An expensive tool? How many people buy iPads and think of them as expensive tools? Furthermore, what other available tablet offers much better battery life?
How many days battery life do you get with your table saw?
Maybe the private carriers are better for large businesses or something?
UPS offers some services that the US Post Office can't touch - like handling all of your shipping logistics. It's been a while, but 5 or 6 years ago you could have them store your goods (e.g. spare parts) in their warehouses all over the country so that when a local need came up the delivery would be faster and cheaper than if you held them in a single location.
I have to laugh at you and the grandparent... all I can say is RTFA!:)
Our cells already use septins to build cages around bacterial pathogens - this research just is the first time someone has observed it in human cells. The talk of new drugs is in how to artificially encourage this behavior.
There is no documented way to escape the sandbox on iOS.
No Apple documented you mean?
I'm a registered and licensed iOS and publisher and have absolutely no way to escape the sandbox, let alone implement my own drivers, without actually cracking the system.
And? All that limits is your access to Apple's App Store... something that Windows does not have.
I think our main difference is in point-of-view. You are a developer, and so Cydia or a computer-based installer involving a jailbreak are not attractive options for you. Because the App Store is the only official way to install apps and because it is a gated community, you do not feel that the device is open... fair enough. Plus Apple could really ruin your day by fixing the device's security holes so that you can no longer jailbreak. But from a user's perspective, all one has to do is run a simple jailbreak application (or sometimes just go to a web address) and the device is as open as you please.
The rest of the industrialized world disagrees with that statement and proves it wrong daily with free health care for everyone in their country.
But not unlimited and always not state-of-the-art. Every country with socialized medicine has some rationing system.
The US currently has socialized medicine - albeit a very disorganized and inefficient and highly rationed system. I'm actually pro socialized medicine - I'm just pointing out the obvious: that you have to make some kind of decision about how and when to cut off care. It can be money, or it can be physician's discretion, or "death panels" (so disingenuous!), rigid rules, waiting lists, or a million other ways - but it cannot be unlimited and it cannot all be state-of-the-art.
Many people get maybe 3 English channels - either because they live too far from the city or because they are in an apartment building and the signal bounces around too much (New York).
If you are lucky enough to get OTA, you might not need cable for the only real reason it is still useful - sports. But it might be more fun to spend that $100/month watching games at the local bar.
I'm old so I have cable - but only because the price is the same if you bundle internet or just get a la carte internet. I'll never understand that...
But nonetheless, the system does not force you to find a local exploit to get access at a level that allows you to replace the OS.
The iPad does not do this, either. A typical user downloads a simple application and presses a button and then reboots the device. Only some hard-core geeks look for exploits, and then just for street cred they create these fantastic easy-to-use jailbreak applications.
But do you really want to financially support a corporation that sees your actions as hostile, and moves proactively to stop you without providing a legitimate out?
As opposed to who? What corporation is out there not using the full power of law to their advantage in a way that looks "evil"? I don't think Apple is the problem here - the law is. It shouldn't be so easy to brandish copyright law to prevent people from hacking devices that they own. Talk about being not even close to the spirit behind copyright law!
A tablet running Windows would be the same thing, though, and perhaps that's what you meant.
Yup:)
Can't really fault Apple or whoever for making engineering decisions that place portability over expandability... been done forever in the laptop industry. Even the best laptop expansion solutions usually involve an external chassis of some sort.
You CAN fault them for trying to lock down the device, and you can fault them for leaving security holes that have so far defeated their attempts to lock down the device:)
But whatever the reasons, you can't currently put "not open" on the list of iPad disadvantages. Maybe the iPad3, though, if Apple finally gets security right.
Don't forget, a Windows machine isn't exclusively a Windows machine but a generic PC that doesn't need to run Windows at all.
As a practical matter, this is not the case. Strictly speaking, people could install any number of OSes on their PC. In reality, most people just use the OS that came with the machine, and in fact many parts of modern PCs are often Windows only for a while until the open source stuff catches up with drivers. Also, if you want to split hairs, they have gotten Linux running on an iPad2.
Note I say this as someone with an ex-Windows HP workstation acting as a FreeBSD server in my basement. I don't have and don't desire an iPad for the reasons that you and others point out, but the fact is that I could buy one and do pretty much anything I want with it. There would be no technical or legal reason to stop me, unless I had some practical reason to worry about such things.
Access to ones own property should not be so tenuous nor should it have to be argued for.
I think the only part of the DMCA that I like is the part which indemnifies web sites so long as they honor take-down requests, and even that part could probably have been done better. In general I think that copyright should be commercial-only and should only apply for a very limited amount of time - something akin to patents terms. I'm definitely on your side on this.
