> I can tell you without any reservation that screen real estate on a touch-based device is valued differently from one using a mouse pointer. That is why Safari behaves differently on both devices.
Bingo. This is one thing that iOS and later Android got right that was horribly wrong with previous tablet implementations. It's not just a matter of making gestures that emulate keyboard-and-mouse. A good user experience on a touch based device requires an entirely new paradigm.
Try using Windows on a tablet and see why tablets weren't popular until iOS.
The same techniques that make 3 -- 4 inch screens useful make 7 inch screens useful. It's not a quantum thing, where 3.6 inch screens have a certain usage, 9.7 inch screens have another usage, with nothing useful in between.
> It's not Apple's fault that the others aren't ready yet.
What a bizarre thing to say.
You know... this isn't a contest. Apple was first to market for this generation of tablets. (The first usable generation, in my opinion.) The question becomes: What other choices will we have? The question is not: Who has the most sales?
> "Despite the flood of new Tablets hitting the market, the Apple iPad remains the overwhelming choice of business buyers going forward - with nearly four-in-five (78%) corporate respondents saying their company plans to purchase Apple iPads."
The key word, as you well know, is "hitting", in this context "just starting to become available" or in some cases "will be available real soon now". Comparing current sales to future markets is a bit disingenious.
And I'll announce this right now, so you don't have to bother: Many, perhaps most of the new tablets will be crap for one reason or another. And that's fine. There will be a few gems, and that will give us more choices than the great jobsian shiny thing.
My daughter actually owns the T101, a slightly higher end version of that. She got it for Christmas.
The only downside to the device is that it runs Windows 7, which has lousy, I repeat, lousy touch support. I'm thinking of trying Ubuntu on it when their tablet-enabled version becomes available. If only it ran Android...
I'm not sure who you're talking to. I don't recall saying that the iPad was nothing new. Do you always carry on conversations like this?
But if you want, I'll say it now. Tablets *have* been around for ages. The iPad as a concept really is nothing new. What made it different was (1) a significant improvement in usability over anything that had come out before, and (2) having an app store easily accessible from the device.
That does not mean that the iPad will be the only tablet worth buying until the sun grows cold. Guess what: Android's paradigm is at least just as good (having used both, I'd say Android's interface is a significant improvement over iOS) and it *also* has an app store accessible from the device. What Android was not, was first to market.
Being first to market as a significantly improved, actually usable tablet, naturally the iPad is going to dominate the market, at least at first. But Android can offer things that Apple either can not or will not offer: Flash support. Memory slot. A user replaceable battery. USB peripherals. Competition among suppliers. A choice of form factors other than 9.7 inches and 3.5 inches. Regardless of who ultimately eats who's lunch, those of us who lament these shortcomings will finally have other choices. That's the point really. You can continue to shout to the wall that the iPad is the greatest tablet, but that kinda misses the point.
There is some truth to that. Since I got the Droid X I carry my laptop much less frequently, and really had no use for the company issued iPad.
I can even log onto my workstation from the phone through Logmein Ignition (home) or Citrix for Android (work), although it's a little painful on the 4" 854X480 display. The Galaxy tab, for instance, has a resolution of 1024X600 on a 7" screen, *and* it still fits in a coat pocket, which the iPad does not do. Ten by Six on seven inches would be pretty much the perfect compromise of usability and portability.
Moreover, an Android tablet would potentially have something that my Droid X currently does not have, and the iPad will never have -- USB host capability. If I could just read images from Compact Flash into the device, I really could leave my laptop home, as Photoshop Express for Android gives me enough functionality to edit and upload photos from the field.
Have not specifically tried it with a PDF, but have used it to read Word docs with "docs to go", and I'm using it to read Slashdot unzoomed right now.
I'm not saying it's ideal, but it is possible. I prefer not to use zoom because I don't like panning back and forth while I'm reading.
The 7" Galaxy tab is 1024X600, and reading a document in landscape (using vertical scrolling) is fine. Dunno enough yet about the Dell tablet to know how it'll perform, but 7" is demonstrably a workable form factor.
