How about the fact that Adobe jumped ship and said Windows was their preferred platform? Or the way Adobe is still using Carbon after years of Apple pushing them to move to Cocoa? Or the way that Adobe's Flash plugin for OSX is slow and unstable and crashes Safari constantly, making Apple look bad? Or when Adobe blamed Apple for poor Flash performance?
How long will it take for Adobe to support them with their development tools?
I guess they could also be concerned about what happens when they want to discontinue something, and they have to contend with a huge install base of old Flash installs. Adobe is one of the companies that have forced Apple to keep supporting Carbon, after all.
I would also wonder if Apple is concerned that the applications made with Flash will suck. Can they trust Adobe to do a good job of using the APIs properly and making the code efficient? Can they trust Flash developers to use standard iPhone UI conventions? Or will they get flooded with submissions of crappy Flash applications which run poorly and have retarded interfaces?
It's not like there's a shortage of iPhone apps. Don't get me wrong, I wish Apple would open up their little walled garden, but it's not because I'm disappointed by the lack of Flash apps on my phone.
I've been saying for years that if Adobe were smart, they would be working on their own operating system to compete with Microsoft. It's not as thought Microsoft isn't invading Adobe's turf with XPS, Silverlight, and their Expression Suite.
If Adobe prettied up a Linux distribution, ported their Creative Suite and supported it on this new platform, and put some work into making OpenOffice a little more presentable, it would be the scariest moment the people at Microsoft have ever experienced.
For example, the ipod connector. Could have very easily been mini/micro usb. But it isn't. And because of that we get mp3/phone docks that are apple only. The reason? Because when you want to buy a new phone or mp3 player you either get to throw away 50$ extra to replace the perfectly good dock as well or stick with apple.
In fairness, the iPod connector carries more than USB, and it's not like everyone else is working really hard to make universal phone docks that will fit all phones snugly. If you buy a dock to fit your phone/mp3 player and you replace your phone with a different model, you pretty much need to get a new dock regardless of the brand.
No, the geeks at/. think that Apple has always made toys for hipsters. Ever since the first Macintosh was released, geeks have thought it was lame. Geeks like CLIs, and if they're willing to admit to having a mouse at all, they want that mouse to have at least 57 buttons.
I agree. I'm about to say something that almost everyone here will think is completely crazy, but I'm going to say it anyway: some of these DEs and Linux distros should focus less on being infinitely flexible and configurable, and more on coming up with one single configuration that works.
Not that I don't appreciate the flexibility and configurability, but having all these different options ought to mean that at least one option is consistant, standard, and controlled. give me a distro that only supports one DE, but make sure that DE's experience is really smooth. Take away all the different themes, and give me one single theme that's extremely polished. Maybe even don't try to support every possible kind of hardware, but certify some set of hardware and support that hardware really well. Go ahead and make some choices for me, just so long as those choices are really good choices.
A lot of people would say that sort of mindset is antithetical to the open source movement, but I don't think it is. Leave it open source, and let other people make any changes they'd like.
Anyway, I it's part of the reason for the success of OSX. While the geeks are all complaining about the lack of configurability, everyone else is happy with how well crafted the defaults are. I think Gnome operates along the same line (but not to the same degree), and while that earns it the wrath of a lot of geeks, it's the reason why so many Linux distros use Gnome as the default environment.
Re:The iPad is original Apple Redux
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The Apple Two
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Though, I can't imagine using it as my only computer as a student, blech
Well, duh! That's not what it's for!
Yeah, I've been reading all the reviews and trying to decide what to make of the iPad, and the unclear conclusion that I've come to is that it's not intended to be a computer.
I know, that sounds weird. It is a computer, after all. It has a processor and storage and RAM and runs an OS, and you can download a bunch of applications, etc. But no, it's not meant to be a computer any more than a Zune or an iPod is. It's not any more a computer than an Apple TV or XBox or Roku box. It's a device, a gadget, an appliance. It's a specialty purpose device that happens to have lots of purposes. iPad : Tablet PC:: WebTV : Computer.
... or something like that. Essentially it's a combination of a ebook reader and a digital notebook-- by saying "notebook" I don't mean to associate it with a "notebook computer". I mean the little bound book of dead tree material that you might carry around for writing down quick notes. So for most of us, this doesn't aim to replace our computers or even our laptop computers. It aims to replace all the paper products we might carry around with us, while also carrying a digital library of music and video.
If you look at the iPad in that light, it begins to make sense. You still might not like it, but at least it won't seem like such a weird little device.
