So the big egos at Apple came out with an iPad with deliberate limitations. Then the big egos at Google prepare a competing product that (users hope) will capitalize on those limitations, but will almost certainly have limitations or flaws of it's own. Let's face it -- when you can capitalize on mindshare, you don't have to work quite as hard on the actual product as long as it's shiny.
I'm thinking we should still wait until Acer or some company with smaller egos and no axe to grind produce a product on which someone can actually get work done, and that interfaces to the usual peripherals in the usual way. I'm thinking I'll wait for that.
> the cosmologists continue to try to convince their mother-in-laws that they really are cosmologists despite not knowing anything about t-zones, foundation blending, manicuring, waxing.... and no, that doesn't mean they went to a bad 'school of cosmology.'
Sounds personal...
I had a friend who was a microwave communications engineer. His grandmother persisted in believing he worked on ovens.
If it works like the GPS/radio in my car, driver distraction will be a moot point, because it'll decline to function unless the parking brake is on.:-)
...and there will be a work-around on youtube in less than 24 hours...
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
> But he noted that the iPad isn't usable even for grandmas.
Enh... "Even" bothers me. I'd say "especially for grandmas". I do sysadmin for three sets of grandparent-age people, and their needs are different, not merely fewer, than us power-nerds. A grandma (as understood in context) needs a simple interface to do a few things, but needs everything to work without dinking around, and needs a decent way to type with those arthritic old hands the long meandering letters for which they are so famous. In this application, the ipad probably passes the simple and reliable test, but loses on keyboard, teleconferencing (which even grandmas are doing these days) and the perception whilst browsing the web that the durned thing doesn't work right sometimes (lack of flash).
I'm somewhat bothered about the report that trimming spam is awkward. Grandmas get a lot of spam. Outlook Express is responsible for a multitude of sins, (do Grandma a favor and turn off the damned preview) but it makes deleting random spam relatively easy.
Otherwise, good question; who, besides fanbois, is the iPad aimed at? In my opinion, it does fill a very important role: It gets the other manufacturers off their butts and correcting the mistakes in previous tablet designs. They now have a big fat target -- the functionality of an iPad with Flash, a camera, a USB port, swappable batteries, optional external keyboard support, and maybe lighter weight. Today we have a shiny toy that you can turn different directions and watch a page re-render. Now the job is to make the changes necessary so that one can actually do useful work.
As far as voice recognition goes, I just upgraded my BB Tour to OS version 5, which comes with a new voice recognition widget, so I spent 20 minutes training it and had a good initial experience. Later that day I pulled it out in a crowd of friends, said "watch this" and told it to call mother-in-law. The experience was not unlike William H. Macy's at the beginning of "Wild Hogs". So other than amusement value, no, voice recognition isn't exactly "there" yet.
I suppose the ipad will get lots of oooooos and aaaaaaahs at starbucks, and if that's it's purpose in life, fine. At least it stimulates the economy. Well, some country's economy.
C'mon, anyone can grasp the concepts behind calculus in an hour or so -- the rest is just slogging through the equations. Of course, you have to know algebra and geometry cold going in or you're dead.
I heard about this yesterday and it seems like a deal was struck. Phil Jones steps down, and the house of commons declines to charge him. We'll never know, of course.
> All of that is gonna work a lot better than my strategy of placing car-sized holes covered with twigs and branches randomly every half mile or so down the interstates.
I think the City of Portland is already doing that. Recently had over $3,000 damage to my Harley from a pothole. Usually I can avoid them but twilight and traffic conspired to miss it. I didn't even lay the bike down. Impact destroyed both wheels and blew out forks and shocks.
I'm red/green colorblind. Don't I get a say in whether I get that corrected?
Is this the culmination of the "differently abled" nonsense? I know -- let's ban glasses. It's morally wrong for people to be "forced" to be able to read street signs.
> I predict with absolute faith that the iPad and its clones are going to kill off single purpose devices like dedicated eReaders such as Amazon's Kindle and GPS devices within the next three years. How can it not work out this way?
Well, one way it wouldn't work out that way is if the general purpose devices really suck at things like ereaders and GPS and so forth. It's not enough to have the device, the applications have to be there, and they have to work well, and in some cases they have to work well together. And both the hardware and applications have to be reasonably priced. These things are not assured.
