine for desktop-like use (including a desktop-like user posture), but that's not the most comfortable way to interface with information.
By comparison, you interface differently with an iPad. As an example, take your netbook and share it with someone else sitting next to you at a table. It's more like sharing a pair of binoculars than sharing a pad of paper or a stack of photos. You're constrained by metaphor and by physical interface.
Yes, yes, you're not going to write programs or develop websites or create dissertations on an iPad. So what? Those are desktop/laptop activities. Browsing the web, watching a movie, going through photos, organizing thoughts, answering emails, playing casual games, reading magazines or technical manuals,... all of these things are better done with something that doesn't force you into a particular, worshipful posture, and are often naturally shared activities that benefit from an unconstrained physical interface.
When I am reading text, I care about text fidelity, not image fidelity. I want to know what the letters and words are. I want to be able to read and re-read the text with minimal eyestrain. Unless you work in advertising or marketing (two industries which I loathe), the purpose of displaying or printing text is to accurately convey which letter is which and which word is which. Anything else (such as font accuracy) is only a means to this end. Anyone (such as you) who thinks font accuracy is worthy as an end in itself is clearly living in a different world from someone (such as me) who reads scientific papers (the vast majority of them on-screen, simply because carrying around 1GB worth of printed papers is impossible) and writes code for a living.
I find claims of eyestrain on Mac displays to be rather far-fetched. Between work and home, I spend 12-16 hours a day in front of Mac monitors and have zero eyestrain. (And this is after 30 years in programming and videography, sitting in front of computer screens all day.)
Font accuracy, as you call it, is not an end in itself, for most of us. It's much like stairs: the rise of each step must be within a few millimeters of the others, or it will throw your feet off. Similarly, fonts which have been warped to fit the pixels throw reading stride off, and also create artifacts that are distracting. Fonts have been developed over centuries and reflect many human factors that affect your reading experience more than some abstract "font accuracy" criterion. This is not some kind of Print Nazi thing where the screen must match paper for reasons of "purity" or something.
For programming, I use one or two specific fonts. In that task, I want monospaced fonts, obviously, and that actually reinforces the idea that character stride is important, not just hitting pixel boundaries. (In this case, the two coincide, but hopefully it's clear that for other tasks, a different kind of stride is necessary and pixel boundaries may not be right.)
I simply do not sit so close to the screen (or use a low-enough-rez screen) that I can see individual pixels, so I cannot see any "blurring" in Mac fonts. I can see that once you're used to the overly-sharpened Windows fonts, you might perceive Mac fonts as "blurry", but that's like people who are used to radio pop music that's over-compressed and has the high and low ends pumped way up and then they listen to real music and find it "mushy and bland". Or to use a closer analogy, it's like someone who insists on Sharpening and Contrasting up all photos, who gets used to the over-sharp, artifacted look and regard anything less as "blurry and dull".
People keep talking as if Apple really missed the boat with iPad, but the truth is they only missed the boat for hard-core, tinker-happy nerds...
I disagree. Most of my friends are not hard core tinker happy nerds. And they were all underwhelmed with the iPad. In fact, I don't know a single person who was actually impressed by it.
Not one.
A lot of people simply have no imagination. And that's the value added by Steve Jobs: he's always drawn to where (he believes) people will WANT to be once they realize how things could be. He may be dramatically wrong -- and unlike other companies, there's no hiding behind focus groups and polls that seemed to indicate a demand -- but it's rather refreshing.
This whole iPad discussion feels to me like a repeat of the people who saw no need for computers, who couldn't imagine using a stupid mouse and icons instead of typing, who could care less about sub-audiophile MP3 players, who saw no reason to replace their VHS library with (more expensive) DVDs, who thought text messaging was stupid when you may as well make a call once you pick up your phone,..., who thought a phone without a physical keypad is going to flop, etc.
The poster you were replying to generalized in the wrong direction: it's not super-techies who are disappointed with the iPad, it's people who cannot imagine interfacing with a computer outside of the standard desktop paradigm. (Laptops are desktops with the keyboard attached via a convenient hinge. The form factor, UI, and how you interface with it is basically the same.) I have a laptop with 5 operating systems on it and all the development tools that I might need, but I will certainly get an iPad for several reasons -- none of them involving writing my own Python or typing a dissertation.
