You pay taxes, get no healthcare, and a private company makes obscene profits. Perfect 21st century US system: socialize the downside, capitalize the upside.
How about Microsoft bring their products up to Unix standard first? How about they do whatever it takes to upgrade the 75% of their userbase that is 10 years behind?
... was not subtitled "The Young Lady's Illustrated Netbook." Why not? Because that would SUCK. The device in The Diamond Age is a "book" not a "computer". Same exact thing with iPad. Any technical hurdles at all are like putting a lock and key on books. Like you have to do a Rubik's Cube to get into a dictionary. It shuts people out from knowledge. Technical people are not shut out from iPad, either. There is a Cisco app that lets you VPN into any computer on the Internet and pull up its graphical desktop, this will be the very best platform for all the huge computer books with optical discs in the back, it will hold 10,000 of them for you. The 2-page book view on iPad is the first eReader that can show 100% of the books in your bookstore or library just as they were meant to be viewed.
It's really strange how many nerds are such traditionalists these days. If it's not a clone of the 1991 PowerBook form factor with a clone of the 1995 Windows operating system, they're all crotchety like "get off my lawn you kids!" It's actually only Generation X that feels this way...people who are 20 or 60 right now want the computer to go away, they want it to be totally transparent, they want to do Facebook or look up recipes, not compile anything or run anti-virus. But people who are 40 and use a computer can't get their head out of DOS and BIOS and other nostalgia they feel they have hard-fought knowledge and mastery of. It's like "I spent all these years learning how to use a computer and now Apple is going to make it easy? Fuck no!" Intel EFI is like 5 years old and only Apple is using it.
The $499 iPad is going to last people for 2 years and cost them $0 in IT consulting, $0 in software upgrades, and $0 in anti-virus and security software. That is $1 per business day. It's going to ask the user to spend almost no time configuring it or troubleshooting it. For a nerd to say that is expensive when nerds know full well how much IT hours cost is disingenuous at best, malicious at worst.
Me personally, I think making IT hours go away is magic enough. The fact that so many who have used an iPad describe it as a magical experience is icing on the cake.
And I think the iPad's Web browser is magic enough on its own, and is what all Web browsers will be in a few years: HTML5, GPU-accelerated graphics, world class typography, color managed images, ISO audio video, Unix networking, buttons/links you can press with your finger, pinch zooming, and flicking to scroll with physics. It makes the Web extremely rich and natural. It's magical compared to IE and the mouse cursor and scroller and + and - keys that most people are using right now, that's for sure.
If a large number of firmware updates are bricking your devices, you are buying bad gear. I've never had a firmware update brick anything. Buy better gear.
Pretending firmware doesn't exist is not a solution. It's there because it needs to be updated sometimes.
You have to patch that car due to liability if nothing else. If you get into an accident, the other party's lawyer could make hay with the fact you're driving an unpatched Toyota.
> It's sure a good thing for those worried parents that they don't have any kind > of web browser on there.
That is exactly why these apps are not needed in App Store. All Apple devices have an HTML5 browser with ISO audio video. There is no shortage of porn without having to go through Apple.
App Store is specifically about being an alternative to the Web. What you have on the Web, you should not have in App Store and vice versa. In App Store, it's managed, it's mediated, and the Web is completely unmanaged, unmediated.
Plus these apps were softcore garbage. The selection of porno on the Web is much more sophisticated. Everybody is better off because of this.
> While I think the NHS overall is more fairer than the US system (even with the major problems I currently > have with it) just remember the grass always seems greener on the other side.
There is no grass in the US, to continue your analogy. There is no medical funding except for people over 65 and veterans. The ground is bare dirt. A routine medical procedure in the US is you live with it, you suck it up, you take a fucking aspirin and hope it gets better on its own. A friend of mine died in his sleep last year at 32 years old... never had a doctor his whole life.
Sincerely: STFU. You have no fucking idea what you are talking about.
Could you replace the CD with something else in 1995? That was when the CD was as old and entrenched as H.264 is now. It's way too late. You should be lobbying MPEG-LA to keep H.264 free after 2016 (like Apple does) not lobbying Google to get a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD thing started. (BTW Blu-Ray is H.264.) Content publishers are even warier of multiple formats than users because it kills media buying.
Further, it's only PC's that have a choice of software codec, and even there it comes at the expense of battery life, decoding a non-standard codec on your CPU instead of H.264 on your GPU with more efficiency. On mobiles you have a built-in H.264 decoder only, that's it. The PC as the center of the digital universe is as passé as the CD. Video is what plays on iPods (H.264) and smartphones (H.264) and set-tops (H.264). It is actually pathetic to think that the Web is going to come late to the video game and rewrite history when you consider how Microsoft does not even support the video tag yet.
Start thinking about the successor to H.264, and better yet, start building it, write some code.
Google is firmly behind H.264 because in YouTube they have a video business. YouTube is H.264 in the back end. There's no alternative to ISO standard H.264 if you want people to actually see your content, same as in 1995 there was no alternative to CD.
