Also if you are claiming openoffice is unusuable on tablet then I assume the only reason is the lack of KB and mouse, since I use OO plenty comfortably on a 10.1" netbook, and I think the transformer solves that issue rather neatly.
Yes, and its a big reason. Apart from the gross differences (losing half your screen to an on-screen keyboard, the loss of precision of fingers c.f. a mouse requiring everything to be bigger - eating more screen real estate) the "language" of using a touchscreen is significantly different from that of a mouse, or even a trackpad with gestures (e.g. no concept of clicking, or moving the pointer without clicking vs. dragging). Maybe "unusable" is too strong, but definitely inferior to using an application in the medium for which it was designed.
I think the transformer solves that issue rather neatly.
Except you're paying a considerable premium over a netbook for the ability to leave the keyboard behind when you don't need it. If you are primarily using traditional applications, that keyboard is going to be a permanent fixture and the overall ergonomics of a netbook may be better. Maybe you'll get better battery life using "tablet" technology (assuming your "regular" Linux distro doesn't bork the power management on your tablet).
To be fair - I agree that the Asus Transformer is about the only non-iPad tablet that interests me.
Seriously - the best system for running an OS and applications designed for a reasonable sized screen, physical keyboard and pointing device is one with... a decent-sized screen, physical keyboard and pointing device. Conversely, if you want a truly handheld device with no keyboard and a touch screen, you want a system and apps designed specifically for that environment.
That's one of the reasons why the iPad succeeded and previous Windows-running tablets didn't. I got an iPad because I was finding my iPod touch and Android phone very useful for certain things and could see a use for a larger version, not because I wanted a replacement for my "proper" computers.
OpenOffice would be hell on a tablet - I'm sure you could get it running, but its just not designed to be usable in that mode.
A MythTV front end for tablets would be terrific - if the UI were re-designed for touch operation: currently its really designed for a remote control or keyboard. Of course, you'd also have to worry about which video formats enjoyed hardware acceleration since your tablet CPU might not be up to software-only decoding (some existing solutions transcode stuff on the server side so the tablet can run them).
So, I guess the Asus Transformer sounds like a contender - but the whole point of that is that you can always disconnect it from the keyboard and use it handheld: if most of your software is going to require the keyboard then why not save your cash and get a netbook?
Since it would only take one slightly more advanced species (with a desire to make their presence known or spread some kind of message) to launch a self-replicating probe capable of visiting every star in the galaxy in a relatively short period, then I have to assume that either those probes are being intercepted, or that sentient life is indeed exceedingly rare (no more than a handful of races per galaxy).
Make that "no more than a handful of races bloody stupid enough to let loose a device capable of unlimited self-replication, and lucky enough to have perfected reliable space travel before transforming their planet into grey goo".
Or as the author Greg Egan put it "it's what bacteria with spaceships would do".
Me, I'd at least put in a "terminator gene" so it stopped or slowed down to "linear" expansion after a few generations - I mean, there's only so much data you can process!
The flower children may be naive in thinking that any race sufficiently advanced to develop interstellar travel must be above war and violence, but I'd wager that a certain amount of ecological understanding is a prerequisite": If you want "manned" travel you'll need to be able to create stable, closed ecosystems for the long voyage, and even for robot probes you'll be looking to ecology as a source of inspiration for any sort of sustainable, self-regulating, system. Heck, if we survive the current financial shitstorm without regressing to the stone age it will be because people have learned that exponential growth is unsustainable. Of course, if you can build a "generation ship" that can survive for years in interstellar space then its much easier, and more productive, to fill your system and its near neighbors (where there is energy and raw material available) with space habitats.
The other solution to the "Fermi Paradox" is that the aliens have passed us by ("Look at the size of that moon, Kodos - no life could have survived those devastating tidal effects, and with that magnetic field deflecting cosmic rays the mutation rate is obviously too low for evolution") or we haven't noticed.
Bacteria/viruses would be an obvious basis for a self-replicating probe (why re-invent the wheel?) so maybe you made First Contact last week, but got better after plenty of fluids and a couple of paracetamol?
The "panspermia" theory (a long way from proven, but also hard to disprove) would also be a neat resolution to Fermi.
Finally, it could be just that, in the evolution of the galaxy, about now is the the time when spacefaring civilizations tend to emerge. We're just waiting for the first man-made object to make it out of the solar system - but even Voyager is going to take aeons to cover the distance to the nearest star (not that its headed in that direction). Maybe we're not far behind the game. We might have a few years to wait before even the aliens with technology 1000 years ahead of us actually get here.
There are all sorts of possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox, only one of which is "there are no ETs". We don't have the data to decide which is correct.
Can someone please explain why we are "fixing" something that doesn't seem to be broken at all?
My theory about Linux desktops is that no capable Linux developer actually uses a GUI for their day-to-day work. The requirements for a desktop have long been:
1) Can launch bash and vim
2) Looks like the current coolest thing (used to be NeXTStep, then OS X, now iOS).
