A large number of PHP functions implemented in pure javascript.
I don't know - there was I making a joke about PHP's reputation as an abomination amongst programming languages and you have to go and post a link to something potentially bloody useful.
JavaScript isn't even that important to the modern Internet. It's pretty isolated to the Web,
Yup, and the web isn't very important to the modern Internet at all.
and even there it's only seriously used by a small number of sites.
Just a few tiny, insignificant ones like Slashdot, Google (Docs/Maps/GMail) and any other website that contains anything more interactive than a form submit button. Except the ones that use Flash (but then the ActionScript language used by Flash developers is a superset of ECMAScript.) - or Java, which really is "only used seriously by a small number of sites" (for given values of "small" and "seriously").
Its also the only game in town if you want to target iOS, Android and desktop browsers with the same codebase. Meanwhile, Java's star seems to be falling,.Net/C#/VB (however well respected) are effectively Microsoft-only.
For every line of JavaScript in a given web site, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of C or C++ code doing the real work within the JavaScript interpreter
Well, yes, that will be true of any "scripting" language.
The statement in TFA that Javascript is "possibly the most important of all the languages" is flamebait, but your position is equally absurd.
The "contest" is probably Javascript vs. Python/Ruby/Perl/PHP. ("CoffeeScript", mentioned in TFA seems to be an effort to make JavaScript look more like the first three of those to appease the haters of curly brackets - where's the campaign to make Javascript look more like PHP, I ask !?:-) ).
Art != "Visually Appealing" (though I happen to think that Minecraft is very beautiful in its own way).
More to the point, Minecraft is all about building/exploring a landscape made entirely from 1m3 blocks. Slapping photo-realistic textures on those blocks and populating the world with beautifully-rendered creatures would look absurd. IMHO the "retro" look is exactly the right artistic choice.
The only alternative that made visual sense would be to render everything to look like a well-known range of construction toys and, subsequently, get sued into a hole in the ground by a well-known Danish toy manufacturer.
Mind you, if I were a well-known Danish toy manufacturer I'd be seriously trying to hire Notch to design Well-Known-Danish-Construction-Toy, The Game.
what's the point of making up arbitrary categories and pick one title out of each?
I agree - this list has had the life organised out of it. The categories look like the output of a committee trying to compromise on technical vs. artistic vs. historical classifications.
They should either have experts and critics select a list of games (possibly obscure) that supports the story they want to tell (and then defend their choices) or let the public freely nominate and vote on games that they like. Don't try and do both together (and then use the "public vote" argument to defend the result). Also, the field of video games is surely large enough to assemble an exhibition on a better-defined theme (realism in video games? abstract art in video games? narrative in video games? the evolution of the RTS | FPS | Platformer?) - currently its a bit like a huge museum having a special exhibition on "Paintings". Maybe the actual exhibition will be better.
Apparently, the only personal computers that ever existed were the C64 and DOS/Windows - everything else was consoles, and before home consoles there was a howling void (no arcade machines, no pre-home-computer games?) I mean, you might say that the original "Colossal Cave" text adventure had no visual art, but it is part of the genesis of things like Monkey Island and Portal. Doom 2 got voted in - but were Wolfenstein 3D (Early example FPS), Doom 1 (FPS hits the big time) or Quake (First FPS with non-faked 3D) even on the menu?
Was the list meant to be US only? That would explain bizarre absences such as Elite (defined a genre) or anything from the ZX81 or Spectrum (shedloads of milestone games).
By the time you've added a keyboard, mouse, display, a decent sized SD card for storage and/or WiFi connectivity so you can actually get data in or out you're probably closer to the cost of a netbook or OLPC, but have lost the benefit of portability.
I guess that a school could provide fixed monitors/keyboards in classrooms, so kids could sit down and plug in their £25 dongle, rather than entrust them with a £150 netbook (and suffer the inevitable loss and damage) - but then (a) the computers could only be used in suitably equipped classrooms and (b) you might as well fix the computers and give kids an even cheaper USB drive to carry around.
Yes, the kids could use their dongle computers at home but its going to be a while before you can assume that everybody has an HDMI TV, and unless kids have a HDMI-equipped TV in their own room (If they do, its good odds that they already have a PC anyway) they'd still have to persuade the rest of the family to miss The X Factor so that they could work on their project.
Nothing wrong with cheap-as-chips single board PCs, but I do wonder why people are so obsessed with building them into wall-warts and USB dongles, when t something slightly bigger (with more room for connectors and space for a couple internal USB devices or a micro HD) would be far more flexible and portable.
Also from TFA:
Braben argues that education since we entered the 2000s has turned towards ICT which teaches useful skills such as writing documents in a word processor, how to create presentations, and basic computer use skills. But that has replaced more computer science-like skills such as basic programming and understanding the architecture and hardware contained in a computer.
Strongly agree - but there's a second string to that, in that ICT has not only supplanted "proper" computer science (which did, once upon a time, exist as an optional high school subject in the UK) but has also tended to pull computers out of maths and science. I've encountered maths teachers who thought, for example, that kids "did" spreadsheets in ICT (they did, but only to turn out pie charts for the annual cat & dog survey - when faced with a fairly trivial modelling exercise they used calculators to fill in the spreadsheet). "ICT" was responsible for many BBC micros being ripped out of subject classrooms and thrown into skips to be replaced by the new ICT (PC) suites. Heck, I'm not advocating it, but even today you could make good use of a good old Beeb (bristling with inputs and outputs and easy to program) in a science classroom!
