"School administrators that I worked with (I did Novell support for a few schools, and integrating their MacBooks into NetWare was nontrivial, but went pretty well) complained the most about having to re-image drives. They spent quite a bit of time optimizing that process, but there are only a few ways to re-image a MacBook, and none are fast enough. I could not get ZenWorks to do it, despite some heroic work by Novell engineers as a pet project. Oh well..."
Jeez, why not use Apple's own Disk Utility software, which works great for re-imaging single machines, or their Server tools which allow you do the same thing for multiple ones.
Sounds like you were trying to use every method but the one that's obvious.
"Our little business did well providing non-warranty repairs until both Apple and Apple dealers realized they were being cut out of the loop in a big way. I left before Apple got hard and cut off parts access. That was the end."
You can't order your parts from a distributor like every normal person?
Unfortunately Linux penetration into actual businesses is actually pretty low.
It may run on server farms or the local "do everything" web box at small and medium businesses, but the people actually working at their jobs there, whose job is not taking care of the server, they use Windows.
It's clear you never set foot inside a business if you believe otherwise. It's unfortunate and stupid, but it's the truth.
I think this is why the media is making a big deal out of the situation. I know here in Portland that one school required all the parents to purchase laptops, but they went with Windows like all good citizens. That this school has the gall to require its students to use the commie infested Macs is reason enough for news sites to sound the alarm for the good of the nation.
After all, only Microsoft deserves to be a requirement, tight?
Flash is dead, man. It took most of the major sites about a week to convert completely away from it, once the ipad came out. Ebay used to be a mess of flash garbage flickering on the frontier of the screen, now it is nice and simple and fast. Google has even nodded to the ipad and enhanced several of their products for it.
As far as what the ipad does, it does nearly everything I would wish it to. Sure, I could use a root shell, and it'd be nice to have background apps running all the time(which are coming in about a week or so with iOS 4).
There's a lot of shit on the app store for sure, but there is a lot of good stuff as well. For anything else, that Steve Jobs doesn't like on the app store for example, I can compile and install it myself. I'm still mystified that you are under the impression that your Android phone can magically do stuff the ipad or iphone can't, aside from multitasking. What's most baffling is that a product comes along that is literally a game changer - nothing exists as competition to it - one that's clearly going to be a tough act to follow, and one that has set the competitors ascramble, spurring the possibility of newer and better devices, and you are disgusted with Apple for even having dreamed it up. What the hell man? Without the ipad your little android or webos tablet would never happen.
I think you proved my point for me. Who wouldn't come up with any excuse they could muster to evade the legal system? Damn near everything has been tried, and depression and anxiety do not fare well as excuses go. I believe less than a tenth of a percent of insanity pleas result in clemency or acquittal.
"He admitted his crime, apparently freely. That takes bollocks."
Bollocks? Maybe. But I also think it he revealed his guilt (quite extensively to the media, by the way) to show off. A competent lawyer would have told him to keep his mouth shut.
"How charming, Afghanis don't even get a show trial! If McKinnon is extradited you'll see him put in front of jury not of his peers that will find him guilty"
I'm not entirely pleased with what passes for justice around here. It's not perfect in Britain either.
"Oh, spare us. The Crown will not decide this man's fate: no appeal would reach this far up. The new government is halting these procedings (perhaps only temporarily) because we, the people are demanding it not because Her Majesty is having second thoughts.
Please, before you think about making another snarky comment about the political system that spawned yours bear in mind one thing: For some time, the monarch has held much of their power only on the condition that it isn't exercised."
The monarch holds and exercises power quite adroitly. It's just not obvious.
I'm glad to know that anybody who manages to get a script for some antidepressants can also now use them as an excuse for their actions and avoid facing the same consequences that other people might. After all the doctors only ever use them extremely rarely, right? And of course, doctors are not allowed to receive gifts from pharma companies as rewards for writing those scripts.
Fuck you and fuck your whole program. I don't care what kind of looped out crazy bullshit your doctor gave you to munch on, if you commit an act you are responsible.