Our Verizon DVR doesn't like our Samsung flatscreen. Lots of loss-of-synch's over HDMI, and that's not very unusual. HDMI is sort of like TIFF that way: so many options that it's a wonder any sender and receiver can sync at all. So there's a difference between supporting plugs and basic protocols and actually working well together.
Fortunately, our PS3 plays Blu-rays flawlessly to the Samsung... so far.
Yes, that's one of the things I dislike in Machine Learning and Computer Vision: the lingua franca seems to be Matlab. Ugh. An ugly, primitive language with a culture that seems to value Perlesque code obfuscation and the proprietary lock-in you get with Matlab. Octave is helpful, and at least if the Matlab code is published you stand a chance of reproducing the experiment in a reasonable alternative. I'm the odd man out, though, as I've used R throughout graduate school, even for ML and Biometrics classes.
Scientists describe their algorithms in peer-reviewed papers, which are then re-implemented (often from scratch) by other scientists.
I recently went through this exercise for a graduate class in biometrics. In researching a particular fingerprint-evaluation algorithm, I found 6 papers that had an algorithmic description, and they all disagreed. Eventually, I could see that 5 out of the 6 were due to various kinds of typos. They simply would not work as written.
1. Making code available. What do we mean by "code"? Do we mean 100K lines of f77 that's been hacked for 30 years? Or do we mean R, SAS, or Mathematica code? The former is probably not so useful to others, though the latter may well be incredibly illuminating, even for non-experts in the specific field.
2. Making DATA available. Yes, in the leaked climate emails, there was some amateurish code. But the big issue there was actually sharing DATA, not code. In fact, emails indicated that there were threats of deleting data, and data that was never actually confirmed, hence a scandal.
3. Unqualified people using your data/code to attack your position. Seems to me that unqualified people are already attacking positions without data/code access, so it's not really a winning position to refuse to share. In fact, it's quite legitimate to suspect someone who is unwilling to share their data/method for arriving at a conclusion. The 1950's "according to scientists" simply doesn't fly anymore.
4. Unqualified wasting your time answering questions about your data/code. The open source movement has had to deal with this for quite some time. Not only that, the presentation of a question or objection: a) can often be judged by its own statement, and b) may be a common question that needs to be answered. In the first case, someone writing to a climatologist and saying "I downloaded your data and put it in excel and used that curve fitting thing and my curve shows temperatures peaking and going down" needs nothing beyond a canned reply, whether in public or private. (And a public discussion of why this is NOT a scientific objection would actually advance the overall state of education and science in the world.)
I'm not sure that 300K of crufty f77 code would be very useful to anyone to see. Though I'd also say that knowing someone's conclusions were based on 300K lines of crufty f77 code would be a point in the "not so sure" column. Which I think is much of the objection of releasing code: it takes guts to put not only your conclusions on the line, but also your assumptions and reasoning and most people are simply not willing to do this. Scientists (capital "S") should be willing to do this, but it would be pretty embarrassing to say, "My conclusions are based on a model that involves 400K lines of fortran code that has been tweaked for the last 30 years and which no one living actually understands. It seems to interpolate data very well, and we have reasons X, Y, and Z to believe that it extrapolates well also."
You may be right, but how many people are willing to say this? Easier to say, "Our proprietary model, developed by [Cue authoritative music] the most EMINENT SCIENTISTS on the PLANET, says A, B, and C," and then Appeal To Authority (tm).
I think MY next Apple purchase will be a 17" MacBook Pro. Because what I need is more like a desktop system I can carry around. YMMV.
This is what I have. And I think it's part of Steve Jobs' insight: we've regressed in a sense back to the "portable computer" days where we get large laptops instead of desktops. They're convenient in many ways, but certainly not on a plane flight, or to just grab -- and disconnect multiple connectors -- to browse the web on the couch. There's a huge gap between the pocketable iPhone and the desktop-replacement 17" MacBook Pro, and downscaling a laptop (desktop, really) netbook-style has been done for quite a while with not all that much success.
Tablets have stumbled for a decade because they have taken a desktop OS with desktop metaphors and forced it down into a smaller, leaner form factor. Result = fail. They then retreat into specialized apps that hide this stupid OS/UI choice, which condemns them to professional niches like doctors offices.
