Don't worry. My next phone will not be from Apple. What some people do not get is that for every 1 person that complains, 8 more already gave up on your product without telling anyone. You should cherish the people who do complain. They at least are interested in you making the product better.
In my opinion it is a relic from the Strategic Air Command clique from WWII. It is about as obsolete a strategic nuclear weapon delivery platform as cavalry is obsolete as an infantry shock weapon.
The instant storable propellant ICBMs were developed in the 1960s, which can be launched in a matter of seconds and travel at Mach 20 to the destination, compared with bombers which take at best 30 minutes to setup, then fly to the target at Mach 1-2, bombers were utterly obsolete. As it should be painfully obvious.
If you take off too late, your airbase has likely been glassed already.
If you take off early enough, and the enemy air defenses did not knock you down (not that difficult to do to a large subsonic or mildly supersonic target), then your air airbase gets glassed, you have nowhere to return to.
By the time the bombers arrive the nuclear exchange is over already. So nuclear bombers are only useful in a first strike scenario against countries with ICBMs. However how can you achieve a successful first strike if the enemy can see your lumbering bombers enter their airspace hours (in a large country like Russia or China) before reaching their targets? Their ICBM counterattack will hit you before you even get there.
Strategic bombers still have uses, but for delivering conventional munitions, or perhaps tactical nuclear weapons in a protracted low intensity nuclear conflict.
IIRC China has more warheads than that. The problem is they do not have enough long range missiles to hit the whole US. Just enough to glass California.
If you compare in terms of manpower the numbers are not ridiculous. However the US spends a lot more on equipment in an attempt to prevent military losses.
You think WW III and IV would have been cheaper? I have little doubts that Russia tried to keep a limited profile during the Korean War precisely because they feared nuclear retaliation. Since then conflicts between major powers kept being shrunk into irrelevance. Compare this with the XIXth century. Russo-Japanese War. Franco-German War. Boxer Rebellion. Spanish-American War. Crimean War. The list goes on.
Please tell me you are not being serious. Strategic nuclear weapons in bombers make no sense since the ICBM was invented. If someone launches an ICBM attack in 15 minutes the bombs are dropping. By that time the pilots are probably still getting out of their bunkers, let alone spinning up the engines, or actually getting to the destination. Doing that would be tantamount to political suicide. You lose the retaliatory strike ability that made MAD successful in guaranteeing world peace in the first place.
You could try to convince me on tactical nuclear weapons in a bomber, but not strategic.
Check his UID. He was probably born after the Cold War ended. In my experience people who did not grow or live through the Cold War do not have the same kind of world view on nuclear weapons.
It's not barely. Even the CPU alone can do decoding in software with free ffdshow-mt. If you are willing to pay $12.95, you can get the CoreAVC codec which uses even less CPU (more well optimized software).
However the machine has hardware H.264 decoding in the GPU as well. Yes, there are Intel GPUs which do hardware H.264 decoding. Also any reasonably recent ATI or NVIDIA GPU does it. This means H.264 decoding is low power.
To tell you the truth I couldn't even tell if it had bluetooth or not. I never needed it. It has a built-in camera, microphone, speakers, and keyboard. It has USB ports, microphone and headphone jacks. What would I use bluetooth for? I actually have a bluetooth USB adapter pen I once bought for playing around, years before I got that Acer, but never used it after the novelty wore off. Only thing I ever used it for at first was controlling presentations with my cell phone. But it was too error prone to be relied upon.
As for expensive apps, I can get OpenOffice for free. Can you get that on iPad? Or what about Paint.NET? Or Eclipse? Fact is most of the things I have installed are free. I only use Windows because of the games. It can do light 3D gaming. Not Crysis, but you cannot run Crysis on the iPad either.
Manufacturer claimed battery time is always bullshit. However I can use it for a day's work without recharging. Good enough for me.
As for the touch screen there are newer convertible tablet machines in the lower iPad price range that have a touchscreen. Some other people here have commented about those. I have little doubts they will get more commonplace. Oh and get this, Windows 7 actually does handwriting recognition.
It's a matter of tradeoffs. Some people may prefer the light touch-based interface of the iPad, but once you actually try doing any mildly intensive work on it... Well.
