I find that my iPad has gotten me reading again. I have done things like curl up all day with it reading a hefty book. Its single-tasking nature means it's only a distraction if the book is boring, in which case why am I reading it anyway? The web feels a lot closer when it's only a window away than when it's a few swipes away, to me.
I used to have an immense library; then I moved back home to New Orleans three days before Katrina and lost pretty much all of it. My current library is the stuff that had never made it out to me from my parent's home, and a few things I bought since - both new stuff and old favorites I just had to have. And it underwent a couple of ruthless cullings, too.
It's still a pleasure to sit down in the couch next to my bookshelves and read a physical book, but honestly, it's just as much a pleasure to read one on my iPad. I will be delighted when people start paying attention to the typography and layout of digital editions like they once did to real books; that's really the only thing I find lacking.
I don't WANT more physical books in my house. Unless they're something like the broadsheet-sized reproductions I have of "Little Nemo In Slumberland". Fiction is perfectly cool with being virtual, in my opinion. I'd basically stopped going to the bookstore, and thus stopped keeping up on new fiction, but having the Kindle software available on my pad and my phone means that I can easily acquire books anywhere.
Yeah, I really rue the day Adobe "refreshed their branding" by letting all the people they got when they bought Macromedia loose on every single product. At least they have made the abstract shapes less LOUD AND GARISH than CS1... but I'm still replacing AI and PS's icons with the last pre-CS ones every time I upgrade.
I have Illustrator running ALL THE TIME so the only time I ever see that damn orange thing is when I reboot my entire machine, which mostly happens when there's a system update. But still. Uuuglyyy.
If you have multiple Nests they'll talk to each other and share data. Plus, well, much simpler UI. People comparing it to things like the EcoBee and saying it loses because it has less features sound like CmdrTaco's infamous take on the iPod.
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
But ANYONE can figure it out in seconds. And it looks GOOD. And that counts for a LOT.
On the other hand... how many things do you see out there that you can drop an iPhone into, versus how many things you can drop an Android phone into? The huge number of different form factors of Android phones works against it here. You'll never find, say, a toy car that lets you plug your Android phone into it to work as a webcam so you can have a driver's-eye view. Lack of customization has its advantages.
iPad1s seems to run around $350-400. And will do surprising amounts of office work. I can't get my Real Work done on mine because I'm an artist, and there's nothing on the iPad yet that holds a candle to Illustrator, but people whose dayjob is writing text can do just fine on an iPad plus an Bluetooth keyboard. I do a lot of my email and web on my iPad these days.
I just installed a TV in my apartment for the first time in nearly a decade. Well, sort of. I got one of those pico projectors, made a little mounting bracket out of some scrap cardboard, and put a sheet up on the wall. After dark I get a pretty nice 4' wide image, suitable for kicking back on the couch and watching. (And for me, not having it usable during the day is a plus - otherwise there's a part of me that would go get a game system and spend weeks getting nothing done but acquiring achievements.)
But I suspect it's not a "TV" by the metrics this article's using, given that I feed it video from my iPad or my computer. Funny, that.
I think in the next decade or two, the "TV" will simply vanish. Especially when my tiny projector seems impossibly quaint because we can just roll out some e-paper or something...
Hell, my circles *leapt* enthusiastically onto G+, then were largely driven away because they're all prone to using Funny Names On The Internet. My G+ stream went from being a happening thing to a ghost town.
> The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.
This sentence is confusing. Is it trying to say that the A1000 was portable? Because I had one and I can assure you that it was not.
I've got Google Music and I quit trying to use it after I got a ton of errors uploading music from my computer. It's a nice idea but it didn't actually work for me in practice.
Let me try to be vaguely useful here, or at least vaguely thoughtful. The temptation to be sarcastic is strong but I think everyone's gotten all the good lines in already.
- If you like having access to information and media, consider the neighboring area: is there a decent bookstore nearby? video rental place? theatres? You won't have the Internet to get this stuff over. If you're in the burbs, consider moving in town where all this stuff will be much easier to find. - Your social life will quite possibly become sparser if your friends are accustomed to planning things over the net; you'll be out of the loop unless someone loves you enough to phone you and say "hey Anonymous Coward we're having a party on Sunday, wanna come". - Phonebooks will stop becoming something you throw away or leave forgotten on the doorstep for a month. - In general you will need to have room for More Stuff if you keep wanting new books/music/etc. The library can help with books but you're probably stuck accumulating more atoms for music.