Overall, I'd welcome the demise of "ICT*" as a curriculum subject (about as sensible as having "handwriting" as a separate subject) on the two conditions that the other subjects were given the necessary time and support to teach IT skills in context, and there was a CS option at age 16-18 (with some sort of "teaser" in the compulsory maths curriculum).
Seems to me that these micro-PCs would be good for the latter, but effectively tied to the computer lab.
(*Note - the 'C' stands for "Communications" and was mandated by the UK Department of Redundancy Department in the UK, who, presumably, didn't think that 'Communication' had anything to do with 'Information' . Figures.)
Telling Google they have to pick and choose what they can use to defend themselves isn't kosher.
Google don't need to defend themselves against the claims that have been thrown out.
This isn't about deciding who is right, at this stage, its about cutting the case down to something that can be heard, considered properly and decided before the heat death of the universe.
Also, its not the Judge's job to get as many patent claims overturned as possible, much as we'd like that to happen.
The day they require app installation for third party products to go through the "App Store" is the day I stop buying Apple computers.
You'd be in good company. Such a move would decimate sales of the Mac (the only question is whether it would decimate them in the pedantically correct sense or the colloquial sense). It would be particularly awkward for people using Macs at work who would then have the "choice" of buying Mac software on their own credit card or persuading the (probably PC-friendly) management to sign up to some sort of corporate iTunes account. The Mac would cease to be a general purpose computer. That's why I don't think its particularly likely. It would also be a big shift from the status quo whereby the Mac comes bundled with free/cheap development tools (I think the last XCode update cost $peanuts on the App Store). Apple also rely on it as the development platform for iOS (again, which costs $peanuts to join c.f. developing for other closed systems such as consoles). They'd also have to somehow persuade their existing user base to "upgrade" and/or prevent them from downgrading.
Of course, it is not impossible that they'd go this way - but I suspect that it would be part of a general decision to give up on traditional desktop computing and concentrate on iDevices, and the alternatives Apple would be considering would be (A) lock down OS X or (B) drop OS X with no option C.
Apple has had 25 years to grind Microsoft into dust by being the "innovator".
Didn't really work out so well for them in practice.
Tell that to the shareholders. It worked out rather better for Apple than it did for Commodore, Radio Shack, Sinclair, Sun (workstations), Silicon Graphics, DEC, Atari, Acorn and all the other platforms (including, ultimately, IBM) that were flattened by the corporate juggernaut created by IBM and inherited by Microsoft. All of those are history, or relegated to small scale enthusiast-run cults (although Acorn left a rather good legacy by developing the ARM processor) while Apple are growing, making money hand-over-fist and firmly on the shortlist of major PC manufacturers. I know its a jump, but baybe - just maybe - they are doing something right?
MS's success has little to do with innovation and a lot to do with its dominant position in corporate computing. Its hard to produce a competing platform when OEMs won't bundle it or promote it lest they fall out of favor with MS?
Meanwhile, Apple and Google seem to be doing a good job between them of grinding Windows Mobile and Symbian into dust (is Symbian officially dust yet?)...
Sorry, you misunderstood the concept of LTS distributions. One feature of them is that everything (and that means app versions) stays the same, so if you can some scripts to deploy it, it will just work
Simples - new app versions go into a separate repository and a simple question at install time asks whether you want to freeze app versions (best for corporate deployments) or use latest "fit for release" () versions (best for home/personal use, and not quite the same as the stable/unstable choice in Debian). Choosing the former disables the app upgrade repo.
Mini DisplayPort - which is plug-compatible with Thunderbolt.
Plus, the existing mini-displayport to DVI or VGA adapters work just fine with the new port (but, yeah, I'm not excusing Apple for not at least throwing a VGA adapter in with their MacBooks).
The only thing that doesn't quite work for me (with a Thunderbolt MacBook Pro) is a mini-displayport to full-displayport cable connected to my HP monitor (same problem with some other 3rd party DisplayPort monitors according to the tubes) - there's some palette/antialiasing problem that makes 1920x1200 look like 640x480 but hopefully that's something that will get mopped up in a future firmware update (others have reported that the combo works fine with BootCamp+Windows so its not something fundamental - 50:50 as to whether its Apple, the monitors or cheap 3rd party displayport cables at fault). Anyhow, using a DisplayPort to DVI adapter works fine with these monitors.
Let's all remember how much we hated XP when it came out, and then how much we wanted Windows 7 to be XP when it came out.
...and remember how people hated Vista so much that it flopped and would have sunk any company that didn't have MS's dominant position and cash reserves.
Actually, ISTR the main hates about XP were product activation, driver hassles and its unquenchable thirst for more than 256MB of memory. The only UI quibbles were that it looked a bit Fischer-Price - it worked much the same way as Win95/2000.
(Waiting for the reaction when OSX 10.7 hits the street...)
Ubuntu need to decide whether they are "the Linux for the rest of us" or "the bleeding edge".
When they started out, making Linux more polished-looking, consistent, user friendly, easy to install and the Linux you'd recommend to Aunty Agatha, that was bleeding edge (even if it wasn't exclusive to Ubuntu, they did a lot to advance that field, and to promote Linux in general) so there was no choice.
