So far, the market will allow Apple to charge $500 and up for an iPad
I want to play with an iPad (not here in the UK). Because my current feeling is that it's a dud from what I've seen and I want to see if using it makes me feel differently. It doesn't seem that way yet. People have queued up for them, bought them, and so far they love them. But you can't tell a product's success from that. If people buy them and find that they have to keep using the main computer/laptop because of limitations, are they going to tell their friends about it? Are they going to buy another one?
And there's a big difference between someone doing a review with one in the setting of doing a review, and actually living with it.
The problem is that the guy doesn't get supply and demand. These companies are already doing it. If one of them decides it's not good business (or goes out of business), then it just makes life a little less competitive for the rest.
I'm kinda tired of the iPad hype. We should all wait 6 months and see if they're still being used by people. My guess is that for a lot of people, they'll get tired of the limitations.
The Android store has a couple of tiny restrictions that are reasonably well defined, and they'll allow you to contact them for more information about them.
I've not heard of a single Android ban that wasn't for basically putting porn on the site (which is quite clearly ruled out).
Consider all the decisions about content, app names, what you can build it in, what analytics you can use. Are you, as a developer going to sit down and invest your time learning this platform, researching your target market only for Apple to decide (for any reason they like) that your App isn't allowed?
My guess... a year from now, most development will be happening on Android.
1. We know that some scientists in the past have deliberately falsified results, so we know that scientists are capable of doing it over this. I'm not even interested in that, though. I'm just interested in whether the science is correct.
2. That's a gross oversimplification. I could easily say that every environmentalist is a socialist who is using it as a way to increase the size of the state because I know of at least 1 socialist group who have quite openly said this.
3. OK. Show me a link from the tobacco companies to Bishop Hill or to McIntyre & McKittrick?
The bottom line is that there is a massive failure rate with experimentation. The guy might discover nothing. He might come up with some nonsense. But what if he finds something useful?
And there are strong arguments against "only official scientsts should do this stuff". The man who solved the problem of determining longitude wasn't a scientists but a clockmaker and the scientists tried to discredit his method in favour of their own for years, despite it being far more accurate.
Except in the case of MMR/autism, it wasn't just some crank that started things using data. It was a doctor writing a peer-reviewed paper for The Lancet. It was actually the credentials of a real doctor that lent the sceptics case so much weight.
The only thing that is proven is that denialists are funded by the oil industry and the same "libertarians" funding the teabaggers, such as the bootstrappy Koch heirs.
Motivation of those who would find holes in science is irrelevant. All that matters is if the science is right or not.
At the end of the day, the opinion of the vast majority of scientists, and in paricular that of almost all climatologists, has not changed. A few years ago most national academies of sciences issued a joint statement supporting the IPCC, each with the overwhelming approval of their members. Has any of them gone back?
That's just an appeal to credentials, that those who are the members of the right guild, union or club believe something. Again, completely irrelevant to whether something is scientifically correct or not
No, it's just fucking criminal PR bullshit, the same kind that was used to justify the Iraq war or implement liberticide "anti-terrorist" policies.
It doesn't matter what your personal opinion is of climate science. One thing is fact: The CRU cannot produce a detailed document showing the process at arriving at their results. They modified raw temperature data and have nothing to show for how that was done.
You try that in a well-regulated software environment... giving your results to an external auditor without a program spec, or handing over details about a drug to the FDA with a bit that says "some magic happens here", or a patent to the patent office which says "woo cloud".
I'm not saying the results are wrong or that the CRU aren't bright, honest people. But if we're going to spend billions of dollars on this problem, then the science that it's based on should be a lot more robust than that.
The downside to free and open access to all data is that research groups get grants to collect AND process the data to come up with results. Opening the data up for free access means that other groups, who have more interest in scooping than being right, have more ability to do that scooping. That leaves the people who did the work in the cold.
Well, hardly "in the cold". They got paid for producing things which the public used. That's the point of public funding of science - as a benefit to the public, not to ensure that scientists get a nice pat-on-the back.