After all, bash (or your alternative CLI shell of choice) is the most powerful and flexible way of controlling a computer ever devised. Developers like vi because it is based on the paradigm of issuing logical commands that transform a set of data, rather than the awful touchy-feely appoach of visually interacting with the text. GUI Perfection is a translucent vim window hovering over a nice picture from the Hubble.
Gnome 3/Unity aren't there to be used - they're there to be looked at and to embody certain academic theories about GUI design.
However the practical vocabulary needs of the interface then forced him to add the concept of using meta-keys on the keyboard to modify mouse clicks.
The long-term payoff of Jobs' decision is that, even today, the majority of actions in Mac software can be performed with a single button. Meta-keys and right-clicks tend to be "shortcuts" for actions that can be done from the main menu. Most of the long-term, low-tech Mac users I work with look bemused if I ctrl-click to pop up a context menu.
The exceptions are if you want to copy rather than move files (but most people seem to cope: you can always duplicate + move or copy + paste... my experience is that low-end windows users are even less capable of copying files). Plus, even I was thrown by one option in the Lion Server app* that only appeared on a right-click context menu, because my experience was that Apple just didn't do that.
(* The train wreck that is Lion Server is proof that, in hell, Linux developers write the applications and Apple developers write the servers).
I am not sure which VM you are using, but Gnome Shell has been available under VirtualBox for a while now.
Gnome 3 and Unity depend on Compiz and 3D acceleration - when I've tried them on VirtualBox (on Mac) they've been unusably glitchy (just like Windows Aero Glass). This also means that you have to install the guest tools before the default desktop on recent distros will work - not insurmountable, but messy.
The latest version of Parallels Desktop seems to cope OK with Unity - but in the past I'd only have recommended paying for Parallels (& its interminable paid updates) for people who primarily wanted the (good) Windows integration - VirtualBox used to be much better for Linux.
I have repeated this to my kids numerous times: a person can go from good looking to ugly in the time it takes them to open their mouths...
OMG! OMG! Are you saying my teeth are crooked!? Daddy, I want them whitened!!! OMG! Its all your fault for not having proper dental when I was six. I HATE YOU!!!!
In other news, atheism is a religion and baldness is a hairdo.
Well, if my employer tried to fire me just because I was an atheist I'd expect to be protected by the same laws that (in many countries) say you can't fire someone for being a Muslim or a Christian.
...and if someone made a TV show featuring a bald starship captain with a French name and a Yorkshire accent, or a bald maverick cop who ate lolipops, they'd probably be, at leased, accused of unoriginality.
In other news, ISTR John Cage sucessfully forced Mike Batt to settle over his 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
The problem with these patents is that they rely on trying to describe in unambiguous words what is actually a subjective visual judgement, so you get these lists of attributes that sound ridiculous. All you can really do is get a jury, show them a representative selection of tablets/phones and ask whether any look as if they were copied from the iPad.
Xerox were "kindly" allowed to buy apple stock in return for letting apple engineers visit their research centre. Apple never directly paid for any of the innovations they used.
For fsck's sake - we're talking about Xerox here, not some naive Mom & Pop corner shop that the slick businessmen from Apple could con into selling their shop for a handful of shiny beads. An outfit like Xerox should have the nous to check whether oil had been discovered on the site or the new interstate was likely to be built next door. Xerox willingly did a deal with Apple, and they're big enough and ugly enough to eat the consequences. Fair play to Apple.
Apple wastes a gazillion dollars trying to get the Galaxy tablet banned, and fail... only to find out later that Samsung kills the product themselves due to slow sales, a la HP Touchpad and RIM whatever
In that case, as long as Apple have already done enough to postpone the Touchpad-esque below-cost firesale until after Christmas, or maybe even until the iPad 3 appears, they can probably chalk up a net win.
Since upgrading to iOS 5 (i.e. 2 major version upgrades from its original OS) I've noticed my iPad 1 becoming a bit sluggish - but not to the point of seriously spoiling the experience... and we're talking about an 18-month old tablet which is like, wow, 10 years old in dog years:-)
And thats without any other apps lingering in the background...
That's what you get when you listen to the Fandroids and allow 3rd Party Apps to multitask.
Not have a flat front? Not be rectangular? Not use black?
Remember - those are ANDs not ORs... or, at least, you need a 'critical mass' of those attributes to infringe.
I've had 4 cellphones (not a great cellphone person!).
Only one of them was black.
Only two of them were rectangular (i.e. 4 straight edges) and while they had rounded-off corners they were much less pronounced than on an iDevice.
None of them had a flat front (and definitely not flat in the iPhone "single sheet of glass" sense), two had soapbar-style bevelled edges and one of them has the "chin" which featured on the first few generations of Android phone.
The Kindle 3 doesn't break Apple's rules (its a rectangle with rounded corners, but the bezel is gently curved and its grey, not black), the ASUS transformer doesn't (front has bevelled edges - not flat, bezel isn't uniform) and plenty of other manufacturers past an present have managed to make phones, ereaders and tablets that don't look like iDevices.