My company issues ipads, and after using one for two weeks I returned mine. It just wasn't a significant win in portability over my notebook, which does more and has SD and USB slots. I don't need to carry around yet another device just 'cause it's cool.
If the iPad works for you, great, but appreciate that others have different needs. The 7" form factor will fit in a coat pocket, which means I'm more likely to have the device on me. That it's not made by Apple makes it more likely that it may have the I/O ports I need. A double win.
Thanks. So I could get a run-up on how Ubuntu tablets will work by looking at Unity on my current Ubuntu box when Unity becomes available. Thanks, will look into that. This really is exciting, but I'm trying not to get too worked up. Windows 7 Pro on the tablet my daughter got for Christmas was a crushing disappointment. I hope Ubuntu is better.
I disagree on a couple of points. Please bear with me while I set this up.
I carry a Droid X, and use Logmein Ignition to log into my main workstation to do the few operations I can't yet do on the phone itself. The only thing I really need is a slightly bigger screen. So yeah, the screen is too small.
My company issues ipads, and I find them very stable and usable. I've *never* thought "damn I need a keyboard for this" because the onscreen keyboard does what I need it to do. (And I'm a fast typist.) I've also never thought "damn, I need a bigger screen" because the screen is big enough and the GUI is designed so that things pop up when you need them and go away when you don't need them anymore.
The Samsung galaxy tablet has at least as good (in my opinion better) interface as the ipad, and it *will* fit in your pocket. It has significantly more screen real-estate than my Droid X but is almost as portable. Similar to the ipad, the virtual keyboard is good enough that I've not seriously considered getting an external keyboard for it.
So on issue 1, "it's too big or too small", it depends partly on what you're trying to do, but in general the best computer is the one you have with you, and I'm more likely to be carrying a 7 inch Android tablet than I will be lugging an ipad. And if I really needed the real estate of the ipad, I'd be tempted to lug a netbook instead, and have things like USB, external video, SDRAM slots, flash support, etc etc.
I think you see where this is going. Both iOS and Android have good enough virtual keyboard support (not just the keyboard itself, but positioning, operation, how it's called up and dismissed and stuff like that) that "where the heck is the keyboard" is pretty much a non-issue.
Now what of Ubuntu?
If Ubuntu is implemented on tablets of the size, weight, complexity and cost of laptop computers, with half-assed touch support that wasn't properly thought through, you *will* be in a position saying "this is too big for this job, too small for that one, too heavy to carry around in one hand, and where the heck is the keyboard??" To which I'd add the possibility that "Right click on this thing is a right pain in the ass"....and the product will be a failure.
Want to see how to do it wrong? Look at current Windows 7 tablet support. Instead of coming up with a touch paradigm that works well, Microsoft has chosen to fake it by leveraging their existing Accessibility tools. It's a total fail -- clunky and annoying to use, with a half-assed keyboard and kludgy mouse gestures that make you wish you had a real keyboard and mouse, too big (to make room for the task bar, tray, start button, walking menus, lack of virtual desktop) to have any kind of portability advantage, too small to be a serious PC. Windows 7 tablet support is everything you were complaining about.
To be a serious contender, Ubuntu needs to be a *lot* better than that. But Apple and Google have demonstrated that it can be done.
I can tell you from experience that I can do probably 70% of the work I need to do on the iPad, and with Ignition I can get to my real PC and do the rest.
Hell, I can do about 50% of my work from my Droid X, and (with some difficulty) still log into my PC from the phone to do the stuff I can't do locally. If either the iPad or the Droid had USB support, I could leave my laptop at home on business trips.
Having used both, I estimate that I can do any part of my workflow on the 7" Galaxy tablet that I could do on the 9.7" iPad screen, and I'm more likely to have the smaller form factor on me.
And so, an Ubuntu tablet with USB host support, SD card reader, and a decent, usable GUI in a 7" form factor would be a godsend. It should also have an HDMI out like the Droid X so I can do presentations without having to lug a laptop.