Now that most Linux distros are, at worst, no harder to install than Windows, and make a good College try at auto-detecting your hardware and helping you locate drivers they might want to think twice against "forcing" major changes on mainstream users (even if there is a way to revert, making them the default will give some people a WTF moment and fragment support and documentation). They also tend to introduce other major changes to subsystems with their regular releases.
If I were Ubuntu I'd have the last LTS version "headlining" the website as the recommended download, with the latest 6-monthly release as an option, and divert a bit more effort to backporting new versions of applications (not just bug/security fixes) to LTS so that non-techie users had an easy way to install the latest & greatest applications without a major OS overhaul. Of course, that's very unsexy work, especially if you're not being paid.
I suspect the iPad 2 is more powerful than the Apple TV. Why would that be your "console"?
Because the Apple TV is wired into your TV - its hard to use the iPad/iPhone as a Wii-style kinetic controller if its got an HDMI cable hanging out of it. Maybe Apple will speed-bump the Apple TV before this can come to fruition - or maybe the iPad will be the console and smaller iDevices the controllers? Or maybe Apple would like you to buy a Mac Mini or an iMac as your home entertainment centre
And if you think there's a big market for board games on PC then.. oh, why do I even bother..
In other news, there wasn't a big market for tablet PCs until the iPad came along. One way iPad distinguished itself from previous tablet PCs was by being "its own device" and not trying to do the things a PC does better (such as running an OS and applications designed for full-sized PCs).
As for board games, PCs are rather solitary devices - best for single-player games or playing over a network with people you can't see, whereas board and card games have a huge social element (which is why there is still a market for board games on boards). Sit a lot of people around a big TV with individual iP(od|hone|ad) controllers and you have a social game. The Wii has already tapped into this somewhat, but each player having an iDevice adds new possibilities.
For example, already, the iOS version of Scrabble lets you use the iPad as the "board" with individual players using iP(od|hone)s as their personal letter racks. The extension to card games and more complex board games (we're not talking snakes and ladders here) is obvious.
Or how about a co-operative shooter where the TV screen showed a third-person view and the iDevices showed individual first-person views?
Well, I'd rather play on the Pippin than on a friggin' touchscreen.
It depends on the type of game and how it is designed - On the one hand, we have FPS, for which I don't think they've cracked the touchscreen controls yet, but in the case of (say) Plants vs. Zombies, the touchscreen works well (if anything, it made PvZ a bit too easy and they should have cranked up the difficulty a bit to compensate). Settlers was fine, too (except for the unforgivable lack of skirmish mode).
ISTR the iPad2 has better motion sensing than the original - which could make for better FPS games where you look around by physically moving the tablet, not to mention "augmented reality" style games using the camera. Plastic machine gun with an iPhone dock as a "sight", anybody?
So, they might have to be innovative with game concepts and game controls rather than just keep turning out Doom N+1. It worked for Nintendo. Or, just concentrate on types of game that are poorly catered for on consoles (e.g. RTS) and work well on tablets.
Price isn't everything, but mobile contracts may be, depending on where you are
...my point was that they are connected: many people (at least, here in the UK) get their phones bundled with a 12- or 18-month contract and either get the phone "free" or for (for the fancier phones) for a fraction of the published retail price. So the retail price isn't necessarily that competitive. Tablets, however, are quite useful without a phone contract (I have a contract on my phone - my tablet doesn't have 3G and even if It had, I'd probably only get a pay-as-you-go deal)... I wonder if the manufacturers are pricing their tablets as phones...
It cannot use any wifi connection that has a proxy, because the Android software has no settings for proxies in the wifi setup. Immediately this means no wifi connections to corporate or campus networks, cutting out the business and academic community at a stroke.
Ye gods, haven't they fixed that yet!? I'd stopped griping about that because my Android phone is stuck on 2.1 and I'd assumed that in any sane universe it would have be fixed in the newer versions...
Why aren't they getting flamed about that? Looks like Android beats apple hands down in one area: their reality distortion field dwarfs Apple's!
I know the geek communituy will huddle around to protect its young, but while you do, can I ask all you Androiders to pull up your calculator and type the following:.0634+.113 SIN
That is, exactly as a TI calculator would provide the answer as=.17548...
Not the android calculator answer of:
SIN(
Bad example. All that means is that Android is emulating a newer style of calculator with alphanumeric display and pseudo-algebraic notation. I have two calculators (one TI and one Casio) that would work in the same way. If it was the nerds' fault, you'd have to type ".0634.113 + SIN ENTER".
If you go into a clothes shop and see a heavily marketed, good brand designer-label shirt for $50 and a shirt from a lesser brand that is almost as nice for $30 then a lot of people are going to choose the $30 one. That's the usual situation with Apple* vs. Brand X when it comes to laptops, music players and phones. Feel free to debate how much Apple deserves its reputation on the basis of functionality and build quality, but if you can't see that Apple is top of the class when it comes to aesthetics and marketing then you're the one with the reality distortion field.
However - if you go into the shop and find the designer shirt for $49.99 and the no-name one for $49.95 and, on closer examination, the differences are, at most, swings and roundabouts, then most people will buy the designer shirt. That's the current state of play with tablets (and that's being fairly generous to the current crop of non-Apple tablets w.r.t. features not working yet, lower res/bad aspect ratio screens, size, weight, battery life). The only reason for getting the "inferior" brand is if you have some objection in principle to the premium brand - and that's just not an issue with the majority of non-slashdotting customers.
