Right, here's what I want to know: What groupware server software does Lightning have the ability to sync with? If they have Exchange support, they may have something here. If it's all local, then it's practically useless for business environments.
I like to spread papers out over a huge table surface
Also how trivial it is to resort pages arbitrarily. But yes, the simple ability to set pages side-by-side is something that a tablet can't easily match.
Yes, but honestly, they're going to go for iPads. Unless they have a need that requires something else, it's almost silly not to. They cost for the feature set (including "thin" and "lightweight" as features) is unbeaten, and they have, according to some estimates, over 70% of the market. iOS devices are dominant, and there isn't a better tablet with more widespread support available.
Getting an Android tablet right now is kind of like getting a Macintosh in 2001. Either you're doing it because you have a niche need, or you're not doing it for practical concerns.
The single biggest problem with going paperless: It's way to easy and convenient to scribble on paper. Yes, many e-readers have some kind of ability to take notes, where you can select some text and add a carefully typed comment. Still, nothing beats a pen and paper for free-form note taking. I haven't seen a tablet that can handle crossing stuff out, scribbling notes in the margins, and drawing little diagrams in as simple and intuitive way as good ol' pen and paper.
First, sooner or later someone is going to want a hard copy of a document, if only because a software copy can be altered and is impermanent.
This is a slightly silly reason. You're saying that if I print out a document, then it's more safe from being altered, since I can just change the digital copy. But if I print change the digital copy, I can just print out another altered version of the document.
You can keep a local copy of a document. You can even write-protect it and create a digital signature showing that it hasn't been altered. You can do document versioning to allow a document to be altered while preserving previous states.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Are you admitting that it's not a zero-sum game? My point is that it's possible for someone to lose $2B without anyone gaining $2B. It's possible for the whole stock market to just be valued at $2 Billion less without the money "going somewhere".
However, before we all go after them for that, remember that Apple is also doing this.
If you're talking about Apple's desktop app store, there's no requirement for developers to distribute through the app store. As far as I know, selling your app through the app store doesn't give you greater access to OSX APIs.
Not that I don't fear the "walled garden" concept, but just to point out that what Microsoft is doing seems to be even worse than what Apple is doing.
Oh, I see. So rich people are so delicate that we can't breathe in their direction without them taking their ball and going home. You know what I think we should do? We should just start giving rich people money. Bribe them to stay in the country. Bankrupt ourselves to do it.
Great, so we can't tax rich people because they will dodge taxes?
You know, con men often get away scott free, so I guess we should just do away with laws against theft and fraud. No point trying to close loopholes in the laws or improving enforcement, since I'm sure they'll just find another way to get around those new laws too.
I'd keep discussing this with you, but I'm off to shoot myself in the head. You see, I won't be able to make my life perfect, so what's the point?
I think you missed the joke, since all of his examples are so poorly chosen that it can't possibly be accidental. Homer, for example, didn't "write down" the Illiad or "pencil in" changes later. It was passed down orally for (probably) hundreds of years before ever being written, and scholars agree that there are edits from different time periods.
With Shakespeare, ignoring the fact that they were "messed with" at the time, they've been reinterpreted many times over the years. Arguably every performance is a "reinterpretation", and it's very common for directors to drop whole scenes that aren't considered essential. I'm not as familiar with the Bach reference, but similar to the way that plays are arguably always a reinterpretation, performing music is always a reinterpretation.
Honestly? I'd rather Slashdot have discussions about the virtues of different kinds of routers and different network topologies than having yet another flame war on politics or another snide bitchfest about iPhones.
Nope. Ultimately the point is that the iPhone lacked a couple of features that most people didn't really use (e.g. MMS) and traded it for everything else working properly for the first time in the history of cell phones.
I'm not going to argue too much (I doubt there's much point, since I'm guessing you just *want* to hate the iPhone), but the battery life of even the original iPhone was quite good in comparison with other smartphones of the time. If you remember, they got slammed for not including 3G, but 3G phones at the time had worse battery life (that's why Apple stayed away from 3G).
It wasn't just that the browser was good. The email client was exceptionally good, and would connect to normal POP/IMAP accounts without trouble or any crazy special modifications. Blackberries still want you to set up stupid extra accounts, a process that's needlessly complicated and error prone. Amazingly, the iPhone was less crash-prone than a lot of phones of the time, including dumb phones. Things like viewing pictures or listening to music on your phone went from being a chore to being a pleasure. Even text messaging was easier and made more sense. Managing your calendar and address book on the device was, for maybe the first time, a realistic proposition, and even before it had ActiveSync support, the over-the-wire sync was more reliable and trouble-free than anything else at the time.