IMO Apple tried to be cheap and forgo pen based input. Saves them a lot of time in software development for complex shape recognition. It was a poor choice for this form factor. I need more than a small portable digital TV/entertainment center. I also need more precise input than a finger can provide for note taking, or drawing, the iPad does not solve that either.
In others words I want to do content creation, not just consumption. That is what a generic computer is for. Apple just doesn't get it. Their vision is pretty much like the vision of a cable company doing WebTV.
As for other more mobile applications I already have my smartphone for that. Which can actually fit in my pocket. Unfortunately for Apple the 3GS is most likely going to be the last smartphone they make I will buy. No more walled gardens to me. My expectations for a phone changed after I saw they are now a generic computer.
Well yeah, that is what the groups in the periodic table are for. When the periodic table was "invented" there were even holes in it and eventually elements where discovered with predicted properties and element number. However it seems that predicting the half life is non-trivial. Also while some things can be predicted there is still a lot of room for error or whatever.
I read a bit more. Seems like the co-founder of TurboHercules is the original Hercules author. So they actually contribute, or contributed at least. Since you seem to know the history of mainframes (likely better than I do) I will refrain from discussing the details of the anti-trust settlement with IBM decades ago, or how IBM has been stomping out anyone with any vague mainframe emulation or clone capability.
I am pretty sure you could get the FSF or the EFF on your side in this case. Unfortunately with the current environment there is a high possibility the EU will not help. In the US the possibility is probably even lower. Even if you do not lose the patent lawsuit, litigation alone could drive a company bankrupt (as happened to the Bleem! Playstation emulator for example). Or the suit could even be lost as happened to Psystar.
Your best chance is probably to appeal in the sense that governments are heavy mainframe users and are likely interested in alternatives. Taxmen and banks usually love these kinds of systems. It is always nice to have these people on your side.:-)
Ah you are the Hercules developer. Well FWIW I am on your side on this case (although that will not be helping much I'm afraid).
I think emulators should be legal, and trying to use hardware patents against them should not be allowed. Just because Microsoft shares some interest does not mean I am against that thing. I was merely pointing out that Microsoft can be on the side of Hercules without a larger anti-FLOSS conspiracy of any sort.
Does TurboHercules actually fund Hercules development, or not? This is a question I have not seen answered so far.
It is a shame you did not use the GPLv3 or the IBM CPL license though. AFAIK the QPL has no patent provisions.
Microsoft has been trying to get a slice of the mainframe business for a long time. Anything that erodes it is in their interest. You do not need to look at other ulterior motives. Nearly invariably when IBM sues someone for providing some sort of mainframe functionality Microsoft has been in the side of the ones defending against IBM. Try reading about T3 Technologies, or Platform Technologies for example.
The aspire is not a netbook. It's a core 2, and it's battery life need not try to compare. (which, btw, it's a core SOLO, not a dual core...)...
Depends on the model. I got a brand new AS1410-2920 a couple of months ago with a SU2300 processor for the price I mentioned ($450 USD).
Like I said in another post at these prices iPad isn't competing with netbooks. It is competing with laptops. There are a lot of cheap Intel CULV laptops, or AMD NeoX2 laptops. Netbooks using Atom are even cheaper. You can get an Acer Aspire One for $300 USD.
As for H.264 decoding, I could do it with a single core 1.4 GHz Athlon XP using CoreAVC, so I doubt I cannot do it in a dual core SU2300 1.2 GHz. However since the Intel GMA 4500 MHD chipset does it in hardware the point is moot.
That "dead end" is not that different than the design of the IBM POWER 7. 4-way SMT, high clock speed, out-of-order, superscalar. IMO what killed the P4 was not the high clockspeed in the main processor but the idiotic "double-pumped" ALUs which created irregular heat zones in the processor, plus the poor implementation for the trace cache.
That Microsoft UNIX-like environment sucked last time I tried it. The package manager did not come installed by default, neither did a X server, a decent compiler, or anything you actually need to work. It was a bare bones UNIX system. You are better off running Linux inside a VM. Much more pleasant experience...
Intel manufactures the Itanium processors. The processor designers are Intel and ex-HP people. I think they all got transferred to Intel a couple of years ago.
I think HP basically does system level activities now, like HP-UX, or chipsets, motherboards and the ilk.
