Like the cable companies are a shining example for anyone. Why do you think Netflix and Hulu are the successes they are now? Just because people do not have any choice does not mean people do not want choice. Why do you think Apple's iPhone marketing slogan is "There's an app for that"?
FWIW I like the Courier design (foldable) more than the iPads. But Courier seems like typical Microsoft vaporware to me. I mean have they done a demo of live hardware yet, or is it still a bunch of design concept animations? Will this ever be a real product, or will the end product really be like the design concepts?
The Linux desktop/laptop never took off either and if you install a Linux distro you get all the applications this this is supposed to have (e.g. OpenOffice, Firefox) and more. For free. However there is always something else people need which is not provided. Apple themselves sell Final Cut Pro for MacOS X which is a video editing solution like Adobe Premiere. The UI may be better designed, or the input may be more natural in the iPad. However that did not stop people from using MS-DOS by the cartload when Apple was struggling to commercialize Macintosh machines in the past. Apple is scared to death of Android and rightly so. If anything it is a much more competent threat than MS-DOS ever was.
It may surprise you to know even the average person does more than web browsing with their computers.
Oh and I did buy the second cheapest netbook I could find. I also do not measure things by how much I pay for them, but how much value for the money I get. I also like to hands on test a product before I buy it. Money is not so easy to be earned to be thrown away buying depreciating items you seldom use. I do not buy Apple PCs, and my next smartphone is not going to be another iPhone, but an Android device. I have actually been changing to more open platforms as I have gone by. My previous cellphone did not have a standard headphone jack for example (thanks Sony Ericsson!).
I am pretty picky about buying shoes however. I am also willing to buy better shoes, but own a smaller selection. I also tend to use anything to destruction and not replace anything that works fine as it is.
Gas stations are more decentralized. There are multiple stations and multiple vendors in multiple places. If you buy a GM car, you are not forced to buy your oil at an Exxon gas station either. The application store is locked in single vendor.
I am not forced to buy a Celeste Pizza Oven to cook my Celeste Pizza either.
It's user shafting because you cannot change the app store to some other vendor. They are locking you into their marketplace. Ever heard of leveraging a monopoly? I have nothing against the app store per se, what I am against is that you cannot use any other store with the hardware.
At that price you can buy a laptop. A non-Apple laptop that is.
A netbook is cheaper. Still it includes all the necessary functionality of a laptop in a reduced form factor. Unless you consider running Crysis necessary functionality. In which case you can buy a good laptop for less than a mid priced iPad model.
I can imagine doing a presentation using the iPad. Once they do a hardware iteration or two and include the dongles. Heck I can imagine people doing a line of furniture for Apple customers who own iPads. Tilted tables just like when people used to write using small chalkboards.
Then again I am not interested in buying closed hardware in this market segment. Cannot do half the things I need (like running DOSBox) to play Master of Magic. Or run Adobe Photoshop, Premiere. Or yes, run TeX. Or developing applications without using an external development platform. Yes, sometimes I code while traveling.
I do not deny the iPad could have its uses but it is not for me. Not as it is anyway.
The difference with the XBox360 is that I am not going to do a lot of content creation on it. Apple is the one which is being confused about the sorts of expectations people have on their devices. IMO.
Ever heard of the Commodore 64 GS? What about the Commodore CDTV? Commodore CD32? Commodore was a computer company, which did their own platforms (hardware and OS), which tried to turn their computers into "appliances" like consoles, and managed to go bankrupt in the process. Sounds familiar?
99 dollars, not cents. There are cellphones costing less than that. Oh and you can only do development using MacOS X IIRC, so you have to add the cost of an Apple PC on top of that. This over dependence on centralized services is also worrisome. If someone nuked Apple's Internet servers you couldn't install anything anymore.
Windows Vista was maligned for the same reason Windows 2000 (which I think was MS's first decent OS, not XP) was. Terrible, terrible driver support in the first year.
You can already see this with Windows Mobile. It used to be (still is) you could install any application in it as a user. For the next version (WM 7), Microsoft having seen that Apple managed to shaft the users with the iTunes store in which they get a fee for every application purchased, Microsoft is not going to allow you to install anything you wish on it without paying a toll fee anymore.
The iPhone was competing with other cellphones. The iPad is competing with laptops. Big difference.
Re:iPad is not a PC
on
iPad Jailbroken
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Overgrown unusable iPod Touch that is. Why would I want an MP3 player which cannot fit into my pocket?
While an iPad could do music, or perhaps even phone abilities the form factor is not small enough to replace either an MP3 player nor a cellphone.