Essentially by making things simpler and more polished, Apple transformed the smartphone into an everyday thing. Before the iPhone, smartphones may have technically worked, but using one was a painfully stupid experience that only geeks wanted to put up with.
Their "wild success" was more hype than anything else.
Yeah, it's not. Sorry, this is why I wanted us to start by admitting at least that much, because otherwise we're trapped in a funny world of denial and self-delusion.
Even before the iPhone started to gain market share, even before they started selling the damned things, they already had done immeasurable damage to their competitors. They had changed the way people thought about their phones.
The real truth, of course, is they've never been in the top spot in terms of market share.
It depends on how you measure it. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" and all that. If you go by model, then I believe the iPhone has been #1. If you go iPhone vs all Blackberries vs. all Android phones, then no, it hasn't been #1.
Look at the iPhone 1 -- a miserable pile of garbage that couldn't even handle MMS. It's beyond me how such a thing sold at all.
But look at the garbage that other people were selling at the time. It's not at all surprising that people would opt for a good phone with limited functionality than a crap phone.
Try typing an email on an iPhone and then on a Blackberry. Guess which one will get done faster, and with less frustration?
I own both a Blackberry and an iPhone, and I can type faster and more reliably on an iPhone. Some of it is what you're used to. If you expect an iPhone to work exactly like a Blackberry, you're going to find it to be a frustrating experience.
I'm sorry, but producers simply don't spend their lives constantly reworking and revising every movie they make.
Well sometimes they kind of do. Blade Runner has the theatrical version, the directors cut, and some other cut (I think). But the thing is, I think you can just choose which one you want to buy. I'm fine with that whole idea. In fact, I say let fans and other directors try to recut the thing, add scenes or remove them, whatever. But keep the original edit around in pristine condition.
There's a problem here: you won't even get agreement from people in answering the question, "What is art?" If you can't get people to agree on what it is, then you won't get agreement from people on the question of "Who owns art?"
It's such a complicated topic where people won't even agree on the basics, so it's hard to come to complex conclusions. One general point that I hope we can reach a consensus on: there's value in preserving art in the original form, even if only as an artifact or cultural snapshot. For example, I don't think it should bother us that Lucas wants to continually mess around with Star Wars. It bothers me, though, in as much as he's trying to force the new versions to be the authoritative versions and trying to make it difficult/unappealing to access the original edits.
If they use android (for the apps) and build enterprise management they could hang on for a bit.... If they fail at that, they could then go to Apple/Google/MS and beg them to integrate their products with a RIM enterprise management system - for a tiny margin.
Nope. Their enterprise management stuff is overblown and not worth as much as people say. At this point, people are using BES out of inertia as much as anything. There may be a couple of companies who actually get value out of the stuff, but not enough to support RIM. ActiveSync is a better solution in 95% of cases.
But when should we short them? That's what I want to know.
I don't know, but it may be that you should have already. I'm not a stock market expert, but I do know about the tech industry, and I can tell you that RIM has been dead in the water for a while already. If you didn't know it before, the flop of the Playbook should have clued you in.
I'm not saying it's the interface that you want, but rather that the iPhone, along with it's interface and it's UI design, destroyed the phone industry as existed before. Apple was so wildly successful that they forced the rest of the industry to reinvent itself. Can we admit to that?
it really sucks when the apps are only available for the big three - iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7.
I don't believe that's really the root problem here. That's a problem, but it's not *the* problem.
The *big* problem with RIM is that they stink. The hardware on the phones aren't bad, but almost everything else about them is. The interface-- well, can we just admit that Apple came along and ate everyone else's lunch in the cell phone industry? Can we just start by admitting that? The industry was stagnant and producing awful little phones with awful interfaces, and it's not until Apple showed that they were going to take over that everyone else responded by making better platforms. Android and Windows 7 are a response to Apple disrupting the entire industry, and somehow RIM failed to respond-- probably because they thought they were immune.
But now back to the interface, the blackberry interface is basically lipstick on a pig. On my blackberry, which is less than a year old, it feels like I'm running a 10 year old interface with a new skin. The graphics are smooth and there are kind of some fancy transitions and stuff; I'm not complaining about a lack of eye candy. I'm saying the design of the user interaction is extremely dated and stupid, and that was after they overhauled it.