OLED demos well... you put a brand new screen in a dark room and with the right content you can blow people away. The thin displays you can make since there is no backlight demo well. The energy consumption demos well with a mostly-black screen. But when you get it home it doesn't work in a bright room, the colors aren't great and worse, change over time. The worst part may be that it's not even more energy efficient than LED-backlit displays when playing video.
On mobiles it's even less appropriate because of the varied lighting conditions you encounter. You would see people struggling with their Nexus One or Zune in daylight if they had sold more than a handful of either device.
The nerd infatuation with this expensive buzzword has been incredible. Some were calling for an OLED iPad, that is crazy. It would cost more than the whole device and have so many drawbacks in practical use. All for a buzzword.
Many custom corporate apps built between 2002-2006 were called "Web apps" but were really "IE6 apps". In the late 90's they would have been Windows apps built with Visual Basic. Companies thought they were modernizing to the Web but really just got a different kind of Windows app.
It continues with IE7 and IE8... these browsers are so incapable that, for example, a rich text editor for them is done as ActiveX instead of as HTML5, so you can't run the app anywhere but IE. Now that these companies are often running multiple platforms (Windows XP, Windows Vista/7, Mac OS, iPhone, Blackberry) they are getting bitten on the ass. It's like Y2K in that the future was never supposed to happen.
Microsoft succeeded in forking the Web. This is the aftermath. That's why HTML5 compatibility is so important, the focus on browser vendors in the spec means that Apple WebKit and Mozilla Gecko engineers do a lot of work to make their browsers compatible with each other. You have WebKit redoing canvas in the standard way, redoing Gears in the standard way. If you're locked into any one browser or one hardware that is not the Web, it is by definition only what's completely universal. If it's not universal (IE, Flash) it's not part of the Web.
The fact that the iPad supports all of the books ever written, not just those that can be rendered on newsprint, is all you need to know. That wins the contest right there. Most books are in color. Many books are entirely made of photographs, such as art or recipe books. Even if a book is all text, the cover is usually color. Even business books are filled with color charts. Supporting the whole library is key. Further, it supports audio video so it supports future books, such as a book for learning Photoshop that includes video of painting techniques.
Secondarily, the touch user interface that lets you just turn the page is fantastic. You don't have to use buttons to read. The device becomes a book. A child can operate it without instruction. No nerd corps is required to help people to read a book.
The full Wi-Fi n and HTML5 Web browser based entirely on an open source, standards-compliant Web decoder is the modern equivalent of having a dictionary built-in. Hyperlinks in books take you right to the Web, and you have Google and Wikipedia and Oxford.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of bookstores, so you can buy from Amazon or Kobo or iBooks or use any of the ones that are filled with free public domain books. The open ePub format is supported in iBooks and many other reading apps. I work in publishing and iPad is the only reader that's generating excitement among publishers. We know that the master copies of these books can be translated to iPad and retain their quality, whereas on other readers you are degrading the master when you put it on there. You have to fix color charts, rework even basic things to make a book work on other readers. With iPad you just make an ePub. Your color photos and charts still work. The labor is much less and the result is much better on iPad.
The iPad battery can play 10 hours of video, which likely means 15 hours of book reading. It charges via USB and there are many juice packs, so you can get as much battery time as you need. This year at CES they had wall sockets with 2 AC and 2 USB in them.
The iPad adjusts its screen brightness to your surroundings so you don't wear out your eyes as on other readers. (Do not repeat that awful myth about LCD being harder on eyes than e-Ink... that is a joke at the best of times, ridiculous from a Slashdot reader.)
At $499 it has a premium price over other book readers, but you get much more. Not just full color and touch, but also 4-20 times the storage, much more speed, a built-in iPod, built-in and 3rd party apps, many games, Podcasts, and it can even run Skype. So it is a book reader with a PC and iPod built-in for many users. If the iPhone is prologue, it will be easy to get 2 years of everyday use from this device, and often even more. And Apple Stores provide consumer grade support, replacing faulty devices on the spot, and offering free help with any technical issues.
The fact that iPad runs on an open source Unix core OS means it is reliable and interoperates well with the Internet and other networks. Everyone who contributed to BSD, Mach, WebKit, OpenGL, and other open source projects and open standards that are represented in iPad should be extremely proud of themselves. This is the closest to Neal Stephenson's Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (read The Diamond Age) that we've come yet. Of course everyone at Apple should be proud also. This device has been described for decades and is sorely needed, much moreso than another Windows netbook.
Even if you sample in music, the sampling is just accompaniment, backing tracks. In other words, the DJ samples, the MC does not.
Further, you don't pretend you didn't sample, you give credit where it's due. You often pay the original artist, especially if the sampling is very prominent.
This young lady is not only guilty of plagiarism, but also of misunderstanding sampling. It's not plagiarism.
The literary version of sampling would be to write a new, unplagiarized book using existing characters and settings from another book. Like a Star Wars themed novel. In that case you use Star Wars as backing for a new work.