I'm curious: what's the point of buying a CD and still torrenting the album? Once you've bought the CD, it's easy enough to rip it, right?
Video really is a problem. It's worth understanding that the record labels largely allowed DRM-free music because Apple backed them into a corner, but Apple doesn't hold the same sway over video that they do over music. No one is really doing DRM-free video yet, which is a shame. Hopefully video is simply behind the curve on this one, and improvements are coming.
I tried renting an HD movie on my PS3 once, just to test it out. I'm pretty sure it was a high quality 1080p version, and as I remember it took a full day to download on a ~10Mbps connection, but I don't know if things have changed since. Such long download times aren't worthwhile for rentals, and I'm not going to buy movies at full price if I can only watch them on my exact PS3 (last I heard, if your PS3 died, you lost all your movie purchases).
Anyway, all this is probably pretty off topic, but I just like to be vocal about this issue because I think these big companies are doing a really crappy job. Unfortunately they have a lock on their products (copyright doesn't really allow for a free market) and so they're essentially holding our culture hostage to their poor planning. I know that's a melodramatic way of putting things, but it's not altogether unfair.
Sure as hell they shouldn't have to buy a different board for that!
That part confused me as well. Don't people just play by whatever rules they want to anyway? I know I've played games of Scrabble where one of the rules is "even made-up words are allowed if they're funny enough." We also used to play Monopoly where bank robberies were allowed under certain circumstances.
Yes, I know they want me to re-buy everything every 5 years, but my point is, that ain't happening.
So the next question is, do they want me to buy stuff at all? Because trying to get me to re-buy everything every 5 years is stopping me from buying things at all. Their sagging sales are the result of market forces: they aren't serving their customers, so their customers aren't buying their products.
The ball is in their court. Fix the problem for me, and you might have yourself a new business model to replace selling me cardboard boxes with little plastic discs.
I'm not saying I was a *serious* collector. I was young and had no money. But I was amassing a collection none the less, since I failed to realize in those days that VHS would be dead in a handful of years.
Minor point, but Amazon has never placed any restrictions on their MP3s, hence why I buy them.
I was talking about their video service. You can buy movies and TV shows, watch them on your computer or Tivo. Nice idea, but if I buy from Amazon, can I play it on an iPad? If I buy a movie from iTunes, can I play it on an Android-based phone?
Nope. I'm locked into a handful of supported devices. What's more, not everything is available in HD (even if the Bluray has been released and the studio obviously has an HD copy), so they're *already* trying to force you to buy a crappier version so they can force you to re-buy it in HD down the line.
Seriously though, I hope movie studios recognize that this is part of the reason their movie sales are down. It's not just piracy. It's a variety of reasons, but I believe one of the main reasons is that people who buy lots of movies are collectors.
I say it as a collector: I don't really want to collect things that are transient in a way that makes them a huge money hole. Back in the day of VHS tapes, I bought a bunch of VHS tapes. When DVDs came out, I bought a bunch of DVDs, including repurchasing a couple of titles I had previously bought on VHS. Then came the MP3 revolution. I realized that it made far more sense to rip CDs to my computer so I could easily store, sort, and retrieve an enormous library, and I realized that those days would be coming for movies sooner or later.
By the time DVD ripping become easy and commonplace, we were into the format wars. I might have bought DVDs and ripped them for my computer, but I knew HD was coming, and so I'd wait it out to see if Bluray or HD-DVD won. Then Bluray won, but it was still expensive and hard to rip. Then there's iTunes and Amazon to contend with, that save you the trouble of ripping and tagging, but aren't compatible with all devices. Now there's new and incompatible Bluray discs? The whole thing just keeps getting more and more complicated, and it's more and more clear that whatever movies I buy today I'll probably need to re-buy later. The only way that they could make me more unlikely to buy anything today is by announcing they'll release a new format in 2 years that supports higher resolutions and 3D displays.
Sorry, it's a long rant for ideas that everyone has probably read before, but damn these companies need to get their crap together. They could stand to learn a thing or two from Gabe Newell on copy protection.
Also not quite the same thing, but can you get tethering applications installed on the Nexus One without hacking it at all? That's even Linux, but it's still not *really* open.
There are a couple problems here, one being that Apple is trying to position the iPad more as a "device" and not as a "computer". Another problem, I suspect, was that Apple wanted to get a built-in connection to cell networks, and carriers are dead-set against users having full control over cell devices.
I know, someone is going to say that if the carriers are the culprit, Apple could have left the WiFi-only iPad more open. That'd be a marketing nightmare. Then Apple would be exposing the crappy practices of their strategic partner (AT&T) as well as condemning the 3G version to ridicule and failure.