Apple has taken the design and metaphors of a very popular pocketable device and is scaling them up.
Which design would my parents prefer? Which design would I prefer when I want to sit on the couch (or on an airplane) and watch a video, browse the web, handle a bit of email, and read a book?
I mean, I have a netbook, but i wouldn't compare that - it is much more capable.
Your netbook is obviously much more capable than your microwave, refrigerator, TV screen, clocks, and a whole host of things around the house. Why don't you replace them with netbooks? (Or, save some money by using your one netbook to bind them all?)
The short answer is that there are two markets for the iPad.
First, there are folks like my parents. They have never really gotten into computers, and simply want to accomplish a few simple tasks in much the same way they would use a VCR, a microwave oven, or a car. Put an iPad dock in their living room and the iPad can sit there displaying photos like one of those electronic frames. Dad can grab it and take it into the Den to browse the web and read his newspaper. Mom could grab it and take it into the dining room and plunk it on a keyboard dock and can check email, etc. It just works. There are no CD's to install, no registration codes to remember, no visible OS to maintain.
Second, folks like me. I have a laptop and it's great: I have a dozen programming languages on it, email, multiple web browsers, even multiple OS's (via Virtualbox). But I have to interface with it in the classical computer posture: sitting in front of a screen, using a keyboard and fine-grained pointer, with a desktop OS and desktop GUI, with the machine held in the standard position (keyboard at bottom, screen in landscape orientation). But there are times when I want to interface with the machine more like a calendar, book, magazine, or piece of note paper, and the iPad allows this.
I also have an iPhone and like it a lot, but the screen is so small that I can only ever interact with bits and pieces of my data. I can't even see an entire day's activities at once. The iPad will let me see all of my data at once. The iPad will let me share information with someone else, much as I do in the physical world. Using a laptop/netbook is a lot like sharing a pair of binoculars, not like sharing photos or drawing on a piece of paper. The iPad can be used at any orientation, and consequently it is viewable from any orientation, and hence can be shared naturally.
When you say that a netbook is "much more capable", you have to consider "for what?". How you interface with it? No, you interface with it as a desktop, hands on a keyboard, screen oriented properly, not really shareable with anyone else -- especially with the cheaper, low-viewing-angle screens on netbooks. Writing a Python program or a thesis for school? Yep, netbook's better. Browsing through a boatload of research documents (say, using the unbelievable Papers app)? The iPad will win on that one. Sharing photos with a friend, watching a movie while relaxing, reading a magazine? The netbook can certainly do it, but only as a tiny desktop rather than as something like a photo or magazine.
I think Microsoft achieved their goals. Their main emphasis has always seemed to be leveraging their current monopoly to create other monopolies. The only innovation I remember them making was to invent the office suite, which put their better-but-single-property competitors heads in vices. (And leveraged their insider knowledge from their first monopoly.)
Sure, Microsoft has a lot of very smart people working for them, and no doubt they have very interesting things in their laboratories. BUT the corporate goal has always been something akin to "Windows everywhere" and the entire company has worked towards that end. MS Tablets did not stumble because of political infighting, they stumbled because they ran MS's desktop property, using their desktop metaphor.
They may have failed to be considered an innovative company. They may have carried their external turf war mentality turn inwards. They may have stumbled on small devices because they wanted Windows Everywhere. But they certainly succeeded where they wanted to: OS monopoly, browser monopoly, office suite monopoly. (Jobs') Apple has a different goal and seems to be succeeding -- or at least threatening to succeed -- rather admirably.
Exactly. You can still get a Macbook or iMac and program to your heart's content. Download Porticus and have a couple thousand open source apps available to you.
If someday MacOS XI woud lock down Macintosh computers, then I'd scream bloody murder. Maybe even move to Linux. But for my information appliances, so what. I'll program on something with a keyboard.
Given that you already have an iPad for other applications, and have it with you, it would be nice for games. I'd love to see Goban ported to the iPad. It's not full-on Go without the sound of polished slate/shell slapping onto a block of wood, but it'd be much better than a vinyl board and plastic stones for a game when you're on the go, or a quick net game after lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you miss CES when a dozen Android tablets were announced? Did you not notice the multiple android tablets that were released this month and last month?
