You'd rather have a big hunk of metal than an airbag? Don't let the "foam" fool you: slamming your face into a block of it at 35mph would only be a little better than running face first into a brick wall at the same speed.
It's squishy and springy...for metal. But it's not what you'd call soft.
Too expensive is a danger. The things we do make are often dependent on cheap goods from other countries. Right now, we're primarily an information/services economy, and our ability to do those things is predicated on cheap goods from other countries.
Cut off that supply, and force those companies to buy expensive domestic goods, and you have problems.
To take a techie hypothetical: you're doing a software start up, working out of your garage. Your capital is about 20,000. You need about a dozen computers, so you buy 500 dollar boxes assembled in asia, with parts made in asia, and you have 14,000 left over, which you can use to buy ramen and booze, while you make your product.
Now imagine that all the computers and parts had to be built and assembled here. How much would you have left over? How long would you be able to work on your project?
See, the mistake is thinking that making physical stuff makes your country rich. It doesn't. If you dominate global shipping, for example, you don't have to make a single product to be rich: you can get rich just moving other peoples products around.
So offshoring stuff that other people do cheaply, that's not a problem. Why pay more to have it done locally? Why pay to prop up an industry that can't compete without massive tariffs? Cheap goods can be used to help us do what we do better than them.
The problem crops up when your citizens decide they're entitled to do work that's not competitive, and then the government decides to do crazy stuff to try and make them competitive...At least locally. Then you end up with crap like our auto industry.
So, a guy wrote a book with a number of assumptions and generalizations predicated on existing technology only...And a dependence on renewable energy is moved right to the realm of impossible?
Bit of a stretch.
The obvious counterargument is that currently we treat electricity like it's an infinite resource, and allow products that use it to be WILDLY inefficient: it's like figuring out peak oil where every car is a 1970's car that gets 6 miles to the gallon, and where the number of cars on the road is going to continue increasing at the 1970's rate.
Requiring a certain level of efficiency, and requiring products to use a lot less power when they are ostensibly "off" would change the consumption figures substantially.
Compare a touch to anything else on the market that fills the same niche and tell me it's "unpolished."
And Flash? Fuck flash. Ads and memory leaks, big fucking deal. It's been so long since I've browsed with anything other than Firefox with Noscript and Flashbock, whenever I see a machine that doesn't have those installed, it makes my eyes bleed.
Unless you're near a wap, I assume you mean...I guess though I'd rather see the internet in, you know, color than in etch-a-sketch.
I have zero use for the Kindle, so just about any device would have more use than that for me. I'd rather just carry a book in my laptop bag than carry a mediocre toy with only one function which it does sort of as well as the real thing.
Except, you know, you're not required to pay AT&T anything, and you CAN read it outside the house, and the battery life is supposed to be 9-10 hours, so maybe if you read REALLY slow...
And webcam? Why the hell would anyone want to run around with a huge ass tablet trying to take pictures of people? I just don't get it.
I said it would do what I would want it to do: Browse the web, goof off, do email, hell, maybe even watch a movie. Sounds perfect for that.
The criticism that it doesn't do what granny would want is fucking hilarious. Who fucking cares what granny wants? Bitch probably doesn't even have a cellphone yet! Granny ain't the target audience here.
The GP brought up the Kindle, so I was responding to that. Imho, the Kindle is a piece of shit. Single function device locked into one vendor. Blea.
I personally don't see the ipad as a tablet PC at all: for one thing, it's not really a pc. It's a embedded system that runs media applications and some cute little apps.
As a device that does that, for a similar price point, it kicks the shit out of media readers like the kindle, and it does (frankly) all the crap I'd ever actually use a tablet pc to do.
If you want a tablet pc, there are plenty on the market.
It's called a confirmation bias. People tend to pursue information that agrees with their opinions.
Now, in the past, news sources were forced to be balanced, to reach the largest possible audience. Only one newspaper in town, so it can't be too far to one side or the other unless the whole coverage area also leans that way.
Now, the market is so diverse that there is plenty of room for specialized news sources, and people can tune in to whichever one makes them feel best about their own opinions, and when all the information they receive conforms to their bias, they become more biased, and you end up with the sort of crap polarized political situation we're in right now.
Seriously. It's a media tablet. What the hell did you think it was going to be? If you want an open source tablet, they're already available on the market. There is no new technology here.