I don't have the inside scoop to know how much of the lockdown is Apple's idea and how much is forced on them by AT&T, but I really doubt it's all Apple's fault. You want openness? Regulate the carriers better. If Apple still won't open up at that point, then at least the competition will be able to.
Well how Apple does that, often enough, is that they aim at existing technology that's poorly executed or has a poorly thought out user interaction and smoothing out some of the ugly edges. I'm not sure how they would do that here. Google search doesn't really have ugly edges in need of smoothing.
I could see Apple trying to take on Google Docs, Gmail, Google Voice, or almost any of Google's other projects, but I'm not sure how you take "type stuff in, hit enter, and get a list of sites in response" and make it easier or more intuitive.
Sorry, I meant "half as much" and not "twice as much". It was basically a typo. The rest of my post stands though. Your netbook might technically be able to do everything the iPad can do, but people won't use it the same way.
And you *are* saying that people shouldn't buy the iPad, or at least that people shouldn't want to buy an iPad. My point is regardless of the technical capabilities of the iPad vs. other computers, if people find it more usable for particular uses, it may well be a good buy. Wanting to buy an iPad is not necessarily an error in judgment.
I'd agree that the Courier is an interesting looking device, except that it's not a real device yet. As far as I know, there's not even a set design yet. It's analogous to those concept cars you see at car shows that look really cool-- it's not a real product yet. If it ever does become a product, then we'll see how open it really is.
Your mindset it pretty normal for what I've seen here in Slashdot, and they all make the same reductive oversimplification: thinking that the only important thing about a computer/device is "what it does".
Either it sends email or it doesn't. Either it can render web pages or it can't. All devices that can send email and render web pages are practically identical. Form factor: irrelevant. Size and weight: unimportant. Works out of the box rather than requiring you to constantly fiddle with it: doesn't matter. Provides a pleasant interaction: no difference whatsoever.
I'm not saying that you should want to buy an iPad. You should buy whichever computers/devices meet your wants and needs, assuming that you're fine with the price and can afford it. Following that logic, some people will buy the iPad, and they're not wrong. Your laptop that costs twice as much won't be as small and thin and light and sleek, won't have a touchscreen, probably won't be as easy to work with on-the-go, and won't have applications custom-built for the form factor. It will be better for some things, worse for others.
So you're saying "Damned Apple, claiming credit for these websites moving to newer standards because the iPad doesn't support Flash. Clearly Apple isn't that important at all! These websites are moving away from Flash in order to support the iPhone. Totally different."?
Ok, whatever. It's not even clear that Apple is claiming credit. Go look at their website for the "iPad ready sites". What does it say?
iPad features Safari, a mobile web browser that supports the latest web standards — including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Here are just a few of the sites that take advantage of these web standards to deliver content that looks and functions beautifully on iPad.
So it's saying the iPad supports the latest web standards, and here are sites that use those web standards. There's definitely no explicit statement of causation.
Still, TED launched their Flash-free site something like 3 days ago. You think it's a coincidence?
But yeah, I get what you're saying. It's about the implication, not what anyone is explicitly saying. The *subtext* of Apple's announcement is that the entire Internet is rebuilding itself to support the iPad, just like the subtext of your post is something like, "I am emotionally threatened by Apple products for some reason that I will never divulge. I get very angry when people get excited about new Apple products, and feel the need to shit on everyone's parade."
Well I think you're right to point out that there's something funny about the idea of having a laptop, iPad (or similar tablet) *and* a smart phone. There's a lot of overlap in functionality there. It's still not clear to me, however, that it spells doom for the iPad.
Looking at the iPad application screenshots that I've seen so far, one thing strikes me strongly: it makes good use of the extra screen space. Smartphone GUIs are limited by screen size, and even when almost the whole front of the device is a screen, it's still not big enough.
Browsing websites on an iPhone or Android phone will do in a pinch, assuming I want to look up one particular thing, but it's not really good enough for browsing. You know, like, "I'm just going to kick back and browse around the internet for a while." Phones aren't good for that. The iPad could be.
I kind of even feel the same way about listening to music, which surprised me because it's not visual at all. I like listening to music on my iPhone when I'm on-the-go, in which case I usually just pick some random music. I don't look around too hard or think too deeply about what I really want to listen to, and I think part of the reason is that the menu system is so tight. It feels slightly confining. I don't feel like it's really convenient to browse through my collection, so the experience isn't as good as flipping through records or even browsing through your computer. (I know, that's just one man's opinion)
So I can see the value in the iPad and would like to have one. But then... I just can't wrap my head around the idea of carrying one around all over the place. I have an iPhone in my pocket 24/7. I carry my laptop around with me quite a lot for work purposes. Carry an iPad around with me too, or instead of one of those devices? Instead of both? Hard to see it.