So it will compete for the same applications the Kindle e-book reader and netbooks already occupy. At a higher price. I cannot fathom why they did not include some sort of USB ports, video output, and include cables. Even cellphones are starting to have that functionality (e.g. HTC Evo 4G), so it can certainly fit into a tablet factor. My guess is that Apple is not content with earning loads on money selling the devices, and with Internet store fees, but wants to make loads of money selling accessories for functionality that should come bundled by default. They will probably learn the lesson IBM learned with the PCjr in 3.. 2..
You know what made me laugh? Seeing an Internet video where you had to "activate" your iPad using iTunes in a computer via the USB/iPhone (blech) connector cable before using it. Oh and you transfer files by using the iTunes sync facility (good luck trying to get data from an USB pen, CD, DVD or any other kind of standard removable media). I would rather keep my netbook (which cost half the price and has a built-in keyboard, video out, USB) thanks. This is not a standalone computer and cannot be used as such. Can you even print to a WiFi LAN printer with the bundled software? Or am I supposed to print over the Internet to a store ($$$) that will snail mail the document to me?
The touch interface office and drawing suites would have potential but do not come bundled. I expect them to drop the price and bundle a cut down version of this suite eventually. What is unbelievable (to me at least) is that it has allegedly already sold like 700 K units and people did not even have the chance of trying it out properly or asking someone else they know which actually uses it. It is nice for a corporation to have such loyal clients.
Heh. Karzai does not have the clout to rule Afghanistan. I doubt anyone but an accomplished military leader could do it and Karzai is definitively not it. Oh and Karzai supposedly was in favor of the King returning to Afghanistan until he found out he could get the dictactor for life spot all for himself. He is pretty slimy.
While I have heard this before, and it makes sense, you have to remember Italy switched to the Allies side near the end of WWI and they still got Mussolini.
So flooding proves global warming. Dryness proves global warming. Snowfall proves global warming (The Day After Tomorrow). Is there anything that can disprove global warming? What kind of theory is this that cannot predict anything, and proves everything? I will give you a hint. A theory that cannot be proven wrong is not a scientific theory at all.
I linked to "Climatic Research Unit hacking incident". You are the ones calling it "Climategate", not me.
They refused to release their test data. Refused access to the test samples. Cherry picked tree ring test samples that better reinforced their point. Refused to disclose their algorithms. Can these people be called scientists? How can I independently check for their findings? Should I base national, nay global, policy on such shoddy work?
One flood in Australia does not refute global warming science.
I'll keep that in mind next time you tell me a dry spell at Australia in December (summer in the Southern Hemisphere) proves global warming. Or that a picture of polar bears on an ice floe during the summer proves global warming.
FWIW I do not believe it was a myth created to do any of those things. I believe it was an existing myth, or more accurately a fallacy, exploited out of proportion in order to enable some of those things. You just have to see the speeches and actions from supporters of policies to supposedly mitigate global warming. They certainly propose raising taxes (via 'carbon credits'), and wealth redistribution (to non-developed regions of the planet). Oh and developing nations do not pay. Nearly all of our energy sources produce global warming (coal, natural gas, petroleum, hydroelectric (if it's built from concrete it's evil, wouldn't you rather chop some trees instead?), or nuclear (yep, concrete)). In fact just by living a person or an animal is emitting noxious global warming gases. Fancy some population reduction? In reality the thing they want us to stop producing the most (CO2) is not noxious at all. You exhale it all the time. There was loads more CO2 in the Jurassic Period yet there was extensive and prolific life across the planet, and it wasn't covered with deserts either. Which makes sense when you consider that plants actually consume CO2 in order to live and store energy.
If you do oxygen rich combustion of natural gas or petroleum you get CO2 and H2O. Neither are nasty things. You (and all life) exhale both. The problem is things that did not burn properly, like aromatics, nitrogen oxide (because the atmosphere has nitrogen in it), ozone (yes), carbon monoxide, or other nasty stuff that has nefarious effects on humans. Or other non-hydrocarbon additives or contaminants in the fuel (sulfur in diesel, a zillion things in coal, etc). Curiously at least sulfur and soot, which are bad for people's health (e.g. black lung disease), actually decrease global warming by increasing albedo from extra cloud cover. As you can probably see by now what reduces temperature and is good for human (or even animal) health is not necessarily the same.