Bullshit. How many iPhone clones have hit the market in the last 2 years? The hardware is virtually identical.
It's not about the hardware, it's about the software. And if you want the software, you've got to drink the Kool-aid, because as soon as you start screwing with the software, it just doesn't work as well.
Why would you do yet another tablet pc to compete with the Kindle? It's not like there aren't dozens of tablet pcs out right now that are completely failing to compete with the Kindle.
I think they made a perfectly good choice for a sort of media-and-app platform that doesn't do much else. Sounds like it'd be a hell of a lot more fun to pull out than my fricking laptop (wait for boot, scroll around with the shitty little touchpad, or drag out a mouse, try to find a good mousing surface, give up and use leg, etc) and despite carrying the damn thing everywhere, I don't even use it as often as my web-enabled phone, just because of convenience.
I don't know. I'm not an Apple fanboy, and this thing interests me. No enough to be an early adopter, but enough to get version 2.0.
Yep yep. People (especially here) missing the point of Apple is pretty common. Skimmed the iPad article yesterday and had nothing but iPhone flashbacks.
"It's derivative."
"It's the same as (crappy, unpolished, user-hostile device that didn't sell) so no one is going to buy one."
"The hardware has been out for (absurd number of years) so Apple has utterly stopped innovating and will be going out of business next year."
"No one wants (feature that everyone wants)."
"It doesn't have (feature that only ubergeeks care about) so no one is going to buy one."
The New York Times...The fucking 800 dollars a year for a daily subscription New York Times, caters to people who want government handouts? The biggest and best known paper from a city that generates a massive amount of tax revenue that is appropriated by the state government and given to towns 100's of miles away for them to build public infrastructure vastly beyond their means? That New York Times?
I guess I didn't know you could subscribe to the NYT with foodstamps. Thank you eversomuch for opening my eyes.
My personal experience at the print media company where I work, is that the online ads, after everyone has taken their piece, don't cover the cost of hosting a huge media-intensive web presence.
Part of the problem is middlemen like Doubleclick and other web-ad retailers; if you're not doing all your own online ads, you're giving them their pound of flesh.
As for the rest, blah, blah, you don't like modern news. So why do you care?
Not only that, but most of the content ON the AP comes from the member papers. They each send up their "National Newsworthy" stories every day, and other member papers pick them up and reprint them.
The actual AP staff has been just as gutted by the current newspaper situation as the individual newspapers, and many AP bureau's are staffed by 1 or 2 guys at the most. They generate very little actual content.
That was my source too, but, unlike you, I can read the fine print. That rate is only good for the first 8 or 12 weeks depending on whether or not you give them your credit card, then it doubles. So 7.40 becomes 14.80, and 5.85 becomes 11.70.
What a shitty analogy. The counter analogy to yours would be: Cigarette's are free, and then the tobacco companies start charging for them, so then the tobacco companies are going to go out of business. See? That's a shitty analogy too! But the difference is, mine's at least relevant to this discussion.
So we have 1,000,000 people who pay for a daily subscription to the New York Times, which costs between 600 and 800 dollars a year, depending on where you live. And you really don't think that if 1,000,000 people are willing to pay that much for a fucking newspaper, that you won't be able to find a few who'd pick it up online? Really?
According to Alexia, the NYT website is the 97th most popular website in the world. It's the 26th most popular site in the US. And when they start charging, you think that no one is going to pay?
Well, the cost of a daily print subscription to the New York Times is 14.80...For a week. Mind you, that's to my house, and I live a long fucking way from NYC (checked it against my old NYC zip code, and it's only 11.70 there).
So, given that the bitch costs 800 bucks a year for us plebes who don't live in New York, and only around 600 for the pricks who do, I'm guessing that 50 bucks a year would be a bit of a steal. =P
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You'd rather have a big hunk of metal than an airbag? Don't let the "foam" fool you: slamming your face into a block of it at 35mph would only be a little better than running face first into a brick wall at the same speed.
It's squishy and springy...for metal. But it's not what you'd call soft.
Too expensive is a danger. The things we do make are often dependent on cheap goods from other countries. Right now, we're primarily an information/services economy, and our ability to do those things is predicated on cheap goods from other countries.