The tragedy of this is the manuscript should have been considered a first draft and rewritten in one voice, even by a ghostwriter. Publishing the same exact phrases is not required in order to be unoriginal.
Lenovo was talking $1999 for this, and there is no availability date.
For the same price you can get an iPad, a MacBook Pro, an iPod touch, and an iPod shuffle. Then you have a desktop OS, a tablet OS, a pocket tablet OS, and a microscopic music player. You have 3 screens. All 4 items work simultaneously. The Mac is carved out of a block of aluminum and feels like it. All you bookmarks and contacts and music and photos sync between all of the devices automatically. The 3 devices with browsers all run HTML5 apps, and the Mac also runs BSD, Java, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, as well as Mac apps. A single iPhone app purchase puts the app on both tablets. A $50 Mac app runs other Intel operating systems in a window at full speed and with 3D graphics.
Just because you are a nerd that doesn't mean you don't have actual work to do. The action is in the software, not some convertible geegaws.
If you don't get that the Mac with OS X saves you time and money and increases productivity compared to a PC with Windows by now then that's your problem. You can help the ignorant but not the stupid, not the completely disfunctional. There are thousands of examples like Genentech where Mac minis replaced Dell towers and millions of dollars were saved and productivity soared. The message has been sent. Many simply are not listening.
I'm working in the I-T group for a huge multinational that is 98% Windows, and me and my co-workers all have Macs at home, and so do most users. But the guy making the buying decisions only knows Microsoft. He does not even know anything about the Web. He's a middle manager guy, not a technologist. Nobody is home. There is no decision-making about I-T except when do we roll out the next Microsoft patch? They still run IE6. They spend months deciding what icons will appear on a user's desktop when they get it. They have no idea what their users do or how to help them be productive. The big issue now is how to convince users they want Windows 7 enough for them to learn it. They're not rolling out better tools, they're propagandizing the next Microsoft thing. You can't help people like that.
HTML5 is not just an author's spec, it's a browser maker's spec. HTML rendering is now at the level of the TCP/IP stack. The WebKit and Mozilla projects bust their balls to handle HTML in the same standardized way. That leaves the browser UI. There are multiple alternate browsers for iPhone, but you have to use WebKit as the renderer, same as you have to use the iPhone OS network stack. Opera is totally free to make an Opera for iPhone, they just don't get to replace core OS components.
There are 2 billion phones and the ones that LEAST need Opera are the iPhones. It's like they want to run their renderer inside Firefox.
It runs iPhone OS v3.2 and 99% of iPhone apps (not the ones that require a built-on camera or GPS).
Since iPhone OS has built-in VPN and Exchange, why would anyone but a troll think that doesn't work on iPad. Somebody already tried the VPN and remote controlled fucking Windows.
iWork documents appear to other devices on the network as a file server, just like about 20% of iPhone apps.
You don't have to look far for these answers. They had a press event. The press handled the device. iPhone OS v3.1.1 is running on iPhone and iPod and the fucking 140,000 apps are on sale right now.
And Apple doesn't talk, they fucking ship. Recommend a dose of that to all in tech. WTF does Steve Ballmer's HP Slate do? When will it ship? What will it cost? None of these things has been said.
This is bullshit. Not only do consumers prefer to pay later, fucking accountants prefer to pay later. Corporations prefer to pay later.
Apple tried this with the iPhone, too. The original iPhone was unsubsidized. People HATED it.
The subsidy is great because it makes it possible to buy an iPhone for $99 instead of a crappy feature phone. The extra $20 per month on the contract is offset by the fact that you're using a smartphone, it pays for itself. You make more sales or get a better job or save time or money compared to when you didn't have a smartphone.
STOP APOLOGIZING FOR ANDROID. It sucks and it won't get better until the people who use it demand that it get better. Google bought Android in 2005. Where are the results? iPad is going to ship with a $15 data plan and Skype calls, that is what was promised from the Google Phone. And iPad with 3G and 16GB is only $50 more than Nexus One.
It is so easy to do transitions, transforms, animate properties such as opacity, add vectors, audio, video in HTML5/WebKit right now, which represents all mobile usage except for mobile Firefox which is still not 1.0. What is needed is for Firefox to catch up with ISO video and CSS animations. I did Flash development since 1997, I much prefer to develop for WebKit now. You make a CSS class that defines one state of the animation, another for another state, and just change the class of the element to animate it and WebKit does the tweening in the GPU. Flash was never, ever this fast or easy or had this performance, and WebKit runs on every OS and architecture and is open source. The idea that we need something else is ridiculous. We just need more browsers to support this. But even now, Safari on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Chrome, Android, Blackberry, Nokia all support this.
Flash is PC software, it has system requirements of a P4 or better, 2GHz or better, there is no such thing as a mobile that can run it. Notice that Mobile Firefox dropped Flash in RC3 for performance and stability reasons. Adobe is using Apple as a red herring, the problem is Flash itself is not part of the Web. It has not been managed like WebKit was since 2002, totally open source, built primarily for speed and standards.