This might be my dream setup, though:
Open the iPad up so I can use it more like a real computer in a pinch (allowing me to get rid of my laptop). This would probably need to eventually include access to a file browser and a command line with root privileges.
Create a good VoIP system that works using the iPad over either 3G (or 4G) or WiFi.
Create an iPhone-like handset that's super-thin and light but doesn't actually have internal storage, cell phone, or wifi capabilities. Basically just a screen with bluetooth and enough computing power to run it. Let it connect via bluetooth to the iPad. Give it controls to dial the VoIP dialer on the iPad (which would go over the iPad's Internet connection), as well as giving it remote controls to the iPad's media player.
Create a docking system which allows me to plug in a mouse, keyboard, and external monitor to my iPad and basically get a full desktop system. Even if it's not super-powerful, it's more comfortable to work for long sessions of a physical keyboard, mouse and big screen.
If it's not clear, the upshot of having the remote would be that you could keep the iPad in a bag, and without opening the bag, you could use the handset to place calls as though the handset were a full phone. The feature to have remote control for media would allow you to plug in headphones, stuff the iPad in a bag (with a long enough cord to still wear the headphones), and then select a new song, change the volume, or hit pause/play without fishing your iPad back out of the bag.
I think that this would potentially be a terrific solution for a lot of people, and we can do it technologically already.
Well you should at least grant him that he already broke the impending dominance of Windows Media audio/video formats and achieved a DRM-free music industry.
Well the iPad may well be why they're all pushing to get these projects done now rather than later. That's not too whacky an idea, since lots of sites went through the trouble of making iPhone-specific versions of their sites when the iPhone was released. I think some of these sites have even said themselves that they're making Flash-free versions specifically to be ready for the iPad.
Now that's not the same as saying that they're *only* doing this to support the iPad. I expect that these sites wouldn't be making this change if it weren't also a move toward greater adoption of standards.
But don't be a hater. Developers are working to support the iPad. It's not a coincidence. There's supposed to be a Netflix app at launch and a Hulu app on the way, and neither of those will have been created accidentally either.
The problem I have here is that I don't agree with what seems to be the premise - HFCS is not a horrible ninja of fat. I personally don't think that HFCS needs to be avoided any more than suga
Well the science does not seem to back you up on that one.
I *do* think that most people [again, excluding specific medical reasons] have it within their capability to not be fat.
I'd agree with you if you mean that a healthy diet and some regular exercise will make you much healthier than a crappy diet and no exercise. I'd agree with you that most people who are terribly obese have a bad diet and probably don't exercise very much. The bigger question in my mind: why?
If you try to attribute it simply to "self control", then I think you're oversimplifying it. There are a lot of social/cultural/economic/psychological factors which contribute. If you actually want to fix things rather than simply finding a scapegoat to blame, it would help to address all of these factors. Depression, anxiety, and social isolation contribute to overeating. Our economic models (bad grocery stores for food, government subsidies for unhealthy food, etc) certainly don't help. Living in a culture which values excess but doesn't value health, moderation, taking responsibility for yourself, or showing good judgment hurts us in many ways.
All of these things are connected and reinforce each other. Telling people, "It's not your fault, it's McDonalds fault!" might be counterproductive in some ways, since it allows people to shirk their own responsibility for their lives. However, telling people, "It's all your own fault. If you really wanted to be thin, you'd get off your fat ass and exercise! You're just an undisciplined peace of crap!" can often be counterproductive. It adds to the depression and sense of helplessness/isolation.
I believe it's also important to understand the phenomenon of learned helplessness. In order for people to unlearn their helplessness, it helps to understand what external factors are contributing to their failure rather than simply blame themselves.
4) This guy, Noah Goodman of MIT, uses inferences with probability: he uses a programming language named "Church" so the computer can go
"100% of birds in training set can fly. Thus, for a new bird there is a 100% chance it can fly"
"Oh ok, penguins can't fly. Given a random bird, 90% chance it can fly. Given random bird with weight to wing span ratio of 5 or less, 80% chance." and so on and so forth.
5) Using a language that mixes two separate strategies to train AIs, a grand unified theory of ai (lower case) is somehow created.
In my mind, you don't get to call it "AI" until, after feeding the computer information on thousands of birds and asks it whether penguins can fly, it responds, "I guess, probably. But look, I don't care about birds. What makes you think I care about birds? Tell me about that sexy printer you have over there. I'd like to plug into her USB port."