This is a good time to read "Fallen Angels" by Larry Niven. Here is a snip of the book description in Wikipedia:
Set in an unspecified 'near-future' (one of the main characters has childhood memories of the Exxon Valdez disaster) in which a radical environmentalist movement, joined with a coalition of religious groups, has gained control of the US government and imposed draconian luddite laws which, in attempts to curb global warming, have ironically brought about the greatest environmental catastrophe in recorded history - an ice age which may eventually escalate into a Snowball Earth.
Oh and the book was written in 1991. Prescient? Hopefully not.
Global warming is far from proven. Global mean temperatures have actually been decreasing in the last years after we hit a solar minimum. The Northern Hemisphere is freezing and Australia seemingly came out from the so called permanent dry as severe floods have traversed the area. Then again numbers from the people who promoted global warming at East Anglia have been "massaged" and are suspect at best, a fabrication at worst. Nice things to ponder before sinking the economy further by funding massive investments into useless (or even dangerous) projects.
Sorry. Not Global Warming. Climate Change. The first moniker was so patently ludicrous it is better to say something nebulous instead. As if climate hasn't been changing since like, forever.
I can understand that users need Flash functionality, however I kind of wonder how problematic this will be for Google. Google may want to port their browser to other platforms which Flash may not support, say for Android, or whatever. Imagine someone wants to use ChromeOS on MIPS, or some yet to develop processor architecture. Then there are all the security issues typical of a closed source product. Google will be publicly distributing code which they do not control, can debug, patch or maintain. People should be funding Gnash or whatever. Perhaps even work some more on one of those fancy Actionscript on Javascript interpreters.
False. Being worse in features does not mean it is less likely to be adopted. One case is BMP. There were a zillion better image file formats but support for it is common because Microsoft made it standard with Windows.
Two reasons. Unisys did not ask non-commercial and non-profit applications to pay GIF (actually LZW) patent royalties. Also, a free software library, libungif, was available for decompression which did not infringe in the patents. A browser only needs to decompress the files. Either reason made Mozilla non-liable for patent royalties. This is not the case with H.264. Best they could do would be to support some generic plugin format or system codec facility.
Most cameras used to support DV25 on DV tape media. Things change. The Chinese hardware manufacturers have tried pushing their own video formats several times so they could refrain from having to pay royalties. If a good free format was available, you would eventually see a lot of hardware supporting it (it is amazing how many hardware devices today have Vorbis and OGG support for example). Why is why the MPEG LA is scared they will lose their revenue source and keep threatening to sue anyone who uses Theora.
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Like the cable companies are a shining example for anyone. Why do you think Netflix and Hulu are the successes they are now? Just because people do not have any choice does not mean people do not want choice. Why do you think Apple's iPhone marketing slogan is "There's an app for that"?
FWIW I like the Courier design (foldable) more than the iPads. But Courier seems like typical Microsoft vaporware to me. I mean have they done a demo of live hardware yet, or is it still a bunch of design concept animations? Will this ever be a real product, or will the end product really be like the design concepts?
The Linux desktop/laptop never took off either and if you install a Linux distro you get all the applications this this is supposed to have (e.g. OpenOffice, Firefox) and more. For free. However there is always something else people need which is not provided. Apple themselves sell Final Cut Pro for MacOS X which is a video editing solution like Adobe Premiere. The UI may be better designed, or the input may be more natural in the iPad. However that did not stop people from using MS-DOS by the cartload when Apple was struggling to commercialize Macintosh machines in the past. Apple is scared to death of Android and rightly so. If anything it is a much more competent threat than MS-DOS ever was.
It may surprise you to know even the average person does more than web browsing with their computers.
Oh and I did buy the second cheapest netbook I could find. I also do not measure things by how much I pay for them, but how much value for the money I get. I also like to hands on test a product before I buy it. Money is not so easy to be earned to be thrown away buying depreciating items you seldom use. I do not buy Apple PCs, and my next smartphone is not going to be another iPhone, but an Android device. I have actually been changing to more open platforms as I have gone by. My previous cellphone did not have a standard headphone jack for example (thanks Sony Ericsson!).
I am pretty picky about buying shoes however. I am also willing to buy better shoes, but own a smaller selection. I also tend to use anything to destruction and not replace anything that works fine as it is.
Gas stations are more decentralized. There are multiple stations and multiple vendors in multiple places. If you buy a GM car, you are not forced to buy your oil at an Exxon gas station either. The application store is locked in single vendor.
I am not forced to buy a Celeste Pizza Oven to cook my Celeste Pizza either.
It's user shafting because you cannot change the app store to some other vendor. They are locking you into their marketplace. Ever heard of leveraging a monopoly? I have nothing against the app store per se, what I am against is that you cannot use any other store with the hardware.