I was recently deprived of Internet for most of a week when I went to a regional Burn - out of cel range, out of power for my phone. The only thing I really missed was not having map data for my phone's GPS, and that was just while we were going to the event. But this was a recreational, temporary thing, not a permanent lifestyle choice.
Evernote has clients for OSX, IOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, and the web. OCRs images you put in it. Syncs between your devices transparently. All clients are free but there's a max of like 60M/mo transfer; if you want to exceed that it's $45/year.
I haven't put alllll my data in it and probably never will but for reference material and general notes? It's kinda where everything goes now.
When's the last time you opened up the hood of your car to fix it? When's the last time you even had a desire to do this? Automobiles have matured from a rickety, unreliable technology that required their operators to be intimately familiar with their innards into something that you probably never really think about - you just get in it and go; you keep the tank full of gas, every now and then you top off a few other internal reservoirs of consumable fluid, and anything beyond that means you take it in for repairs.
There's a small minority of people who care about how cars work, who are interested in getting their hands dirty and tweaking the hell out of their cars. Most people are happy to just choose a color they like and maybe hang something from the rear-view mirror or put on a couple of stickers. These folks have "traded freedom for security". Because the freedom to, say, tweak the timing of their spark-plugs for maximum fuel efficiency is not a freedom they desire; what they want is a machine they can reliably use to get from point A to point B. Which has turned out to be another kind of freedom that completely changed the shape of society.
If you want the "freedom" to tinker with your car, you can find forums dedicated to it; you can get ahold of service manuals, you can get the tools needed to open it up and fuck around to your heart's desire. But you're no longer obligated to tinker with it just to drive across the city.
Because most people are not comfortable with the command line.
The App Store IS the same idea as apt-get: a small interface to a trusted repository that you can download all kinds of things from. But it's got a hell of a lot more time and love put into the user interface. The App store is apt-get for people who are not interested in the inner workings of their computer.
Are you uncomfortable with getting updates to your Android phone's OS from Google/the manufacturer/your carrier over the net? Are you uncomfortable with your 360 or PS3 getting system updates? It's the same principle.
I don't know if I'll be updating my Air to Lion by buying a tiny little USB drive or by hitting the App Store. I've found myself making jokes like "Removable storage? How quaint!" when being passed data on a USB drive, so it's quite possible that this will feel like a compelling option - do I really need to add to the collection of OSX DVDs gathering dust on my shelf? I've got more than enough atoms in my life. Keep digital data digital.
Ah, okay then, maybe he actually does have a beef here. Without any mention of the logs it really just sounded like he was assuming that it is entirely impossible for anyone at the newspaper to have the faintest clue about this very basic bit of Internet researching.
I read both his posts and the newspaper article; the only common point of data at the time I saw them was the result of a whois. His additional research into the headers of the image wasn't cited anywhere on the paper's site except in the comment he left on the article.
Why yes, obviously the only place the newspaper could have discovered this is your blog. Nobody involved in as non-technical field as the *press* could ever have heard of whois, or the many web interfaces to that command. You are right in assuming that you are the only person who was curious about this ad campaign to do even the most rudimentary amount of research.
Unless you have logs showing hits from IPs that resolve as being at the paper, I think Occam's Razor applies.
As long as the consoles are still the source of a significant return on the investment of running your game studio for a couple of years, they'll continue to be worth targeting. Piracy's a lot easier on computers than on consoles. And making games with this level of detail is going to get even more stupidly expensive.
Plus of course other factors like "some people prefer sitting on the couch with a gamepad to hunching in front of the computer with keyboard/mouse".
Overall it's very pretty, a good take on the current design trends while still remaining Slashdot - the shapes are largely the same, but it's been generally lightened up. I like it!
I might suggest either a slightly heavier font choice, changing the body copy to a paler grey, or making the background a very pale grey; it's a little too contrasty for easy reading right now IMHO.
It'd also be nice to see a maximum column width but I know most nerds still seem to scream bloody murder if text doesn't use every precious pixel of their widescreen monitor when they maximize their browser window. Having a nice bit of leading between the lines is very much appreciated; it makes it a lot easier to read everything!
Mostly this shows that the kind of people who like to play first-person shoot-em-ups prefer to play on a computer.
I wonder how much the sales numbers reflect this? Or are the kind of people who like to play FPSs also the kind of people who don't bother to pay for games they get a lot of enjoyment out of?
i wonder if there are java ides that automatically *fold away* all the declarations they autocomplete for you? just how succinct would java be if all of its automatically-generated-by-the-ide verbosity was also auto-hidden from you, until you decided to look under the hood?
is there an elegant language hidden beneath the layers of machine-generated noise in java?