You think I'm joking. You hope I'm joking. I'm not joking.
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How about the fact that Adobe jumped ship and said Windows was their preferred platform? Or the way Adobe is still using Carbon after years of Apple pushing them to move to Cocoa? Or the way that Adobe's Flash plugin for OSX is slow and unstable and crashes Safari constantly, making Apple look bad? Or when Adobe blamed Apple for poor Flash performance?
These companies aren't BFF anymore.
How long will it take for Adobe to support them with their development tools?
I guess they could also be concerned about what happens when they want to discontinue something, and they have to contend with a huge install base of old Flash installs. Adobe is one of the companies that have forced Apple to keep supporting Carbon, after all.
I would also wonder if Apple is concerned that the applications made with Flash will suck. Can they trust Adobe to do a good job of using the APIs properly and making the code efficient? Can they trust Flash developers to use standard iPhone UI conventions? Or will they get flooded with submissions of crappy Flash applications which run poorly and have retarded interfaces?
It's not like there's a shortage of iPhone apps. Don't get me wrong, I wish Apple would open up their little walled garden, but it's not because I'm disappointed by the lack of Flash apps on my phone.
I've been saying for years that if Adobe were smart, they would be working on their own operating system to compete with Microsoft. It's not as thought Microsoft isn't invading Adobe's turf with XPS, Silverlight, and their Expression Suite.
If Adobe prettied up a Linux distribution, ported their Creative Suite and supported it on this new platform, and put some work into making OpenOffice a little more presentable, it would be the scariest moment the people at Microsoft have ever experienced.
For example, the ipod connector. Could have very easily been mini/micro usb. But it isn't. And because of that we get mp3/phone docks that are apple only. The reason? Because when you want to buy a new phone or mp3 player you either get to throw away 50$ extra to replace the perfectly good dock as well or stick with apple.
In fairness, the iPod connector carries more than USB, and it's not like everyone else is working really hard to make universal phone docks that will fit all phones snugly. If you buy a dock to fit your phone/mp3 player and you replace your phone with a different model, you pretty much need to get a new dock regardless of the brand.
No, the geeks at /. think that Apple has always made toys for hipsters. Ever since the first Macintosh was released, geeks have thought it was lame. Geeks like CLIs, and if they're willing to admit to having a mouse at all, they want that mouse to have at least 57 buttons.
I agree. I'm about to say something that almost everyone here will think is completely crazy, but I'm going to say it anyway: some of these DEs and Linux distros should focus less on being infinitely flexible and configurable, and more on coming up with one single configuration that works.
Not that I don't appreciate the flexibility and configurability, but having all these different options ought to mean that at least one option is consistant, standard, and controlled. give me a distro that only supports one DE, but make sure that DE's experience is really smooth. Take away all the different themes, and give me one single theme that's extremely polished. Maybe even don't try to support every possible kind of hardware, but certify some set of hardware and support that hardware really well. Go ahead and make some choices for me, just so long as those choices are really good choices.
A lot of people would say that sort of mindset is antithetical to the open source movement, but I don't think it is. Leave it open source, and let other people make any changes they'd like.
Anyway, I it's part of the reason for the success of OSX. While the geeks are all complaining about the lack of configurability, everyone else is happy with how well crafted the defaults are. I think Gnome operates along the same line (but not to the same degree), and while that earns it the wrath of a lot of geeks, it's the reason why so many Linux distros use Gnome as the default environment.
Though, I can't imagine using it as my only computer as a student, blech
Well, duh! That's not what it's for!
Yeah, I've been reading all the reviews and trying to decide what to make of the iPad, and the unclear conclusion that I've come to is that it's not intended to be a computer.
I know, that sounds weird. It is a computer, after all. It has a processor and storage and RAM and runs an OS, and you can download a bunch of applications, etc. But no, it's not meant to be a computer any more than a Zune or an iPod is. It's not any more a computer than an Apple TV or XBox or Roku box. It's a device, a gadget, an appliance. It's a specialty purpose device that happens to have lots of purposes. iPad : Tablet PC :: WebTV : Computer.
... or something like that. Essentially it's a combination of a ebook reader and a digital notebook-- by saying "notebook" I don't mean to associate it with a "notebook computer". I mean the little bound book of dead tree material that you might carry around for writing down quick notes. So for most of us, this doesn't aim to replace our computers or even our laptop computers. It aims to replace all the paper products we might carry around with us, while also carrying a digital library of music and video.