Yes and yes.
How come when Apple does something people take notice. But when a hundred others go through more traditional channels such as trade shows people who think they are industry insiders don't have a clue?
Perhaps because the Apple device is worth noting, while the others are not? Just a wild guess, mind you, but it all goes back to a succinct quote above:
StreetStealth: Apple's model will always compromise developer flexibility when user experience is at stake. Google's model will always compromise user experience when developer flexibility is at stake.
The Apollo program was unique in many ways. One of which is that you can look up at night and see the moon. I'm all in favor of establishing a permanent base on the moon: the idea that you might live up on that white ball sparks imagination. It would provide a good testbed for true deep space manned exploration, as well as a good launching/supply pad for such missions. Mars will NOT duplicate the moon experience: it doesn't have the "look up and see" component, and I think a permanent colony will be far more inspiring to folks than the "Wow, an astronaut set foot on object X and made a speech!". The idea that we can LIVE long-term somewhere other than Earth is inspiring -- the idea that we might commute there is even more inspiring -- and the idea that we can follow up on exploration (the Moon) with settlement is also inspiring.
BUT, robotic missions can be inspiring, too. Think of the Mars rovers, Hubble, Voyager, etc, which all spark the imagination. You just have to pick the right kinds of missions, which would not all be "make a radar map of object X" -- useful for science no doubt, but not very "I'm going to become an engineer/scientist/space-worker".
Read science fiction and see how often manned exploration is preceded by robotic exploration. And you'll also often find commercial interests, too: mining colonies, etc, and NASA can provide the seed for commercial interests. (Which will then take on a life of their own, beyond NASA's budget.)
That's a good insight. I'm a statistics professor, and some of the problems I see are a) people generally get exposed to a single course in statistics; b) they're usually mathematically unprepared for it; c) so much gets squeezed into that one opportunity that heads are exploding;...
I'd add that the head 'sploding part, for me, was probability. I wasn't really able to overcome probability's counter-intuitive nature in the first half of Probability & Statistics, so I managed to create a really-sketchy-but-pulled-my-class-grade-average-up-from-dismal picture of statistics that turned burned me on my next two or three exposures to stats in other areas... I was well into graduate school before I finally started getting it.
Not only is it touting vaporware "iPad killers", but it's touting Linux-based coming-to-a-store-near-you iPad killers. Actually, retrofitted Linux-based, no-keyboard iPad killers which will have desktop GUIs.
But wait, there's more: people will buy them rather than the iPad because they want to do the kinds of things you'd do on desktops or laptops with keyboards.
I'll probably lose Karma over this one... I'm usually not this sarcastic, but this thread is so laughable... it's like some kind of super-hero movie where you see 100 kamikaze's on bicycles riding towards Godzilla with shouts of victory on their lips.
All those hours of reading Slashdot and watching movies with all kinds of stuff being blown up, and I didn't put 2 and 2 together to get RDX-powered nanotubes. I feel like I missed my calling.
This is one power-generation technology, however, where you do NOT want a device that goes to 11.
When the driver says they have their foot on the brake, they are just plain wrong. The human motor system is not perfect, and it doesn't always do what it is told.'
This was true with Audi in the 80's, ...
I think the key here was that the brake/gas pedals were not well-designed. Or rather, were designed for a racing technique called, I believe, heel-n-toe shifting. This made it way easier than necessary to accidentally hit the accelerator when you meant to hit the brake. At least that's my understanding of how it worked out in the end. Both sides were essentially wrong: the drivers had in fact hit the gas pedal, but Audi had an easy-to-mess-up design.
The Toyota problems, to the extent that they were actually due to floor mats getting stuck, would also be poor design. There's no need to have the gas pedal reach close to the floor, where a mat might catch on it. Nor to have the behind-the-pedal mechanisms within reach of a severely-jammed-forward mat, either. Perhaps 30 years ago, when things were mechanical and they needed some leverage, but not today.
Reminds me of Phineas and Ferb when you hear, "In hindsight, I question the decision to put a self-destruct button on this device in the first place."
Actually, you don't process and throw away information. You are not Sensing and then Compressing, you are Compressed Sensing, so you take in less data in the first place.