If you pay by message, sure. Just like, if you buy internet access by the kilobyte, it adds up quickly.
I bought unlimited SMS for daughter's phone because she's a deamon texter. I think it's $10 a month.
I have SMS capability on my (non-i) phone because it's the way my daughter and some of my friends communicate. I have the gtalk app on my phone because other of my friends use that and nothing else.
Telling my family and friends that they must use email because I have an i-phone and that's all it supports makes me look like a chump.
Your mileage may vary, I guess. I suppose as a fanboi one could hand-select one's family and friends such that they all communicate via email.
And fer crissake, blink once in awhile. Your eyes are all shiny.
I'd say multitasking on the ipad is a dead on requirement. This isn't the 1980's anymore, guys. The cheapest generic Netbook will multitask. Most smartphones will multitask. Wristwatches will multitask. Winders has had multitasking since... Oh, I dunno, 1993, or 1996 or 2000 depending on your definition of "multitask". Still a long time ago.
By price. Buy the best CPU you can afford and don't worry about what it's called. Multiple cores is usually better. Faster clock speeds is usually better. More modern processors usually give better performance at the same clock speed.
"One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."
Thanks, I needed a laugh this morning. What is it to them whether you can use the product or not, other than more calls on their help line in Bangalore? You assume they have any commitment to the product whatsoever after you've purchased it?
What will stem the tide of bad DRM is when we refuse to buy the products and companies start to go out of business.
How is this more convenient? If mere proximity were sufficient (as in the Prius key) it might be interesting, but if I have to pull out a device and tap in a pin to make it work, that's hardly more convenient than having a key that I had to pull out and fit into the lock. And what happens when the device runs out of grunt? Do I have to find a charger before I can get into my house? Maybe not if I can still use a conventional key. But if I have to keep a key with me anyway, what value, other than excruciating nerdism, would the device have?
I guess one could argue that it's more secure ("something you have and something you know") but with all the people hacking rfid these days, that doesn't seem likely either.
I used to do IT for a utility, and we had one analyst who did interesting and esoteric mathematical calculations for research. The work was high profile and undeniably important, but like most IT departments, the person holding the bag of money had different priorities, so the analyst got a fairly high end workstation but no server resources. He discovered that he could export his code to other Unix boxes and run it there. He wrote sophisticated programs to seek out and exploit boxes all over the company to do his analysis. (This was long ago -- these days he would probably be fired or even have charges brought against him.)
Now, a savvy person would have written the code to run their analysis in the dark of night, using unused cycles, and nobody would be the wiser. Instead, he insisted on running this monster during regular working hours, because, you know, those are the hours he worked.
You can imagine the chaos. File shares, print servers, engineer workstations, and even (gritted teeth) admin workstations would grind to a halt.
Appeals to the analyst in question (let's call him "Fred") were fruitless. Fred saw his work as important and didn't see anything wrong with what he was doing. He said that if IT needed more resources, we should buy more machines. Which is true, except for the fundamental disconnect between what he needed and what IT was willing to purchase.
The policy at the time was that any Unix account could log into any machine except a select few (mail server, NIS server, etc). Getting that policy changed was very difficult, in part, I think, because our managers didn't really understand the issue. We finally took matters into our own hands, which led to the infamous "Fred Exclusion". Boy, was Fred pissed. Fortunately, the same lazy management that was partially responsible for the problem couldn't be persuaded to force us to change it back. He left the company shortly after that and his replacement couldn't figure out his code, so the problem did eventually go away.
In this case, I wouldn't bother changing your workstation settings, I'd slowly, a file at a time, move your workfiles to a non-shared directory. Or alternately, move all your files to his workstation, using the argument that he would have faster access to them, and then use his machine as a fileshare.
Slashdot Mirror
So the big egos at Apple came out with an iPad with deliberate limitations. Then the big egos at Google prepare a competing product that (users hope) will capitalize on those limitations, but will almost certainly have limitations or flaws of it's own. Let's face it -- when you can capitalize on mindshare, you don't have to work quite as hard on the actual product as long as it's shiny.