But I'd also point out that Apple (nor Tivo, nor MS, etc) did not make the law and really cannot be blamed for playing within the rules, even if it seems evil. Really we need to change the rules that encourage "evil". For instance, the use of a proprietary image on cartridges has been used almost forever by Nintendo (and others) to prevent 3rd party software development. This is about as far from the intent of copyright law as one can imagine, and it really shouldn't be legal.
Proves that it isn't? How so? What does it prove I can't do that I can do on a Windows machine?
Or did you mean "legally open" or some such weirdness? In which case I'll just grant you victory because I don't care about such pedantry. Laws/contracts that can't be enforced do not really exist as far as I'm concerned. It's like the "speed limit" signs that cops are legally forbidden from enforcing strictly.
Are you claiming Justin Bieber doesn't have a target demographic? My five-year-old seems to like him. I don't, but I don't think he'd be too upset about that.
There is also jailbreak. It might not be by design, and it may not be in the future, but currently an iPad2 is just as open as a machine running Windows.
It might, but I'm skeptical. MS has a pretty bad track record whenever they try to generalize Windows past traditional PC use. It would be cool if they can pull it off.
A tablet IS a PC - it just has a different pointing device, and is optimized for battery life rather than raw power. Actually, I can't even say that because netbooks make the same tradeoff, but include a different pointing device and attached keyboard.
I missed the tablet craze when I was working out of coffee shops. Most of my time was spent in a text editor or in MATLAB.
There were certainly days where I would have killed for more battery life, but I'm skeptical that I could have worked out a workflow when I was doing MATLAB work. If I weren't fighting with 100 other people for the same WiFi signal, I could have remoted in to a real machine - but that was not always possible even from a reasonable laptop.
But for the projects I was doing where it was just text editing and the occasional sftp upload... yeah, an iPad would be fine. Might miss the screen real estate (especially for looking up documentation), but more than possible.
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An expensive tool? How many people buy iPads and think of them as expensive tools? Furthermore, what other available tablet offers much better battery life?
How many days battery life do you get with your table saw?
Ah, he threw me by referring to the MAFIAA, which is an American trade association comprised of European and Japanese companies :)
LOL, as the parent of a 2 and 5 year old, I understand :)
Of course, they are just as happy watching YouTube as they are broadcast TV. Actually, broadcast TV pisses them off because their requests go unheard.
Maybe the private carriers are better for large businesses or something?
UPS offers some services that the US Post Office can't touch - like handling all of your shipping logistics. It's been a while, but 5 or 6 years ago you could have them store your goods (e.g. spare parts) in their warehouses all over the country so that when a local need came up the delivery would be faster and cheaper than if you held them in a single location.
I have to laugh at you and the grandparent... all I can say is RTFA! :)
Our cells already use septins to build cages around bacterial pathogens - this research just is the first time someone has observed it in human cells. The talk of new drugs is in how to artificially encourage this behavior.
There is no documented way to escape the sandbox on iOS.
No Apple documented you mean?
I'm a registered and licensed iOS and publisher and have absolutely no way to escape the sandbox, let alone implement my own drivers, without actually cracking the system.
And? All that limits is your access to Apple's App Store... something that Windows does not have.
I think our main difference is in point-of-view. You are a developer, and so Cydia or a computer-based installer involving a jailbreak are not attractive options for you. Because the App Store is the only official way to install apps and because it is a gated community, you do not feel that the device is open... fair enough. Plus Apple could really ruin your day by fixing the device's security holes so that you can no longer jailbreak. But from a user's perspective, all one has to do is run a simple jailbreak application (or sometimes just go to a web address) and the device is as open as you please.
The rest of the industrialized world disagrees with that statement and proves it wrong daily with free health care for everyone in their country.
But not unlimited and always not state-of-the-art. Every country with socialized medicine has some rationing system.
The US currently has socialized medicine - albeit a very disorganized and inefficient and highly rationed system. I'm actually pro socialized medicine - I'm just pointing out the obvious: that you have to make some kind of decision about how and when to cut off care. It can be money, or it can be physician's discretion, or "death panels" (so disingenuous!), rigid rules, waiting lists, or a million other ways - but it cannot be unlimited and it cannot all be state-of-the-art.
LOL... I think "old" in this case is anyone who remembers CDs :)
Sorry to do this to you, but it is the first link on Google :)
Many people get maybe 3 English channels - either because they live too far from the city or because they are in an apartment building and the signal bounces around too much (New York).
If you are lucky enough to get OTA, you might not need cable for the only real reason it is still useful - sports. But it might be more fun to spend that $100/month watching games at the local bar.
I'm old so I have cable - but only because the price is the same if you bundle internet or just get a la carte internet. I'll never understand that...
So far the only answer to these problems has been BitTorrent.
