As a Canadian, I still have to say that it's working well only because US is next door with their big army. Nobody will touch us because US will obviously step in immediately.
When have schools been about giving students what they love? Should we get them iPhones with unlimited texting plans? Or how about buckets of candy for the little ones, and booze for the older ones?
And, they are *cheap*? I don't know how much money schools in NZ have, but they are not cheap over here. I see from another post of yours that anecdotal evidence was enough to convince you that netbooks are crap, but I can guarantee you that netbooks more powerful than iPads, while also being cheaper, do exist.
Finally, what is this great educational software that these students are going to be using that's not available on PCs? Does that offset the fact that 90% of good productivity software doesn't exist on iPads, encouraging the students to use instead of create?
The simplicity of iPad, its intuitive interface, and simple apps are great for the very young ones, but as soon as those kids want to do more, they'll be lost in the productive world that's dominated by a completely different kind of computer experience.
They're fucked because the guy who doesn't own a TV and doesn't watch any of it, wants to stream the occasional thing he does watch?
Hey, listen -- they don't care about you. They care about those who do watch TV and have TV sets, and they don't want to lose them. You don't matter to the TV world.
Realistically here, the high end camera makers don't write plugins for the GIMP, so if one wants to make use of the RAW images from one's EOS-1 or other camera without losing data, they are either using Photoshop, or perhaps Lightroom.
Nikon and Canon don't write plugins for Adobe products, either. Adobe writes them, and they don't even have full access to RAW specs, as camera manufactures keep them proprietary and secret. Most of it is reverse-engineered, with some (unknown) data simple being unused by Adobe products.
If GIMP developers went through the same effort of reverse-engineering formats, they'd be able to support them, too. Although, I still don't see many serious professionals using GIMP -- the difference in other features and performance is just too great.
"Gamer keyboards" tend to have additional programmable buttons for key stroke combinations, which normal keyboards don't. "Gamer mice" similarly have extra buttons that normal mice don't. The "gamer network card" has a dedicated network processor on board, which reduces CPU usage, and has an impact on your local LAN latency.
For most people, these features make no discernible difference between "gamer" and "normal", but they do nonetheless provide some value to a small percentage of people, and hence charge the premium. These companies don't deserve the same hate that Monster deserves for selling identical performing cables for 20x price.
How long can you continue 'amassing billions and billions of dollars' when your market is shrinking and your competitors own the new markets you want to get into?
What's this shrinking market? The PC market is most definitely not shrinking, and isn't showing any signs that it will start to.
Funny, the GPLv2 and v3 are actually shorter than pretty much every EULA I've had the misfortune of stopping to look at. I'm sure your lawyers could do a cursory reading for you, otherwise what are you paying them for?
Most small companies have lawyers on contract, i.e. they pay them per service. You have to be pretty big to afford having lawyers on salary that are just sitting around waiting for you to send them licenses to read through.
My opinion only but I think Apple dropped the ball with the iPad again. Why not provide a stylus and an app that would make the iPad behave like electronic paper. You could take notes in class, in meetings, draw tech diagrams, etc?
I think you need to learn to read. All they've added is wireless streaming... To actually "sync", as in, transfer to iPad so you can take it with you, you still need to be plugged in.
Bah, I can buy 3 decent laptops for the price of one of these.. by the time the first two die and I get the third, the third will be superior in specs in every way to this Mac Pro.
You're not buying a nice suit, it's perfectly ok for it to not last long -- technology advances too fast for you to hang on to the same piece of electronics for years and years.
It says "Main program is based on Blender and released as an open source GNU license." in the FAQ, too.
The whole thing is probably misleading and all, but there isn't anything illegal going on. Rebranding and charging for distribution of GPLed software is allowed, as long as a free download of the source is also offered.
How many car makers are there? TV makers? Cloth makers? Drills makers? Lots! And nobody is confused.
I think you don't understand the problem. It's not that having a choice of products is confusing (there are, after all, many PC makers, too), it's that the developer pool can only develop for a limited number of OSes. OSes are very different from TVs, cloth, drills, and cars, because they need developers to make applications, to make them appealing to the consumer. There is a reason why so few OSes exist for PCs -- you need to be in top N to attract developers, where N is some very small number after which the developer can't justify the reduced number of users vs. some particular OS feature they are attracted to.
You have some pretty arbitrary rules for what is acceptable and what is not. Why are "telco managers" the scum of the earth for charging more than $15 for unlimited, but you're willing to pay $50+ for internet at home and get very far from unlimited?
That all being said, if you get off your high horse and look at what the competition (no, not *pretend* competition) brought to Canada over the last few years, you'd find mobile providers like 7-11 Speak Out that are exactly what you want (prepaid valid for 12 months, dumb phones, free incoming SMSes, 10 cents for outgoing, and $10 for unlimited browsing). Your diatribe actually reads like a bad ad for Speak Out, really:).
Why announce now? It's not about selling a product to consumers. It's about selling a brand to investors.