I'm thinking we should still wait until Acer or some company with smaller egos and no axe to grind produce a product on which someone can actually get work done, and that interfaces to the usual peripherals in the usual way. I'm thinking I'll wait for that.
Yeah, but, being ten light years away, it's going to have to really scoot to be here by 2012.
> the cosmologists continue to try to convince their mother-in-laws that they really are cosmologists despite not knowing anything about t-zones, foundation blending, manicuring, waxing.... and no, that doesn't mean they went to a bad 'school of cosmology.'
Sounds personal...
I had a friend who was a microwave communications engineer. His grandmother persisted in believing he worked on ovens.
If it works like the GPS/radio in my car, driver distraction will be a moot point, because it'll decline to function unless the parking brake is on. :-)
Now, hang on, isn't most of the news in Murdoch's papers just regurgitated wire items? What does he think "reporting" means?
But aside from that, I actually agree. Google doing their own reporting would kill the newspapers stone dead, and let's face it -- it's about time.
Will it blend?
> But he noted that the iPad isn't usable even for grandmas.
Enh... "Even" bothers me. I'd say "especially for grandmas". I do sysadmin for three sets of grandparent-age people, and their needs are different, not merely fewer, than us power-nerds. A grandma (as understood in context) needs a simple interface to do a few things, but needs everything to work without dinking around, and needs a decent way to type with those arthritic old hands the long meandering letters for which they are so famous. In this application, the ipad probably passes the simple and reliable test, but loses on keyboard, teleconferencing (which even grandmas are doing these days) and the perception whilst browsing the web that the durned thing doesn't work right sometimes (lack of flash).
I'm somewhat bothered about the report that trimming spam is awkward. Grandmas get a lot of spam. Outlook Express is responsible for a multitude of sins, (do Grandma a favor and turn off the damned preview) but it makes deleting random spam relatively easy.
Otherwise, good question; who, besides fanbois, is the iPad aimed at? In my opinion, it does fill a very important role: It gets the other manufacturers off their butts and correcting the mistakes in previous tablet designs. They now have a big fat target -- the functionality of an iPad with Flash, a camera, a USB port, swappable batteries, optional external keyboard support, and maybe lighter weight. Today we have a shiny toy that you can turn different directions and watch a page re-render. Now the job is to make the changes necessary so that one can actually do useful work.
As far as voice recognition goes, I just upgraded my BB Tour to OS version 5, which comes with a new voice recognition widget, so I spent 20 minutes training it and had a good initial experience. Later that day I pulled it out in a crowd of friends, said "watch this" and told it to call mother-in-law. The experience was not unlike William H. Macy's at the beginning of "Wild Hogs". So other than amusement value, no, voice recognition isn't exactly "there" yet.
I suppose the ipad will get lots of oooooos and aaaaaaahs at starbucks, and if that's it's purpose in life, fine. At least it stimulates the economy. Well, some country's economy.
C'mon, anyone can grasp the concepts behind calculus in an hour or so -- the rest is just slogging through the equations. Of course, you have to know algebra and geometry cold going in or you're dead.
I'm one of those supermultitaskers! Yes I am! In fact, right now I'm driving while I posqoaherohd;lk
I heard about this yesterday and it seems like a deal was struck. Phil Jones steps down, and the house of commons declines to charge him. We'll never know, of course.
> All of that is gonna work a lot better than my strategy of placing car-sized holes covered with twigs and branches randomly every half mile or so down the interstates.
I think the City of Portland is already doing that. Recently had over $3,000 damage to my Harley from a pothole. Usually I can avoid them but twilight and traffic conspired to miss it. I didn't even lay the bike down. Impact destroyed both wheels and blew out forks and shocks.
> We're really in trouble when NASA has no choice but to call Bruce Willis.
Oooh... do we get to see him blow up a Prius? With him inside?
Yet another distraction.
I'm red/green colorblind. Don't I get a say in whether I get that corrected?
Is this the culmination of the "differently abled" nonsense? I know -- let's ban glasses. It's morally wrong for people to be "forced" to be able to read street signs.
Bah!
The article itself is brilliant. I don't see where Viacom has a leg to stand on. But strange things happen in lawsuits.
> I predict with absolute faith that the iPad and its clones are going to kill off single purpose devices like dedicated eReaders such as Amazon's Kindle and GPS devices within the next three years. How can it not work out this way?