Hulu?
and not one of them carries college level lectures?
<cough>Khan Academy<cough>
Basically, broadcast TV is for old people now. Young people don't even buy cable anymore.
"My cat's breath smells like cat food."
But nonetheless, the system does not force you to find a local exploit to get access at a level that allows you to replace the OS.
The iPad does not do this, either. A typical user downloads a simple application and presses a button and then reboots the device. Only some hard-core geeks look for exploits, and then just for street cred they create these fantastic easy-to-use jailbreak applications.
But do you really want to financially support a corporation that sees your actions as hostile, and moves proactively to stop you without providing a legitimate out?
As opposed to who? What corporation is out there not using the full power of law to their advantage in a way that looks "evil"? I don't think Apple is the problem here - the law is. It shouldn't be so easy to brandish copyright law to prevent people from hacking devices that they own. Talk about being not even close to the spirit behind copyright law!
Leave the sandbox without cracking the system.
That's an awfully artificial limitation. If you impose artificial limitations on the device but not on Windows, then yes, it is not very open at all.
A tablet running Windows would be the same thing, though, and perhaps that's what you meant.
Yup :)
Can't really fault Apple or whoever for making engineering decisions that place portability over expandability... been done forever in the laptop industry. Even the best laptop expansion solutions usually involve an external chassis of some sort.
You CAN fault them for trying to lock down the device, and you can fault them for leaving security holes that have so far defeated their attempts to lock down the device :)
But whatever the reasons, you can't currently put "not open" on the list of iPad disadvantages. Maybe the iPad3, though, if Apple finally gets security right.
Don't forget, a Windows machine isn't exclusively a Windows machine but a generic PC that doesn't need to run Windows at all.
As a practical matter, this is not the case. Strictly speaking, people could install any number of OSes on their PC. In reality, most people just use the OS that came with the machine, and in fact many parts of modern PCs are often Windows only for a while until the open source stuff catches up with drivers. Also, if you want to split hairs, they have gotten Linux running on an iPad2.
Note I say this as someone with an ex-Windows HP workstation acting as a FreeBSD server in my basement. I don't have and don't desire an iPad for the reasons that you and others point out, but the fact is that I could buy one and do pretty much anything I want with it. There would be no technical or legal reason to stop me, unless I had some practical reason to worry about such things.
Access to ones own property should not be so tenuous nor should it have to be argued for.
I think the only part of the DMCA that I like is the part which indemnifies web sites so long as they honor take-down requests, and even that part could probably have been done better. In general I think that copyright should be commercial-only and should only apply for a very limited amount of time - something akin to patents terms. I'm definitely on your side on this.
But I'd also point out that Apple (nor Tivo, nor MS, etc) did not make the law and really cannot be blamed for playing within the rules, even if it seems evil. Really we need to change the rules that encourage "evil". For instance, the use of a proprietary image on cartridges has been used almost forever by Nintendo (and others) to prevent 3rd party software development. This is about as far from the intent of copyright law as one can imagine, and it really shouldn't be legal.
Proves that it isn't? How so? What does it prove I can't do that I can do on a Windows machine?
Or did you mean "legally open" or some such weirdness? In which case I'll just grant you victory because I don't care about such pedantry. Laws/contracts that can't be enforced do not really exist as far as I'm concerned. It's like the "speed limit" signs that cops are legally forbidden from enforcing strictly.
Are you claiming Justin Bieber doesn't have a target demographic? My five-year-old seems to like him. I don't, but I don't think he'd be too upset about that.
It just seems to be a noisy minority that can't handle this.
Their heads might explode when they see what ladies are paying for purses :)
There is also jailbreak. It might not be by design, and it may not be in the future, but currently an iPad2 is just as open as a machine running Windows.
Ask the millions buying them? Clearly there is a point - you just aren't the target user (neither am I, incidentally).
It might, but I'm skeptical. MS has a pretty bad track record whenever they try to generalize Windows past traditional PC use. It would be cool if they can pull it off.
A tablet IS a PC - it just has a different pointing device, and is optimized for battery life rather than raw power. Actually, I can't even say that because netbooks make the same tradeoff, but include a different pointing device and attached keyboard.
I missed the tablet craze when I was working out of coffee shops. Most of my time was spent in a text editor or in MATLAB.
There were certainly days where I would have killed for more battery life, but I'm skeptical that I could have worked out a workflow when I was doing MATLAB work. If I weren't fighting with 100 other people for the same WiFi signal, I could have remoted in to a real machine - but that was not always possible even from a reasonable laptop.
But for the projects I was doing where it was just text editing and the occasional sftp upload... yeah, an iPad would be fine. Might miss the screen real estate (especially for looking up documentation), but more than possible.