In summary, the whole point of this exercise is to be able to do most of your work without having to lug around a backpack. Current hig
The article has apparently been slashdotted, so I can only guess how it's been implemented.
Please bear with me, I have to take a run-up to this.
I've used the Galaxy tablet, an iPad, and a tablet running Windows 7.
The iPad is very stable intuitive and usable. The Android tablet works much the same as the iPad with the additional features of a higher degree of customization, widgets, flash, and so forth.
The Windows 7 tablet sucks.
The main reason the Windows 7 tablet sucks is that the GUI doesn't seem to like living on a tablet. Too many operations assume keyboard and two button mouse, and tablet support consists of clumsy work-arounds to simulate a two button mouse on a tablet, when what is sorely needed is a new, mouseless paradigm, as the iPad and Android already have.
An additional problem I'm having with the Win7 tablet is that the virtual keyboard is not accurate enough to type in yer damned password. I have to resort to a physical keyboard to log into the damned thing. Part of the problem is probably hardware, but it does not help that the keys do not light up or do anything to indicate what key it thinks you've pressed, and you can't see what you're typing. If this really was designed to be a touch interface, instead of something cobbled together to have a presence in the tablet market, it'd work better than that.
Parenthetically, Microsoft already has a killer touch interface in Surface, so at least some people in Redmond know how a touch GUI is supposed to work. Given that, it totally baffles me that they'd try to push off this Windows 7 kludge as a serious contender in the tablet marketplace. I mean, what the hell?
Which brings us to Ubuntu. I've used past versions, and am very impressed. It's a tight little OS with a fast, well integrated, and at times amusing GUI. (I still get a kick out of shaking the rubber windows.) I think putting Ubuntu on a tablet is a very exciting idea.
But
Ubuntu out of the box is just as mousey as Winders. If all they're going to do is paste on work-around gestures to simulate a multi-button mouse and throw up a virtual keyboard, I'm not interested. I've already been down that road, and don't want to go through that frustration again. If that's what they're planning to offer, I'll stick with Android.
However, if Ubuntu produces a really truly designed-from-ground-up-to-be-mouseless interface, and it works well, then I'm all over that.
This is going to be interesting. Apple did the transition correctly to touch devices -- they came up with a brand new set of GUI rules instead of trying to reuse the paradigms in OSX. Android was designed from the start to be a touch interface. Winders has flubbed it so far, for their consumer devices at least. It'll be fascinating to see what Ubuntu does.
I always felt that using third party apps in Facebook was a little like playing flash games on random websites -- you're giving alien code full access to whatever information you have on Facebook, and may even be opening attack vectors on your local computer.
The friends and family in my close circle range from promoting social networks for a living, to distrusting them entirely and refusing to participate even under an assumed name. I'm somewhere in the middle -- I have a small circle of friends whom I actually know, I have security locked down appropriately with periodic reviews, and I never play the games or use any of the apps. No interest in virtual organized crime, virtual farms, virtual restaurants, or today's fortune, and I don't care that someone has answered a question about me that I need to click to unlock. And I have absolutely no interest in revealing my Netflix queue to my mom. Like any tool, you can use it properly or poke your eye out, your choice.
For the facebook user swamped with lonely little cows and pillow fights in their news feed, do this: Mouse over the little "x" in the upper corner of the item. Observe a popup allowing you to "block user-name" or "block application-name". Choose the latter, and that particular app will never be seen again. Do this consistently for a week or so and you find that your news feed has been reduced from a firehose of banality to a trickle of genuine social interaction. In the rare cases where your nephew finds new crap to plaster on your wall faster than you can update your blacklist, you can always "block user-name" and ban him from your news feed. He'll never know.
Stop using Facebook? It's a little like saying "Why don't you avoid the spam and 419 scams and viruses -- just stop using email!" If you said that in 1995 you might get a few people nodding their heads. In 2010 it's a ridiculous statement.