> Nuanti's [proprietary] Highgate Media Suite will enable support for standards-based HTML5 video streaming with > [nonstandard} Theora in browsers that have [proprietary] Silverlight.
Or you could use ISO/IEC 14496-10 (MPEG-4 part 10, H.264) and playback not just in Silverlight, but directly in hardware on every device that can play video on the planet, including PC GPU's, iPods, smartphones from all manufacturers, game consoles, and in FlashPlayer and QuickTime Player and Chrome and Safari.
What is the point of using standard HTML5 markup if you don't use standard ISO/IEC video? No fucking point at all.
HTML5 is a markup standard. Where it pertains to video is in the standardization of video-related markup, i.e. the "video" tag, not video formats. W3C has nothing to teach MPEG about video formats. W3C also has nothing to teach MPEG or ISO about standardization, because the Web is a mess of proprietary IE and Flash while MPEG has enabled 20 years of consumer digital video, including the DVD and Blu-Ray. Right now, both QuickTime Player and FlashPlayer play H.264, both iTunes and YouTube are H.264, both Flip and iPod camcorders are H.264, but I can't make one Web app for both IE and Firefox.
What we are talking about with Web video today is "will our H.264 video playback move from plug-ins (QuickTime Player and FlashPlayer) to native browser playback?" That is all. The format is not in question. The HTML4 Web has already been using the ISO standard format in iTunes, YouTube, and many others. There is no competing format. FLV is still used too much, but it has been deprecated since 2008, it has no HD sizes, it is proprietary to Adobe, the encoder costs $599, and it takes much more bandwidth than H.264. There are no Ogg camcorders, iPods, video editors. These tools and devices were all built for MPEG-4, which is a standardization of the QuickTime file format that was used previously. Google has already said that even if they had the compute time to transcode YouTube to Ogg, the Internet does not have the bandwidth for an Ogg YouTube, and almost nobody has a player.
Ten years ago, Linux users complained that they could not view the video on the Web because it was in QuickTime containers with Sorenson video and Qdesign audio and that was all proprietary, not standardized. Now, the video is all in ISO MPEG-4 containers, with ISO H.264 video and ISO AAC audio and is playable on Linux in FlashPlayer and WebKit browsers and other players, and the complaining continues. It is disheartening.
There's no way Windows would pass any kind of Internet-readiness test, it gets viruses and lacks the basic network security features of Unix systems. So it is weird to hear this guy say our Internet "cars" need certification.
Do you think you need to take a test to use an iPad? The reason so many XP are out there is the massive user training to go to a newer Windows nets no productivity benefit, yet people trade in their old phones for iPhone and without any training the Web browser and a couple of key apps make them immediately more productive.
Apple is working hard so computing is easy, the Unix community is working hard so computing is safe, and Microsoft says you need to take a test and get a license.
Feature phones will be gone by the time anyone does anything with this. The iPhone form factor is clearly where all phones are going because the screen supports the Web. If you're going to support the Web, you need Unix. Fixing Symbian to be modern should have happened a long time ago if at all.
These hardware companies are getting killed by Apple because Apple is a software company. They spend much more time designing the software interactions than the physical hardware, which they reduce as far as possible to keep it out of the way of the software. My Apple Logic Studio is bigger than all of my other apps combined by about 10 times and costs $100 per year to stay current. Apple layers on the software, their devices do much more because they have software resources that completely outclass the competition. The software community already gave Nokia free Unix, they should be building on top of that. Nobody cares what kernel is in their phone, they care that it surfs the Web, is fast, doesn't stall, is easy to use.
The same $500 hardware with everything stripped out except the browser is "serious competition"?
This is embarrassing coming from Google. Didn't Nexus One hurt their brand enough? iPad is almost $100 cheaper than Nexus one and with a $30 data only plan and Skype is more like what the Google Phone was rumored to be.
Apple is bigger than Google and for Apple this is a full-time job, not a hobby.
Tablet PC's have been available for a decade and iPhones for only 3 years and yet corporate has more iPhones than Tablet PC's. I think you dramatically underestimate the corporate uses for iPad. Consider there is a Salesforce app for iPhone that will gain a larger UI very quickly, then multiply that by the thousands of other corporate apps, then factor in all the custom apps corporations have built for themselves on iPhone over the past couple of years. Then consider at $499 the iPad is priced like a mobile phone, not a computer. The Nexus One costs $549, for example, and has 1/4 the storage of the $499 iPad.
Somebody said to me the other day "iPad may do well in Mac shops" and I laughed my ass off. iPad will do well in iPhone shops, which is 70% of the Fortune 500 and growing. Where I work right now, they switched from Blackberry to iPhone with no user training and everybody was measurably more productive, while on the other hand, the user training investment and at least short-term productivity hit of Vista caused them to skip it entirely.
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Apple does not discourage it through technical measures. What kind of bullshit is that? There's a fucking switch you turn on. Done.
The fact that AT&T does not support tethering an iPhone is a huge drag, but it has zero to do with iPhone or Apple.
I know Android users need SOMETHING to feel smug about, but come on.