A canonical example is a 1-pixel camera that uses a grid of micro-mirrors, each of which can be set to reflect onto the pixel or not. By setting the grid randomly, you are essentially doing a Random Projection of the data before it's recorded, so you are Compressed Sensing. With a sufficient number of these 1-pixel images, each with a different random mirror setup you can reproduce the original image to some level of accuracy, using fewer bits than a JPEG/etc of similar quality. Unlike JPEG, you are not taking in a full set of data, then compressing, so it takes LESS processing power, not more.
So you save in image transmission bandwidth if the sensor is, say, orbiting Jupiter. And you save energy expended in compressing the image. And you could perhaps afford to make a VERY expensive single pixel imager that has an incredibly wide frequency range, which might be prohibitively expensive, or even impossible to fabricate in a larger array.
Personally, I think there's a lot of hype to CS, but it's definitely not the same as JPEG/Wavelet/etc compression after taking a full-resolution image.
It's the experience that you've NOT had that the netbook is missing. Try sharing a netbook presentation with someone. Or, say, showing them photos on it. The shape and the low-viewing-angle screen make it more like passing a pair of binoculars back and forth than actually sharing something. Imagine reading through and highlighting PDFs on a netbook -- landscape screen only, and useless keyboard sticking out at an awkward angle -- versus on the iPad.
The iPad lets you interface with it as you would a notepad or a book, while a netbook is simply a shrunk-down desktop with a built-in desk. Yes, if you can't think of using an electronic device that doesn't work like your desktop and doesn't offer (scaled-down) desktop apps and accessories, the iPad simply won't do. But for its intended uses, the way you are able to physically interface with it is "magical".
In addition to changing the physical form factor, they've also "sushi-fied" the interface. Previous flops in this space were due to desktop OS's being put onto "tablets" and they required desktop metaphors, which at a minimum requires a high-resolution pointing device -- in most cases a pen. The iPad, in addition to a better form factor for the device, has changed the UI so it doesn't require a physical keyboard or high-rez pointing device, just as sushi is cut in such a way that it does not require knife and fork.
The iPhone offered new things in a phone, things the average consumer didn't realize were possible. The iPad offers... what?
The iPhone was widely criticized in there here parts because it provided nothing NEW, and in fact did not provide "standard" things that other phones had offered for quite some time. You accidentally hit the nail on the head with the second part of your sentence: "... didn't realize were possible." The fact is the "more featureful" phones were a pain-in-the-butt to use. Yeah, my previous phone had text messaging, but I rarely used it. Yeah, my previous phone had voicemail, but it sucked. Yeah, my previous phone could surf the web -- and the phone's menus were designed to get you to accidentally access the web, to make them more money. About the only NEW thing the iPhone did was to have visual voicemail... AND a great user interface that made all of the other features easily accessible.
The iPad offers a different way of interfacing with your information than a desktop/laptop. Yes, in some ways it's just a big iPhone, but that's a good thing for a device that emphasizes content over pocketability. At the same time, it doesn't dictate your posture and its orientation as a desktop/laptop do, and that can make it more comfortable for you and also allow collaborative use in a way that laptops/netbooks simply don't. Sharing an iPad with someone at your table is more like sharing a stack of photos or drawing on a notepad than passing around the binoculars, I mean laptop.
It's all about the interface, not a long list of features... just as the iPhone was. Except it's a lot more about the physical interface -- literally your posture, your motions, how you hold it, and how you interface with it -- than about the onscreen UI, which is basically building on what the iPhone did.
An 18-wheeler provides significantly more functionality than whatever car you're driving, so why don't you buy one?
Fact is, you wouldn't buy one, even if it were half the price of your car, because the biggest checklist does not make for the best user experience.
This is such crap.
I'm sure the iPad will find an audience and will sell by the truckload, but come on...are they really claiming that people won't pay for a netbook, but they will pay the same price for something with half the functionality and none of the openness, just because it's pretty?
Yeah, when you turn form factor and how you interface with something into "pretty", it sounds pretty lame. That, of course, doesn't make it lame.
The fact is, a netbook is a tiny laptop, which in turn is a desktop with a convenient hinge joining the keyboard and screen. They use a desktop metaphor, have desktop-like physical constraints on how you use them, and probably use a desktop OS. Which is fine for desktop-like use (including a desktop-like user posture), but that's not the most comfortable way to interface with information.