I think Apple is going to remove root access [matthewblo.ch] from the Mac in one or two more OS X updates
Requiring "sandboxing" for App Store apps (which is what the blog you cited was about) has got nothing to do with removing root/admin access. It is to do with making it safe to allow non-privileged users to install Apps from the App Store. So, as an admin you can allow your kids/students/teachers/workers to install software from the App store without giving them root access.
Sure, its not impossible that Apple could try to lock down iOS, but its not the inevitable consequence of sandboxing and the App Store.
I think you're missing the point. ARM clearly lost to x86 in terms of the PC and I think it's fair to contend that they would have become a footnote in computing if not for the capabilities they developed while working with Apple
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove - nobody is disputing that Apple's investment in ARM was important, but Apple didn't magically transform the ARM into a low-power chip: it was low-power from birth because it achieved better performance than an x86 with a fraction of the number of transistors and Acorn had already developed a static logic version (one of Newton's requirements) of the ARM2 for handheld devices.
ARM would be just as much a footnote if they'd relied on Newton for their continued success.
That's why ARM have the advantage now - their system is low power from the ground up, while Intel are desperately trying to re-engineer the more complex x86 architecture for low power applications.
2 MHz was not all that remarkably fast for its today - the competing ZX Spectrum ran at 3.5 MHz. Although to be fair the 6502 does more per cycle than the Z80.
As others have pointed out, you can't compare 6502 clock speeds with Z80 clock speeds - Z80s had always been clocked at ~70% faster than comparable 6502 systems.
Most previous 6502 systems - PET, Apple II etc. - had 1MHz clocks. According to Wikipedia, the C64 only had a ~1MHz clock (regional variations).
The 6502 second processor for the BBC ran at 3MHz. Smokin'!
The current ARM has little to do with the BBC micro. Apple purchased a stake in Acorn with the goal of getting them to FAB a low powered CPU to power the Newton.
...except that if the 6502 BBC micro hadn't happened, Acorn wouldn't have developed the ARM2/3 to use in the next gen BBC Micro and there wouldn't have been anything for Apple to buy in to. It may have evolved since then, but Apple sure as hell didn't invent the ARM.
The first ARM-based machines were the ARM2-powered Acorn Archimedes range, released in 1987, the entry level model of which was still branded as "BBC Micro". At the time, they kicked sand in the face of 80286-based machines. The Newton didn't appear until much later.
Cheekily, in 1994, Apple touted their new PowerPC-based Macs as the first RISC-based personal computers.
Although to be fair the 6502 does more per cycle than the Z80.
Yeah - the 6502 vs. Z80 debate was very much parallel to the later RISC vs. CISC debate. No great surprise that the 6502 was a major inspiration behind the ARM.
Was the Beeb available before the Apple ][ ? Was it more or less expensive in the UK?
I get the feeling that the BBC Micro enjoyed a kind of tax protected status, the way American made pickup trucks do in the US.
The BBC came quite a while after the Apple II - if you've been following the 30th Birthday announcements, its actually younger than the IBM PC (...of course, the IBM was eye-wateringly expensive for a few years, until the Clone Wars began).
I've programmed both and, generally, the BBC was considerably more powerful than the Apple.
It had a (much) better BASIC with 'structured programming' facilities (Repeat/Until loops, multiline if/then/else named procedures), a built-in 6502 assembler (so you could use BASIC as a macro language) and neat indirection facilities for working with bytes/words/strings in memory. Unusually for "home" computers of the time it had a 'proper' operating system, quite separate from BASIC - the BASIC ROM lived in a paged memory space alongside applications such as wordprocessors and other utility ROMs such as the disc filing system (popular BBC expansions included extra ROM sockets for applications or 'sideways RAM' for use as a RAMdisk or to let you develop your own ROMs).
The graphics were much better (but with a caveat) than the competition - 160x256 in 8 colours, 320x256 in 4 colours or a TV-tousing 640x256 in monochrome. Also, those colour modes were fully bit-mapped c.f. the attribute-based solutions on other systems (where you could e.g. only have 2 colours in each 8x8 cell, or on the Apple where you could only plot white by plotting a magenta pixel next to a green pixel). There was a proper palette system (so you could do fast animation by palette switching - only TTL though so its always the same 8 colours) and 'hardware' scrolling by tweaking the memory mapping (which could also pull tricks like changing display mode half-way down the screen, as used in Elite). The caveat was that the RAM was shared between data and video - so the higher modes used 20K out of your 32K. Although aftermarket upgrades appeared that added a 20K page to replace the video RAM (which worked seamlessly provided that the application used the correct OS calls rather than poking things directly) Acorn took their own sweet time before building that feature into later models.
It also had a shedload of internal hardware: a Teletext-compatible character generator chip for low-memory, high-quality TV friendly 40 col text & block graphics (without eating your RAM); a 'proper' sound generator chip; analogue inputs (not audio frequency, but great for proper joysticks and school science experiments) and a 'user port' which made about half of a 6522 VIA chip available for digital I/O, a serial port, parallel port, proprietary expansion port & vacant sockets on-board for a floppy controller and 'econet' LAN... Plus a really decent keyboard (the kind with discrete key-switches for each key). Then there was Acorn's 'Tube' interface, which allowed you to hang off a 'second processor': i.e. a headless 6502, Z80 or (later) 32016-based computer that used the BBC as an I/O processor. (Of course, the really interesting one was the ARM second processor, but AFAIK that was never publicly available).