You pay taxes, get no healthcare, and a private company makes obscene profits. Perfect 21st century US system: socialize the downside, capitalize the upside.
How about Microsoft bring their products up to Unix standard first? How about they do whatever it takes to upgrade the 75% of their userbase that is 10 years behind?
... was not subtitled "The Young Lady's Illustrated Netbook." Why not? Because that would SUCK. The device in The Diamond Age is a "book" not a "computer". Same exact thing with iPad. Any technical hurdles at all are like putting a lock and key on books. Like you have to do a Rubik's Cube to get into a dictionary. It shuts people out from knowledge. Technical people are not shut out from iPad, either. There is a Cisco app that lets you VPN into any computer on the Internet and pull up its graphical desktop, this will be the very best platform for all the huge computer books with optical discs in the back, it will hold 10,000 of them for you. The 2-page book view on iPad is the first eReader that can show 100% of the books in your bookstore or library just as they were meant to be viewed.
It's really strange how many nerds are such traditionalists these days. If it's not a clone of the 1991 PowerBook form factor with a clone of the 1995 Windows operating system, they're all crotchety like "get off my lawn you kids!" It's actually only Generation X that feels this way ...people who are 20 or 60 right now want the computer to go away, they want it to be totally transparent, they want to do Facebook or look up recipes, not compile anything or run anti-virus. But people who are 40 and use a computer can't get their head out of DOS and BIOS and other nostalgia they feel they have hard-fought knowledge and mastery of. It's like "I spent all these years learning how to use a computer and now Apple is going to make it easy? Fuck no!" Intel EFI is like 5 years old and only Apple is using it.
The $499 iPad is going to last people for 2 years and cost them $0 in IT consulting, $0 in software upgrades, and $0 in anti-virus and security software. That is $1 per business day. It's going to ask the user to spend almost no time configuring it or troubleshooting it. For a nerd to say that is expensive when nerds know full well how much IT hours cost is disingenuous at best, malicious at worst.
Me personally, I think making IT hours go away is magic enough. The fact that so many who have used an iPad describe it as a magical experience is icing on the cake.
And I think the iPad's Web browser is magic enough on its own, and is what all Web browsers will be in a few years: HTML5, GPU-accelerated graphics, world class typography, color managed images, ISO audio video, Unix networking, buttons/links you can press with your finger, pinch zooming, and flicking to scroll with physics. It makes the Web extremely rich and natural. It's magical compared to IE and the mouse cursor and scroller and + and - keys that most people are using right now, that's for sure.
If a large number of firmware updates are bricking your devices, you are buying bad gear. I've never had a firmware update brick anything. Buy better gear.
Pretending firmware doesn't exist is not a solution. It's there because it needs to be updated sometimes.
You have to patch that car due to liability if nothing else. If you get into an accident, the other party's lawyer could make hay with the fact you're driving an unpatched Toyota.
> It's sure a good thing for those worried parents that they don't have any kind
> of web browser on there.
That is exactly why these apps are not needed in App Store. All Apple devices have an HTML5 browser with ISO audio video. There is no shortage of porn without having to go through Apple.
App Store is specifically about being an alternative to the Web. What you have on the Web, you should not have in App Store and vice versa. In App Store, it's managed, it's mediated, and the Web is completely unmanaged, unmediated.
Plus these apps were softcore garbage. The selection of porno on the Web is much more sophisticated. Everybody is better off because of this.
> While I think the NHS overall is more fairer than the US system (even with the major problems I currently
> have with it) just remember the grass always seems greener on the other side.
There is no grass in the US, to continue your analogy. There is no medical funding except for people over 65 and veterans. The ground is bare dirt. A routine medical procedure in the US is you live with it, you suck it up, you take a fucking aspirin and hope it gets better on its own. A friend of mine died in his sleep last year at 32 years old ... never had a doctor his whole life.
Sincerely: STFU. You have no fucking idea what you are talking about.
Could you replace the CD with something else in 1995? That was when the CD was as old and entrenched as H.264 is now. It's way too late. You should be lobbying MPEG-LA to keep H.264 free after 2016 (like Apple does) not lobbying Google to get a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD thing started. (BTW Blu-Ray is H.264.) Content publishers are even warier of multiple formats than users because it kills media buying.
Further, it's only PC's that have a choice of software codec, and even there it comes at the expense of battery life, decoding a non-standard codec on your CPU instead of H.264 on your GPU with more efficiency. On mobiles you have a built-in H.264 decoder only, that's it. The PC as the center of the digital universe is as passé as the CD. Video is what plays on iPods (H.264) and smartphones (H.264) and set-tops (H.264). It is actually pathetic to think that the Web is going to come late to the video game and rewrite history when you consider how Microsoft does not even support the video tag yet.
Start thinking about the successor to H.264, and better yet, start building it, write some code.
Google is firmly behind H.264 because in YouTube they have a video business. YouTube is H.264 in the back end. There's no alternative to ISO standard H.264 if you want people to actually see your content, same as in 1995 there was no alternative to CD.