If you look at the iPad in that light, it begins to make sense. You still might not like it, but at least it won't seem like such a weird little device.
I'm curious: what's the point of buying a CD and still torrenting the album? Once you've bought the CD, it's easy enough to rip it, right?
Video really is a problem. It's worth understanding that the record labels largely allowed DRM-free music because Apple backed them into a corner, but Apple doesn't hold the same sway over video that they do over music. No one is really doing DRM-free video yet, which is a shame. Hopefully video is simply behind the curve on this one, and improvements are coming.
I tried renting an HD movie on my PS3 once, just to test it out. I'm pretty sure it was a high quality 1080p version, and as I remember it took a full day to download on a ~10Mbps connection, but I don't know if things have changed since. Such long download times aren't worthwhile for rentals, and I'm not going to buy movies at full price if I can only watch them on my exact PS3 (last I heard, if your PS3 died, you lost all your movie purchases).
Anyway, all this is probably pretty off topic, but I just like to be vocal about this issue because I think these big companies are doing a really crappy job. Unfortunately they have a lock on their products (copyright doesn't really allow for a free market) and so they're essentially holding our culture hostage to their poor planning. I know that's a melodramatic way of putting things, but it's not altogether unfair.
Sure as hell they shouldn't have to buy a different board for that!
That part confused me as well. Don't people just play by whatever rules they want to anyway? I know I've played games of Scrabble where one of the rules is "even made-up words are allowed if they're funny enough." We also used to play Monopoly where bank robberies were allowed under certain circumstances.
Yes, I know they want me to re-buy everything every 5 years, but my point is, that ain't happening.
So the next question is, do they want me to buy stuff at all? Because trying to get me to re-buy everything every 5 years is stopping me from buying things at all. Their sagging sales are the result of market forces: they aren't serving their customers, so their customers aren't buying their products.
The ball is in their court. Fix the problem for me, and you might have yourself a new business model to replace selling me cardboard boxes with little plastic discs.
AFAIK neither PS3 or XBox360 have Amazon Video On Demand support. None of Apple's devices (iPod, iPad, AppleTV) do.
I'm not saying I was a *serious* collector. I was young and had no money. But I was amassing a collection none the less, since I failed to realize in those days that VHS would be dead in a handful of years.
Minor point, but Amazon has never placed any restrictions on their MP3s, hence why I buy them.
I was talking about their video service. You can buy movies and TV shows, watch them on your computer or Tivo. Nice idea, but if I buy from Amazon, can I play it on an iPad? If I buy a movie from iTunes, can I play it on an Android-based phone?
Nope. I'm locked into a handful of supported devices. What's more, not everything is available in HD (even if the Bluray has been released and the studio obviously has an HD copy), so they're *already* trying to force you to buy a crappier version so they can force you to re-buy it in HD down the line.
Yeah, time to run out and buy all new stuff!
Seriously though, I hope movie studios recognize that this is part of the reason their movie sales are down. It's not just piracy. It's a variety of reasons, but I believe one of the main reasons is that people who buy lots of movies are collectors.
I say it as a collector: I don't really want to collect things that are transient in a way that makes them a huge money hole. Back in the day of VHS tapes, I bought a bunch of VHS tapes. When DVDs came out, I bought a bunch of DVDs, including repurchasing a couple of titles I had previously bought on VHS. Then came the MP3 revolution. I realized that it made far more sense to rip CDs to my computer so I could easily store, sort, and retrieve an enormous library, and I realized that those days would be coming for movies sooner or later.
By the time DVD ripping become easy and commonplace, we were into the format wars. I might have bought DVDs and ripped them for my computer, but I knew HD was coming, and so I'd wait it out to see if Bluray or HD-DVD won. Then Bluray won, but it was still expensive and hard to rip. Then there's iTunes and Amazon to contend with, that save you the trouble of ripping and tagging, but aren't compatible with all devices. Now there's new and incompatible Bluray discs? The whole thing just keeps getting more and more complicated, and it's more and more clear that whatever movies I buy today I'll probably need to re-buy later. The only way that they could make me more unlikely to buy anything today is by announcing they'll release a new format in 2 years that supports higher resolutions and 3D displays.
Sorry, it's a long rant for ideas that everyone has probably read before, but damn these companies need to get their crap together. They could stand to learn a thing or two from Gabe Newell on copy protection.
Also not quite the same thing, but can you get tethering applications installed on the Nexus One without hacking it at all? That's even Linux, but it's still not *really* open.
