Quite. Price/earning ratios over 20 are very high. I'm not saying Apple won't have good growth, but at 24, it's almost like betting that they'll bring out another iPhone or iPod, and we just don't know that.
Exactly. There was nothing wrong with what MS did with tablets, it worked quite nice, and absolutely no-one that I knew bought one.
Tablet is a bad general form factor and iPad is only selling because it's sexy. Tablets work on pocket size devices because space is at a premium, but once something stops fitting in a pocket or a handbag, you may as well have a laptop.
Sure, there are niche uses for these things, but I reckon most iPads will be collecting dust within weeks.
When a company starts a new project or an entrepreneur starts a small business it's sensible to build something quite small and straightforward. It might take off, but it might not, so don't spend more on the tech than you really need.
So, something gets produced that's VERY hacky. And for a short term solution and from a business perspective, that's quite bright.
The problem is that scale it up a little and it starts falling apart. It becomes hard to maintain because the fundamentals are so poor. It's generally much better to spend the time rewriting at this point than living with what you've got.
The simple, bottom-line with privacy is that you ask first and make it very clear to people if you are changing things, and confirm that they're OK.
My Google Maps has a latitude option. I don't want to use it. If I accidentally press it, Google kindly points out that I'll be sharing data and would I like to confirm. No, I don't.
There's nothing old world or new world about this. It's just about common courtesy and treating people right.
When he says:-
The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we'll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.
well...
I give up my location which is highly anonymised data, and Google clearly explains this to me. Fine.
The organisations I trade with that give me discounts use this internally. That's their business.
We don't "give up our images". You have no rights over your face in public. I can walk down a street in the UK taking people's photographs.
If medical records go online then sure, there's a risk of something happening. A risk. Entirely different from a company just deciding to do it deliberately.
It looks like it might suit me (but living in the UK, I'm going to have to wait a lot longer). It's not about me, but about my family. I want something that isn't too crippled, but which also offers the user friendliness of a single remote.
It could replace my current STB, but also give me lolcats, movie trailers and maybe Miniclip on my TV.
If that's their game, then they're playing a risky one which could backfire spectacularly.
Apple don't have the Windows API level of dominance to pull this off. Blackberry and Android are both bigger in terms of sales. If it carries on then you'll see developers jump ship and it won't be those platforms that are left isolated because of no cross-platform apps. It will be iPhone.
I'm saying that it's not worth doing for that reason. I'm saying that you should only be putting men into space because it's useful to put men into space.
Do I think we should spend money putting men into space? No. It serves little purpose now. We've done it dozens of times before and it costs a huge amount of money. Spending money on probes and robots gives us far more science about our universe for a fraction of the price.
PHP is a popular, nasty hack. It's main redeeming feature is that as you say, you can host everywhere for a couple of bucks a month.
Pragmatically, I use it for those reasons. But I'd rather kids were taught using good languages that teach the concepts well and they can always go and hack later. Best of all would be something like Python/Django or Ruby on Rails.
That's the problem. No-one is saying that you can take programmers with A-level CompSci and get them to do hardcore coding, but VB6 is just bad. VB6 was always about building WYSIWIG form-based applications and not much else. It's a scrappy form of UI OO and if you haven't moved onto.net by now (or one of the more recent FOSS languages) then you shouldn't be teaching programming.
Agreed. VB is a very bad choice. I can see why PHP isn't in there - it's basically a hack. Delphi/Pascal used to make sense because of strong typing, but if you're going to do that, go with C# which is in use.
This is my whole problem with it. Every time I look at it beyond "ooh, it's shiny", there's a problem with it. I just can't find a set of circumstances where it works.
If I'm at home, I have a laptop, PC, iPod, TV and DVD player. So, I already have music wherever I want. I can already watch movies on a large screen. I can browse on a laptop with a screen that's self-supporting rather than sitting at some funny angle.
If I'm out and about, I have an Android phone or I can take my laptop. If I have to carry something that doesn't fit in my pocket, I might as well take my laptop with me. It will do everything the iPad will and more.
It's not just "where's the command line". I can't even see why my non-tech relatives would buy one.
Like what? Excepting "flying around things" games and GPS enabled apps, what apps can deliver functionality that a laptop can't?
I get that Apps are great on an iPhone/iPod Touch because of the fiddly size and lack of data input, but once you scale up those problems go away. And I'm prepared to compromise for an iPhone because of the convenience of putting it in my pocket. Once I need a case, I might as well carry a laptop.
You can sense it in some of the blog reviews. People want it to be nice because it's new and flashy and don't want to look stupid by saying it's useless. But nothing they're saying suggests that they're very impressed with it in terms of helping them.
And I'm sure there's a few people for whom a 10" tablet is genuinely useful, but it's a niche.