So why aren't Androids cheaper? Have Apple broken the habit of a lifetime and sold the iPad for an unbeatable price (flap, oink!)? I suspect that Android tablets are being sold using the phone pricing model: inflate the RRP to entice people to get their phone on contract from a carrier (contract-free phones always look overpriced to me c.f. other mobile electronics) - this works for phones which are useless without a contract - may not work for tablets which work perfectly well with WiFi hotspots.
(* the "Apple Tax" is overstated by haters who cherry-pick which specs they are going to compare and don't place any value on size, weight and industrial design - but you have to stand on your head and squint - e.g. by comparing MacBooks with Sony Vaios - to make it go away).
A lot of bluff and bluster against Microsoft for defending a patent. Barnes and Noble needs to attack the patent or the patent system. Fighting a PR battle is evidence that B&N doesn't have the facts necessary to win the patent fight.
Go read TFA from Groklaw - It includes a metric shedload of attacks on the validity and applicability of the patents, as well as the "Microsoft is being evil" PR stuff (which could be crucial if the case ever ends up in front of a jury).
I saw that in 3D. I got about fifteen minutes in before I noticed.
Perhaps because the first 15 minutes of Tron Legacy are in 2D? The 3D doesn't start until Dorothy arrives in Oz (sorry, I mean until Flynn Jr enters the Grid).
Even so, though I'm not disagreeing - its occasionally impressive but mostly fails to make up for having to wear fracking sunglasses in a cinema. With so many other depth cues, stereoscopic information is just less important than (say) colour or sound.
The trailers were quite good, though - especially the one that starts with the deliberately bad red/green fringed plastic dinosaur...
So yeah, my Xoom market crashes on occasion and I have to reopen it, but I also have a bunch of widgets all over my home screen.
And while my instability will eventually be fixed, the iPad will never have widgets.
Woah! that's two big assumptions! You have no guarantee that your Xoom will be fixed (still waiting for SVG support and, more importantly, internet proxy support for my Android phone), nor can you know that iOS will never have widgets - if there is enough demand Apple may well add them (as they did with multitasking).
Hell, I wouldn't even bet against Apple relenting on Flash if it started losing them sales - but it doesn't sound as if people are bowled over by Flash on the few Android systems that now support it.
Besides HDTV, there's also the benefit of side-by-side windows. A single widescreen is so much nicer than futzing around with dual monitors (the trend that I never got into).
I'm fine with 16:10 - A 24" 16:10 will, e.g. hold 2 full-size A4 pages with space to spare top and bottom for toolbars/menu and space for a couple of sidebars or a filer window, which is pretty much the sweet spot (and I can live with small black bars if I'm watching TV on it). Now, although 24" 1920x1200 screens are still available, the trend seems to be towards 23" 1080p (bye bye vertical space for menus and toolbars), larger TVs which are still only 1080p or "arrgh! my wallet!!!" for some 2560x1440 monster. Worse for laptops where vertical resolution is more of an issue.
What people dont understand is that HTML5 is great for video, but when it comes to complex interactive video/animation (what flash is good at doing) you will need to have javascript in order to handle it.
That's what I meant by "What's lacking currently is (a) nice development tools similar to Flash Pro or Flex". HTML5+DOM+ECMAScript+SVG+AJAX should be able to deliver similar functionality to the Flash player - but currently you do have to code it from scratch in Javascript (although libraries like Dojo already do a lot of the heavy lifting) and browser support (esp. for SVG) is still a pain.
Of course, even in Flash you still end up needing to code the clever stuff in ActionScript - which is a descendant of Javascript (ActionScript 1 was ECMAScript but its diverged since, but mainly with syntactic sugar for pseudo-class-based OOP). True, Flash's bulit-in objects are higher-level and easier to use than the HTML/SVG DOM, but later releases of Flash seem to have added more ActionScript-based application framework stuff over that, so its more analogous to using something like Dojo on top of "HTML5". In fact, what has ticked me off is Adobe's tendency to ship a half-baked Actionscript Application Framework with one release and then, rather than fully baking it in the next release, come up with a new half baked AF, probably dependent on a new, not-entirely-backwards-compatible version of Actionscript. That, and using a different AF for Flex (so its a pain to mix Flex and Flash)...
1. the icons are on the left, to conserve vertical space. Ok, but I'm NOT on a netbook.
Actually, that also makes sense with the general move to 16:9 monitors (which is also annoying, but using the same size panels as HD TV is clearly going to be an economic end-of-argument). However, most sensible GUIs let you put the icon bar left/right/top/bottom to suit your preferences and monitor configuration.
HTML5 is not a Flash/Silverlight replacement. It does some things better, it does somethings worse, but for the majority of the functionality of Flash and Silverlight, HTML5 just doesn't do it.
HTML5 + JavaScript/ECMAScript + SVG + WebGL have the potential to act as a delivery platform for most of what Flash/Actionscript does (I've used flash a lot, but haven't used Silverlight). Plus, there's node.js to potentially offer a server-side solution.
What's lacking currently is (a) nice development tools similar to Flash Pro or Flex (depending whether you want code-based or visual development), (b) a clear winner in the Javascript application framework stakes (Until TFA is de-slashdotted I assume Maqetta uses Dojo? ) and (c) reliable, mainstream browser support for all the associated technologies (e.g. SVG - essential for Flash-style 2D vector graphics and animation - is currently a pain in IE and disabled on most non-hacked Androids - particularly vexing when all the Fandroids keep bashing Apple for not supporting Flash).