BTW one of the reasons Itanium has always had less than stellar performance is that Intel persistently chooses to manufacture it in the last (or worse) generation process. Example, they are manufacturing 32 nm X86-64 processors now (which is top notch in the industry), yet the recently released Itanium Tukwilla still uses 65 nm. Compare that to the best Itanium competitor, the IBM POWER 7, which is manufactured in 45 nm.
Oh and RISC/X86 processors still have some design space headroom in them. X86 in particular is pretty weak in floating point power still, but that could be easily corrected. In fact there are plans to quadruple the performance, by design changes alone, in the next couple of processor generations from Intel and AMD.
- Oh TCO. The ultimate measure that doesn't measure anything and is usually mentioned by salesmen who know that product is not less expensive at all, and need to make a strawman case to make customers think they are cheaper. Ok, licensing. I cannot get Flash on the iPhone for any price. How does that measure up?
- You can get an Acer Aspire 1410 for like $450 USD. It has a dual core processor. It comes with the Intel 4500 MHD chipset which does H.264 decoding (heck even the CPU is beefy enough to do decoding if the chipset did not have support for it). Oh and get this. It has an HDMI port. Alternatively you can get Atom netbooks with the NVIDIA Ion chipset or a Broadcom chipset which does hardware H.264 decoding. That Acer is not even the best in its category and you can shop around if you want.
- Good luck rough handling your iPad. This is from a company which used to take a lot of flack because people would scratch the display in regular use, let alone something like the beach.
- You would be surprised at how easy it is to hand something over. Assuming the kids cannot get it themselves that is.
- Yeah I agree portrait mode would be nice. Except since it is attached to the keyboard in a netbook it does not make a lot of sense. You would have to be able to detach the keyboard somehow. Then again a Kindle would probably be better for books. I like comics but wouldn't buy a device like this to read them (but maybe someone else will).
- The computer I mentioned has 802.11n.
- I can get a 3G USB adapter.
- iPad doesn't have 4GB of RAM to read back from the disk on hibernate either. Can it even do virtual memory?
- I keep getting continuously annoying iTunes and iPhone OS updates all the time as well. Or app store updates. When I get an iPhone OS update I need to reboot my phone. Heck I cannot use a brand new iPhone without having an Apple store account and syncing via iTunes first. Is iPad going to be any different? Not really.
- I get the feeling you think it does constant patches because you probably only seldom turn on your machine and so it updates whenever you use it. Oh and at least in Windows you can actually install two different browsers if you want to. Plus you can install other operating systems than Windows on a netbook...
Re:It's not the same size, first of all
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
Ok, I just remembered an alternative non tiresome input method. Use a neck strap and put it against your chest. But it probably only works for larger form factors than the one the iPad uses.
Re:It's not the same size, first of all
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
I think you will find that people will seldom do input in the iPad like his Steveness showed, lying in the couch. They will place it on a table instead. I figured that much when I first heard it would be a tablet. I also happen to think it would have worked better if it had sketch support and a pen (so you could have higher resolution input) but that was obviously too much work for Apple... Maybe in version 3.
Yes, this is true. It also applies to a lot of other iPad use cases. Not having a horizontal writing surface combined with a vertical display surface is an issue for a lot of use cases, unfortunately. But Malda is still right that a lot of people do videoconferencing on their PC, especially family which has their kids living far away, or whatever and wants to keep in touch. While theoretically this could be done in a phone form factor, curiously iPhone does not have a videoconferencing camera. To be honest I am more chaffed by the lack of Flash when Adobe seemingly was interested in adding support, or by the lack of standard interface ports in the unit. Or lack of basic OS functionality.
I also run a block plugin. Sure there is Flash overuse. However if you really did not need Flash at all you would not be using FlashBlock in the first place. You would simply not install the Flash plugin at all. Or uninstall it.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
Apple themselves know they are competing with netbooks. Or as they like to say it "better" than a netbook. Quoting:
10:10AM "We think we've got something that is better. And we call it the iPad."
10:09AM "Now some people thought that was a netbook -- the problem is that netbooks aren't better than anything!" Big cheers! Ha! - slide
It is a shame the iPad isn't better than anything either Steve.
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It sounds an awful lot like cooperative multitasking. I wonder if they have to call a yield() function... Which sucks.