The behind-the-scenes stuff stinks too. I support a lot of Blackberries, and they're constantly having random stupid problems where someone stops getting their mail or they get duplicates, and that's while using their touted BES stuff. It's junk. It breaks constantly. ActiveSync provides more stable results.
I'm not so sure about your suggestion to use Windows 7. It may be their best choice, but it's not a great choice. RIM is essentially headed down the same road as Palm at this point. They were huge, they sat on their hands and watched the world move on, they're probably going to try to become another hardware vendor with a commodity OS, but that makes them just another one of many hardware vendors with the same OS, and it's not clear they'll compete well. On top of that, it's not entirely clear to me that Windows phone 7 itself is doing very well. Sure, Microsoft will keep making it, but can RIM make money selling it?
The hour is later than you think, and RIM probably doesn't have any winning strategy here. Their best option may be to hope they can sell to someone who wants something about their intellectual property or their supply chain. But who would buy them? HP is out. I doubt Apple cares. I don't think Microsoft would be interested.
I've been saying for a while that the whole "video games cause violence" idea has causality wrong. If you're a happy, perfectly well adjusted person, then playing DOOM won't turn you into a killer. However, if you have mental/emotional problems that make you potentially violent and homicidal, you might be very likely to seek out means to play out those desires, which may include violent games.
If you want to prevent the next school shooting, don't bother censoring video games. Seek out the troubled kids and try to help them.
The real problem here isn't the video games. The real problem is high school.
I'm sure they'll ignore the amazing feat Netflix has accomplished (namely getting people to pay for streaming content online)
That's not the amazing feat. Of course you can get people to pay for streaming. The amazing thing is that they got content owners to allow streaming of so much content on a subscription basis instead of under the "onerous terms" you talk about. Most of the problems with Netflix streaming comes from either content owners wanting to restrict distribution, or ISPs not wanting to build their infrastructure properly.
But the trades themselves are not where people make or lose money. You spend $2 billion and get $2 billion worth of stock. It's what happens after that trade-- when that stock loses its value-- that you lose your $2 billion.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, here's what I want to know: What groupware server software does Lightning have the ability to sync with? If they have Exchange support, they may have something here. If it's all local, then it's practically useless for business environments.
I like to spread papers out over a huge table surface
Also how trivial it is to resort pages arbitrarily. But yes, the simple ability to set pages side-by-side is something that a tablet can't easily match.
Yes, but honestly, they're going to go for iPads. Unless they have a need that requires something else, it's almost silly not to. They cost for the feature set (including "thin" and "lightweight" as features) is unbeaten, and they have, according to some estimates, over 70% of the market. iOS devices are dominant, and there isn't a better tablet with more widespread support available.
Getting an Android tablet right now is kind of like getting a Macintosh in 2001. Either you're doing it because you have a niche need, or you're not doing it for practical concerns.
The single biggest problem with going paperless: It's way to easy and convenient to scribble on paper. Yes, many e-readers have some kind of ability to take notes, where you can select some text and add a carefully typed comment. Still, nothing beats a pen and paper for free-form note taking. I haven't seen a tablet that can handle crossing stuff out, scribbling notes in the margins, and drawing little diagrams in as simple and intuitive way as good ol' pen and paper.
First, sooner or later someone is going to want a hard copy of a document, if only because a software copy can be altered and is impermanent.
This is a slightly silly reason. You're saying that if I print out a document, then it's more safe from being altered, since I can just change the digital copy. But if I print change the digital copy, I can just print out another altered version of the document.
You can keep a local copy of a document. You can even write-protect it and create a digital signature showing that it hasn't been altered. You can do document versioning to allow a document to be altered while preserving previous states.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Are you admitting that it's not a zero-sum game? My point is that it's possible for someone to lose $2B without anyone gaining $2B. It's possible for the whole stock market to just be valued at $2 Billion less without the money "going somewhere".
However, before we all go after them for that, remember that Apple is also doing this.
If you're talking about Apple's desktop app store, there's no requirement for developers to distribute through the app store. As far as I know, selling your app through the app store doesn't give you greater access to OSX APIs.
Not that I don't fear the "walled garden" concept, but just to point out that what Microsoft is doing seems to be even worse than what Apple is doing.
You're right. This is a triumph of the free market.
Oh, I see. So rich people are so delicate that we can't breathe in their direction without them taking their ball and going home. You know what I think we should do? We should just start giving rich people money. Bribe them to stay in the country. Bankrupt ourselves to do it.