Maybe Maqetta will offer a solution to (b) in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
A large number of PHP functions implemented in pure javascript.
I don't know - there was I making a joke about PHP's reputation as an abomination amongst programming languages and you have to go and post a link to something potentially bloody useful.
JavaScript isn't even that important to the modern Internet. It's pretty isolated to the Web,
Yup, and the web isn't very important to the modern Internet at all.
and even there it's only seriously used by a small number of sites.
Just a few tiny, insignificant ones like Slashdot, Google (Docs/Maps/GMail) and any other website that contains anything more interactive than a form submit button. Except the ones that use Flash (but then the ActionScript language used by Flash developers is a superset of ECMAScript.) - or Java, which really is "only used seriously by a small number of sites" (for given values of "small" and "seriously").
Its also the only game in town if you want to target iOS, Android and desktop browsers with the same codebase. Meanwhile, Java's star seems to be falling, .Net/C#/VB (however well respected) are effectively Microsoft-only.
For every line of JavaScript in a given web site, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of C or C++ code doing the real work within the JavaScript interpreter
Well, yes, that will be true of any "scripting" language.
The statement in TFA that Javascript is "possibly the most important of all the languages" is flamebait, but your position is equally absurd.
The "contest" is probably Javascript vs. Python/Ruby/Perl/PHP. ("CoffeeScript", mentioned in TFA seems to be an effort to make JavaScript look more like the first three of those to appease the haters of curly brackets - where's the campaign to make Javascript look more like PHP, I ask !? :-) ).
Art != "Visually Appealing" (though I happen to think that Minecraft is very beautiful in its own way).
More to the point, Minecraft is all about building/exploring a landscape made entirely from 1m3 blocks. Slapping photo-realistic textures on those blocks and populating the world with beautifully-rendered creatures would look absurd. IMHO the "retro" look is exactly the right artistic choice.
The only alternative that made visual sense would be to render everything to look like a well-known range of construction toys and, subsequently, get sued into a hole in the ground by a well-known Danish toy manufacturer.
Mind you, if I were a well-known Danish toy manufacturer I'd be seriously trying to hire Notch to design Well-Known-Danish-Construction-Toy, The Game.
what's the point of making up arbitrary categories and pick one title out of each?
I agree - this list has had the life organised out of it. The categories look like the output of a committee trying to compromise on technical vs. artistic vs. historical classifications.
They should either have experts and critics select a list of games (possibly obscure) that supports the story they want to tell (and then defend their choices) or let the public freely nominate and vote on games that they like. Don't try and do both together (and then use the "public vote" argument to defend the result). Also, the field of video games is surely large enough to assemble an exhibition on a better-defined theme (realism in video games? abstract art in video games? narrative in video games? the evolution of the RTS | FPS | Platformer?) - currently its a bit like a huge museum having a special exhibition on "Paintings". Maybe the actual exhibition will be better.
Apparently, the only personal computers that ever existed were the C64 and DOS/Windows - everything else was consoles, and before home consoles there was a howling void (no arcade machines, no pre-home-computer games?) I mean, you might say that the original "Colossal Cave" text adventure had no visual art, but it is part of the genesis of things like Monkey Island and Portal. Doom 2 got voted in - but were Wolfenstein 3D (Early example FPS), Doom 1 (FPS hits the big time) or Quake (First FPS with non-faked 3D) even on the menu?
Was the list meant to be US only? That would explain bizarre absences such as Elite (defined a genre) or anything from the ZX81 or Spectrum (shedloads of milestone games).
By the time you've added a keyboard, mouse, display, a decent sized SD card for storage and/or WiFi connectivity so you can actually get data in or out you're probably closer to the cost of a netbook or OLPC, but have lost the benefit of portability.
I guess that a school could provide fixed monitors/keyboards in classrooms, so kids could sit down and plug in their £25 dongle, rather than entrust them with a £150 netbook (and suffer the inevitable loss and damage) - but then (a) the computers could only be used in suitably equipped classrooms and (b) you might as well fix the computers and give kids an even cheaper USB drive to carry around.
Yes, the kids could use their dongle computers at home but its going to be a while before you can assume that everybody has an HDMI TV, and unless kids have a HDMI-equipped TV in their own room (If they do, its good odds that they already have a PC anyway) they'd still have to persuade the rest of the family to miss The X Factor so that they could work on their project.
Nothing wrong with cheap-as-chips single board PCs, but I do wonder why people are so obsessed with building them into wall-warts and USB dongles, when t something slightly bigger (with more room for connectors and space for a couple internal USB devices or a micro HD) would be far more flexible and portable.
Also from TFA:
Braben argues that education since we entered the 2000s has turned towards ICT which teaches useful skills such as writing documents in a word processor, how to create presentations, and basic computer use skills. But that has replaced more computer science-like skills such as basic programming and understanding the architecture and hardware contained in a computer.
Strongly agree - but there's a second string to that, in that ICT has not only supplanted "proper" computer science (which did, once upon a time, exist as an optional high school subject in the UK) but has also tended to pull computers out of maths and science. I've encountered maths teachers who thought, for example, that kids "did" spreadsheets in ICT (they did, but only to turn out pie charts for the annual cat & dog survey - when faced with a fairly trivial modelling exercise they used calculators to fill in the spreadsheet). "ICT" was responsible for many BBC micros being ripped out of subject classrooms and thrown into skips to be replaced by the new ICT (PC) suites. Heck, I'm not advocating it, but even today you could make good use of a good old Beeb (bristling with inputs and outputs and easy to program) in a science classroom!