There are a couple problems here, one being that Apple is trying to position the iPad more as a "device" and not as a "computer". Another problem, I suspect, was that Apple wanted to get a built-in connection to cell networks, and carriers are dead-set against users having full control over cell devices.
I know, someone is going to say that if the carriers are the culprit, Apple could have left the WiFi-only iPad more open. That'd be a marketing nightmare. Then Apple would be exposing the crappy practices of their strategic partner (AT&T) as well as condemning the 3G version to ridicule and failure.
I don't have the inside scoop to know how much of the lockdown is Apple's idea and how much is forced on them by AT&T, but I really doubt it's all Apple's fault. You want openness? Regulate the carriers better. If Apple still won't open up at that point, then at least the competition will be able to.
Well how Apple does that, often enough, is that they aim at existing technology that's poorly executed or has a poorly thought out user interaction and smoothing out some of the ugly edges. I'm not sure how they would do that here. Google search doesn't really have ugly edges in need of smoothing.
I could see Apple trying to take on Google Docs, Gmail, Google Voice, or almost any of Google's other projects, but I'm not sure how you take "type stuff in, hit enter, and get a list of sites in response" and make it easier or more intuitive.
Sorry, I meant "half as much" and not "twice as much". It was basically a typo. The rest of my post stands though. Your netbook might technically be able to do everything the iPad can do, but people won't use it the same way.
And you *are* saying that people shouldn't buy the iPad, or at least that people shouldn't want to buy an iPad. My point is regardless of the technical capabilities of the iPad vs. other computers, if people find it more usable for particular uses, it may well be a good buy. Wanting to buy an iPad is not necessarily an error in judgment.
I'd agree that the Courier is an interesting looking device, except that it's not a real device yet. As far as I know, there's not even a set design yet. It's analogous to those concept cars you see at car shows that look really cool-- it's not a real product yet. If it ever does become a product, then we'll see how open it really is.
Your mindset it pretty normal for what I've seen here in Slashdot, and they all make the same reductive oversimplification: thinking that the only important thing about a computer/device is "what it does".
Either it sends email or it doesn't. Either it can render web pages or it can't. All devices that can send email and render web pages are practically identical. Form factor: irrelevant. Size and weight: unimportant. Works out of the box rather than requiring you to constantly fiddle with it: doesn't matter. Provides a pleasant interaction: no difference whatsoever.
I'm not saying that you should want to buy an iPad. You should buy whichever computers/devices meet your wants and needs, assuming that you're fine with the price and can afford it. Following that logic, some people will buy the iPad, and they're not wrong. Your laptop that costs twice as much won't be as small and thin and light and sleek, won't have a touchscreen, probably won't be as easy to work with on-the-go, and won't have applications custom-built for the form factor. It will be better for some things, worse for others.
So you're saying "Damned Apple, claiming credit for these websites moving to newer standards because the iPad doesn't support Flash. Clearly Apple isn't that important at all! These websites are moving away from Flash in order to support the iPhone. Totally different."?
Ok, whatever. It's not even clear that Apple is claiming credit. Go look at their website for the "iPad ready sites". What does it say?
iPad features Safari, a mobile web browser that supports the latest web standards — including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Here are just a few of the sites that take advantage of these web standards to deliver content that looks and functions beautifully on iPad.
So it's saying the iPad supports the latest web standards, and here are sites that use those web standards. There's definitely no explicit statement of causation.
Still, TED launched their Flash-free site something like 3 days ago. You think it's a coincidence?
But yeah, I get what you're saying. It's about the implication, not what anyone is explicitly saying. The *subtext* of Apple's announcement is that the entire Internet is rebuilding itself to support the iPad, just like the subtext of your post is something like, "I am emotionally threatened by Apple products for some reason that I will never divulge. I get very angry when people get excited about new Apple products, and feel the need to shit on everyone's parade."
Well I think you're right to point out that there's something funny about the idea of having a laptop, iPad (or similar tablet) *and* a smart phone. There's a lot of overlap in functionality there. It's still not clear to me, however, that it spells doom for the iPad.
Looking at the iPad application screenshots that I've seen so far, one thing strikes me strongly: it makes good use of the extra screen space. Smartphone GUIs are limited by screen size, and even when almost the whole front of the device is a screen, it's still not big enough.
Browsing websites on an iPhone or Android phone will do in a pinch, assuming I want to look up one particular thing, but it's not really good enough for browsing. You know, like, "I'm just going to kick back and browse around the internet for a while." Phones aren't good for that. The iPad could be.