Great, so we can't tax rich people because they will dodge taxes?
You know, con men often get away scott free, so I guess we should just do away with laws against theft and fraud. No point trying to close loopholes in the laws or improving enforcement, since I'm sure they'll just find another way to get around those new laws too.
I'd keep discussing this with you, but I'm off to shoot myself in the head. You see, I won't be able to make my life perfect, so what's the point?
I think you missed the joke, since all of his examples are so poorly chosen that it can't possibly be accidental. Homer, for example, didn't "write down" the Illiad or "pencil in" changes later. It was passed down orally for (probably) hundreds of years before ever being written, and scholars agree that there are edits from different time periods.
With Shakespeare, ignoring the fact that they were "messed with" at the time, they've been reinterpreted many times over the years. Arguably every performance is a "reinterpretation", and it's very common for directors to drop whole scenes that aren't considered essential. I'm not as familiar with the Bach reference, but similar to the way that plays are arguably always a reinterpretation, performing music is always a reinterpretation.
Having said that, really slashdot? Slow day?
Honestly? I'd rather Slashdot have discussions about the virtues of different kinds of routers and different network topologies than having yet another flame war on politics or another snide bitchfest about iPhones.
This new business venture seems a little Quixotic.
Nope. Ultimately the point is that the iPhone lacked a couple of features that most people didn't really use (e.g. MMS) and traded it for everything else working properly for the first time in the history of cell phones.
I'm not going to argue too much (I doubt there's much point, since I'm guessing you just *want* to hate the iPhone), but the battery life of even the original iPhone was quite good in comparison with other smartphones of the time. If you remember, they got slammed for not including 3G, but 3G phones at the time had worse battery life (that's why Apple stayed away from 3G).
It wasn't just that the browser was good. The email client was exceptionally good, and would connect to normal POP/IMAP accounts without trouble or any crazy special modifications. Blackberries still want you to set up stupid extra accounts, a process that's needlessly complicated and error prone. Amazingly, the iPhone was less crash-prone than a lot of phones of the time, including dumb phones. Things like viewing pictures or listening to music on your phone went from being a chore to being a pleasure. Even text messaging was easier and made more sense. Managing your calendar and address book on the device was, for maybe the first time, a realistic proposition, and even before it had ActiveSync support, the over-the-wire sync was more reliable and trouble-free than anything else at the time.
Essentially by making things simpler and more polished, Apple transformed the smartphone into an everyday thing. Before the iPhone, smartphones may have technically worked, but using one was a painfully stupid experience that only geeks wanted to put up with.
Their "wild success" was more hype than anything else.
Yeah, it's not. Sorry, this is why I wanted us to start by admitting at least that much, because otherwise we're trapped in a funny world of denial and self-delusion.
Even before the iPhone started to gain market share, even before they started selling the damned things, they already had done immeasurable damage to their competitors. They had changed the way people thought about their phones.
The real truth, of course, is they've never been in the top spot in terms of market share.
It depends on how you measure it. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" and all that. If you go by model, then I believe the iPhone has been #1. If you go iPhone vs all Blackberries vs. all Android phones, then no, it hasn't been #1.
Look at the iPhone 1 -- a miserable pile of garbage that couldn't even handle MMS. It's beyond me how such a thing sold at all.
But look at the garbage that other people were selling at the time. It's not at all surprising that people would opt for a good phone with limited functionality than a crap phone.
Try typing an email on an iPhone and then on a Blackberry. Guess which one will get done faster, and with less frustration?
I own both a Blackberry and an iPhone, and I can type faster and more reliably on an iPhone. Some of it is what you're used to. If you expect an iPhone to work exactly like a Blackberry, you're going to find it to be a frustrating experience.
I'm sorry, but producers simply don't spend their lives constantly reworking and revising every movie they make.
Well sometimes they kind of do. Blade Runner has the theatrical version, the directors cut, and some other cut (I think). But the thing is, I think you can just choose which one you want to buy. I'm fine with that whole idea. In fact, I say let fans and other directors try to recut the thing, add scenes or remove them, whatever. But keep the original edit around in pristine condition.
The debate though, is not about that fact. It's about how much credit Apple really deserves for innovation.
I don't know why you think that's the debate. And frankly, I don't know where we'd begin to debate that.
The point here is that RIM failed, and part of the reason they failed is that they didn't respond effectively to the threat created by the iPhone.
There's a problem here: you won't even get agreement from people in answering the question, "What is art?" If you can't get people to agree on what it is, then you won't get agreement from people on the question of "Who owns art?"