The real "home computer" device is more likely to be some sort of internet box that works with a TV. Surf the net from the TV, download movies to watch and apps. Movies on a 10" 4x3 screen covered in fingerprints? Forget it.
But a lot of people do use easily guessable passwords. If you could get access to the records of a veterinarian and filter out just the female cat owners with email addresses, you'd probably be able to get a lot of information. They don't all use their cat's name, but I'll bet that more than 25% do.
that was what was one thing that was spot on about Wargames. I've been in a few offices where people did precisely the same thing (often because they were forced to remember half a dozen passwords for half a dozen different systems and had to change them every month).
When Edgar Wright interviewed policemen for Hot Fuzz he asked them what part of police work was never shown, and they said the paperwork. Which is why there's this high-octane paperwork scene.
The thing is that all those other things (e.g. missing buses) are real. You wouldn't have an expert car driver press a button and the wheels get replaced with skis (unless it's James Bond) in order that he could carry on chasing someone through snow. We know that cars don't work that way.
And this isn't the 60s any more when operating a computer meant going into a temperature-controlled room. Millions of people know what they do and that you don't need a slow-moving progress bar to move money from A to B.
There's a few plot devices to do with computers which are real and which I've never seen used in a movie. You could have a buddy cop scene where Bruce Willis is teamed with a geek and the perp deletes the file off his phone and the geek explains how it's not really deleted, just lost and proceeds to undelete the files. Or a sting where someone changes some router settings to use a different IP address so that they can get their password. You could still make it dramatic but use things that are real.
Here's the big thing for you: the differences between the Android 1.5 SDK and 2.1 are actually quite small. 1.5 to 1.6 was mostly some animation classes, accessibility, text-to-speech and sending SMS. 1.6 to 2.1 was things like using Webkit's storage, live wallpapers and Telephony strength.
The vast majority of apps written today could comfortably be written against 1.5.
The rate of rise with Android is pretty shocking. AdMob are already delivering more ads to Android handsets than to iPhone. Apple's market share was flat last quarter (with Android rising 5%+).
Anecdotally, a lot of friends of mine are waiting for their iPhone contracts to go Android.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite. Price/earning ratios over 20 are very high. I'm not saying Apple won't have good growth, but at 24, it's almost like betting that they'll bring out another iPhone or iPod, and we just don't know that.
There's a company I thought had gone the way of the Ashton-Tates.
Plenty of free burners for the rare time I need to do a DVD now, and their video editor sucked.
Exactly. There was nothing wrong with what MS did with tablets, it worked quite nice, and absolutely no-one that I knew bought one.
Tablet is a bad general form factor and iPad is only selling because it's sexy. Tablets work on pocket size devices because space is at a premium, but once something stops fitting in a pocket or a handbag, you may as well have a laptop.
Sure, there are niche uses for these things, but I reckon most iPads will be collecting dust within weeks.
The other problem is with scale.
When a company starts a new project or an entrepreneur starts a small business it's sensible to build something quite small and straightforward. It might take off, but it might not, so don't spend more on the tech than you really need.
So, something gets produced that's VERY hacky. And for a short term solution and from a business perspective, that's quite bright.
The problem is that scale it up a little and it starts falling apart. It becomes hard to maintain because the fundamentals are so poor. It's generally much better to spend the time rewriting at this point than living with what you've got.
The simple, bottom-line with privacy is that you ask first and make it very clear to people if you are changing things, and confirm that they're OK.
My Google Maps has a latitude option. I don't want to use it. If I accidentally press it, Google kindly points out that I'll be sharing data and would I like to confirm. No, I don't.
There's nothing old world or new world about this. It's just about common courtesy and treating people right.
When he says:-
The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we'll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.
well...
It looks like it might suit me (but living in the UK, I'm going to have to wait a lot longer). It's not about me, but about my family. I want something that isn't too crippled, but which also offers the user friendliness of a single remote.
It could replace my current STB, but also give me lolcats, movie trailers and maybe Miniclip on my TV.
If that's their game, then they're playing a risky one which could backfire spectacularly.
Apple don't have the Windows API level of dominance to pull this off. Blackberry and Android are both bigger in terms of sales. If it carries on then you'll see developers jump ship and it won't be those platforms that are left isolated because of no cross-platform apps. It will be iPhone.
I'm saying that it's not worth doing for that reason. I'm saying that you should only be putting men into space because it's useful to put men into space.
Do I think we should spend money putting men into space? No. It serves little purpose now. We've done it dozens of times before and it costs a huge amount of money. Spending money on probes and robots gives us far more science about our universe for a fraction of the price.
Spending money anywhere generates scientific spin-offs. Just giving members of the public a tax rebate will indirectly create science.