In order to block porn, ISPs would have to know which of the packets passing through their servers contain bits of porn and which don't. How is that accomplished? I know about blocking lists of known naughty sites, but there is so much porn out there on so many sites, many of them small time with non-obvious URLs, I wonder how they identify it all? Like, would they have to have a "porn identifying" division that surfed the internet to update the naughty list? I wonder how many applications they get for *that* job. I wonder if you could work from home.
Any show has potential to improve, but I don't expect it to happen. The current vogue appears to be to (1) Insert copious amounts of "gritty realism" which, since the writers appear not to understand what that means, rapidly devolves into soap-opera melodrama, (2) String out the main story arc as long as possible to (2a) save on writing costs and (2b) increase the number of episodes available for the rerun market, and (3) pull plot threads out of their arse like tapeworms and then drop them unexplained and unresolved.
These features combine to make the series (1) boring, (2) more boring, and (3) incomprehensible.
Everything meaningful that has happened so far could be condensed into 13 episodes, *including* reasonable amounts of characterization. But they chose to string out a few pages of plot for one lugubrious episode after another after another after another until we were ready to watch *anything* else (except Caprica, which had exactly the same problem). The root problem is a production system where the cast and crew can lose sight of the purpose of the show -- entertainment -- and nobody corrects them on it.
>no computer network can be considered completely and utterly impenetrable
C'mon, this is news? Have we learned nothing in the past 30 years? When I did military design in the eighties, "secure" was keeping the computer in a locked, shielded, windowless room with an armored door and NO NETWORK CONNECTION.
Data transfer was done extremely carefully via disk packs, with many checks and balances.
Once we had to push out a huge (for the time) amount of data to the staging equipment cage, more than we could reasonably handle by moving disk packs around. The cage was cut off from the local LAN during the transfer, and a single data cable was temporarily run along the ground from the computer room to the cage, with a guard at the door until the transfer was complete and we could seal up the room again.
Even then, I wouldn't call that completely and utterly impenetrable, just extremely difficult to penetrate.
We have one of those ASUS netbooks with a fold-over touchscreen (so can be used in tablet mode) running Win7. It's essentially a Win7 netbook with a built-in digitizer. We didn't expect any more than that.
It comes with a layer on top of Win7 provided by Asus that gives you some tablet functionality, but trying to use non-tablet-friendly apps, or even Windows 7 itself from the touchscreen is an exercise in frustration.
What it *is* useful for is for drawing programs. The primary user is an artist, and will bring up the drawing app, then fold over the display and draw with the stylus.
If you have to have a Win7 netbook, it's useful in some situations for it to have a touchscreen. But even after working with one for awhile, I honestly can't imagine incorporating a Windows 7 tablet into my workflow. I think the first things most people would buy are a keyboard and a mouse. And then, seriously, where are you? Back where you started.
If Microsoft is really serious about putting something like Windows on a tablet, and make it useful as a tablet, they need to completely rethink the human interface.
Maybe Windows Mobile 7? Assuming for the sake of this argument that it doesn't suck as much as Windows Mobile 6 and earlier?
My new cube is half again as big as my old one, and my boss has a cube the size of a freight car. (All his furniture is huddled at one end. You could square-dance in the open space.)
Of course, the company has gotten a lot smaller this year. I'm thinking this is an unexpected benefit of a down economy.
Slashdot Mirror
> I can tell you without any reservation that screen real estate on a touch-based device is valued differently from one using a mouse pointer. That is why Safari behaves differently on both devices.
Bingo. This is one thing that iOS and later Android got right that was horribly wrong with previous tablet implementations. It's not just a matter of making gestures that emulate keyboard-and-mouse. A good user experience on a touch based device requires an entirely new paradigm.
Try using Windows on a tablet and see why tablets weren't popular until iOS.
The same techniques that make 3 -- 4 inch screens useful make 7 inch screens useful. It's not a quantum thing, where 3.6 inch screens have a certain usage, 9.7 inch screens have another usage, with nothing useful in between.