If you don't like the deal, go and sit in your own lab paid for by someone else and publish your results and get all the glory.
Ultimately, any form of closed system is just one of many disadvantages with a product. But it may be that it's an acceptable compromise for all the upsides of that product for that consumer.
My Wii is a closed system. But it's a games system, and as such, I don't really expect it to be open. And for what I got, I was happy with the deal.
The real issue is ensuring that consumers are aware of this.
And yes, Android is more open. Jailbreaking exists but most people, even geeks don't bother with it, because installing 3rd party is easy. But my absolute favourite thing over iPhone? I can put files on without some piece-of-crap software. Plug in the phone, mounts as a drive in Windows then drag-and-drop files over to/from the SD card.
Google does have some guidelines for developers but they're nothing like Apple's arbitrariness, nor has Google set themselves up as a capricious gatekeeper. Personally, as a developer I'm much more comfortable with the idea of dealing with Google than I ever would be with Apple.
Exactly. It's not so much that Google is total anarchy, it's that Google have some clearly defined rules about what is and isn't acceptable and have stuck to it. That means that developers know where they stand and whether to bother doing a development or not.
The trouble is that Gruber's a quite wealthy web designer and Mac fanboy. He gets all the tools he want. What he doesn't see is that sometimes, users will actually compromise on an ugly, slow app because it delivers functionality.
WinMerge looks like ass compared to BeyondCompare but it costs $0 instead of $50 and does what I need it to do.
Here's a question for you: would you more likely build an app because it "might be allowed"? You want to be the first to find out, or build an App only for Apple to work out later how to identify them and kick your app out of the store?
Apple's famous secrecy (and arbitrary policies on the app store) will be there undoing here. Google are pretty damned explicit about what goes in the Marketplace and what doesn't, and if they wanted to change the policy, they'd tell people and be clear about it. Oh, and you've always got non-Marketplace as an option.
And because you're facing an approval process which is arbitrary, all it would take is for them to work out some sort of pattern about your code that looks like Unity and they'll ban it.
Actually a very good parallel. If you see the way that kids behave, the one who changes the rules and behaves like a pedant about goal decisions might win the game today, but all that happens is that eventually, the other kids stop calling on him.
I'm personally about to start my 1st Android app. I thought it was completely original as an idea, but someone pointed out that there's already an iPhone app that does something similar.
Now, I'm still going to do it for Android, but what with there already being a competitor for iPhone, the Mac overheads and having to learn Objective-C, I won't bother.
And I have no doubt that with what I was doing (quite straightforward GUI form input/output) that using a generator would add little to the performance of the App over handcoding it.
They'll end up with what they've got on Mac if they're not careful - either giant apps, or apps coded by Mac enthusiasts.
And the thing that I'm getting about all of this is that a lot of developers have truly woken up to this fact over this issue. They've realised that you can't just look at the app store and say "as long as I don't do x or y that I'll be OK". Apple can simply change the rules and screw your whole business.
It's like when some countries in Africa used to nationalise land or businesses. In effect, people's property got stolen by the government. The result? Well, no-one started any businesses because the risk of it getting stolen was factored in and people didn't put their money there.
No matter how much you want to argue that this paper or that newpaper isn't doing "real journalism", they are all dying and they are almost the sole original sources for most news we hear, including most news the government or various corporations don't want you to hear.
The 3 top stories in today's Times say otherwise. Two are speeches being reported and one is based on a press release from Clarence House.
A blogger could write a program which would present a press release and they click "yes" or "no" and just paste it as a post on a blog and they'd do as much as the main news in Today's Times.
It's only sites like The Economist upwards where people will pay for content.
A friend of mine works for a company that provides global commodity price data. The people who buy that data do so because it's worth something to them. It helps them make better multi-million dollar deals. It's also produced to a high degree of rigour and accuracy.
Newspapers? A lot of it is just about passing time. A lot of people read them in the past because it was a way to get around the boredom of a train commute (and magazines didn't come out every day). But you can sit and read the latest from Gizmodo, or Gawker or Slashdot. There's so much low-grade media out there that almost no-one will pay for an online newspaper.