Suddenly I am very glad that my habit when filling out PDFs is to download them, open them in Illustrator, make a new layer, and start putting down text. Sometimes I'll even move lines around on the form a little if needs be.
What with being more up on the activities of fan-fiction authors than the activities of the Erlang world (it's really a fine slicing of 'vaguely aware of' for both), I keep wanting to read "OTP" as "One True Pairing", and wonder who Erlang is supposed to be having an imagined relationship with.
I'm not sure I want to google for the real meaning of OTP in this context. I kinda like the mental images.
So let's say you bought a Windows box. Maybe you got it from HP. Maybe you got it from Dell. Maybe from Sony.
Who do you expect to provide you with a patch when someone discovers a new Windows vulnerability? Microsoft, right? If it's really serious it'll probably pop up in the next Patch Tuesday. If it's hyper-serious then it might come out three or four days after the vuln was announced.
That's not the way it works in the Android world, annoyingly enough. Imagine if the version of Windows loaded onto that HP machine was a special HP version, full of HP customizations like a proprietary HP window manager and a proprietary HP web browser. MS can't give you any patches because the HP customizations are a fork of MS's source; when MS does bugfixes, someone at HP has to take a diff of the new MS tree, merge it with the HP tree, and run it all through QA. Oh, and the store you bought it from? Some of them have their own variant source trees too, so the same machine bought from Best Buy rather than direct from HP has its own fork of the OS.
Now multiply this by a different fork for every damn model they sell. Oh, and because they only have so much money, HP/Dell/Sony/Best Buy/whoever typically only bother merging in the OS updates for computers they made in the last year. If you're lucky.
Oh, and some of them have implemented DRM that will trash your computer if you try to install vanilla MS Windows. And nobody makes the drivers for their custom hardware available anywhere outside of the binary blobs they distribute. Pretty much everyone except the hardcore nerds is just gonna be running whatever release of the OS came with their computer, or maybe the one update they got - even if they keep the machine for five years. Even if they want to try and update it.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that my iPad has gotten me reading again. I have done things like curl up all day with it reading a hefty book. Its single-tasking nature means it's only a distraction if the book is boring, in which case why am I reading it anyway? The web feels a lot closer when it's only a window away than when it's a few swipes away, to me.
I used to have an immense library; then I moved back home to New Orleans three days before Katrina and lost pretty much all of it. My current library is the stuff that had never made it out to me from my parent's home, and a few things I bought since - both new stuff and old favorites I just had to have. And it underwent a couple of ruthless cullings, too.
It's still a pleasure to sit down in the couch next to my bookshelves and read a physical book, but honestly, it's just as much a pleasure to read one on my iPad. I will be delighted when people start paying attention to the typography and layout of digital editions like they once did to real books; that's really the only thing I find lacking.
I don't WANT more physical books in my house. Unless they're something like the broadsheet-sized reproductions I have of "Little Nemo In Slumberland". Fiction is perfectly cool with being virtual, in my opinion. I'd basically stopped going to the bookstore, and thus stopped keeping up on new fiction, but having the Kindle software available on my pad and my phone means that I can easily acquire books anywhere.
Yeah, I really rue the day Adobe "refreshed their branding" by letting all the people they got when they bought Macromedia loose on every single product. At least they have made the abstract shapes less LOUD AND GARISH than CS1... but I'm still replacing AI and PS's icons with the last pre-CS ones every time I upgrade.
I have Illustrator running ALL THE TIME so the only time I ever see that damn orange thing is when I reboot my entire machine, which mostly happens when there's a system update. But still. Uuuglyyy.
If you have multiple Nests they'll talk to each other and share data. Plus, well, much simpler UI. People comparing it to things like the EcoBee and saying it loses because it has less features sound like CmdrTaco's infamous take on the iPod.
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
But ANYONE can figure it out in seconds. And it looks GOOD. And that counts for a LOT.
On the other hand... how many things do you see out there that you can drop an iPhone into, versus how many things you can drop an Android phone into? The huge number of different form factors of Android phones works against it here. You'll never find, say, a toy car that lets you plug your Android phone into it to work as a webcam so you can have a driver's-eye view. Lack of customization has its advantages.
iPad1s seems to run around $350-400. And will do surprising amounts of office work. I can't get my Real Work done on mine because I'm an artist, and there's nothing on the iPad yet that holds a candle to Illustrator, but people whose dayjob is writing text can do just fine on an iPad plus an Bluetooth keyboard. I do a lot of my email and web on my iPad these days.