Overall, I'd welcome the demise of "ICT*" as a curriculum subject (about as sensible as having "handwriting" as a separate subject) on the two conditions that the other subjects were given the necessary time and support to teach IT skills in context, and there was a CS option at age 16-18 (with some sort of "teaser" in the compulsory maths curriculum).
Seems to me that these micro-PCs would be good for the latter, but effectively tied to the computer lab.
(*Note - the 'C' stands for "Communications" and was mandated by the UK Department of Redundancy Department in the UK, who, presumably, didn't think that 'Communication' had anything to do with 'Information' . Figures.)
Telling Google they have to pick and choose what they can use to defend themselves isn't kosher.
Google don't need to defend themselves against the claims that have been thrown out.
This isn't about deciding who is right, at this stage, its about cutting the case down to something that can be heard, considered properly and decided before the heat death of the universe.
Also, its not the Judge's job to get as many patent claims overturned as possible, much as we'd like that to happen.
The day they require app installation for third party products to go through the "App Store" is the day I stop buying Apple computers.
You'd be in good company. Such a move would decimate sales of the Mac (the only question is whether it would decimate them in the pedantically correct sense or the colloquial sense). It would be particularly awkward for people using Macs at work who would then have the "choice" of buying Mac software on their own credit card or persuading the (probably PC-friendly) management to sign up to some sort of corporate iTunes account. The Mac would cease to be a general purpose computer. That's why I don't think its particularly likely. It would also be a big shift from the status quo whereby the Mac comes bundled with free/cheap development tools (I think the last XCode update cost $peanuts on the App Store). Apple also rely on it as the development platform for iOS (again, which costs $peanuts to join c.f. developing for other closed systems such as consoles). They'd also have to somehow persuade their existing user base to "upgrade" and/or prevent them from downgrading.
Of course, it is not impossible that they'd go this way - but I suspect that it would be part of a general decision to give up on traditional desktop computing and concentrate on iDevices, and the alternatives Apple would be considering would be (A) lock down OS X or (B) drop OS X with no option C.
Apple has had 25 years to grind Microsoft into dust by being the "innovator". Didn't really work out so well for them in practice.
Tell that to the shareholders. It worked out rather better for Apple than it did for Commodore, Radio Shack, Sinclair, Sun (workstations), Silicon Graphics, DEC, Atari, Acorn and all the other platforms (including, ultimately, IBM) that were flattened by the corporate juggernaut created by IBM and inherited by Microsoft. All of those are history, or relegated to small scale enthusiast-run cults (although Acorn left a rather good legacy by developing the ARM processor) while Apple are growing, making money hand-over-fist and firmly on the shortlist of major PC manufacturers. I know its a jump, but baybe - just maybe - they are doing something right?
MS's success has little to do with innovation and a lot to do with its dominant position in corporate computing. Its hard to produce a competing platform when OEMs won't bundle it or promote it lest they fall out of favor with MS?
Meanwhile, Apple and Google seem to be doing a good job between them of grinding Windows Mobile and Symbian into dust (is Symbian officially dust yet?)...
Sorry, you misunderstood the concept of LTS distributions. One feature of them is that everything (and that means app versions) stays the same, so if you can some scripts to deploy it, it will just work
Simples - new app versions go into a separate repository and a simple question at install time asks whether you want to freeze app versions (best for corporate deployments) or use latest "fit for release" () versions (best for home/personal use, and not quite the same as the stable/unstable choice in Debian). Choosing the former disables the app upgrade repo.
What's on the back of their displays right now?
Mini DisplayPort - which is plug-compatible with Thunderbolt.
Plus, the existing mini-displayport to DVI or VGA adapters work just fine with the new port (but, yeah, I'm not excusing Apple for not at least throwing a VGA adapter in with their MacBooks).
The only thing that doesn't quite work for me (with a Thunderbolt MacBook Pro) is a mini-displayport to full-displayport cable connected to my HP monitor (same problem with some other 3rd party DisplayPort monitors according to the tubes) - there's some palette/antialiasing problem that makes 1920x1200 look like 640x480 but hopefully that's something that will get mopped up in a future firmware update (others have reported that the combo works fine with BootCamp+Windows so its not something fundamental - 50:50 as to whether its Apple, the monitors or cheap 3rd party displayport cables at fault). Anyhow, using a DisplayPort to DVI adapter works fine with these monitors.
Let's all remember how much we hated XP when it came out, and then how much we wanted Windows 7 to be XP when it came out.
...and remember how people hated Vista so much that it flopped and would have sunk any company that didn't have MS's dominant position and cash reserves.
Actually, ISTR the main hates about XP were product activation, driver hassles and its unquenchable thirst for more than 256MB of memory. The only UI quibbles were that it looked a bit Fischer-Price - it worked much the same way as Win95/2000.
(Waiting for the reaction when OSX 10.7 hits the street...)
Ubuntu need to decide whether they are "the Linux for the rest of us" or "the bleeding edge".
When they started out, making Linux more polished-looking, consistent, user friendly, easy to install and the Linux you'd recommend to Aunty Agatha, that was bleeding edge (even if it wasn't exclusive to Ubuntu, they did a lot to advance that field, and to promote Linux in general) so there was no choice.