Yup. It actually makes things worse for them, because rather than accepting that they have to drastically change how they work to take account of the internet, they're just gearing up for paywall + iPad to save them.
The interesting thing is that their biggest competitor (the Daily Telegraph) is owned by a couple of guys who haven't been in the newspaper business for long, so they're not so ingrained in the old models. They're hired a young editor who gets that it has to run 24 hours, target every device out there and so forth.
If the Telegraph play it right, they'll just get a whole load of online readers switching from The Times.
Re:Apple has, what, 9% of the market?
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
And Apple has a 91% share of the $1000+ PC market.
Qualification to that: in the retail channel, where most PC purchases over $1000 are things like lightweight, non-retail customer laptops. Not many people buy Thinkpads retail.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
The problem isn't just the iPad. It's the whole question of tablet computing. Touch works on phone because it frees up space. It means you can get a decent size screen because you're not sacrificing space for the UI. But it is a compromise (albeit an acceptable one).
Once you go beyond pocket size, you're into competing with laptops. I know people think they'll walk around like Picard, but walking and touching a screen doesn't work like that.
For me, even the "sitting in front of a PC using Slashdot" doesn't work. A laptop gives me a hinge and a keyboard. I neither have to hold it up, nor crick my neck.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
As someone who uses recipes quite a lot, I just don't want a tablet. I'm in an environment with lots of flour, fat, water, alcohol and vegetables. A tablet computer just doesn't play nice there unless it's been designed around that stuff.
I also make notes as I'm cooking, and again, what's really easier? A pen or opening up a touch keyboard when I've got pastry on my hands? I don't really care if I get pastry on a recipe or a $1 pen. When it comes to a $500 tablet, it's a whole different thing.
Slashdot Mirror
So far, the market will allow Apple to charge $500 and up for an iPad
I want to play with an iPad (not here in the UK). Because my current feeling is that it's a dud from what I've seen and I want to see if using it makes me feel differently. It doesn't seem that way yet. People have queued up for them, bought them, and so far they love them. But you can't tell a product's success from that. If people buy them and find that they have to keep using the main computer/laptop because of limitations, are they going to tell their friends about it? Are they going to buy another one?
And there's a big difference between someone doing a review with one in the setting of doing a review, and actually living with it.
The problem is that the guy doesn't get supply and demand. These companies are already doing it. If one of them decides it's not good business (or goes out of business), then it just makes life a little less competitive for the rest.
I'm kinda tired of the iPad hype. We should all wait 6 months and see if they're still being used by people. My guess is that for a lot of people, they'll get tired of the limitations.
The Android store has a couple of tiny restrictions that are reasonably well defined, and they'll allow you to contact them for more information about them.
I've not heard of a single Android ban that wasn't for basically putting porn on the site (which is quite clearly ruled out).
Consider all the decisions about content, app names, what you can build it in, what analytics you can use. Are you, as a developer going to sit down and invest your time learning this platform, researching your target market only for Apple to decide (for any reason they like) that your App isn't allowed?
My guess... a year from now, most development will be happening on Android.
So how do you get from the raw to the modified data?
1. We know that some scientists in the past have deliberately falsified results, so we know that scientists are capable of doing it over this. I'm not even interested in that, though. I'm just interested in whether the science is correct.
2. That's a gross oversimplification. I could easily say that every environmentalist is a socialist who is using it as a way to increase the size of the state because I know of at least 1 socialist group who have quite openly said this.
3. OK. Show me a link from the tobacco companies to Bishop Hill or to McIntyre & McKittrick?
So, they've published the method by which they modified the raw temperature data? Last thing I heard, they'd lost it.
They had 1 day of testimony. And their results still aren't reproduceable.
That doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening, but UEA can't prove it's happening.
Probably because he might find a problem with it.
The bottom line is that there is a massive failure rate with experimentation. The guy might discover nothing. He might come up with some nonsense. But what if he finds something useful?