I just installed a TV in my apartment for the first time in nearly a decade. Well, sort of. I got one of those pico projectors, made a little mounting bracket out of some scrap cardboard, and put a sheet up on the wall. After dark I get a pretty nice 4' wide image, suitable for kicking back on the couch and watching. (And for me, not having it usable during the day is a plus - otherwise there's a part of me that would go get a game system and spend weeks getting nothing done but acquiring achievements.)
But I suspect it's not a "TV" by the metrics this article's using, given that I feed it video from my iPad or my computer. Funny, that.
I think in the next decade or two, the "TV" will simply vanish. Especially when my tiny projector seems impossibly quaint because we can just roll out some e-paper or something...
Hell, my circles *leapt* enthusiastically onto G+, then were largely driven away because they're all prone to using Funny Names On The Internet. My G+ stream went from being a happening thing to a ghost town.
> The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.
This sentence is confusing. Is it trying to say that the A1000 was portable? Because I had one and I can assure you that it was not.
I've got Google Music and I quit trying to use it after I got a ton of errors uploading music from my computer. It's a nice idea but it didn't actually work for me in practice.
Let me try to be vaguely useful here, or at least vaguely thoughtful. The temptation to be sarcastic is strong but I think everyone's gotten all the good lines in already.
- If you like having access to information and media, consider the neighboring area: is there a decent bookstore nearby? video rental place? theatres? You won't have the Internet to get this stuff over. If you're in the burbs, consider moving in town where all this stuff will be much easier to find.
- Your social life will quite possibly become sparser if your friends are accustomed to planning things over the net; you'll be out of the loop unless someone loves you enough to phone you and say "hey Anonymous Coward we're having a party on Sunday, wanna come".
- Phonebooks will stop becoming something you throw away or leave forgotten on the doorstep for a month.
- In general you will need to have room for More Stuff if you keep wanting new books/music/etc. The library can help with books but you're probably stuck accumulating more atoms for music.
I was recently deprived of Internet for most of a week when I went to a regional Burn - out of cel range, out of power for my phone. The only thing I really missed was not having map data for my phone's GPS, and that was just while we were going to the event. But this was a recreational, temporary thing, not a permanent lifestyle choice.
You probably want to go read Thoreau. n.n
Offline mode is one of the things Evernote uses to distinguish the paid version from the free version
+1 iusethistoo
Evernote has clients for OSX, IOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, and the web. OCRs images you put in it. Syncs between your devices transparently. All clients are free but there's a max of like 60M/mo transfer; if you want to exceed that it's $45/year.
I haven't put alllll my data in it and probably never will but for reference material and general notes? It's kinda where everything goes now.
When's the last time you opened up the hood of your car to fix it? When's the last time you even had a desire to do this? Automobiles have matured from a rickety, unreliable technology that required their operators to be intimately familiar with their innards into something that you probably never really think about - you just get in it and go; you keep the tank full of gas, every now and then you top off a few other internal reservoirs of consumable fluid, and anything beyond that means you take it in for repairs.
There's a small minority of people who care about how cars work, who are interested in getting their hands dirty and tweaking the hell out of their cars. Most people are happy to just choose a color they like and maybe hang something from the rear-view mirror or put on a couple of stickers. These folks have "traded freedom for security". Because the freedom to, say, tweak the timing of their spark-plugs for maximum fuel efficiency is not a freedom they desire; what they want is a machine they can reliably use to get from point A to point B. Which has turned out to be another kind of freedom that completely changed the shape of society.
If you want the "freedom" to tinker with your car, you can find forums dedicated to it; you can get ahold of service manuals, you can get the tools needed to open it up and fuck around to your heart's desire. But you're no longer obligated to tinker with it just to drive across the city.
"And also, why don't they just use apt-get?"
Because most people are not comfortable with the command line.
The App Store IS the same idea as apt-get: a small interface to a trusted repository that you can download all kinds of things from. But it's got a hell of a lot more time and love put into the user interface. The App store is apt-get for people who are not interested in the inner workings of their computer.
Are you uncomfortable with getting updates to your Android phone's OS from Google/the manufacturer/your carrier over the net? Are you uncomfortable with your 360 or PS3 getting system updates? It's the same principle.
I don't know if I'll be updating my Air to Lion by buying a tiny little USB drive or by hitting the App Store. I've found myself making jokes like "Removable storage? How quaint!" when being passed data on a USB drive, so it's quite possible that this will feel like a compelling option - do I really need to add to the collection of OSX DVDs gathering dust on my shelf? I've got more than enough atoms in my life. Keep digital data digital.