Don't worry. My next phone will not be from Apple. What some people do not get is that for every 1 person that complains, 8 more already gave up on your product without telling anyone. You should cherish the people who do complain. They at least are interested in you making the product better.
Neither are they launching an actual Dragon capsule. Just a mockup. This is a rocket test. Still beats that bogus Ares-IX propaganda launch though.
In my opinion it is a relic from the Strategic Air Command clique from WWII. It is about as obsolete a strategic nuclear weapon delivery platform as cavalry is obsolete as an infantry shock weapon.
The instant storable propellant ICBMs were developed in the 1960s, which can be launched in a matter of seconds and travel at Mach 20 to the destination, compared with bombers which take at best 30 minutes to setup, then fly to the target at Mach 1-2, bombers were utterly obsolete. As it should be painfully obvious.
If you take off too late, your airbase has likely been glassed already.
If you take off early enough, and the enemy air defenses did not knock you down (not that difficult to do to a large subsonic or mildly supersonic target), then your air airbase gets glassed, you have nowhere to return to.
By the time the bombers arrive the nuclear exchange is over already. So nuclear bombers are only useful in a first strike scenario against countries with ICBMs. However how can you achieve a successful first strike if the enemy can see your lumbering bombers enter their airspace hours (in a large country like Russia or China) before reaching their targets? Their ICBM counterattack will hit you before you even get there.
Strategic bombers still have uses, but for delivering conventional munitions, or perhaps tactical nuclear weapons in a protracted low intensity nuclear conflict.
IIRC China has more warheads than that. The problem is they do not have enough long range missiles to hit the whole US. Just enough to glass California.
If you compare in terms of manpower the numbers are not ridiculous. However the US spends a lot more on equipment in an attempt to prevent military losses.
You think WW III and IV would have been cheaper? I have little doubts that Russia tried to keep a limited profile during the Korean War precisely because they feared nuclear retaliation. Since then conflicts between major powers kept being shrunk into irrelevance. Compare this with the XIXth century. Russo-Japanese War. Franco-German War. Boxer Rebellion. Spanish-American War. Crimean War. The list goes on.
Please tell me you are not being serious. Strategic nuclear weapons in bombers make no sense since the ICBM was invented. If someone launches an ICBM attack in 15 minutes the bombs are dropping. By that time the pilots are probably still getting out of their bunkers, let alone spinning up the engines, or actually getting to the destination. Doing that would be tantamount to political suicide. You lose the retaliatory strike ability that made MAD successful in guaranteeing world peace in the first place.
You could try to convince me on tactical nuclear weapons in a bomber, but not strategic.
Check his UID. He was probably born after the Cold War ended. In my experience people who did not grow or live through the Cold War do not have the same kind of world view on nuclear weapons.
It's not barely. Even the CPU alone can do decoding in software with free ffdshow-mt. If you are willing to pay $12.95, you can get the CoreAVC codec which uses even less CPU (more well optimized software).
However the machine has hardware H.264 decoding in the GPU as well. Yes, there are Intel GPUs which do hardware H.264 decoding. Also any reasonably recent ATI or NVIDIA GPU does it. This means H.264 decoding is low power.
To tell you the truth I couldn't even tell if it had bluetooth or not. I never needed it. It has a built-in camera, microphone, speakers, and keyboard. It has USB ports, microphone and headphone jacks. What would I use bluetooth for? I actually have a bluetooth USB adapter pen I once bought for playing around, years before I got that Acer, but never used it after the novelty wore off. Only thing I ever used it for at first was controlling presentations with my cell phone. But it was too error prone to be relied upon.
As for expensive apps, I can get OpenOffice for free. Can you get that on iPad? Or what about Paint.NET? Or Eclipse? Fact is most of the things I have installed are free. I only use Windows because of the games. It can do light 3D gaming. Not Crysis, but you cannot run Crysis on the iPad either.
Manufacturer claimed battery time is always bullshit. However I can use it for a day's work without recharging. Good enough for me.
As for the touch screen there are newer convertible tablet machines in the lower iPad price range that have a touchscreen. Some other people here have commented about those. I have little doubts they will get more commonplace. Oh and get this, Windows 7 actually does handwriting recognition.
It's a matter of tradeoffs. Some people may prefer the light touch-based interface of the iPad, but once you actually try doing any mildly intensive work on it... Well.