OLED demos well ... you put a brand new screen in a dark room and with the right content you can blow people away. The thin displays you can make since there is no backlight demo well. The energy consumption demos well with a mostly-black screen. But when you get it home it doesn't work in a bright room, the colors aren't great and worse, change over time. The worst part may be that it's not even more energy efficient than LED-backlit displays when playing video.
On mobiles it's even less appropriate because of the varied lighting conditions you encounter. You would see people struggling with their Nexus One or Zune in daylight if they had sold more than a handful of either device.
The nerd infatuation with this expensive buzzword has been incredible. Some were calling for an OLED iPad, that is crazy. It would cost more than the whole device and have so many drawbacks in practical use. All for a buzzword.
Many custom corporate apps built between 2002-2006 were called "Web apps" but were really "IE6 apps". In the late 90's they would have been Windows apps built with Visual Basic. Companies thought they were modernizing to the Web but really just got a different kind of Windows app.
It continues with IE7 and IE8 ... these browsers are so incapable that, for example, a rich text editor for them is done as ActiveX instead of as HTML5, so you can't run the app anywhere but IE. Now that these companies are often running multiple platforms (Windows XP, Windows Vista/7, Mac OS, iPhone, Blackberry) they are getting bitten on the ass. It's like Y2K in that the future was never supposed to happen.
Microsoft succeeded in forking the Web. This is the aftermath. That's why HTML5 compatibility is so important, the focus on browser vendors in the spec means that Apple WebKit and Mozilla Gecko engineers do a lot of work to make their browsers compatible with each other. You have WebKit redoing canvas in the standard way, redoing Gears in the standard way. If you're locked into any one browser or one hardware that is not the Web, it is by definition only what's completely universal. If it's not universal (IE, Flash) it's not part of the Web.
Why don't they just make their operating system incompatible with viruses and malware? Somehow everybody else manages it.
The fact that the iPad supports all of the books ever written, not just those that can be rendered on newsprint, is all you need to know. That wins the contest right there. Most books are in color. Many books are entirely made of photographs, such as art or recipe books. Even if a book is all text, the cover is usually color. Even business books are filled with color charts. Supporting the whole library is key. Further, it supports audio video so it supports future books, such as a book for learning Photoshop that includes video of painting techniques.
Secondarily, the touch user interface that lets you just turn the page is fantastic. You don't have to use buttons to read. The device becomes a book. A child can operate it without instruction. No nerd corps is required to help people to read a book.
The full Wi-Fi n and HTML5 Web browser based entirely on an open source, standards-compliant Web decoder is the modern equivalent of having a dictionary built-in. Hyperlinks in books take you right to the Web, and you have Google and Wikipedia and Oxford.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of bookstores, so you can buy from Amazon or Kobo or iBooks or use any of the ones that are filled with free public domain books. The open ePub format is supported in iBooks and many other reading apps. I work in publishing and iPad is the only reader that's generating excitement among publishers. We know that the master copies of these books can be translated to iPad and retain their quality, whereas on other readers you are degrading the master when you put it on there. You have to fix color charts, rework even basic things to make a book work on other readers. With iPad you just make an ePub. Your color photos and charts still work. The labor is much less and the result is much better on iPad.
The iPad battery can play 10 hours of video, which likely means 15 hours of book reading. It charges via USB and there are many juice packs, so you can get as much battery time as you need. This year at CES they had wall sockets with 2 AC and 2 USB in them.
The iPad adjusts its screen brightness to your surroundings so you don't wear out your eyes as on other readers. (Do not repeat that awful myth about LCD being harder on eyes than e-Ink ... that is a joke at the best of times, ridiculous from a Slashdot reader.)
At $499 it has a premium price over other book readers, but you get much more. Not just full color and touch, but also 4-20 times the storage, much more speed, a built-in iPod, built-in and 3rd party apps, many games, Podcasts, and it can even run Skype. So it is a book reader with a PC and iPod built-in for many users. If the iPhone is prologue, it will be easy to get 2 years of everyday use from this device, and often even more. And Apple Stores provide consumer grade support, replacing faulty devices on the spot, and offering free help with any technical issues.
The fact that iPad runs on an open source Unix core OS means it is reliable and interoperates well with the Internet and other networks. Everyone who contributed to BSD, Mach, WebKit, OpenGL, and other open source projects and open standards that are represented in iPad should be extremely proud of themselves. This is the closest to Neal Stephenson's Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (read The Diamond Age) that we've come yet. Of course everyone at Apple should be proud also. This device has been described for decades and is sorely needed, much moreso than another Windows netbook.
Even if you sample in music, the sampling is just accompaniment, backing tracks. In other words, the DJ samples, the MC does not.
Further, you don't pretend you didn't sample, you give credit where it's due. You often pay the original artist, especially if the sampling is very prominent.
This young lady is not only guilty of plagiarism, but also of misunderstanding sampling. It's not plagiarism.
The literary version of sampling would be to write a new, unplagiarized book using existing characters and settings from another book. Like a Star Wars themed novel. In that case you use Star Wars as backing for a new work.