It's also about selling the brand to consumers. Building up the public image of a new product well before it is released is a very common strategy in the industry. Not everybody has Apple's loyal following that will buy a new product the day they hear about it for the first time... and even in the case of iPad, the hype for Apple's tablet was building up for a year even if Apple wasn't "officially" announcing anything.
Ah, you forget the art of prequels. When you run out of stuff that happened *later*, just make up stuff *before*. You could even go so far before that none of the characters are even born yet and do a Toy Story in Matrix universe.
Interesting how you think its never going to happen but then resort to cover up the posibility of it happening with writting off an exception. But event hat exception shows lack of imagination. Imagine this future:
Honestly, if you just replace iPad with a "laptop", you get the description of what most (tech) workplaces look like these days. Everyone has a laptop with a docking station, you just pick up the laptop to go to a meeting, a single wire hooks you up to a projector (compatibility problems on VGA ports? What?), wireless networking allows VNC access to anything...
Nothing you mentioned makes a tablet more appealing than a laptop at workplace.
For those of us who don't know biology well, what does this really mean? What is phosphorous used for in our cells, and how does arsenic change things? Searching for "phosphorous-based life" comes up with discussiong on phosphorous, silicon, and other elements instead of *carbon*, but these new bacteria are still made of the same carbon building blocks as us, no?
That's because we've been chased off, or just play single player now.
I don't think that invalidates my point that nobody is complaining about memorized openings. Those who left, left because they prefer turn-based strategies (for the most part), like you. Those who stayed don't think memorizing openings is anything to complain about.
I've enjoyed Heroes of Might and Magic III the most I think. Turn based helped showcase the strategic aspect a lot more.
Turn-based games also have standard openings, even more so than real-time games because the reflexes are taken out of it and you have even more time to focus on following an optimal path. Sure, you can play Civilization 4, for example, by winging it, and you'll lose to the axeman rush because it's available to your opponent and he knows how to get there optimally.
It's there in every strategy game, but you might not see if it you only play single-player. Which, for some games, is better anyway, IMO.
Go is infinitely more interesting then Chess. There are no hundreds of standard openings to memorize like in Chess -- every game is pretty much guaranteed to be unique.
While the game might be unique to a certain degree, there is no way that you will get to any kind of decent level without memorizing many standard josekis (i.e. corner opening, to those unfamiliar with the game...). It doesn't matter how many options you have in mid-game, if you're behind in 2 or more corners, you've got a very deep hole to climb out of.
I'm with you that it's way more interesting than chess and gives you way more options, but let's not kid ourselves -- you have to memorize good openings to be proficient at Go.
A lot of people seem to complain about this and especially about the realtime requirement in strategy
Actually, only a handful of people complain about this, and mostly those that haven't even played the game. On forums visited by actual players, nobody complains about this at all.
Sure, there are a bazillion complaints about other trivial things:), but people are generally interested in figuring out how to beat each other, as there certainly isn't a "one build order to win them all".
Slashdot Mirror
As a Canadian, I still have to say that it's working well only because US is next door with their big army. Nobody will touch us because US will obviously step in immediately.
When have schools been about giving students what they love? Should we get them iPhones with unlimited texting plans? Or how about buckets of candy for the little ones, and booze for the older ones?
And, they are *cheap*? I don't know how much money schools in NZ have, but they are not cheap over here. I see from another post of yours that anecdotal evidence was enough to convince you that netbooks are crap, but I can guarantee you that netbooks more powerful than iPads, while also being cheaper, do exist.
Finally, what is this great educational software that these students are going to be using that's not available on PCs? Does that offset the fact that 90% of good productivity software doesn't exist on iPads, encouraging the students to use instead of create?
The simplicity of iPad, its intuitive interface, and simple apps are great for the very young ones, but as soon as those kids want to do more, they'll be lost in the productive world that's dominated by a completely different kind of computer experience.
They're fucked because the guy who doesn't own a TV and doesn't watch any of it, wants to stream the occasional thing he does watch?
Hey, listen -- they don't care about you. They care about those who do watch TV and have TV sets, and they don't want to lose them. You don't matter to the TV world.
Nikon and Canon don't write plugins for Adobe products, either. Adobe writes them, and they don't even have full access to RAW specs, as camera manufactures keep them proprietary and secret. Most of it is reverse-engineered, with some (unknown) data simple being unused by Adobe products.
If GIMP developers went through the same effort of reverse-engineering formats, they'd be able to support them, too. Although, I still don't see many serious professionals using GIMP -- the difference in other features and performance is just too great.
Why did you throw bokeh in there? There's a lot more to image quality that comes to mind before nice bokeh, whose quality is lens-dominated anyway.
"Gamer keyboards" tend to have additional programmable buttons for key stroke combinations, which normal keyboards don't. "Gamer mice" similarly have extra buttons that normal mice don't. The "gamer network card" has a dedicated network processor on board, which reduces CPU usage, and has an impact on your local LAN latency.