And there are strong arguments against "only official scientsts should do this stuff". The man who solved the problem of determining longitude wasn't a scientists but a clockmaker and the scientists tried to discredit his method in favour of their own for years, despite it being far more accurate.
Except in the case of MMR/autism, it wasn't just some crank that started things using data. It was a doctor writing a peer-reviewed paper for The Lancet. It was actually the credentials of a real doctor that lent the sceptics case so much weight.
The only thing that is proven is that denialists are funded by the oil industry and the same "libertarians" funding the teabaggers, such as the bootstrappy Koch heirs.
Motivation of those who would find holes in science is irrelevant. All that matters is if the science is right or not.
At the end of the day, the opinion of the vast majority of scientists, and in paricular that of almost all climatologists, has not changed. A few years ago most national academies of sciences issued a joint statement supporting the IPCC, each with the overwhelming approval of their members. Has any of them gone back?
That's just an appeal to credentials, that those who are the members of the right guild, union or club believe something. Again, completely irrelevant to whether something is scientifically correct or not
No, it's just fucking criminal PR bullshit, the same kind that was used to justify the Iraq war or implement liberticide "anti-terrorist" policies.
It doesn't matter what your personal opinion is of climate science. One thing is fact: The CRU cannot produce a detailed document showing the process at arriving at their results. They modified raw temperature data and have nothing to show for how that was done.
You try that in a well-regulated software environment... giving your results to an external auditor without a program spec, or handing over details about a drug to the FDA with a bit that says "some magic happens here", or a patent to the patent office which says "woo cloud".
I'm not saying the results are wrong or that the CRU aren't bright, honest people. But if we're going to spend billions of dollars on this problem, then the science that it's based on should be a lot more robust than that.
The downside to free and open access to all data is that research groups get grants to collect AND process the data to come up with results. Opening the data up for free access means that other groups, who have more interest in scooping than being right, have more ability to do that scooping. That leaves the people who did the work in the cold.
Well, hardly "in the cold". They got paid for producing things which the public used. That's the point of public funding of science - as a benefit to the public, not to ensure that scientists get a nice pat-on-the back.
If you don't like the deal, go and sit in your own lab paid for by someone else and publish your results and get all the glory.
Ultimately, any form of closed system is just one of many disadvantages with a product. But it may be that it's an acceptable compromise for all the upsides of that product for that consumer.
My Wii is a closed system. But it's a games system, and as such, I don't really expect it to be open. And for what I got, I was happy with the deal.
The real issue is ensuring that consumers are aware of this.
And yes, Android is more open. Jailbreaking exists but most people, even geeks don't bother with it, because installing 3rd party is easy. But my absolute favourite thing over iPhone? I can put files on without some piece-of-crap software. Plug in the phone, mounts as a drive in Windows then drag-and-drop files over to/from the SD card.
Google does have some guidelines for developers but they're nothing like Apple's arbitrariness, nor has Google set themselves up as a capricious gatekeeper. Personally, as a developer I'm much more comfortable with the idea of dealing with Google than I ever would be with Apple.
Exactly. It's not so much that Google is total anarchy, it's that Google have some clearly defined rules about what is and isn't acceptable and have stuck to it. That means that developers know where they stand and whether to bother doing a development or not.
The trouble is that Gruber's a quite wealthy web designer and Mac fanboy. He gets all the tools he want. What he doesn't see is that sometimes, users will actually compromise on an ugly, slow app because it delivers functionality.
WinMerge looks like ass compared to BeyondCompare but it costs $0 instead of $50 and does what I need it to do.
Here's a question for you: would you more likely build an app because it "might be allowed"? You want to be the first to find out, or build an App only for Apple to work out later how to identify them and kick your app out of the store?
Apple's famous secrecy (and arbitrary policies on the app store) will be there undoing here. Google are pretty damned explicit about what goes in the Marketplace and what doesn't, and if they wanted to change the policy, they'd tell people and be clear about it. Oh, and you've always got non-Marketplace as an option.