By comparison, you interface differently with an iPad. As an example, take your netbook and share it with someone else sitting next to you at a table. It's more like sharing a pair of binoculars than sharing a pad of paper or a stack of photos. You're constrained by metaphor and by physical interface.
Yes, yes, you're not going to write programs or develop websites or create dissertations on an iPad. So what? Those are desktop/laptop activities. Browsing the web, watching a movie, going through photos, organizing thoughts, answering emails, playing casual games, reading magazines or technical manuals, ... all of these things are better done with something that doesn't force you into a particular, worshipful posture, and are often naturally shared activities that benefit from an unconstrained physical interface.
Does anyone actually game with Macs?>
... yes, we do.
When I am reading text, I care about text fidelity, not image fidelity. I want to know what the letters and words are. I want to be able to read and re-read the text with minimal eyestrain. Unless you work in advertising or marketing (two industries which I loathe), the purpose of displaying or printing text is to accurately convey which letter is which and which word is which. Anything else (such as font accuracy) is only a means to this end. Anyone (such as you) who thinks font accuracy is worthy as an end in itself is clearly living in a different world from someone (such as me) who reads scientific papers (the vast majority of them on-screen, simply because carrying around 1GB worth of printed papers is impossible) and writes code for a living.
I find claims of eyestrain on Mac displays to be rather far-fetched. Between work and home, I spend 12-16 hours a day in front of Mac monitors and have zero eyestrain. (And this is after 30 years in programming and videography, sitting in front of computer screens all day.)
Font accuracy, as you call it, is not an end in itself, for most of us. It's much like stairs: the rise of each step must be within a few millimeters of the others, or it will throw your feet off. Similarly, fonts which have been warped to fit the pixels throw reading stride off, and also create artifacts that are distracting. Fonts have been developed over centuries and reflect many human factors that affect your reading experience more than some abstract "font accuracy" criterion. This is not some kind of Print Nazi thing where the screen must match paper for reasons of "purity" or something.
For programming, I use one or two specific fonts. In that task, I want monospaced fonts, obviously, and that actually reinforces the idea that character stride is important, not just hitting pixel boundaries. (In this case, the two coincide, but hopefully it's clear that for other tasks, a different kind of stride is necessary and pixel boundaries may not be right.)
I simply do not sit so close to the screen (or use a low-enough-rez screen) that I can see individual pixels, so I cannot see any "blurring" in Mac fonts. I can see that once you're used to the overly-sharpened Windows fonts, you might perceive Mac fonts as "blurry", but that's like people who are used to radio pop music that's over-compressed and has the high and low ends pumped way up and then they listen to real music and find it "mushy and bland". Or to use a closer analogy, it's like someone who insists on Sharpening and Contrasting up all photos, who gets used to the over-sharp, artifacted look and regard anything less as "blurry and dull".
People keep talking as if Apple really missed the boat with iPad, but the truth is they only missed the boat for hard-core, tinker-happy nerds...
I disagree. Most of my friends are not hard core tinker happy nerds. And they were all underwhelmed with the iPad. In fact, I don't know a single person who was actually impressed by it.
Not one.
A lot of people simply have no imagination. And that's the value added by Steve Jobs: he's always drawn to where (he believes) people will WANT to be once they realize how things could be. He may be dramatically wrong -- and unlike other companies, there's no hiding behind focus groups and polls that seemed to indicate a demand -- but it's rather refreshing.
This whole iPad discussion feels to me like a repeat of the people who saw no need for computers, who couldn't imagine using a stupid mouse and icons instead of typing, who could care less about sub-audiophile MP3 players, who saw no reason to replace their VHS library with (more expensive) DVDs, who thought text messaging was stupid when you may as well make a call once you pick up your phone, ..., who thought a phone without a physical keypad is going to flop, etc.
The poster you were replying to generalized in the wrong direction: it's not super-techies who are disappointed with the iPad, it's people who cannot imagine interfacing with a computer outside of the standard desktop paradigm. (Laptops are desktops with the keyboard attached via a convenient hinge. The form factor, UI, and how you interface with it is basically the same.) I have a laptop with 5 operating systems on it and all the development tools that I might need, but I will certainly get an iPad for several reasons -- none of them involving writing my own Python or typing a dissertation.