What I'm saying is that it's way too early to tell at this particular time. Let's talk again in six months.
> It's not Apple's fault that the others aren't ready yet.
What a bizarre thing to say.
You know... this isn't a contest. Apple was first to market for this generation of tablets. (The first usable generation, in my opinion.) The question becomes: What other choices will we have? The question is not: Who has the most sales?
> "Despite the flood of new Tablets hitting the market, the Apple iPad remains the overwhelming choice of business buyers going forward - with nearly four-in-five (78%) corporate respondents saying their company plans to purchase Apple iPads."
The key word, as you well know, is "hitting", in this context "just starting to become available" or in some cases "will be available real soon now". Comparing current sales to future markets is a bit disingenious.
And I'll announce this right now, so you don't have to bother: Many, perhaps most of the new tablets will be crap for one reason or another. And that's fine. There will be a few gems, and that will give us more choices than the great jobsian shiny thing.
My daughter actually owns the T101, a slightly higher end version of that. She got it for Christmas.
The only downside to the device is that it runs Windows 7, which has lousy, I repeat, lousy touch support. I'm thinking of trying Ubuntu on it when their tablet-enabled version becomes available. If only it ran Android...
I'm not sure who you're talking to. I don't recall saying that the iPad was nothing new. Do you always carry on conversations like this?
But if you want, I'll say it now. Tablets *have* been around for ages. The iPad as a concept really is nothing new. What made it different was (1) a significant improvement in usability over anything that had come out before, and (2) having an app store easily accessible from the device.
That does not mean that the iPad will be the only tablet worth buying until the sun grows cold. Guess what: Android's paradigm is at least just as good (having used both, I'd say Android's interface is a significant improvement over iOS) and it *also* has an app store accessible from the device. What Android was not, was first to market.
Being first to market as a significantly improved, actually usable tablet, naturally the iPad is going to dominate the market, at least at first. But Android can offer things that Apple either can not or will not offer: Flash support. Memory slot. A user replaceable battery. USB peripherals. Competition among suppliers. A choice of form factors other than 9.7 inches and 3.5 inches. Regardless of who ultimately eats who's lunch, those of us who lament these shortcomings will finally have other choices. That's the point really. You can continue to shout to the wall that the iPad is the greatest tablet, but that kinda misses the point.
Maybe he has one pocket that goes all the way across...
There is some truth to that. Since I got the Droid X I carry my laptop much less frequently, and really had no use for the company issued iPad.
I can even log onto my workstation from the phone through Logmein Ignition (home) or Citrix for Android (work), although it's a little painful on the 4" 854X480 display. The Galaxy tab, for instance, has a resolution of 1024X600 on a 7" screen, *and* it still fits in a coat pocket, which the iPad does not do. Ten by Six on seven inches would be pretty much the perfect compromise of usability and portability.
Moreover, an Android tablet would potentially have something that my Droid X currently does not have, and the iPad will never have -- USB host capability. If I could just read images from Compact Flash into the device, I really could leave my laptop home, as Photoshop Express for Android gives me enough functionality to edit and upload photos from the field.
Have not specifically tried it with a PDF, but have used it to read Word docs with "docs to go", and I'm using it to read Slashdot unzoomed right now.
I'm not saying it's ideal, but it is possible. I prefer not to use zoom because I don't like panning back and forth while I'm reading.
The 7" Galaxy tab is 1024X600, and reading a document in landscape (using vertical scrolling) is fine. Dunno enough yet about the Dell tablet to know how it'll perform, but 7" is demonstrably a workable form factor.
Really? Great. Wake me when the 2.2 update is released. Not interesting until then.
> 10" minimum - to comfortably read a page of text in landscape without zooming.
Demonstrably untrue. I do it all the time with my 55 year old eyes on my 4" Droid X.
A 7" tablet, that actually fits in a coat pocket, would be just about perfect. 10" (9.7 actually) is too big. You might as well carry a notebook.
Which just goes to prove, there's more then one market out there for tablets.