Cut off that supply, and force those companies to buy expensive domestic goods, and you have problems.
To take a techie hypothetical: you're doing a software start up, working out of your garage. Your capital is about 20,000. You need about a dozen computers, so you buy 500 dollar boxes assembled in asia, with parts made in asia, and you have 14,000 left over, which you can use to buy ramen and booze, while you make your product.
Now imagine that all the computers and parts had to be built and assembled here. How much would you have left over? How long would you be able to work on your project?
See, the mistake is thinking that making physical stuff makes your country rich. It doesn't. If you dominate global shipping, for example, you don't have to make a single product to be rich: you can get rich just moving other peoples products around.
So offshoring stuff that other people do cheaply, that's not a problem. Why pay more to have it done locally? Why pay to prop up an industry that can't compete without massive tariffs? Cheap goods can be used to help us do what we do better than them.
The problem crops up when your citizens decide they're entitled to do work that's not competitive, and then the government decides to do crazy stuff to try and make them competitive...At least locally. Then you end up with crap like our auto industry.
So, a guy wrote a book with a number of assumptions and generalizations predicated on existing technology only...And a dependence on renewable energy is moved right to the realm of impossible?
Bit of a stretch.
The obvious counterargument is that currently we treat electricity like it's an infinite resource, and allow products that use it to be WILDLY inefficient: it's like figuring out peak oil where every car is a 1970's car that gets 6 miles to the gallon, and where the number of cars on the road is going to continue increasing at the 1970's rate.
Requiring a certain level of efficiency, and requiring products to use a lot less power when they are ostensibly "off" would change the consumption figures substantially.
Compare a touch to anything else on the market that fills the same niche and tell me it's "unpolished."
And Flash? Fuck flash. Ads and memory leaks, big fucking deal. It's been so long since I've browsed with anything other than Firefox with Noscript and Flashbock, whenever I see a machine that doesn't have those installed, it makes my eyes bleed.
Unless you're near a wap, I assume you mean...I guess though I'd rather see the internet in, you know, color than in etch-a-sketch.
I have zero use for the Kindle, so just about any device would have more use than that for me. I'd rather just carry a book in my laptop bag than carry a mediocre toy with only one function which it does sort of as well as the real thing.
Except, you know, you're not required to pay AT&T anything, and you CAN read it outside the house, and the battery life is supposed to be 9-10 hours, so maybe if you read REALLY slow...
And webcam? Why the hell would anyone want to run around with a huge ass tablet trying to take pictures of people? I just don't get it.
I said it would do what I would want it to do: Browse the web, goof off, do email, hell, maybe even watch a movie. Sounds perfect for that.
The criticism that it doesn't do what granny would want is fucking hilarious. Who fucking cares what granny wants? Bitch probably doesn't even have a cellphone yet! Granny ain't the target audience here.
The GP brought up the Kindle, so I was responding to that. Imho, the Kindle is a piece of shit. Single function device locked into one vendor. Blea.
I personally don't see the ipad as a tablet PC at all: for one thing, it's not really a pc. It's a embedded system that runs media applications and some cute little apps.
As a device that does that, for a similar price point, it kicks the shit out of media readers like the kindle, and it does (frankly) all the crap I'd ever actually use a tablet pc to do.
If you want a tablet pc, there are plenty on the market.
It's called a confirmation bias. People tend to pursue information that agrees with their opinions.
Now, in the past, news sources were forced to be balanced, to reach the largest possible audience. Only one newspaper in town, so it can't be too far to one side or the other unless the whole coverage area also leans that way.
Now, the market is so diverse that there is plenty of room for specialized news sources, and people can tune in to whichever one makes them feel best about their own opinions, and when all the information they receive conforms to their bias, they become more biased, and you end up with the sort of crap polarized political situation we're in right now.
You can't make people read what they don't want to read. And you can't blame media companies for catering to the majority of their customers.
That's crap. There are two sides to media coverage:
1) meaningful, useful information
2) sugary crap that makes people consume.
The less people care about 1) the more 2) you see. People in this country are not well informed, and they don't really seem to want to be.
Yea, that'd be...Well, just like today.
Seriously. It's a media tablet. What the hell did you think it was going to be? If you want an open source tablet, they're already available on the market. There is no new technology here.