It's such a complicated topic where people won't even agree on the basics, so it's hard to come to complex conclusions. One general point that I hope we can reach a consensus on: there's value in preserving art in the original form, even if only as an artifact or cultural snapshot. For example, I don't think it should bother us that Lucas wants to continually mess around with Star Wars. It bothers me, though, in as much as he's trying to force the new versions to be the authoritative versions and trying to make it difficult/unappealing to access the original edits.
If they use android (for the apps) and build enterprise management they could hang on for a bit.... If they fail at that, they could then go to Apple/Google/MS and beg them to integrate their products with a RIM enterprise management system - for a tiny margin.
Nope. Their enterprise management stuff is overblown and not worth as much as people say. At this point, people are using BES out of inertia as much as anything. There may be a couple of companies who actually get value out of the stuff, but not enough to support RIM. ActiveSync is a better solution in 95% of cases.
But when should we short them? That's what I want to know.
I don't know, but it may be that you should have already. I'm not a stock market expert, but I do know about the tech industry, and I can tell you that RIM has been dead in the water for a while already. If you didn't know it before, the flop of the Playbook should have clued you in.
I'm not saying it's the interface that you want, but rather that the iPhone, along with it's interface and it's UI design, destroyed the phone industry as existed before. Apple was so wildly successful that they forced the rest of the industry to reinvent itself. Can we admit to that?
it really sucks when the apps are only available for the big three - iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7.
I don't believe that's really the root problem here. That's a problem, but it's not *the* problem.
The *big* problem with RIM is that they stink. The hardware on the phones aren't bad, but almost everything else about them is. The interface-- well, can we just admit that Apple came along and ate everyone else's lunch in the cell phone industry? Can we just start by admitting that? The industry was stagnant and producing awful little phones with awful interfaces, and it's not until Apple showed that they were going to take over that everyone else responded by making better platforms. Android and Windows 7 are a response to Apple disrupting the entire industry, and somehow RIM failed to respond-- probably because they thought they were immune.
But now back to the interface, the blackberry interface is basically lipstick on a pig. On my blackberry, which is less than a year old, it feels like I'm running a 10 year old interface with a new skin. The graphics are smooth and there are kind of some fancy transitions and stuff; I'm not complaining about a lack of eye candy. I'm saying the design of the user interaction is extremely dated and stupid, and that was after they overhauled it.
The behind-the-scenes stuff stinks too. I support a lot of Blackberries, and they're constantly having random stupid problems where someone stops getting their mail or they get duplicates, and that's while using their touted BES stuff. It's junk. It breaks constantly. ActiveSync provides more stable results.
I'm not so sure about your suggestion to use Windows 7. It may be their best choice, but it's not a great choice. RIM is essentially headed down the same road as Palm at this point. They were huge, they sat on their hands and watched the world move on, they're probably going to try to become another hardware vendor with a commodity OS, but that makes them just another one of many hardware vendors with the same OS, and it's not clear they'll compete well. On top of that, it's not entirely clear to me that Windows phone 7 itself is doing very well. Sure, Microsoft will keep making it, but can RIM make money selling it?
The hour is later than you think, and RIM probably doesn't have any winning strategy here. Their best option may be to hope they can sell to someone who wants something about their intellectual property or their supply chain. But who would buy them? HP is out. I doubt Apple cares. I don't think Microsoft would be interested.
I've been saying for a while that the whole "video games cause violence" idea has causality wrong. If you're a happy, perfectly well adjusted person, then playing DOOM won't turn you into a killer. However, if you have mental/emotional problems that make you potentially violent and homicidal, you might be very likely to seek out means to play out those desires, which may include violent games.
If you want to prevent the next school shooting, don't bother censoring video games. Seek out the troubled kids and try to help them.
The real problem here isn't the video games. The real problem is high school.
I'm sure they'll ignore the amazing feat Netflix has accomplished (namely getting people to pay for streaming content online)
That's not the amazing feat. Of course you can get people to pay for streaming. The amazing thing is that they got content owners to allow streaming of so much content on a subscription basis instead of under the "onerous terms" you talk about. Most of the problems with Netflix streaming comes from either content owners wanting to restrict distribution, or ISPs not wanting to build their infrastructure properly.
But the trades themselves are not where people make or lose money. You spend $2 billion and get $2 billion worth of stock. It's what happens after that trade-- when that stock loses its value-- that you lose your $2 billion.