What competitors? The only viable competition this moment is the Samsung Galaxy, which has been out, what, weeks?
Of course businesses that are buying tablets right now are buying iPads, right now. It's the only viable product, right now.
Let's talk later when we're actually comparing apples to apples (so to speak).
My company issues ipads, and after using one for two weeks I returned mine. It just wasn't a significant win in portability over my notebook, which does more and has SD and USB slots. I don't need to carry around yet another device just 'cause it's cool.
If the iPad works for you, great, but appreciate that others have different needs. The 7" form factor will fit in a coat pocket, which means I'm more likely to have the device on me. That it's not made by Apple makes it more likely that it may have the I/O ports I need. A double win.
Because the iPad is too big.
If I wanted to lug around a device that big I'd get a netbook, which has USB and an SD card reader.
The advantage of the tablet form factor is portability, and the ipad is a little too big and heavy to be a significant win in this area.
Thanks. So I could get a run-up on how Ubuntu tablets will work by looking at Unity on my current Ubuntu box when Unity becomes available. Thanks, will look into that. This really is exciting, but I'm trying not to get too worked up. Windows 7 Pro on the tablet my daughter got for Christmas was a crushing disappointment. I hope Ubuntu is better.
I disagree on a couple of points. Please bear with me while I set this up.
I carry a Droid X, and use Logmein Ignition to log into my main workstation to do the few operations I can't yet do on the phone itself. The only thing I really need is a slightly bigger screen. So yeah, the screen is too small.
My company issues ipads, and I find them very stable and usable. I've *never* thought "damn I need a keyboard for this" because the onscreen keyboard does what I need it to do. (And I'm a fast typist.) I've also never thought "damn, I need a bigger screen" because the screen is big enough and the GUI is designed so that things pop up when you need them and go away when you don't need them anymore.
The Samsung galaxy tablet has at least as good (in my opinion better) interface as the ipad, and it *will* fit in your pocket. It has significantly more screen real-estate than my Droid X but is almost as portable. Similar to the ipad, the virtual keyboard is good enough that I've not seriously considered getting an external keyboard for it.
So on issue 1, "it's too big or too small", it depends partly on what you're trying to do, but in general the best computer is the one you have with you, and I'm more likely to be carrying a 7 inch Android tablet than I will be lugging an ipad. And if I really needed the real estate of the ipad, I'd be tempted to lug a netbook instead, and have things like USB, external video, SDRAM slots, flash support, etc etc.
I think you see where this is going. Both iOS and Android have good enough virtual keyboard support (not just the keyboard itself, but positioning, operation, how it's called up and dismissed and stuff like that) that "where the heck is the keyboard" is pretty much a non-issue.
Now what of Ubuntu?
If Ubuntu is implemented on tablets of the size, weight, complexity and cost of laptop computers, with half-assed touch support that wasn't properly thought through, you *will* be in a position saying "this is too big for this job, too small for that one, too heavy to carry around in one hand, and where the heck is the keyboard??" To which I'd add the possibility that "Right click on this thing is a right pain in the ass". ...and the product will be a failure.
Want to see how to do it wrong? Look at current Windows 7 tablet support. Instead of coming up with a touch paradigm that works well, Microsoft has chosen to fake it by leveraging their existing Accessibility tools. It's a total fail -- clunky and annoying to use, with a half-assed keyboard and kludgy mouse gestures that make you wish you had a real keyboard and mouse, too big (to make room for the task bar, tray, start button, walking menus, lack of virtual desktop) to have any kind of portability advantage, too small to be a serious PC. Windows 7 tablet support is everything you were complaining about.
To be a serious contender, Ubuntu needs to be a *lot* better than that. But Apple and Google have demonstrated that it can be done.
I can tell you from experience that I can do probably 70% of the work I need to do on the iPad, and with Ignition I can get to my real PC and do the rest.
Hell, I can do about 50% of my work from my Droid X, and (with some difficulty) still log into my PC from the phone to do the stuff I can't do locally. If either the iPad or the Droid had USB support, I could leave my laptop at home on business trips.