At that price you can buy a laptop. A non-Apple laptop that is.
A netbook is cheaper. Still it includes all the necessary functionality of a laptop in a reduced form factor. Unless you consider running Crysis necessary functionality. In which case you can buy a good laptop for less than a mid priced iPad model.
I can imagine doing a presentation using the iPad. Once they do a hardware iteration or two and include the dongles. Heck I can imagine people doing a line of furniture for Apple customers who own iPads. Tilted tables just like when people used to write using small chalkboards.
Then again I am not interested in buying closed hardware in this market segment. Cannot do half the things I need (like running DOSBox) to play Master of Magic. Or run Adobe Photoshop, Premiere. Or yes, run TeX. Or developing applications without using an external development platform. Yes, sometimes I code while traveling.
I do not deny the iPad could have its uses but it is not for me. Not as it is anyway.
Ever heard of the Commodore 64 GS? What about the Commodore CDTV? Commodore CD32? Commodore was a computer company, which did their own platforms (hardware and OS), which tried to turn their computers into "appliances" like consoles, and managed to go bankrupt in the process. Sounds familiar?
99 dollars, not cents. There are cellphones costing less than that. Oh and you can only do development using MacOS X IIRC, so you have to add the cost of an Apple PC on top of that. This over dependence on centralized services is also worrisome. If someone nuked Apple's Internet servers you couldn't install anything anymore.
Windows Vista was maligned for the same reason Windows 2000 (which I think was MS's first decent OS, not XP) was. Terrible, terrible driver support in the first year.
You can already see this with Windows Mobile. It used to be (still is) you could install any application in it as a user. For the next version (WM 7), Microsoft having seen that Apple managed to shaft the users with the iTunes store in which they get a fee for every application purchased, Microsoft is not going to allow you to install anything you wish on it without paying a toll fee anymore.
The iPhone was competing with other cellphones. The iPad is competing with laptops. Big difference.
While an iPad could do music, or perhaps even phone abilities the form factor is not small enough to replace either an MP3 player nor a cellphone.
So it will compete for the same applications the Kindle e-book reader and netbooks already occupy. At a higher price. I cannot fathom why they did not include some sort of USB ports, video output, and include cables. Even cellphones are starting to have that functionality (e.g. HTC Evo 4G), so it can certainly fit into a tablet factor. My guess is that Apple is not content with earning loads on money selling the devices, and with Internet store fees, but wants to make loads of money selling accessories for functionality that should come bundled by default. They will probably learn the lesson IBM learned with the PCjr in 3.. 2..
You know what made me laugh? Seeing an Internet video where you had to "activate" your iPad using iTunes in a computer via the USB/iPhone (blech) connector cable before using it. Oh and you transfer files by using the iTunes sync facility (good luck trying to get data from an USB pen, CD, DVD or any other kind of standard removable media). I would rather keep my netbook (which cost half the price and has a built-in keyboard, video out, USB) thanks. This is not a standalone computer and cannot be used as such. Can you even print to a WiFi LAN printer with the bundled software? Or am I supposed to print over the Internet to a store ($$$) that will snail mail the document to me?
The touch interface office and drawing suites would have potential but do not come bundled. I expect them to drop the price and bundle a cut down version of this suite eventually. What is unbelievable (to me at least) is that it has allegedly already sold like 700 K units and people did not even have the chance of trying it out properly or asking someone else they know which actually uses it. It is nice for a corporation to have such loyal clients.
Heh. Karzai does not have the clout to rule Afghanistan. I doubt anyone but an accomplished military leader could do it and Karzai is definitively not it. Oh and Karzai supposedly was in favor of the King returning to Afghanistan until he found out he could get the dictactor for life spot all for himself. He is pretty slimy.
While I have heard this before, and it makes sense, you have to remember Italy switched to the Allies side near the end of WWI and they still got Mussolini.
So flooding proves global warming. Dryness proves global warming. Snowfall proves global warming (The Day After Tomorrow). Is there anything that can disprove global warming? What kind of theory is this that cannot predict anything, and proves everything? I will give you a hint. A theory that cannot be proven wrong is not a scientific theory at all.
I linked to "Climatic Research Unit hacking incident". You are the ones calling it "Climategate", not me.
They refused to release their test data. Refused access to the test samples. Cherry picked tree ring test samples that better reinforced their point. Refused to disclose their algorithms. Can these people be called scientists? How can I independently check for their findings? Should I base national, nay global, policy on such shoddy work?
One flood in Australia does not refute global warming science.