IMO Apple tried to be cheap and forgo pen based input. Saves them a lot of time in software development for complex shape recognition. It was a poor choice for this form factor. I need more than a small portable digital TV/entertainment center. I also need more precise input than a finger can provide for note taking, or drawing, the iPad does not solve that either.
In others words I want to do content creation, not just consumption. That is what a generic computer is for. Apple just doesn't get it. Their vision is pretty much like the vision of a cable company doing WebTV.
As for other more mobile applications I already have my smartphone for that. Which can actually fit in my pocket. Unfortunately for Apple the 3GS is most likely going to be the last smartphone they make I will buy. No more walled gardens to me. My expectations for a phone changed after I saw they are now a generic computer.
Well yeah, that is what the groups in the periodic table are for. When the periodic table was "invented" there were even holes in it and eventually elements where discovered with predicted properties and element number. However it seems that predicting the half life is non-trivial. Also while some things can be predicted there is still a lot of room for error or whatever.
I read a bit more. Seems like the co-founder of TurboHercules is the original Hercules author. So they actually contribute, or contributed at least. Since you seem to know the history of mainframes (likely better than I do) I will refrain from discussing the details of the anti-trust settlement with IBM decades ago, or how IBM has been stomping out anyone with any vague mainframe emulation or clone capability.
I am pretty sure you could get the FSF or the EFF on your side in this case. Unfortunately with the current environment there is a high possibility the EU will not help. In the US the possibility is probably even lower. Even if you do not lose the patent lawsuit, litigation alone could drive a company bankrupt (as happened to the Bleem! Playstation emulator for example). Or the suit could even be lost as happened to Psystar.
Your best chance is probably to appeal in the sense that governments are heavy mainframe users and are likely interested in alternatives. Taxmen and banks usually love these kinds of systems. It is always nice to have these people on your side. :-)
Ah you are the Hercules developer. Well FWIW I am on your side on this case (although that will not be helping much I'm afraid).
I think emulators should be legal, and trying to use hardware patents against them should not be allowed. Just because Microsoft shares some interest does not mean I am against that thing. I was merely pointing out that Microsoft can be on the side of Hercules without a larger anti-FLOSS conspiracy of any sort.
Does TurboHercules actually fund Hercules development, or not? This is a question I have not seen answered so far.
It is a shame you did not use the GPLv3 or the IBM CPL license though. AFAIK the QPL has no patent provisions.
It is more than PR. It is often a business strategy. But strategy and tactics are different things, done by different people.
Microsoft has been trying to get a slice of the mainframe business for a long time. Anything that erodes it is in their interest. You do not need to look at other ulterior motives. Nearly invariably when IBM sues someone for providing some sort of mainframe functionality Microsoft has been in the side of the ones defending against IBM. Try reading about T3 Technologies, or Platform Technologies for example.
The aspire is not a netbook. It's a core 2, and it's battery life need not try to compare. (which, btw, it's a core SOLO, not a dual core...) ...
Depends on the model. I got a brand new AS1410-2920 a couple of months ago with a SU2300 processor for the price I mentioned ($450 USD).
Like I said in another post at these prices iPad isn't competing with netbooks. It is competing with laptops. There are a lot of cheap Intel CULV laptops, or AMD NeoX2 laptops. Netbooks using Atom are even cheaper. You can get an Acer Aspire One for $300 USD.
As for H.264 decoding, I could do it with a single core 1.4 GHz Athlon XP using CoreAVC, so I doubt I cannot do it in a dual core SU2300 1.2 GHz. However since the Intel GMA 4500 MHD chipset does it in hardware the point is moot.
That "dead end" is not that different than the design of the IBM POWER 7. 4-way SMT, high clock speed, out-of-order, superscalar. IMO what killed the P4 was not the high clockspeed in the main processor but the idiotic "double-pumped" ALUs which created irregular heat zones in the processor, plus the poor implementation for the trace cache.
That Microsoft UNIX-like environment sucked last time I tried it. The package manager did not come installed by default, neither did a X server, a decent compiler, or anything you actually need to work. It was a bare bones UNIX system. You are better off running Linux inside a VM. Much more pleasant experience...