Having used both, I estimate that I can do any part of my workflow on the 7" Galaxy tablet that I could do on the 9.7" iPad screen, and I'm more likely to have the smaller form factor on me.
And so, an Ubuntu tablet with USB host support, SD card reader, and a decent, usable GUI in a 7" form factor would be a godsend. It should also have an HDMI out like the Droid X so I can do presentations without having to lug a laptop.
In summary, the whole point of this exercise is to be able to do most of your work without having to lug around a backpack. Current hig
The article has apparently been slashdotted, so I can only guess how it's been implemented.
Please bear with me, I have to take a run-up to this.
I've used the Galaxy tablet, an iPad, and a tablet running Windows 7.
The iPad is very stable intuitive and usable. The Android tablet works much the same as the iPad with the additional features of a higher degree of customization, widgets, flash, and so forth.
The Windows 7 tablet sucks.
The main reason the Windows 7 tablet sucks is that the GUI doesn't seem to like living on a tablet. Too many operations assume keyboard and two button mouse, and tablet support consists of clumsy work-arounds to simulate a two button mouse on a tablet, when what is sorely needed is a new, mouseless paradigm, as the iPad and Android already have.
An additional problem I'm having with the Win7 tablet is that the virtual keyboard is not accurate enough to type in yer damned password. I have to resort to a physical keyboard to log into the damned thing. Part of the problem is probably hardware, but it does not help that the keys do not light up or do anything to indicate what key it thinks you've pressed, and you can't see what you're typing. If this really was designed to be a touch interface, instead of something cobbled together to have a presence in the tablet market, it'd work better than that.
Parenthetically, Microsoft already has a killer touch interface in Surface, so at least some people in Redmond know how a touch GUI is supposed to work. Given that, it totally baffles me that they'd try to push off this Windows 7 kludge as a serious contender in the tablet marketplace. I mean, what the hell?
Which brings us to Ubuntu. I've used past versions, and am very impressed. It's a tight little OS with a fast, well integrated, and at times amusing GUI. (I still get a kick out of shaking the rubber windows.) I think putting Ubuntu on a tablet is a very exciting idea.
But
Ubuntu out of the box is just as mousey as Winders. If all they're going to do is paste on work-around gestures to simulate a multi-button mouse and throw up a virtual keyboard, I'm not interested. I've already been down that road, and don't want to go through that frustration again. If that's what they're planning to offer, I'll stick with Android.
However, if Ubuntu produces a really truly designed-from-ground-up-to-be-mouseless interface, and it works well, then I'm all over that.
This is going to be interesting. Apple did the transition correctly to touch devices -- they came up with a brand new set of GUI rules instead of trying to reuse the paradigms in OSX. Android was designed from the start to be a touch interface. Winders has flubbed it so far, for their consumer devices at least. It'll be fascinating to see what Ubuntu does.
I always felt that using third party apps in Facebook was a little like playing flash games on random websites -- you're giving alien code full access to whatever information you have on Facebook, and may even be opening attack vectors on your local computer.
The friends and family in my close circle range from promoting social networks for a living, to distrusting them entirely and refusing to participate even under an assumed name. I'm somewhere in the middle -- I have a small circle of friends whom I actually know, I have security locked down appropriately with periodic reviews, and I never play the games or use any of the apps. No interest in virtual organized crime, virtual farms, virtual restaurants, or today's fortune, and I don't care that someone has answered a question about me that I need to click to unlock. And I have absolutely no interest in revealing my Netflix queue to my mom. Like any tool, you can use it properly or poke your eye out, your choice.
For the facebook user swamped with lonely little cows and pillow fights in their news feed, do this: Mouse over the little "x" in the upper corner of the item. Observe a popup allowing you to "block user-name" or "block application-name". Choose the latter, and that particular app will never be seen again. Do this consistently for a week or so and you find that your news feed has been reduced from a firehose of banality to a trickle of genuine social interaction. In the rare cases where your nephew finds new crap to plaster on your wall faster than you can update your blacklist, you can always "block user-name" and ban him from your news feed. He'll never know.