The Apple's advantages were (a) software base (but the BBC accumulated quite a big software base in the UK) and (b) internal expansion (the BBC had lots of expansion potential but it was either via external interfaces or slightly kludey piggyback boards). I think there were more options for upgrading an Apple 2 to '64K clean' RAM configuration.
However, If you got the BBC 6502 second processor (a 4MHz 6502 with 64k RAM, with the original BBC handling all the I/O) then anything else with 8 bits (and quite a few things with 16) could eat your dust... unfortunately the price of that hampered adoption and, hence, software support (although you could play the definitive version of Elite).
Maybe in a few years, we'll be at the point that you can write out a paragraph of instructions and have a computer parse it into a script that can be run.
Except that its not that easy to write a paragraph of instructions in 'natural language' that unambiguously describes a task. Lawyers make a lot of money pretending they can do it; mathematicians usually resort to specialist notation as soon as they get serious - neither profession has ever been accused of using 'natural language':-) Any non-trivial example is likely to end up reading like an ISO standard document or a software EULA.
From what I've heard of Siri, it seems to work well within a limited universe of discourse: search the web and cross-reference with your calendar and contact list. However, I'm sure the websites dedicated to "Siri mistakes" will soon be bulging...
there probably wasn't enough actual interest to warrant development.
Nor was there enough interest to enable any of the similar products from third parties to take off in a big way. AFAIK some of these are still going, but they haven't set the world alight. Actually, the closest thing to Hypercard that is a Big Thing is probably Flash - which has the huge advantage that it runs across multiple platforms.
Hypercard was an incarnation of the Rapid Application Development Myth - very quick to knock up an impressive-looking GUI, but much harder to produce a finished application that works "just so". Like all RAD systems, the danger is that the last 10% of the work doesn't just take the usual 90% of the time, it takes forever because you hit the limits of the system, and you end up having to re-write in a proper programming language.
These things are actually aimed at a fairly narrow niche between users who don't want to develop anything, and programmers who'd rather use full-grown developer tools.
Also, some of Hypercard's role has been taken over by (a) Flash (as noted above) and (b) the Web (either via lovingly hand-crafted HTML or user-friendly HTML creators). On OS X, there's Dashcode, as well as Automator and Apple Script.
(Plus, I hate languages like AppleScript that try to use 'natural language'... natural language wasn't designed for programming, so why try?)
A ban on phones with non-removable batteries may be necessary. You can carry the phone on board, but the battery has to go in a plastic bag in luggage.
....but then passengers will start spontaneously combusting because they can't call people up to say "I've just landed" the millisecond the seatbelt sign goes off. When you tried to pick up your luggage you wouldn't be able to get near the carousel because of a crowd of numpties rummaging in their suitcases to find batteries and then standing around making calls (with the total disconnection from the surrounding environment that entails).
...or maybe they do, but when an Acme MP-5147/Z (T) goes phut on a plane it doesn't make the tech blogs. Apple's high media profile is a two-edged sword.
What advantage does this offer that could justify the upper bound on pricing? Is there anything that could justify a 4K price? or is this just a novel idea thing?
$4k vs. $30k probably depends whether they lovingly hand-craft 10 units or get a sweatshop to knock them out in quantity.
$4k would be low enough for some gadget freaks (i.e. the ones with $5k hi-fis and $10k tellys) with more money than sense to buy them for fun.
$30k might be low enough for research teams with an end-of-year surplus to get one in order to investigate your first question.
I'm sure that they'll want one on CSI but they're fictitious so its probably cheaper and more convincing to mock one up with CGI in post-production.
Super-villains will want the 20' x 20' de-luxe model to explain their world domination plans in terms that even an over-sexed British spy or Austrian ex-bodybuilder can understand - that will cost more than $30k but (a) Super-villains never pay, they just murder the creator and (b) see 'CSI' above.
Sure, unless anyone else is wearing polarized sunglasses in the vicinity.
Yup. What you need is to hack one of the 3D systems that uses active LCD shutter glasses.
The screen would rapidly alternate between showing the actual image and a screen full of dazzling random hash. The shutter glasses, synced to the monitor would block out the hash and allow the user to see the image. Use a sync cable rather than some optical system, let the frequency wander randomly a bit and include some rogue flickering with the hash to make it hard for a bystander with active glasses to get in sync.
Slashdot Mirror
Also if you are claiming openoffice is unusuable on tablet then I assume the only reason is the lack of KB and mouse, since I use OO plenty comfortably on a 10.1" netbook, and I think the transformer solves that issue rather neatly.