Intel manufactures the Itanium processors. The processor designers are Intel and ex-HP people. I think they all got transferred to Intel a couple of years ago.
I think HP basically does system level activities now, like HP-UX, or chipsets, motherboards and the ilk.
BTW one of the reasons Itanium has always had less than stellar performance is that Intel persistently chooses to manufacture it in the last (or worse) generation process. Example, they are manufacturing 32 nm X86-64 processors now (which is top notch in the industry), yet the recently released Itanium Tukwilla still uses 65 nm. Compare that to the best Itanium competitor, the IBM POWER 7, which is manufactured in 45 nm.
Oh and RISC/X86 processors still have some design space headroom in them. X86 in particular is pretty weak in floating point power still, but that could be easily corrected. In fact there are plans to quadruple the performance, by design changes alone, in the next couple of processor generations from Intel and AMD.
- Oh TCO. The ultimate measure that doesn't measure anything and is usually mentioned by salesmen who know that product is not less expensive at all, and need to make a strawman case to make customers think they are cheaper. Ok, licensing. I cannot get Flash on the iPhone for any price. How does that measure up?
- You can get an Acer Aspire 1410 for like $450 USD. It has a dual core processor. It comes with the Intel 4500 MHD chipset which does H.264 decoding (heck even the CPU is beefy enough to do decoding if the chipset did not have support for it). Oh and get this. It has an HDMI port. Alternatively you can get Atom netbooks with the NVIDIA Ion chipset or a Broadcom chipset which does hardware H.264 decoding. That Acer is not even the best in its category and you can shop around if you want.
- Good luck rough handling your iPad. This is from a company which used to take a lot of flack because people would scratch the display in regular use, let alone something like the beach.
- You would be surprised at how easy it is to hand something over. Assuming the kids cannot get it themselves that is.
- Yeah I agree portrait mode would be nice. Except since it is attached to the keyboard in a netbook it does not make a lot of sense. You would have to be able to detach the keyboard somehow. Then again a Kindle would probably be better for books. I like comics but wouldn't buy a device like this to read them (but maybe someone else will).
- The computer I mentioned has 802.11n.
- I can get a 3G USB adapter.
- iPad doesn't have 4GB of RAM to read back from the disk on hibernate either. Can it even do virtual memory?
- I keep getting continuously annoying iTunes and iPhone OS updates all the time as well. Or app store updates. When I get an iPhone OS update I need to reboot my phone. Heck I cannot use a brand new iPhone without having an Apple store account and syncing via iTunes first. Is iPad going to be any different? Not really.
- I get the feeling you think it does constant patches because you probably only seldom turn on your machine and so it updates whenever you use it. Oh and at least in Windows you can actually install two different browsers if you want to. Plus you can install other operating systems than Windows on a netbook...
Ok, I just remembered an alternative non tiresome input method. Use a neck strap and put it against your chest. But it probably only works for larger form factors than the one the iPad uses.
I think you will find that people will seldom do input in the iPad like his Steveness showed, lying in the couch. They will place it on a table instead. I figured that much when I first heard it would be a tablet. I also happen to think it would have worked better if it had sketch support and a pen (so you could have higher resolution input) but that was obviously too much work for Apple... Maybe in version 3.
Yes, this is true. It also applies to a lot of other iPad use cases. Not having a horizontal writing surface combined with a vertical display surface is an issue for a lot of use cases, unfortunately. But Malda is still right that a lot of people do videoconferencing on their PC, especially family which has their kids living far away, or whatever and wants to keep in touch. While theoretically this could be done in a phone form factor, curiously iPhone does not have a videoconferencing camera. To be honest I am more chaffed by the lack of Flash when Adobe seemingly was interested in adding support, or by the lack of standard interface ports in the unit. Or lack of basic OS functionality.
I also run a block plugin. Sure there is Flash overuse. However if you really did not need Flash at all you would not be using FlashBlock in the first place. You would simply not install the Flash plugin at all. Or uninstall it.
Apple themselves know they are competing with netbooks. Or as they like to say it "better" than a netbook. Quoting:
10:10AM "We think we've got something that is better. And we call it the iPad."
10:09AM "Now some people thought that was a netbook -- the problem is that netbooks aren't better than anything!" Big cheers! Ha! - slide
It is a shame the iPad isn't better than anything either Steve.