And because you're facing an approval process which is arbitrary, all it would take is for them to work out some sort of pattern about your code that looks like Unity and they'll ban it.
So pleased that I went Android.
Actually a very good parallel. If you see the way that kids behave, the one who changes the rules and behaves like a pedant about goal decisions might win the game today, but all that happens is that eventually, the other kids stop calling on him.
A lot of developers will just walk away.
I'm personally about to start my 1st Android app. I thought it was completely original as an idea, but someone pointed out that there's already an iPhone app that does something similar.
Now, I'm still going to do it for Android, but what with there already being a competitor for iPhone, the Mac overheads and having to learn Objective-C, I won't bother.
And I have no doubt that with what I was doing (quite straightforward GUI form input/output) that using a generator would add little to the performance of the App over handcoding it.
They'll end up with what they've got on Mac if they're not careful - either giant apps, or apps coded by Mac enthusiasts.
This is Apple's store. You are Apple's bitch.
And the thing that I'm getting about all of this is that a lot of developers have truly woken up to this fact over this issue. They've realised that you can't just look at the app store and say "as long as I don't do x or y that I'll be OK". Apple can simply change the rules and screw your whole business.
It's like when some countries in Africa used to nationalise land or businesses. In effect, people's property got stolen by the government. The result? Well, no-one started any businesses because the risk of it getting stolen was factored in and people didn't put their money there.
No matter how much you want to argue that this paper or that newpaper isn't doing "real journalism", they are all dying and they are almost the sole original sources for most news we hear, including most news the government or various corporations don't want you to hear.
The 3 top stories in today's Times say otherwise. Two are speeches being reported and one is based on a press release from Clarence House.
A blogger could write a program which would present a press release and they click "yes" or "no" and just paste it as a post on a blog and they'd do as much as the main news in Today's Times.
It's only sites like The Economist upwards where people will pay for content.
A friend of mine works for a company that provides global commodity price data. The people who buy that data do so because it's worth something to them. It helps them make better multi-million dollar deals. It's also produced to a high degree of rigour and accuracy.
Newspapers? A lot of it is just about passing time. A lot of people read them in the past because it was a way to get around the boredom of a train commute (and magazines didn't come out every day). But you can sit and read the latest from Gizmodo, or Gawker or Slashdot. There's so much low-grade media out there that almost no-one will pay for an online newspaper.
Yup. It actually makes things worse for them, because rather than accepting that they have to drastically change how they work to take account of the internet, they're just gearing up for paywall + iPad to save them.
The interesting thing is that their biggest competitor (the Daily Telegraph) is owned by a couple of guys who haven't been in the newspaper business for long, so they're not so ingrained in the old models. They're hired a young editor who gets that it has to run 24 hours, target every device out there and so forth.
If the Telegraph play it right, they'll just get a whole load of online readers switching from The Times.
Qualification to that: in the retail channel, where most PC purchases over $1000 are things like lightweight, non-retail customer laptops. Not many people buy Thinkpads retail.
The problem isn't just the iPad. It's the whole question of tablet computing. Touch works on phone because it frees up space. It means you can get a decent size screen because you're not sacrificing space for the UI. But it is a compromise (albeit an acceptable one).
Once you go beyond pocket size, you're into competing with laptops. I know people think they'll walk around like Picard, but walking and touching a screen doesn't work like that.
For me, even the "sitting in front of a PC using Slashdot" doesn't work. A laptop gives me a hinge and a keyboard. I neither have to hold it up, nor crick my neck.
As someone who uses recipes quite a lot, I just don't want a tablet. I'm in an environment with lots of flour, fat, water, alcohol and vegetables. A tablet computer just doesn't play nice there unless it's been designed around that stuff.
I also make notes as I'm cooking, and again, what's really easier? A pen or opening up a touch keyboard when I've got pastry on my hands? I don't really care if I get pastry on a recipe or a $1 pen. When it comes to a $500 tablet, it's a whole different thing.