Now that most Linux distros are, at worst, no harder to install than Windows, and make a good College try at auto-detecting your hardware and helping you locate drivers they might want to think twice against "forcing" major changes on mainstream users (even if there is a way to revert, making them the default will give some people a WTF moment and fragment support and documentation). They also tend to introduce other major changes to subsystems with their regular releases.
If I were Ubuntu I'd have the last LTS version "headlining" the website as the recommended download, with the latest 6-monthly release as an option, and divert a bit more effort to backporting new versions of applications (not just bug/security fixes) to LTS so that non-techie users had an easy way to install the latest & greatest applications without a major OS overhaul. Of course, that's very unsexy work, especially if you're not being paid.
I suspect the iPad 2 is more powerful than the Apple TV. Why would that be your "console"?
Because the Apple TV is wired into your TV - its hard to use the iPad/iPhone as a Wii-style kinetic controller if its got an HDMI cable hanging out of it. Maybe Apple will speed-bump the Apple TV before this can come to fruition - or maybe the iPad will be the console and smaller iDevices the controllers? Or maybe Apple would like you to buy a Mac Mini or an iMac as your home entertainment centre
And if you think there's a big market for board games on PC then.. oh, why do I even bother..
In other news, there wasn't a big market for tablet PCs until the iPad came along. One way iPad distinguished itself from previous tablet PCs was by being "its own device" and not trying to do the things a PC does better (such as running an OS and applications designed for full-sized PCs).
As for board games, PCs are rather solitary devices - best for single-player games or playing over a network with people you can't see, whereas board and card games have a huge social element (which is why there is still a market for board games on boards). Sit a lot of people around a big TV with individual iP(od|hone|ad) controllers and you have a social game. The Wii has already tapped into this somewhat, but each player having an iDevice adds new possibilities.
For example, already, the iOS version of Scrabble lets you use the iPad as the "board" with individual players using iP(od|hone)s as their personal letter racks. The extension to card games and more complex board games (we're not talking snakes and ladders here) is obvious.
Or how about a co-operative shooter where the TV screen showed a third-person view and the iDevices showed individual first-person views?
Well, I'd rather play on the Pippin than on a friggin' touchscreen.
It depends on the type of game and how it is designed - On the one hand, we have FPS, for which I don't think they've cracked the touchscreen controls yet, but in the case of (say) Plants vs. Zombies, the touchscreen works well (if anything, it made PvZ a bit too easy and they should have cranked up the difficulty a bit to compensate). Settlers was fine, too (except for the unforgivable lack of skirmish mode).
ISTR the iPad2 has better motion sensing than the original - which could make for better FPS games where you look around by physically moving the tablet, not to mention "augmented reality" style games using the camera. Plastic machine gun with an iPhone dock as a "sight", anybody?
So, they might have to be innovative with game concepts and game controls rather than just keep turning out Doom N+1. It worked for Nintendo. Or, just concentrate on types of game that are poorly catered for on consoles (e.g. RTS) and work well on tablets.
Price isn't everything, but mobile contracts may be, depending on where you are
...my point was that they are connected: many people (at least, here in the UK) get their phones bundled with a 12- or 18-month contract and either get the phone "free" or for (for the fancier phones) for a fraction of the published retail price. So the retail price isn't necessarily that competitive. Tablets, however, are quite useful without a phone contract (I have a contract on my phone - my tablet doesn't have 3G and even if It had, I'd probably only get a pay-as-you-go deal)... I wonder if the manufacturers are pricing their tablets as phones...
It cannot use any wifi connection that has a proxy, because the Android software has no settings for proxies in the wifi setup. Immediately this means no wifi connections to corporate or campus networks, cutting out the business and academic community at a stroke.
Ye gods, haven't they fixed that yet!? I'd stopped griping about that because my Android phone is stuck on 2.1 and I'd assumed that in any sane universe it would have be fixed in the newer versions...
Why aren't they getting flamed about that? Looks like Android beats apple hands down in one area: their reality distortion field dwarfs Apple's!
What tablet keyboards really suck at is writing Slashdot comments in HTML.
(< and > are two shifts away on the iPad...)
Bad example. All that means is that Android is emulating a newer style of calculator with alphanumeric display and pseudo-algebraic notation. I have two calculators (one TI and one Casio) that would work in the same way. If it was the nerds' fault, you'd have to type ".0634 .113 + SIN ENTER".
If you go into a clothes shop and see a heavily marketed, good brand designer-label shirt for $50 and a shirt from a lesser brand that is almost as nice for $30 then a lot of people are going to choose the $30 one. That's the usual situation with Apple* vs. Brand X when it comes to laptops, music players and phones. Feel free to debate how much Apple deserves its reputation on the basis of functionality and build quality, but if you can't see that Apple is top of the class when it comes to aesthetics and marketing then you're the one with the reality distortion field.
However - if you go into the shop and find the designer shirt for $49.99 and the no-name one for $49.95 and, on closer examination, the differences are, at most, swings and roundabouts, then most people will buy the designer shirt. That's the current state of play with tablets (and that's being fairly generous to the current crop of non-Apple tablets w.r.t. features not working yet, lower res/bad aspect ratio screens, size, weight, battery life). The only reason for getting the "inferior" brand is if you have some objection in principle to the premium brand - and that's just not an issue with the majority of non-slashdotting customers.