Stop using Facebook? It's a little like saying "Why don't you avoid the spam and 419 scams and viruses -- just stop using email!" If you said that in 1995 you might get a few people nodding their heads. In 2010 it's a ridiculous statement.
In order to block porn, ISPs would have to know which of the packets passing through their servers contain bits of porn and which don't. How is that accomplished? I know about blocking lists of known naughty sites, but there is so much porn out there on so many sites, many of them small time with non-obvious URLs, I wonder how they identify it all? Like, would they have to have a "porn identifying" division that surfed the internet to update the naughty list? I wonder how many applications they get for *that* job. I wonder if you could work from home.
Any show has potential to improve, but I don't expect it to happen. The current vogue appears to be to (1) Insert copious amounts of "gritty realism" which, since the writers appear not to understand what that means, rapidly devolves into soap-opera melodrama, (2) String out the main story arc as long as possible to (2a) save on writing costs and (2b) increase the number of episodes available for the rerun market, and (3) pull plot threads out of their arse like tapeworms and then drop them unexplained and unresolved.
These features combine to make the series (1) boring, (2) more boring, and (3) incomprehensible.
Everything meaningful that has happened so far could be condensed into 13 episodes, *including* reasonable amounts of characterization. But they chose to string out a few pages of plot for one lugubrious episode after another after another after another until we were ready to watch *anything* else (except Caprica, which had exactly the same problem). The root problem is a production system where the cast and crew can lose sight of the purpose of the show -- entertainment -- and nobody corrects them on it.
> 'Perfumers on the team used their professionally trained noses to identify specific embalming substances in the mouth used to hide nasty odors.'
Worst. Job. Ever.
Someone should send that in to Mike Rowe....
Seriously, there never was. There are just more attack vectors now.
>no computer network can be considered completely and utterly impenetrable
C'mon, this is news? Have we learned nothing in the past 30 years? When I did military design in the eighties, "secure" was keeping the computer in a locked, shielded, windowless room with an armored door and NO NETWORK CONNECTION.
Data transfer was done extremely carefully via disk packs, with many checks and balances.
Once we had to push out a huge (for the time) amount of data to the staging equipment cage, more than we could reasonably handle by moving disk packs around. The cage was cut off from the local LAN during the transfer, and a single data cable was temporarily run along the ground from the computer room to the cage, with a guard at the door until the transfer was complete and we could seal up the room again.
Even then, I wouldn't call that completely and utterly impenetrable, just extremely difficult to penetrate.
It probably runs Linux.
We have one of those ASUS netbooks with a fold-over touchscreen (so can be used in tablet mode) running Win7. It's essentially a Win7 netbook with a built-in digitizer. We didn't expect any more than that.
It comes with a layer on top of Win7 provided by Asus that gives you some tablet functionality, but trying to use non-tablet-friendly apps, or even Windows 7 itself from the touchscreen is an exercise in frustration.
What it *is* useful for is for drawing programs. The primary user is an artist, and will bring up the drawing app, then fold over the display and draw with the stylus.
If you have to have a Win7 netbook, it's useful in some situations for it to have a touchscreen. But even after working with one for awhile, I honestly can't imagine incorporating a Windows 7 tablet into my workflow. I think the first things most people would buy are a keyboard and a mouse. And then, seriously, where are you? Back where you started.
If Microsoft is really serious about putting something like Windows on a tablet, and make it useful as a tablet, they need to completely rethink the human interface.
Maybe Windows Mobile 7? Assuming for the sake of this argument that it doesn't suck as much as Windows Mobile 6 and earlier?
My new cube is half again as big as my old one, and my boss has a cube the size of a freight car. (All his furniture is huddled at one end. You could square-dance in the open space.)
Of course, the company has gotten a lot smaller this year. I'm thinking this is an unexpected benefit of a down economy.