The tragedy of this is the manuscript should have been considered a first draft and rewritten in one voice, even by a ghostwriter. Publishing the same exact phrases is not required in order to be unoriginal.
Lenovo was talking $1999 for this, and there is no availability date.
For the same price you can get an iPad, a MacBook Pro, an iPod touch, and an iPod shuffle. Then you have a desktop OS, a tablet OS, a pocket tablet OS, and a microscopic music player. You have 3 screens. All 4 items work simultaneously. The Mac is carved out of a block of aluminum and feels like it. All you bookmarks and contacts and music and photos sync between all of the devices automatically. The 3 devices with browsers all run HTML5 apps, and the Mac also runs BSD, Java, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, as well as Mac apps. A single iPhone app purchase puts the app on both tablets. A $50 Mac app runs other Intel operating systems in a window at full speed and with 3D graphics.
Just because you are a nerd that doesn't mean you don't have actual work to do. The action is in the software, not some convertible geegaws.
If you don't get that the Mac with OS X saves you time and money and increases productivity compared to a PC with Windows by now then that's your problem. You can help the ignorant but not the stupid, not the completely disfunctional. There are thousands of examples like Genentech where Mac minis replaced Dell towers and millions of dollars were saved and productivity soared. The message has been sent. Many simply are not listening.
I'm working in the I-T group for a huge multinational that is 98% Windows, and me and my co-workers all have Macs at home, and so do most users. But the guy making the buying decisions only knows Microsoft. He does not even know anything about the Web. He's a middle manager guy, not a technologist. Nobody is home. There is no decision-making about I-T except when do we roll out the next Microsoft patch? They still run IE6. They spend months deciding what icons will appear on a user's desktop when they get it. They have no idea what their users do or how to help them be productive. The big issue now is how to convince users they want Windows 7 enough for them to learn it. They're not rolling out better tools, they're propagandizing the next Microsoft thing. You can't help people like that.
HTML5 is not just an author's spec, it's a browser maker's spec. HTML rendering is now at the level of the TCP/IP stack. The WebKit and Mozilla projects bust their balls to handle HTML in the same standardized way. That leaves the browser UI. There are multiple alternate browsers for iPhone, but you have to use WebKit as the renderer, same as you have to use the iPhone OS network stack. Opera is totally free to make an Opera for iPhone, they just don't get to replace core OS components.
There are 2 billion phones and the ones that LEAST need Opera are the iPhones. It's like they want to run their renderer inside Firefox.
Another me-too product that Google is not designed or staffed to make and which will lower the value of their brand.
It's like they're starting a nightclub.
It runs iPhone OS v3.2 and 99% of iPhone apps (not the ones that require a built-on camera or GPS).
Since iPhone OS has built-in VPN and Exchange, why would anyone but a troll think that doesn't work on iPad. Somebody already tried the VPN and remote controlled fucking Windows.
iWork documents appear to other devices on the network as a file server, just like about 20% of iPhone apps.
You don't have to look far for these answers. They had a press event. The press handled the device. iPhone OS v3.1.1 is running on iPhone and iPod and the fucking 140,000 apps are on sale right now.
And Apple doesn't talk, they fucking ship. Recommend a dose of that to all in tech. WTF does Steve Ballmer's HP Slate do? When will it ship? What will it cost? None of these things has been said.
Is this really the best you have in anti-iPad BS?
This is bullshit. Not only do consumers prefer to pay later, fucking accountants prefer to pay later. Corporations prefer to pay later.
Apple tried this with the iPhone, too. The original iPhone was unsubsidized. People HATED it.
The subsidy is great because it makes it possible to buy an iPhone for $99 instead of a crappy feature phone. The extra $20 per month on the contract is offset by the fact that you're using a smartphone, it pays for itself. You make more sales or get a better job or save time or money compared to when you didn't have a smartphone.
STOP APOLOGIZING FOR ANDROID. It sucks and it won't get better until the people who use it demand that it get better. Google bought Android in 2005. Where are the results? iPad is going to ship with a $15 data plan and Skype calls, that is what was promised from the Google Phone. And iPad with 3G and 16GB is only $50 more than Nexus One.
It is so easy to do transitions, transforms, animate properties such as opacity, add vectors, audio, video in HTML5/WebKit right now, which represents all mobile usage except for mobile Firefox which is still not 1.0. What is needed is for Firefox to catch up with ISO video and CSS animations. I did Flash development since 1997, I much prefer to develop for WebKit now. You make a CSS class that defines one state of the animation, another for another state, and just change the class of the element to animate it and WebKit does the tweening in the GPU. Flash was never, ever this fast or easy or had this performance, and WebKit runs on every OS and architecture and is open source. The idea that we need something else is ridiculous. We just need more browsers to support this. But even now, Safari on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Chrome, Android, Blackberry, Nokia all support this.