Yes, and its a big reason. Apart from the gross differences (losing half your screen to an on-screen keyboard, the loss of precision of fingers c.f. a mouse requiring everything to be bigger - eating more screen real estate) the "language" of using a touchscreen is significantly different from that of a mouse, or even a trackpad with gestures (e.g. no concept of clicking, or moving the pointer without clicking vs. dragging). Maybe "unusable" is too strong, but definitely inferior to using an application in the medium for which it was designed.
I think the transformer solves that issue rather neatly.
Except you're paying a considerable premium over a netbook for the ability to leave the keyboard behind when you don't need it. If you are primarily using traditional applications, that keyboard is going to be a permanent fixture and the overall ergonomics of a netbook may be better. Maybe you'll get better battery life using "tablet" technology (assuming your "regular" Linux distro doesn't bork the power management on your tablet).
To be fair - I agree that the Asus Transformer is about the only non-iPad tablet that interests me.
Seriously - the best system for running an OS and applications designed for a reasonable sized screen, physical keyboard and pointing device is one with... a decent-sized screen, physical keyboard and pointing device. Conversely, if you want a truly handheld device with no keyboard and a touch screen, you want a system and apps designed specifically for that environment.
That's one of the reasons why the iPad succeeded and previous Windows-running tablets didn't. I got an iPad because I was finding my iPod touch and Android phone very useful for certain things and could see a use for a larger version, not because I wanted a replacement for my "proper" computers.
OpenOffice would be hell on a tablet - I'm sure you could get it running, but its just not designed to be usable in that mode.
A MythTV front end for tablets would be terrific - if the UI were re-designed for touch operation: currently its really designed for a remote control or keyboard. Of course, you'd also have to worry about which video formats enjoyed hardware acceleration since your tablet CPU might not be up to software-only decoding (some existing solutions transcode stuff on the server side so the tablet can run them).
So, I guess the Asus Transformer sounds like a contender - but the whole point of that is that you can always disconnect it from the keyboard and use it handheld: if most of your software is going to require the keyboard then why not save your cash and get a netbook?
Since it would only take one slightly more advanced species (with a desire to make their presence known or spread some kind of message) to launch a self-replicating probe capable of visiting every star in the galaxy in a relatively short period, then I have to assume that either those probes are being intercepted, or that sentient life is indeed exceedingly rare (no more than a handful of races per galaxy).
Make that "no more than a handful of races bloody stupid enough to let loose a device capable of unlimited self-replication, and lucky enough to have perfected reliable space travel before transforming their planet into grey goo".
Or as the author Greg Egan put it "it's what bacteria with spaceships would do".
Me, I'd at least put in a "terminator gene" so it stopped or slowed down to "linear" expansion after a few generations - I mean, there's only so much data you can process!
The flower children may be naive in thinking that any race sufficiently advanced to develop interstellar travel must be above war and violence, but I'd wager that a certain amount of ecological understanding is a prerequisite": If you want "manned" travel you'll need to be able to create stable, closed ecosystems for the long voyage, and even for robot probes you'll be looking to ecology as a source of inspiration for any sort of sustainable, self-regulating, system. Heck, if we survive the current financial shitstorm without regressing to the stone age it will be because people have learned that exponential growth is unsustainable. Of course, if you can build a "generation ship" that can survive for years in interstellar space then its much easier, and more productive, to fill your system and its near neighbors (where there is energy and raw material available) with space habitats.
The other solution to the "Fermi Paradox" is that the aliens have passed us by ("Look at the size of that moon, Kodos - no life could have survived those devastating tidal effects, and with that magnetic field deflecting cosmic rays the mutation rate is obviously too low for evolution") or we haven't noticed.
Bacteria/viruses would be an obvious basis for a self-replicating probe (why re-invent the wheel?) so maybe you made First Contact last week, but got better after plenty of fluids and a couple of paracetamol?
The "panspermia" theory (a long way from proven, but also hard to disprove) would also be a neat resolution to Fermi.
Finally, it could be just that, in the evolution of the galaxy, about now is the the time when spacefaring civilizations tend to emerge. We're just waiting for the first man-made object to make it out of the solar system - but even Voyager is going to take aeons to cover the distance to the nearest star (not that its headed in that direction). Maybe we're not far behind the game. We might have a few years to wait before even the aliens with technology 1000 years ahead of us actually get here.
There are all sorts of possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox, only one of which is "there are no ETs". We don't have the data to decide which is correct.
Can someone please explain why we are "fixing" something that doesn't seem to be broken at all?
My theory about Linux desktops is that no capable Linux developer actually uses a GUI for their day-to-day work. The requirements for a desktop have long been:
1) Can launch bash and vim
2) Looks like the current coolest thing (used to be NeXTStep, then OS X, now iOS).
After all, bash (or your alternative CLI shell of choice) is the most powerful and flexible way of controlling a computer ever devised. Developers like vi because it is based on the paradigm of issuing logical commands that transform a set of data, rather than the awful touchy-feely appoach of visually interacting with the text. GUI Perfection is a translucent vim window hovering over a nice picture from the Hubble.
Gnome 3/Unity aren't there to be used - they're there to be looked at and to embody certain academic theories about GUI design.