For most people, these features make no discernible difference between "gamer" and "normal", but they do nonetheless provide some value to a small percentage of people, and hence charge the premium. These companies don't deserve the same hate that Monster deserves for selling identical performing cables for 20x price.
What's this shrinking market? The PC market is most definitely not shrinking, and isn't showing any signs that it will start to.
I hate that site. The answers are complete garbage, yet they almost always land on the front page of Google.
Oh, how I'm going to love this feature.
Most small companies have lawyers on contract, i.e. they pay them per service. You have to be pretty big to afford having lawyers on salary that are just sitting around waiting for you to send them licenses to read through.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=stylus+for+ipad
I think you need to learn to read. All they've added is wireless streaming... To actually "sync", as in, transfer to iPad so you can take it with you, you still need to be plugged in.
Bah, I can buy 3 decent laptops for the price of one of these.. by the time the first two die and I get the third, the third will be superior in specs in every way to this Mac Pro.
You're not buying a nice suit, it's perfectly ok for it to not last long -- technology advances too fast for you to hang on to the same piece of electronics for years and years.
It says "Main program is based on Blender and released as an open source GNU license." in the FAQ, too.
The whole thing is probably misleading and all, but there isn't anything illegal going on. Rebranding and charging for distribution of GPLed software is allowed, as long as a free download of the source is also offered.
Lol!
"It's already a revolution, and it's only just begun."
Understated, my ass.
If by "roughly as fast" you mean about 50% slower, then, yeah.
I think you don't understand the problem. It's not that having a choice of products is confusing (there are, after all, many PC makers, too), it's that the developer pool can only develop for a limited number of OSes. OSes are very different from TVs, cloth, drills, and cars, because they need developers to make applications, to make them appealing to the consumer. There is a reason why so few OSes exist for PCs -- you need to be in top N to attract developers, where N is some very small number after which the developer can't justify the reduced number of users vs. some particular OS feature they are attracted to.
You have some pretty arbitrary rules for what is acceptable and what is not. Why are "telco managers" the scum of the earth for charging more than $15 for unlimited, but you're willing to pay $50+ for internet at home and get very far from unlimited?
That all being said, if you get off your high horse and look at what the competition (no, not *pretend* competition) brought to Canada over the last few years, you'd find mobile providers like 7-11 Speak Out that are exactly what you want (prepaid valid for 12 months, dumb phones, free incoming SMSes, 10 cents for outgoing, and $10 for unlimited browsing). Your diatribe actually reads like a bad ad for Speak Out, really :).
It's also about selling the brand to consumers. Building up the public image of a new product well before it is released is a very common strategy in the industry. Not everybody has Apple's loyal following that will buy a new product the day they hear about it for the first time... and even in the case of iPad, the hype for Apple's tablet was building up for a year even if Apple wasn't "officially" announcing anything.
Ah, you forget the art of prequels. When you run out of stuff that happened *later*, just make up stuff *before*. You could even go so far before that none of the characters are even born yet and do a Toy Story in Matrix universe.
Honestly, if you just replace iPad with a "laptop", you get the description of what most (tech) workplaces look like these days. Everyone has a laptop with a docking station, you just pick up the laptop to go to a meeting, a single wire hooks you up to a projector (compatibility problems on VGA ports? What?), wireless networking allows VNC access to anything...
Nothing you mentioned makes a tablet more appealing than a laptop at workplace.
Only in the USA.
For those of us who don't know biology well, what does this really mean? What is phosphorous used for in our cells, and how does arsenic change things? Searching for "phosphorous-based life" comes up with discussiong on phosphorous, silicon, and other elements instead of *carbon*, but these new bacteria are still made of the same carbon building blocks as us, no?
I don't think that invalidates my point that nobody is complaining about memorized openings. Those who left, left because they prefer turn-based strategies (for the most part), like you. Those who stayed don't think memorizing openings is anything to complain about.
Turn-based games also have standard openings, even more so than real-time games because the reflexes are taken out of it and you have even more time to focus on following an optimal path. Sure, you can play Civilization 4, for example, by winging it, and you'll lose to the axeman rush because it's available to your opponent and he knows how to get there optimally.
It's there in every strategy game, but you might not see if it you only play single-player. Which, for some games, is better anyway, IMO.
While the game might be unique to a certain degree, there is no way that you will get to any kind of decent level without memorizing many standard josekis (i.e. corner opening, to those unfamiliar with the game...). It doesn't matter how many options you have in mid-game, if you're behind in 2 or more corners, you've got a very deep hole to climb out of.
I'm with you that it's way more interesting than chess and gives you way more options, but let's not kid ourselves -- you have to memorize good openings to be proficient at Go.
Actually, only a handful of people complain about this, and mostly those that haven't even played the game. On forums visited by actual players, nobody complains about this at all.
Sure, there are a bazillion complaints about other trivial things :), but people are generally interested in figuring out how to beat each other, as there certainly isn't a "one build order to win them all".