Our Verizon DVR doesn't like our Samsung flatscreen. Lots of loss-of-synch's over HDMI, and that's not very unusual. HDMI is sort of like TIFF that way: so many options that it's a wonder any sender and receiver can sync at all. So there's a difference between supporting plugs and basic protocols and actually working well together.
Fortunately, our PS3 plays Blu-rays flawlessly to the Samsung... so far.
Yes, that's one of the things I dislike in Machine Learning and Computer Vision: the lingua franca seems to be Matlab. Ugh. An ugly, primitive language with a culture that seems to value Perlesque code obfuscation and the proprietary lock-in you get with Matlab. Octave is helpful, and at least if the Matlab code is published you stand a chance of reproducing the experiment in a reasonable alternative. I'm the odd man out, though, as I've used R throughout graduate school, even for ML and Biometrics classes.
Scientists describe their algorithms in peer-reviewed papers, which are then re-implemented (often from scratch) by other scientists.
I recently went through this exercise for a graduate class in biometrics. In researching a particular fingerprint-evaluation algorithm, I found 6 papers that had an algorithmic description, and they all disagreed. Eventually, I could see that 5 out of the 6 were due to various kinds of typos. They simply would not work as written.
Seems to me that there are several issues here:
1. Making code available. What do we mean by "code"? Do we mean 100K lines of f77 that's been hacked for 30 years? Or do we mean R, SAS, or Mathematica code? The former is probably not so useful to others, though the latter may well be incredibly illuminating, even for non-experts in the specific field.
2. Making DATA available. Yes, in the leaked climate emails, there was some amateurish code. But the big issue there was actually sharing DATA, not code. In fact, emails indicated that there were threats of deleting data, and data that was never actually confirmed, hence a scandal.
3. Unqualified people using your data/code to attack your position. Seems to me that unqualified people are already attacking positions without data/code access, so it's not really a winning position to refuse to share. In fact, it's quite legitimate to suspect someone who is unwilling to share their data/method for arriving at a conclusion. The 1950's "according to scientists" simply doesn't fly anymore.
4. Unqualified wasting your time answering questions about your data/code. The open source movement has had to deal with this for quite some time. Not only that, the presentation of a question or objection: a) can often be judged by its own statement, and b) may be a common question that needs to be answered. In the first case, someone writing to a climatologist and saying "I downloaded your data and put it in excel and used that curve fitting thing and my curve shows temperatures peaking and going down" needs nothing beyond a canned reply, whether in public or private. (And a public discussion of why this is NOT a scientific objection would actually advance the overall state of education and science in the world.)
I'm not sure that 300K of crufty f77 code would be very useful to anyone to see. Though I'd also say that knowing someone's conclusions were based on 300K lines of crufty f77 code would be a point in the "not so sure" column. Which I think is much of the objection of releasing code: it takes guts to put not only your conclusions on the line, but also your assumptions and reasoning and most people are simply not willing to do this. Scientists (capital "S") should be willing to do this, but it would be pretty embarrassing to say, "My conclusions are based on a model that involves 400K lines of fortran code that has been tweaked for the last 30 years and which no one living actually understands. It seems to interpolate data very well, and we have reasons X, Y, and Z to believe that it extrapolates well also."
You may be right, but how many people are willing to say this? Easier to say, "Our proprietary model, developed by [Cue authoritative music] the most EMINENT SCIENTISTS on the PLANET, says A, B, and C," and then Appeal To Authority (tm).
I think MY next Apple purchase will be a 17" MacBook Pro. Because what I need is more like a desktop system I can carry around. YMMV.
This is what I have. And I think it's part of Steve Jobs' insight: we've regressed in a sense back to the "portable computer" days where we get large laptops instead of desktops. They're convenient in many ways, but certainly not on a plane flight, or to just grab -- and disconnect multiple connectors -- to browse the web on the couch. There's a huge gap between the pocketable iPhone and the desktop-replacement 17" MacBook Pro, and downscaling a laptop (desktop, really) netbook-style has been done for quite a while with not all that much success.
Yes.
Tablets have stumbled for a decade because they have taken a desktop OS with desktop metaphors and forced it down into a smaller, leaner form factor. Result = fail. They then retreat into specialized apps that hide this stupid OS/UI choice, which condemns them to professional niches like doctors offices.