However the practical vocabulary needs of the interface then forced him to add the concept of using meta-keys on the keyboard to modify mouse clicks.
The long-term payoff of Jobs' decision is that, even today, the majority of actions in Mac software can be performed with a single button. Meta-keys and right-clicks tend to be "shortcuts" for actions that can be done from the main menu. Most of the long-term, low-tech Mac users I work with look bemused if I ctrl-click to pop up a context menu.
The exceptions are if you want to copy rather than move files (but most people seem to cope: you can always duplicate + move or copy + paste... my experience is that low-end windows users are even less capable of copying files). Plus, even I was thrown by one option in the Lion Server app* that only appeared on a right-click context menu, because my experience was that Apple just didn't do that.
(* The train wreck that is Lion Server is proof that, in hell, Linux developers write the applications and Apple developers write the servers).
I am not sure which VM you are using, but Gnome Shell has been available under VirtualBox for a while now.
Gnome 3 and Unity depend on Compiz and 3D acceleration - when I've tried them on VirtualBox (on Mac) they've been unusably glitchy (just like Windows Aero Glass). This also means that you have to install the guest tools before the default desktop on recent distros will work - not insurmountable, but messy.
The latest version of Parallels Desktop seems to cope OK with Unity - but in the past I'd only have recommended paying for Parallels (& its interminable paid updates) for people who primarily wanted the (good) Windows integration - VirtualBox used to be much better for Linux.
I have repeated this to my kids numerous times: a person can go from good looking to ugly in the time it takes them to open their mouths...
OMG! OMG! Are you saying my teeth are crooked!? Daddy, I want them whitened!!! OMG! Its all your fault for not having proper dental when I was six. I HATE YOU!!!!
In other news, atheism is a religion and baldness is a hairdo.
Well, if my employer tried to fire me just because I was an atheist I'd expect to be protected by the same laws that (in many countries) say you can't fire someone for being a Muslim or a Christian.
...and if someone made a TV show featuring a bald starship captain with a French name and a Yorkshire accent, or a bald maverick cop who ate lolipops, they'd probably be, at leased, accused of unoriginality.
In other news, ISTR John Cage sucessfully forced Mike Batt to settle over his 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
The problem with these patents is that they rely on trying to describe in unambiguous words what is actually a subjective visual judgement, so you get these lists of attributes that sound ridiculous. All you can really do is get a jury, show them a representative selection of tablets/phones and ask whether any look as if they were copied from the iPad.
Xerox were "kindly" allowed to buy apple stock in return for letting apple engineers visit their research centre. Apple never directly paid for any of the innovations they used.
For fsck's sake - we're talking about Xerox here, not some naive Mom & Pop corner shop that the slick businessmen from Apple could con into selling their shop for a handful of shiny beads. An outfit like Xerox should have the nous to check whether oil had been discovered on the site or the new interstate was likely to be built next door. Xerox willingly did a deal with Apple, and they're big enough and ugly enough to eat the consequences. Fair play to Apple.
Apple wastes a gazillion dollars trying to get the Galaxy tablet banned, and fail... only to find out later that Samsung kills the product themselves due to slow sales, a la HP Touchpad and RIM whatever
In that case, as long as Apple have already done enough to postpone the Touchpad-esque below-cost firesale until after Christmas, or maybe even until the iPad 3 appears, they can probably chalk up a net win.
The iPad can definitely be sluggish
Since upgrading to iOS 5 (i.e. 2 major version upgrades from its original OS) I've noticed my iPad 1 becoming a bit sluggish - but not to the point of seriously spoiling the experience... and we're talking about an 18-month old tablet which is like, wow, 10 years old in dog years :-)
And thats without any other apps lingering in the background...
That's what you get when you listen to the Fandroids and allow 3rd Party Apps to multitask.
Not have a flat front? Not be rectangular? Not use black?
Remember - those are ANDs not ORs... or, at least, you need a 'critical mass' of those attributes to infringe.
I've had 4 cellphones (not a great cellphone person!).
Only one of them was black.
Only two of them were rectangular (i.e. 4 straight edges) and while they had rounded-off corners they were much less pronounced than on an iDevice.
None of them had a flat front (and definitely not flat in the iPhone "single sheet of glass" sense), two had soapbar-style bevelled edges and one of them has the "chin" which featured on the first few generations of Android phone.
The Kindle 3 doesn't break Apple's rules (its a rectangle with rounded corners, but the bezel is gently curved and its grey, not black), the ASUS transformer doesn't (front has bevelled edges - not flat, bezel isn't uniform) and plenty of other manufacturers past an present have managed to make phones, ereaders and tablets that don't look like iDevices.
I think Apple is going to remove root access [matthewblo.ch] from the Mac in one or two more OS X updates
Requiring "sandboxing" for App Store apps (which is what the blog you cited was about) has got nothing to do with removing root/admin access. It is to do with making it safe to allow non-privileged users to install Apps from the App Store. So, as an admin you can allow your kids/students/teachers/workers to install software from the App store without giving them root access.