Ah, okay then, maybe he actually does have a beef here. Without any mention of the logs it really just sounded like he was assuming that it is entirely impossible for anyone at the newspaper to have the faintest clue about this very basic bit of Internet researching.
I read both his posts and the newspaper article; the only common point of data at the time I saw them was the result of a whois. His additional research into the headers of the image wasn't cited anywhere on the paper's site except in the comment he left on the article.
Why yes, obviously the only place the newspaper could have discovered this is your blog. Nobody involved in as non-technical field as the *press* could ever have heard of whois, or the many web interfaces to that command. You are right in assuming that you are the only person who was curious about this ad campaign to do even the most rudimentary amount of research.
Unless you have logs showing hits from IPs that resolve as being at the paper, I think Occam's Razor applies.
As long as the consoles are still the source of a significant return on the investment of running your game studio for a couple of years, they'll continue to be worth targeting. Piracy's a lot easier on computers than on consoles. And making games with this level of detail is going to get even more stupidly expensive.
Plus of course other factors like "some people prefer sitting on the couch with a gamepad to hunching in front of the computer with keyboard/mouse".
Overall it's very pretty, a good take on the current design trends while still remaining Slashdot - the shapes are largely the same, but it's been generally lightened up. I like it!
I might suggest either a slightly heavier font choice, changing the body copy to a paler grey, or making the background a very pale grey; it's a little too contrasty for easy reading right now IMHO.
It'd also be nice to see a maximum column width but I know most nerds still seem to scream bloody murder if text doesn't use every precious pixel of their widescreen monitor when they maximize their browser window. Having a nice bit of leading between the lines is very much appreciated; it makes it a lot easier to read everything!
> everyone always told me macs were perfectly safe and never get viruses!
OH HAI WE PATCHED SOME 0DAY SPLOITZ B4 NE1 COULD P0WNZUS
Mostly this shows that the kind of people who like to play first-person shoot-em-ups prefer to play on a computer.
I wonder how much the sales numbers reflect this? Or are the kind of people who like to play FPSs also the kind of people who don't bother to pay for games they get a lot of enjoyment out of?
i wonder if there are java ides that automatically *fold away* all the declarations they autocomplete for you? just how succinct would java be if all of its automatically-generated-by-the-ide verbosity was also auto-hidden from you, until you decided to look under the hood?
is there an elegant language hidden beneath the layers of machine-generated noise in java?
http://gigaom.com/video/vlc-for-android-coming-soon/
Not that there's much to it.
Suddenly I am very glad that my habit when filling out PDFs is to download them, open them in Illustrator, make a new layer, and start putting down text. Sometimes I'll even move lines around on the form a little if needs be.
Sadly, most people don't have this capability.
What with being more up on the activities of fan-fiction authors than the activities of the Erlang world (it's really a fine slicing of 'vaguely aware of' for both), I keep wanting to read "OTP" as "One True Pairing", and wonder who Erlang is supposed to be having an imagined relationship with.
I'm not sure I want to google for the real meaning of OTP in this context. I kinda like the mental images.
So let's say you bought a Windows box. Maybe you got it from HP. Maybe you got it from Dell. Maybe from Sony.
Who do you expect to provide you with a patch when someone discovers a new Windows vulnerability? Microsoft, right? If it's really serious it'll probably pop up in the next Patch Tuesday. If it's hyper-serious then it might come out three or four days after the vuln was announced.
That's not the way it works in the Android world, annoyingly enough. Imagine if the version of Windows loaded onto that HP machine was a special HP version, full of HP customizations like a proprietary HP window manager and a proprietary HP web browser. MS can't give you any patches because the HP customizations are a fork of MS's source; when MS does bugfixes, someone at HP has to take a diff of the new MS tree, merge it with the HP tree, and run it all through QA. Oh, and the store you bought it from? Some of them have their own variant source trees too, so the same machine bought from Best Buy rather than direct from HP has its own fork of the OS.
Now multiply this by a different fork for every damn model they sell. Oh, and because they only have so much money, HP/Dell/Sony/Best Buy/whoever typically only bother merging in the OS updates for computers they made in the last year. If you're lucky.
Oh, and some of them have implemented DRM that will trash your computer if you try to install vanilla MS Windows. And nobody makes the drivers for their custom hardware available anywhere outside of the binary blobs they distribute. Pretty much everyone except the hardcore nerds is just gonna be running whatever release of the OS came with their computer, or maybe the one update they got - even if they keep the machine for five years. Even if they want to try and update it.
So tell me, why is this a problem?