I'll keep that in mind next time you tell me a dry spell at Australia in December (summer in the Southern Hemisphere) proves global warming. Or that a picture of polar bears on an ice floe during the summer proves global warming.
FWIW I do not believe it was a myth created to do any of those things. I believe it was an existing myth, or more accurately a fallacy, exploited out of proportion in order to enable some of those things. You just have to see the speeches and actions from supporters of policies to supposedly mitigate global warming. They certainly propose raising taxes (via 'carbon credits'), and wealth redistribution (to non-developed regions of the planet). Oh and developing nations do not pay. Nearly all of our energy sources produce global warming (coal, natural gas, petroleum, hydroelectric (if it's built from concrete it's evil, wouldn't you rather chop some trees instead?), or nuclear (yep, concrete)). In fact just by living a person or an animal is emitting noxious global warming gases. Fancy some population reduction? In reality the thing they want us to stop producing the most (CO2) is not noxious at all. You exhale it all the time. There was loads more CO2 in the Jurassic Period yet there was extensive and prolific life across the planet, and it wasn't covered with deserts either. Which makes sense when you consider that plants actually consume CO2 in order to live and store energy.
If you do oxygen rich combustion of natural gas or petroleum you get CO2 and H2O. Neither are nasty things. You (and all life) exhale both. The problem is things that did not burn properly, like aromatics, nitrogen oxide (because the atmosphere has nitrogen in it), ozone (yes), carbon monoxide, or other nasty stuff that has nefarious effects on humans. Or other non-hydrocarbon additives or contaminants in the fuel (sulfur in diesel, a zillion things in coal, etc). Curiously at least sulfur and soot, which are bad for people's health (e.g. black lung disease), actually decrease global warming by increasing albedo from extra cloud cover. As you can probably see by now what reduces temperature and is good for human (or even animal) health is not necessarily the same.
This is a good time to read "Fallen Angels" by Larry Niven. Here is a snip of the book description in Wikipedia:
Set in an unspecified 'near-future' (one of the main characters has childhood memories of the Exxon Valdez disaster) in which a radical environmentalist movement, joined with a coalition of religious groups, has gained control of the US government and imposed draconian luddite laws which, in attempts to curb global warming, have ironically brought about the greatest environmental catastrophe in recorded history - an ice age which may eventually escalate into a Snowball Earth.
Oh and the book was written in 1991. Prescient? Hopefully not.
Global warming is far from proven. Global mean temperatures have actually been decreasing in the last years after we hit a solar minimum. The Northern Hemisphere is freezing and Australia seemingly came out from the so called permanent dry as severe floods have traversed the area. Then again numbers from the people who promoted global warming at East Anglia have been "massaged" and are suspect at best, a fabrication at worst. Nice things to ponder before sinking the economy further by funding massive investments into useless (or even dangerous) projects.
Sorry. Not Global Warming. Climate Change. The first moniker was so patently ludicrous it is better to say something nebulous instead. As if climate hasn't been changing since like, forever.
I can understand that users need Flash functionality, however I kind of wonder how problematic this will be for Google. Google may want to port their browser to other platforms which Flash may not support, say for Android, or whatever. Imagine someone wants to use ChromeOS on MIPS, or some yet to develop processor architecture. Then there are all the security issues typical of a closed source product. Google will be publicly distributing code which they do not control, can debug, patch or maintain. People should be funding Gnash or whatever. Perhaps even work some more on one of those fancy Actionscript on Javascript interpreters.
I hope you do not own an iPhone either.
All current browsers support PNG (including transparency) in case you did not notice.
Mozilla has both those features (hardware acceleration and sandboxing) in the development branch in case you did not notice.
False. Being worse in features does not mean it is less likely to be adopted. One case is BMP. There were a zillion better image file formats but support for it is common because Microsoft made it standard with Windows.
Two reasons. Unisys did not ask non-commercial and non-profit applications to pay GIF (actually LZW) patent royalties. Also, a free software library, libungif, was available for decompression which did not infringe in the patents. A browser only needs to decompress the files. Either reason made Mozilla non-liable for patent royalties. This is not the case with H.264. Best they could do would be to support some generic plugin format or system codec facility.
Most cameras used to support DV25 on DV tape media. Things change. The Chinese hardware manufacturers have tried pushing their own video formats several times so they could refrain from having to pay royalties. If a good free format was available, you would eventually see a lot of hardware supporting it (it is amazing how many hardware devices today have Vorbis and OGG support for example). Why is why the MPEG LA is scared they will lose their revenue source and keep threatening to sue anyone who uses Theora.