What's most important is whether the thing itself is worth doing.
probably the teachers used to know VB and switched.
I doubt they're using any OO in this, which is ridiculous.
PHP is a popular, nasty hack. It's main redeeming feature is that as you say, you can host everywhere for a couple of bucks a month.
Pragmatically, I use it for those reasons. But I'd rather kids were taught using good languages that teach the concepts well and they can always go and hack later. Best of all would be something like Python/Django or Ruby on Rails.
That's the problem. No-one is saying that you can take programmers with A-level CompSci and get them to do hardcore coding, but VB6 is just bad. VB6 was always about building WYSIWIG form-based applications and not much else. It's a scrappy form of UI OO and if you haven't moved onto .net by now (or one of the more recent FOSS languages) then you shouldn't be teaching programming.
Most teachers can't do program either beyond the trivial level, so their pupils don't have much chance of learning it.
I hope you are not an English teacher ;)
Agreed. VB is a very bad choice. I can see why PHP isn't in there - it's basically a hack. Delphi/Pascal used to make sense because of strong typing, but if you're going to do that, go with C# which is in use.
This is my whole problem with it. Every time I look at it beyond "ooh, it's shiny", there's a problem with it. I just can't find a set of circumstances where it works.
If I'm at home, I have a laptop, PC, iPod, TV and DVD player. So, I already have music wherever I want. I can already watch movies on a large screen. I can browse on a laptop with a screen that's self-supporting rather than sitting at some funny angle.
If I'm out and about, I have an Android phone or I can take my laptop. If I have to carry something that doesn't fit in my pocket, I might as well take my laptop with me. It will do everything the iPad will and more.
It's not just "where's the command line". I can't even see why my non-tech relatives would buy one.
Like what? Excepting "flying around things" games and GPS enabled apps, what apps can deliver functionality that a laptop can't?
I get that Apps are great on an iPhone/iPod Touch because of the fiddly size and lack of data input, but once you scale up those problems go away. And I'm prepared to compromise for an iPhone because of the convenience of putting it in my pocket. Once I need a case, I might as well carry a laptop.
You can sense it in some of the blog reviews. People want it to be nice because it's new and flashy and don't want to look stupid by saying it's useless. But nothing they're saying suggests that they're very impressed with it in terms of helping them.
And I'm sure there's a few people for whom a 10" tablet is genuinely useful, but it's a niche.
The real "home computer" device is more likely to be some sort of internet box that works with a TV. Surf the net from the TV, download movies to watch and apps. Movies on a 10" 4x3 screen covered in fingerprints? Forget it.
But a lot of people do use easily guessable passwords. If you could get access to the records of a veterinarian and filter out just the female cat owners with email addresses, you'd probably be able to get a lot of information. They don't all use their cat's name, but I'll bet that more than 25% do.
that was what was one thing that was spot on about Wargames. I've been in a few offices where people did precisely the same thing (often because they were forced to remember half a dozen passwords for half a dozen different systems and had to change them every month).
Watch a few cop movies with actual cops.
When Edgar Wright interviewed policemen for Hot Fuzz he asked them what part of police work was never shown, and they said the paperwork. Which is why there's this high-octane paperwork scene.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5QIUYg5M6w
The thing is that all those other things (e.g. missing buses) are real. You wouldn't have an expert car driver press a button and the wheels get replaced with skis (unless it's James Bond) in order that he could carry on chasing someone through snow. We know that cars don't work that way.
And this isn't the 60s any more when operating a computer meant going into a temperature-controlled room. Millions of people know what they do and that you don't need a slow-moving progress bar to move money from A to B.
There's a few plot devices to do with computers which are real and which I've never seen used in a movie. You could have a buddy cop scene where Bruce Willis is teamed with a geek and the perp deletes the file off his phone and the geek explains how it's not really deleted, just lost and proceeds to undelete the files. Or a sting where someone changes some router settings to use a different IP address so that they can get their password. You could still make it dramatic but use things that are real.
Here's the big thing for you: the differences between the Android 1.5 SDK and 2.1 are actually quite small. 1.5 to 1.6 was mostly some animation classes, accessibility, text-to-speech and sending SMS. 1.6 to 2.1 was things like using Webkit's storage, live wallpapers and Telephony strength.
The vast majority of apps written today could comfortably be written against 1.5.
The rate of rise with Android is pretty shocking. AdMob are already delivering more ads to Android handsets than to iPhone. Apple's market share was flat last quarter (with Android rising 5%+).
Anecdotally, a lot of friends of mine are waiting for their iPhone contracts to go Android.
There's been a few changes from 1.5 to 2.0, but most of the developer changes are quite small/obscure.
... how many shares does she still own in Apple?
That article reads like pure FUD to me.