Well, one way it wouldn't work out that way is if the general purpose devices really suck at things like ereaders and GPS and so forth. It's not enough to have the device, the applications have to be there, and they have to work well, and in some cases they have to work well together. And both the hardware and applications have to be reasonably priced. These things are not assured.
If you pay by message, sure. Just like, if you buy internet access by the kilobyte, it adds up quickly.
I bought unlimited SMS for daughter's phone because she's a deamon texter. I think it's $10 a month.
I have SMS capability on my (non-i) phone because it's the way my daughter and some of my friends communicate. I have the gtalk app on my phone because other of my friends use that and nothing else.
Telling my family and friends that they must use email because I have an i-phone and that's all it supports makes me look like a chump.
Your mileage may vary, I guess. I suppose as a fanboi one could hand-select one's family and friends such that they all communicate via email.
And fer crissake, blink once in awhile. Your eyes are all shiny.
I'd say multitasking on the ipad is a dead on requirement. This isn't the 1980's anymore, guys. The cheapest generic Netbook will multitask. Most smartphones will multitask. Wristwatches will multitask. Winders has had multitasking since... Oh, I dunno, 1993, or 1996 or 2000 depending on your definition of "multitask". Still a long time ago.
By price. Buy the best CPU you can afford and don't worry about what it's called. Multiple cores is usually better. Faster clock speeds is usually better. More modern processors usually give better performance at the same clock speed.
"One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."
Thanks, I needed a laugh this morning. What is it to them whether you can use the product or not, other than more calls on their help line in Bangalore? You assume they have any commitment to the product whatsoever after you've purchased it?
What will stem the tide of bad DRM is when we refuse to buy the products and companies start to go out of business.
How is this more convenient? If mere proximity were sufficient (as in the Prius key) it might be interesting, but if I have to pull out a device and tap in a pin to make it work, that's hardly more convenient than having a key that I had to pull out and fit into the lock. And what happens when the device runs out of grunt? Do I have to find a charger before I can get into my house? Maybe not if I can still use a conventional key. But if I have to keep a key with me anyway, what value, other than excruciating nerdism, would the device have?
I guess one could argue that it's more secure ("something you have and something you know") but with all the people hacking rfid these days, that doesn't seem likely either.
This seems like a gimmick.
I used to do IT for a utility, and we had one analyst who did interesting and esoteric mathematical calculations for research. The work was high profile and undeniably important, but like most IT departments, the person holding the bag of money had different priorities, so the analyst got a fairly high end workstation but no server resources. He discovered that he could export his code to other Unix boxes and run it there. He wrote sophisticated programs to seek out and exploit boxes all over the company to do his analysis. (This was long ago -- these days he would probably be fired or even have charges brought against him.)
Now, a savvy person would have written the code to run their analysis in the dark of night, using unused cycles, and nobody would be the wiser. Instead, he insisted on running this monster during regular working hours, because, you know, those are the hours he worked.
You can imagine the chaos. File shares, print servers, engineer workstations, and even (gritted teeth) admin workstations would grind to a halt.
Appeals to the analyst in question (let's call him "Fred") were fruitless. Fred saw his work as important and didn't see anything wrong with what he was doing. He said that if IT needed more resources, we should buy more machines. Which is true, except for the fundamental disconnect between what he needed and what IT was willing to purchase.
The policy at the time was that any Unix account could log into any machine except a select few (mail server, NIS server, etc). Getting that policy changed was very difficult, in part, I think, because our managers didn't really understand the issue. We finally took matters into our own hands, which led to the infamous "Fred Exclusion". Boy, was Fred pissed. Fortunately, the same lazy management that was partially responsible for the problem couldn't be persuaded to force us to change it back. He left the company shortly after that and his replacement couldn't figure out his code, so the problem did eventually go away.
In this case, I wouldn't bother changing your workstation settings, I'd slowly, a file at a time, move your workfiles to a non-shared directory. Or alternately, move all your files to his workstation, using the argument that he would have faster access to them, and then use his machine as a fileshare.
Downtown near where I work, they drive away the bums by blaring Beatles tunes 24 hours a day. In German. It works.
If you're posting here, you already own one.