So why aren't Androids cheaper? Have Apple broken the habit of a lifetime and sold the iPad for an unbeatable price (flap, oink!)? I suspect that Android tablets are being sold using the phone pricing model: inflate the RRP to entice people to get their phone on contract from a carrier (contract-free phones always look overpriced to me c.f. other mobile electronics) - this works for phones which are useless without a contract - may not work for tablets which work perfectly well with WiFi hotspots.
(* the "Apple Tax" is overstated by haters who cherry-pick which specs they are going to compare and don't place any value on size, weight and industrial design - but you have to stand on your head and squint - e.g. by comparing MacBooks with Sony Vaios - to make it go away).
A lot of bluff and bluster against Microsoft for defending a patent. Barnes and Noble needs to attack the patent or the patent system. Fighting a PR battle is evidence that B&N doesn't have the facts necessary to win the patent fight.
Go read TFA from Groklaw - It includes a metric shedload of attacks on the validity and applicability of the patents, as well as the "Microsoft is being evil" PR stuff (which could be crucial if the case ever ends up in front of a jury).
I saw that in 3D. I got about fifteen minutes in before I noticed.
Perhaps because the first 15 minutes of Tron Legacy are in 2D? The 3D doesn't start until Dorothy arrives in Oz (sorry, I mean until Flynn Jr enters the Grid).
Even so, though I'm not disagreeing - its occasionally impressive but mostly fails to make up for having to wear fracking sunglasses in a cinema. With so many other depth cues, stereoscopic information is just less important than (say) colour or sound.
The trailers were quite good, though - especially the one that starts with the deliberately bad red/green fringed plastic dinosaur...
So yeah, my Xoom market crashes on occasion and I have to reopen it, but I also have a bunch of widgets all over my home screen. And while my instability will eventually be fixed, the iPad will never have widgets.
Woah! that's two big assumptions! You have no guarantee that your Xoom will be fixed (still waiting for SVG support and, more importantly, internet proxy support for my Android phone), nor can you know that iOS will never have widgets - if there is enough demand Apple may well add them (as they did with multitasking).
Hell, I wouldn't even bet against Apple relenting on Flash if it started losing them sales - but it doesn't sound as if people are bowled over by Flash on the few Android systems that now support it.
Besides HDTV, there's also the benefit of side-by-side windows. A single widescreen is so much nicer than futzing around with dual monitors (the trend that I never got into).
I'm fine with 16:10 - A 24" 16:10 will, e.g. hold 2 full-size A4 pages with space to spare top and bottom for toolbars/menu and space for a couple of sidebars or a filer window, which is pretty much the sweet spot (and I can live with small black bars if I'm watching TV on it). Now, although 24" 1920x1200 screens are still available, the trend seems to be towards 23" 1080p (bye bye vertical space for menus and toolbars), larger TVs which are still only 1080p or "arrgh! my wallet!!!" for some 2560x1440 monster. Worse for laptops where vertical resolution is more of an issue.
What people dont understand is that HTML5 is great for video, but when it comes to complex interactive video/animation (what flash is good at doing) you will need to have javascript in order to handle it.
That's what I meant by "What's lacking currently is (a) nice development tools similar to Flash Pro or Flex". HTML5+DOM+ECMAScript+SVG+AJAX should be able to deliver similar functionality to the Flash player - but currently you do have to code it from scratch in Javascript (although libraries like Dojo already do a lot of the heavy lifting) and browser support (esp. for SVG) is still a pain.
Of course, even in Flash you still end up needing to code the clever stuff in ActionScript - which is a descendant of Javascript (ActionScript 1 was ECMAScript but its diverged since, but mainly with syntactic sugar for pseudo-class-based OOP). True, Flash's bulit-in objects are higher-level and easier to use than the HTML/SVG DOM, but later releases of Flash seem to have added more ActionScript-based application framework stuff over that, so its more analogous to using something like Dojo on top of "HTML5". In fact, what has ticked me off is Adobe's tendency to ship a half-baked Actionscript Application Framework with one release and then, rather than fully baking it in the next release, come up with a new half baked AF, probably dependent on a new, not-entirely-backwards-compatible version of Actionscript. That, and using a different AF for Flex (so its a pain to mix Flex and Flash)...
1. the icons are on the left, to conserve vertical space. Ok, but I'm NOT on a netbook.
Actually, that also makes sense with the general move to 16:9 monitors (which is also annoying, but using the same size panels as HD TV is clearly going to be an economic end-of-argument). However, most sensible GUIs let you put the icon bar left/right/top/bottom to suit your preferences and monitor configuration.
HTML5 is not a Flash/Silverlight replacement. It does some things better, it does somethings worse, but for the majority of the functionality of Flash and Silverlight, HTML5 just doesn't do it.
HTML5 + JavaScript/ECMAScript + SVG + WebGL have the potential to act as a delivery platform for most of what Flash/Actionscript does (I've used flash a lot, but haven't used Silverlight). Plus, there's node.js to potentially offer a server-side solution.
What's lacking currently is (a) nice development tools similar to Flash Pro or Flex (depending whether you want code-based or visual development), (b) a clear winner in the Javascript application framework stakes (Until TFA is de-slashdotted I assume Maqetta uses Dojo? ) and (c) reliable, mainstream browser support for all the associated technologies (e.g. SVG - essential for Flash-style 2D vector graphics and animation - is currently a pain in IE and disabled on most non-hacked Androids - particularly vexing when all the Fandroids keep bashing Apple for not supporting Flash).
Maybe Maqetta will offer a solution to (b) in the future.