Sure, its not impossible that Apple could try to lock down iOS, but its not the inevitable consequence of sandboxing and the App Store.
I think you're missing the point. ARM clearly lost to x86 in terms of the PC and I think it's fair to contend that they would have become a footnote in computing if not for the capabilities they developed while working with Apple
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove - nobody is disputing that Apple's investment in ARM was important, but Apple didn't magically transform the ARM into a low-power chip: it was low-power from birth because it achieved better performance than an x86 with a fraction of the number of transistors and Acorn had already developed a static logic version (one of Newton's requirements) of the ARM2 for handheld devices.
ARM would be just as much a footnote if they'd relied on Newton for their continued success.
That's why ARM have the advantage now - their system is low power from the ground up, while Intel are desperately trying to re-engineer the more complex x86 architecture for low power applications.
2 MHz was not all that remarkably fast for its today - the competing ZX Spectrum ran at 3.5 MHz. Although to be fair the 6502 does more per cycle than the Z80.
As others have pointed out, you can't compare 6502 clock speeds with Z80 clock speeds - Z80s had always been clocked at ~70% faster than comparable 6502 systems.
Most previous 6502 systems - PET, Apple II etc. - had 1MHz clocks. According to Wikipedia, the C64 only had a ~1MHz clock (regional variations).
The 6502 second processor for the BBC ran at 3MHz. Smokin'!
The current ARM has little to do with the BBC micro. Apple purchased a stake in Acorn with the goal of getting them to FAB a low powered CPU to power the Newton.
...except that if the 6502 BBC micro hadn't happened, Acorn wouldn't have developed the ARM2/3 to use in the next gen BBC Micro and there wouldn't have been anything for Apple to buy in to. It may have evolved since then, but Apple sure as hell didn't invent the ARM.
The first ARM-based machines were the ARM2-powered Acorn Archimedes range, released in 1987, the entry level model of which was still branded as "BBC Micro". At the time, they kicked sand in the face of 80286-based machines. The Newton didn't appear until much later.
Cheekily, in 1994, Apple touted their new PowerPC-based Macs as the first RISC-based personal computers.
Although to be fair the 6502 does more per cycle than the Z80.
Yeah - the 6502 vs. Z80 debate was very much parallel to the later RISC vs. CISC debate. No great surprise that the 6502 was a major inspiration behind the ARM.
Was the Beeb available before the Apple ][ ? Was it more or less expensive in the UK?
I get the feeling that the BBC Micro enjoyed a kind of tax protected status, the way American made pickup trucks do in the US.
The BBC came quite a while after the Apple II - if you've been following the 30th Birthday announcements, its actually younger than the IBM PC (...of course, the IBM was eye-wateringly expensive for a few years, until the Clone Wars began).
I've programmed both and, generally, the BBC was considerably more powerful than the Apple.
It had a (much) better BASIC with 'structured programming' facilities (Repeat/Until loops, multiline if/then/else named procedures), a built-in 6502 assembler (so you could use BASIC as a macro language) and neat indirection facilities for working with bytes/words/strings in memory. Unusually for "home" computers of the time it had a 'proper' operating system, quite separate from BASIC - the BASIC ROM lived in a paged memory space alongside applications such as wordprocessors and other utility ROMs such as the disc filing system (popular BBC expansions included extra ROM sockets for applications or 'sideways RAM' for use as a RAMdisk or to let you develop your own ROMs).
The graphics were much better (but with a caveat) than the competition - 160x256 in 8 colours, 320x256 in 4 colours or a TV-tousing 640x256 in monochrome. Also, those colour modes were fully bit-mapped c.f. the attribute-based solutions on other systems (where you could e.g. only have 2 colours in each 8x8 cell, or on the Apple where you could only plot white by plotting a magenta pixel next to a green pixel). There was a proper palette system (so you could do fast animation by palette switching - only TTL though so its always the same 8 colours) and 'hardware' scrolling by tweaking the memory mapping (which could also pull tricks like changing display mode half-way down the screen, as used in Elite). The caveat was that the RAM was shared between data and video - so the higher modes used 20K out of your 32K. Although aftermarket upgrades appeared that added a 20K page to replace the video RAM (which worked seamlessly provided that the application used the correct OS calls rather than poking things directly) Acorn took their own sweet time before building that feature into later models.
It also had a shedload of internal hardware: a Teletext-compatible character generator chip for low-memory, high-quality TV friendly 40 col text & block graphics (without eating your RAM); a 'proper' sound generator chip; analogue inputs (not audio frequency, but great for proper joysticks and school science experiments) and a 'user port' which made about half of a 6522 VIA chip available for digital I/O, a serial port, parallel port, proprietary expansion port & vacant sockets on-board for a floppy controller and 'econet' LAN... Plus a really decent keyboard (the kind with discrete key-switches for each key). Then there was Acorn's 'Tube' interface, which allowed you to hang off a 'second processor': i.e. a headless 6502, Z80 or (later) 32016-based computer that used the BBC as an I/O processor. (Of course, the really interesting one was the ARM second processor, but AFAIK that was never publicly available).