I kind of even feel the same way about listening to music, which surprised me because it's not visual at all. I like listening to music on my iPhone when I'm on-the-go, in which case I usually just pick some random music. I don't look around too hard or think too deeply about what I really want to listen to, and I think part of the reason is that the menu system is so tight. It feels slightly confining. I don't feel like it's really convenient to browse through my collection, so the experience isn't as good as flipping through records or even browsing through your computer. (I know, that's just one man's opinion)
So I can see the value in the iPad and would like to have one. But then... I just can't wrap my head around the idea of carrying one around all over the place. I have an iPhone in my pocket 24/7. I carry my laptop around with me quite a lot for work purposes. Carry an iPad around with me too, or instead of one of those devices? Instead of both? Hard to see it.
This might be my dream setup, though:
Create a docking system which allows me to plug in a mouse, keyboard, and external monitor to my iPad and basically get a full desktop system. Even if it's not super-powerful, it's more comfortable to work for long sessions of a physical keyboard, mouse and big screen.
If it's not clear, the upshot of having the remote would be that you could keep the iPad in a bag, and without opening the bag, you could use the handset to place calls as though the handset were a full phone. The feature to have remote control for media would allow you to plug in headphones, stuff the iPad in a bag (with a long enough cord to still wear the headphones), and then select a new song, change the volume, or hit pause/play without fishing your iPad back out of the bag.
I think that this would potentially be a terrific solution for a lot of people, and we can do it technologically already.
Well you should at least grant him that he already broke the impending dominance of Windows Media audio/video formats and achieved a DRM-free music industry.
Well the iPad may well be why they're all pushing to get these projects done now rather than later. That's not too whacky an idea, since lots of sites went through the trouble of making iPhone-specific versions of their sites when the iPhone was released. I think some of these sites have even said themselves that they're making Flash-free versions specifically to be ready for the iPad.
Now that's not the same as saying that they're *only* doing this to support the iPad. I expect that these sites wouldn't be making this change if it weren't also a move toward greater adoption of standards.
But don't be a hater. Developers are working to support the iPad. It's not a coincidence. There's supposed to be a Netflix app at launch and a Hulu app on the way, and neither of those will have been created accidentally either.
Are you joking? You're joking, right? At what point are you going to say "APRIL FOOLS!"?
The problem I have here is that I don't agree with what seems to be the premise - HFCS is not a horrible ninja of fat. I personally don't think that HFCS needs to be avoided any more than suga
Well the science does not seem to back you up on that one.
I *do* think that most people [again, excluding specific medical reasons] have it within their capability to not be fat.
I'd agree with you if you mean that a healthy diet and some regular exercise will make you much healthier than a crappy diet and no exercise. I'd agree with you that most people who are terribly obese have a bad diet and probably don't exercise very much. The bigger question in my mind: why?
If you try to attribute it simply to "self control", then I think you're oversimplifying it. There are a lot of social/cultural/economic/psychological factors which contribute. If you actually want to fix things rather than simply finding a scapegoat to blame, it would help to address all of these factors. Depression, anxiety, and social isolation contribute to overeating. Our economic models (bad grocery stores for food, government subsidies for unhealthy food, etc) certainly don't help. Living in a culture which values excess but doesn't value health, moderation, taking responsibility for yourself, or showing good judgment hurts us in many ways.
All of these things are connected and reinforce each other. Telling people, "It's not your fault, it's McDonalds fault!" might be counterproductive in some ways, since it allows people to shirk their own responsibility for their lives. However, telling people, "It's all your own fault. If you really wanted to be thin, you'd get off your fat ass and exercise! You're just an undisciplined peace of crap!" can often be counterproductive. It adds to the depression and sense of helplessness/isolation.
I believe it's also important to understand the phenomenon of learned helplessness. In order for people to unlearn their helplessness, it helps to understand what external factors are contributing to their failure rather than simply blame themselves.
4) This guy, Noah Goodman of MIT, uses inferences with probability: he uses a programming language named "Church" so the computer can go "100% of birds in training set can fly. Thus, for a new bird there is a 100% chance it can fly" "Oh ok, penguins can't fly. Given a random bird, 90% chance it can fly. Given random bird with weight to wing span ratio of 5 or less, 80% chance." and so on and so forth. 5) Using a language that mixes two separate strategies to train AIs, a grand unified theory of ai (lower case) is somehow created.
In my mind, you don't get to call it "AI" until, after feeding the computer information on thousands of birds and asks it whether penguins can fly, it responds, "I guess, probably. But look, I don't care about birds. What makes you think I care about birds? Tell me about that sexy printer you have over there. I'd like to plug into her USB port."
You think I'm joking. You hope I'm joking. I'm not joking.