Bullshit. How many iPhone clones have hit the market in the last 2 years? The hardware is virtually identical.
It's not about the hardware, it's about the software. And if you want the software, you've got to drink the Kool-aid, because as soon as you start screwing with the software, it just doesn't work as well.
Why would you do yet another tablet pc to compete with the Kindle? It's not like there aren't dozens of tablet pcs out right now that are completely failing to compete with the Kindle.
I think they made a perfectly good choice for a sort of media-and-app platform that doesn't do much else. Sounds like it'd be a hell of a lot more fun to pull out than my fricking laptop (wait for boot, scroll around with the shitty little touchpad, or drag out a mouse, try to find a good mousing surface, give up and use leg, etc) and despite carrying the damn thing everywhere, I don't even use it as often as my web-enabled phone, just because of convenience.
I don't know. I'm not an Apple fanboy, and this thing interests me. No enough to be an early adopter, but enough to get version 2.0.
Yep yep. People (especially here) missing the point of Apple is pretty common. Skimmed the iPad article yesterday and had nothing but iPhone flashbacks.
"It's derivative."
"It's the same as (crappy, unpolished, user-hostile device that didn't sell) so no one is going to buy one."
"The hardware has been out for (absurd number of years) so Apple has utterly stopped innovating and will be going out of business next year."
"No one wants (feature that everyone wants)."
"It doesn't have (feature that only ubergeeks care about) so no one is going to buy one."
So, despite the fact that you can basically get news from all over the world through the internet, it's all the fault of the msm that you're ignorant.
Gotcha.
The New York Times...The fucking 800 dollars a year for a daily subscription New York Times, caters to people who want government handouts? The biggest and best known paper from a city that generates a massive amount of tax revenue that is appropriated by the state government and given to towns 100's of miles away for them to build public infrastructure vastly beyond their means? That New York Times?
I guess I didn't know you could subscribe to the NYT with foodstamps. Thank you eversomuch for opening my eyes.
My personal experience at the print media company where I work, is that the online ads, after everyone has taken their piece, don't cover the cost of hosting a huge media-intensive web presence.
Part of the problem is middlemen like Doubleclick and other web-ad retailers; if you're not doing all your own online ads, you're giving them their pound of flesh.
As for the rest, blah, blah, you don't like modern news. So why do you care?
I love how people who think all news is utter shit and all media outlets are worthless still feel the need to opine when they change their practices.
Why do you care?
Oh I agree. I think 50, or even 60 is "fair", mostly because people don't seem to care about a 5-dollar-a-month credit card charge.
Not only that, but most of the content ON the AP comes from the member papers. They each send up their "National Newsworthy" stories every day, and other member papers pick them up and reprint them.
The actual AP staff has been just as gutted by the current newspaper situation as the individual newspapers, and many AP bureau's are staffed by 1 or 2 guys at the most. They generate very little actual content.
So, in your world, all blogs are Groklaw?
Come on.
That was my source too, but, unlike you, I can read the fine print. That rate is only good for the first 8 or 12 weeks depending on whether or not you give them your credit card, then it doubles. So 7.40 becomes 14.80, and 5.85 becomes 11.70.
Buyer beware.
Wow yea. Because, when I want news, I want to spend half my day finding a random guy who was there, and listening to his opinion.
What a shitty analogy. The counter analogy to yours would be: Cigarette's are free, and then the tobacco companies start charging for them, so then the tobacco companies are going to go out of business. See? That's a shitty analogy too! But the difference is, mine's at least relevant to this discussion.
So we have 1,000,000 people who pay for a daily subscription to the New York Times, which costs between 600 and 800 dollars a year, depending on where you live. And you really don't think that if 1,000,000 people are willing to pay that much for a fucking newspaper, that you won't be able to find a few who'd pick it up online? Really?
According to Alexia, the NYT website is the 97th most popular website in the world. It's the 26th most popular site in the US. And when they start charging, you think that no one is going to pay?
Well, the cost of a daily print subscription to the New York Times is 14.80...For a week. Mind you, that's to my house, and I live a long fucking way from NYC (checked it against my old NYC zip code, and it's only 11.70 there).
So, given that the bitch costs 800 bucks a year for us plebes who don't live in New York, and only around 600 for the pricks who do, I'm guessing that 50 bucks a year would be a bit of a steal. =P