Flash is PC software, it has system requirements of a P4 or better, 2GHz or better, there is no such thing as a mobile that can run it. Notice that Mobile Firefox dropped Flash in RC3 for performance and stability reasons. Adobe is using Apple as a red herring, the problem is Flash itself is not part of the Web. It has not been managed like WebKit was since 2002, totally open source, built primarily for speed and standards.
> Nuanti's [proprietary] Highgate Media Suite will enable support for standards-based HTML5 video streaming with
> [nonstandard} Theora in browsers that have [proprietary] Silverlight.
Or you could use ISO/IEC 14496-10 (MPEG-4 part 10, H.264) and playback not just in Silverlight, but directly in hardware on every device that can play video on the planet, including PC GPU's, iPods, smartphones from all manufacturers, game consoles, and in FlashPlayer and QuickTime Player and Chrome and Safari.
What is the point of using standard HTML5 markup if you don't use standard ISO/IEC video? No fucking point at all.
HTML5 is a markup standard. Where it pertains to video is in the standardization of video-related markup, i.e. the "video" tag, not video formats. W3C has nothing to teach MPEG about video formats. W3C also has nothing to teach MPEG or ISO about standardization, because the Web is a mess of proprietary IE and Flash while MPEG has enabled 20 years of consumer digital video, including the DVD and Blu-Ray. Right now, both QuickTime Player and FlashPlayer play H.264, both iTunes and YouTube are H.264, both Flip and iPod camcorders are H.264, but I can't make one Web app for both IE and Firefox.
What we are talking about with Web video today is "will our H.264 video playback move from plug-ins (QuickTime Player and FlashPlayer) to native browser playback?" That is all. The format is not in question. The HTML4 Web has already been using the ISO standard format in iTunes, YouTube, and many others. There is no competing format. FLV is still used too much, but it has been deprecated since 2008, it has no HD sizes, it is proprietary to Adobe, the encoder costs $599, and it takes much more bandwidth than H.264. There are no Ogg camcorders, iPods, video editors. These tools and devices were all built for MPEG-4, which is a standardization of the QuickTime file format that was used previously. Google has already said that even if they had the compute time to transcode YouTube to Ogg, the Internet does not have the bandwidth for an Ogg YouTube, and almost nobody has a player.
Ten years ago, Linux users complained that they could not view the video on the Web because it was in QuickTime containers with Sorenson video and Qdesign audio and that was all proprietary, not standardized. Now, the video is all in ISO MPEG-4 containers, with ISO H.264 video and ISO AAC audio and is playable on Linux in FlashPlayer and WebKit browsers and other players, and the complaining continues. It is disheartening.
There's no way Windows would pass any kind of Internet-readiness test, it gets viruses and lacks the basic network security features of Unix systems. So it is weird to hear this guy say our Internet "cars" need certification.
Do you think you need to take a test to use an iPad? The reason so many XP are out there is the massive user training to go to a newer Windows nets no productivity benefit, yet people trade in their old phones for iPhone and without any training the Web browser and a couple of key apps make them immediately more productive.
Apple is working hard so computing is easy, the Unix community is working hard so computing is safe, and Microsoft says you need to take a test and get a license.
Feature phones will be gone by the time anyone does anything with this. The iPhone form factor is clearly where all phones are going because the screen supports the Web. If you're going to support the Web, you need Unix. Fixing Symbian to be modern should have happened a long time ago if at all.
These hardware companies are getting killed by Apple because Apple is a software company. They spend much more time designing the software interactions than the physical hardware, which they reduce as far as possible to keep it out of the way of the software. My Apple Logic Studio is bigger than all of my other apps combined by about 10 times and costs $100 per year to stay current. Apple layers on the software, their devices do much more because they have software resources that completely outclass the competition. The software community already gave Nokia free Unix, they should be building on top of that. Nobody cares what kernel is in their phone, they care that it surfs the Web, is fast, doesn't stall, is easy to use.
The same $500 hardware with everything stripped out except the browser is "serious competition"?
This is embarrassing coming from Google. Didn't Nexus One hurt their brand enough? iPad is almost $100 cheaper than Nexus one and with a $30 data only plan and Skype is more like what the Google Phone was rumored to be.
Apple is bigger than Google and for Apple this is a full-time job, not a hobby.
Tablet PC's have been available for a decade and iPhones for only 3 years and yet corporate has more iPhones than Tablet PC's. I think you dramatically underestimate the corporate uses for iPad. Consider there is a Salesforce app for iPhone that will gain a larger UI very quickly, then multiply that by the thousands of other corporate apps, then factor in all the custom apps corporations have built for themselves on iPhone over the past couple of years. Then consider at $499 the iPad is priced like a mobile phone, not a computer. The Nexus One costs $549, for example, and has 1/4 the storage of the $499 iPad.
Somebody said to me the other day "iPad may do well in Mac shops" and I laughed my ass off. iPad will do well in iPhone shops, which is 70% of the Fortune 500 and growing. Where I work right now, they switched from Blackberry to iPhone with no user training and everybody was measurably more productive, while on the other hand, the user training investment and at least short-term productivity hit of Vista caused them to skip it entirely.
Make no mistake, iPad is meant for business.