The Apple's advantages were (a) software base (but the BBC accumulated quite a big software base in the UK) and (b) internal expansion (the BBC had lots of expansion potential but it was either via external interfaces or slightly kludey piggyback boards). I think there were more options for upgrading an Apple 2 to '64K clean' RAM configuration.
However, If you got the BBC 6502 second processor (a 4MHz 6502 with 64k RAM, with the original BBC handling all the I/O) then anything else with 8 bits (and quite a few things with 16) could eat your dust... unfortunately the price of that hampered adoption and, hence, software support (although you could play the definitive version of Elite).
The BBC B cost ~£400 - but
Maybe in a few years, we'll be at the point that you can write out a paragraph of instructions and have a computer parse it into a script that can be run.
Except that its not that easy to write a paragraph of instructions in 'natural language' that unambiguously describes a task. Lawyers make a lot of money pretending they can do it; mathematicians usually resort to specialist notation as soon as they get serious - neither profession has ever been accused of using 'natural language' :-) Any non-trivial example is likely to end up reading like an ISO standard document or a software EULA.
From what I've heard of Siri, it seems to work well within a limited universe of discourse: search the web and cross-reference with your calendar and contact list. However, I'm sure the websites dedicated to "Siri mistakes" will soon be bulging...
there probably wasn't enough actual interest to warrant development.
Nor was there enough interest to enable any of the similar products from third parties to take off in a big way. AFAIK some of these are still going, but they haven't set the world alight. Actually, the closest thing to Hypercard that is a Big Thing is probably Flash - which has the huge advantage that it runs across multiple platforms.
Hypercard was an incarnation of the Rapid Application Development Myth - very quick to knock up an impressive-looking GUI, but much harder to produce a finished application that works "just so". Like all RAD systems, the danger is that the last 10% of the work doesn't just take the usual 90% of the time, it takes forever because you hit the limits of the system, and you end up having to re-write in a proper programming language.
These things are actually aimed at a fairly narrow niche between users who don't want to develop anything, and programmers who'd rather use full-grown developer tools.
Also, some of Hypercard's role has been taken over by (a) Flash (as noted above) and (b) the Web (either via lovingly hand-crafted HTML or user-friendly HTML creators). On OS X, there's Dashcode, as well as Automator and Apple Script.
(Plus, I hate languages like AppleScript that try to use 'natural language'... natural language wasn't designed for programming, so why try?)
A ban on phones with non-removable batteries may be necessary. You can carry the phone on board, but the battery has to go in a plastic bag in luggage.
....but then passengers will start spontaneously combusting because they can't call people up to say "I've just landed" the millisecond the seatbelt sign goes off. When you tried to pick up your luggage you wouldn't be able to get near the carousel because of a crowd of numpties rummaging in their suitcases to find batteries and then standing around making calls (with the total disconnection from the surrounding environment that entails).
I love how apple tried to blame everyone else for what is actually there problem.
Yeah, because other manufacturer's batteries never go wrong.
...or maybe they do, but when an Acme MP-5147/Z (T) goes phut on a plane it doesn't make the tech blogs. Apple's high media profile is a two-edged sword.
I have always wondered why more companies don't use Slashdot own software.
The moderation system could be useful:
The server has just crashed!
(Score: -1 - I'm on my lunch break)
Please submit your report by Tuesday at the latest so that it can be distributed in time for the meeting on Friday week.
(Score: 5 - Funny)
It has come to my notice that some employees have been visiting unauthorized websites on company time.
(Score: -2 - Troll)
Once a discussion becomes threaded it is much simpler to get clarification to the right question
Or you could get an email client that handles threading/tagging/mailboxes/filtering....
What advantage does this offer that could justify the upper bound on pricing? Is there anything that could justify a 4K price? or is this just a novel idea thing?
$4k vs. $30k probably depends whether they lovingly hand-craft 10 units or get a sweatshop to knock them out in quantity.
$4k would be low enough for some gadget freaks (i.e. the ones with $5k hi-fis and $10k tellys) with more money than sense to buy them for fun.
$30k might be low enough for research teams with an end-of-year surplus to get one in order to investigate your first question.
I'm sure that they'll want one on CSI but they're fictitious so its probably cheaper and more convincing to mock one up with CGI in post-production.
Super-villains will want the 20' x 20' de-luxe model to explain their world domination plans in terms that even an over-sexed British spy or Austrian ex-bodybuilder can understand - that will cost more than $30k but (a) Super-villains never pay, they just murder the creator and (b) see 'CSI' above.
Sure, unless anyone else is wearing polarized sunglasses in the vicinity.
Yup. What you need is to hack one of the 3D systems that uses active LCD shutter glasses.
The screen would rapidly alternate between showing the actual image and a screen full of dazzling random hash. The shutter glasses, synced to the monitor would block out the hash and allow the user to see the image. Use a sync cable rather than some optical system, let the frequency wander randomly a bit and include some rogue flickering with the hash to make it hard for a bystander with active glasses to get in sync.
Or, don't watch porn in a shared office.