Apple has taken the design and metaphors of a very popular pocketable device and is scaling them up.
Which design would my parents prefer? Which design would I prefer when I want to sit on the couch (or on an airplane) and watch a video, browse the web, handle a bit of email, and read a book?
I mean, I have a netbook, but i wouldn't compare that - it is much more capable.
Your netbook is obviously much more capable than your microwave, refrigerator, TV screen, clocks, and a whole host of things around the house. Why don't you replace them with netbooks? (Or, save some money by using your one netbook to bind them all?)
[Hint: "more capable" requires a context.]
The short answer is that there are two markets for the iPad.
First, there are folks like my parents. They have never really gotten into computers, and simply want to accomplish a few simple tasks in much the same way they would use a VCR, a microwave oven, or a car. Put an iPad dock in their living room and the iPad can sit there displaying photos like one of those electronic frames. Dad can grab it and take it into the Den to browse the web and read his newspaper. Mom could grab it and take it into the dining room and plunk it on a keyboard dock and can check email, etc. It just works. There are no CD's to install, no registration codes to remember, no visible OS to maintain.
Second, folks like me. I have a laptop and it's great: I have a dozen programming languages on it, email, multiple web browsers, even multiple OS's (via Virtualbox). But I have to interface with it in the classical computer posture: sitting in front of a screen, using a keyboard and fine-grained pointer, with a desktop OS and desktop GUI, with the machine held in the standard position (keyboard at bottom, screen in landscape orientation). But there are times when I want to interface with the machine more like a calendar, book, magazine, or piece of note paper, and the iPad allows this.
I also have an iPhone and like it a lot, but the screen is so small that I can only ever interact with bits and pieces of my data. I can't even see an entire day's activities at once. The iPad will let me see all of my data at once. The iPad will let me share information with someone else, much as I do in the physical world. Using a laptop/netbook is a lot like sharing a pair of binoculars, not like sharing photos or drawing on a piece of paper. The iPad can be used at any orientation, and consequently it is viewable from any orientation, and hence can be shared naturally.
When you say that a netbook is "much more capable", you have to consider "for what?". How you interface with it? No, you interface with it as a desktop, hands on a keyboard, screen oriented properly, not really shareable with anyone else -- especially with the cheaper, low-viewing-angle screens on netbooks. Writing a Python program or a thesis for school? Yep, netbook's better. Browsing through a boatload of research documents (say, using the unbelievable Papers app)? The iPad will win on that one. Sharing photos with a friend, watching a movie while relaxing, reading a magazine? The netbook can certainly do it, but only as a tiny desktop rather than as something like a photo or magazine.
Simple.
I think Microsoft achieved their goals. Their main emphasis has always seemed to be leveraging their current monopoly to create other monopolies. The only innovation I remember them making was to invent the office suite, which put their better-but-single-property competitors heads in vices. (And leveraged their insider knowledge from their first monopoly.)
Sure, Microsoft has a lot of very smart people working for them, and no doubt they have very interesting things in their laboratories. BUT the corporate goal has always been something akin to "Windows everywhere" and the entire company has worked towards that end. MS Tablets did not stumble because of political infighting, they stumbled because they ran MS's desktop property, using their desktop metaphor.
They may have failed to be considered an innovative company. They may have carried their external turf war mentality turn inwards. They may have stumbled on small devices because they wanted Windows Everywhere. But they certainly succeeded where they wanted to: OS monopoly, browser monopoly, office suite monopoly. (Jobs') Apple has a different goal and seems to be succeeding -- or at least threatening to succeed -- rather admirably.
Exactly. You can still get a Macbook or iMac and program to your heart's content. Download Porticus and have a couple thousand open source apps available to you.
If someday MacOS XI woud lock down Macintosh computers, then I'd scream bloody murder. Maybe even move to Linux. But for my information appliances, so what. I'll program on something with a keyboard.
Given that you already have an iPad for other applications, and have it with you, it would be nice for games. I'd love to see Goban ported to the iPad. It's not full-on Go without the sound of polished slate/shell slapping onto a block of wood, but it'd be much better than a vinyl board and plastic stones for a game when you're on the go, or a quick net game after lunch.