If my door is poorly locked and you come in here and start rifling through my shit, I am going to shoot you. I'm sure you thought you were just helping me out by showing me how shitty my door lock was. Uncle Sam I am sure is misunderstanding Gary in the same fashion.
This excuse would not cut it in my house, and does not cut it for Uncle Sam either.
Well he was crassly stupid and completely fucked when he admitted he broke into the computers and found UFOs. If he would have kept his fuckin mouth shut as I am sure his lawyer was begging him to do he might not have had any problems. But he admitted his offense and is now sounding like a whiny little bitch for failing to man up and face the music.
You may think that breaking into US DOD computers is minor, but Gary's just lucky he's not an Afghani who did it, or else he'd be dead now. Uncle Sam is serious about stuff like this, even if you and Gary aren't, and guess what? Uncle Sam has a lot more clout with the Crown than you or Gary.
Relax, cheer up, and blow into this bag for a minute.
People do make stuff like this up all the time. Heck, I know people with other, unrelated mental problems who feign anxiety attacks because it gets them the attention they crave. Babies and little kids do this shit, and I think a lot of people who "suffer" from such ailments never just grew the fuck out of it usually due to a lack of actual parenting effort by the people who biologically formed them, combined with a total lack of understanding of the concept of personal responsibility.
The point of the matter is that, he had cognition when he broke into those computers, knew what he did, and got busted for it. Then he did the worst thing ever, admitting to it! If I was that dumb and knew it was almost impossible to run or hide I would be suffering from anxiety, depression, and panic attacks too. But just because I am nervous because I was dumb should not be an excuse to evade personal responsibility. This is what Gary is possibly doing and it fucking reeks.
Besides, if you had the entire US Federal Government out for your blood and hide, you'd probably suffer from anxiety, depression, and panic attacks too! I know I would!
The trick with the ipad is not just its physical form factor. It's the package, software and hardware. People would not be lining up to use Windows over RDP on the iPad if that were what it ran for its software component, even if it was half as thick and had twenty times the battery it has now.
Windows over RDP may be a solution for you, but that totally negates any benefit of having a nice small touchscreen device as you need a stylus to poke at UI nubbins. Meanwhile on the ipad i'm tilting and rotating and using my hand to enlarge or shrink stuff.
In this day and age, printing is pointless especially if you have a nice tiny device that practically runs forever to read and edit documents on.
If some other douchebag doesn't have an iPad yet you can email the document to them, and they can print it. Or you can drag n drop the document from its spot in itunes and then print it yourself if you want to carry around paper for some increasingly pointless reason.
Or you can email your documents to your free gmail account and access them from anywhere that has a printer, and print them. Printers tend to actually be hooked to computers you know, where you find one the other is usually a meter or two away at the farthest.
The point of this thing is to be a portable device, that you take by itself because you don't need anything fancier at the moment. You don't throw it into a gym bag along with a printer and a raid array all hooked to a big lead acid battery to run it all for all of 3 minutes. You grab the shit you need, and leave the rest on the network.
Now that printing's out of the way, who said anything about not being able to save? I can save damn near anything I can find on the internet, to the ipad. I can then email it. Or heck, I can use my ipad to ssh into my computer here, and use wget to grab it.
It's a fucking tiny little device, designed to be mobile and thin and run a long time. If you really have a problem with the app situation, pay your $99, get your certificate, compile whatever the hell you want, and put it on the ipad yourself. Steve Jobs doesn't care what you install on your machine in this case.
"I'll take something useful over something pretty anyday. Useful AND pretty is a bonus. However, like the iPad, pretty and not useful is an epic fail."
I don't think anybody can hear you, over the millions of people who are sometimes physically duking it out over places in line to buy the iPad, yelling and screaming themselves hoarse trying to buy them.
Seriously, epic fail? A million units a month, which is the kind of volume companies would probably kill for if it would help them, is an epic fail?
Can you think of another gadget that is selling like that? I can only think of a few that ever have. None at this high of a price point though.
The geekiest people I know all have iPads now, despite it being crippled. We just all paid our $99 tax to Apple and can compile and stick whatever we want on there. You get a buttload of certificates, so I can hook up people who didn't pay the tax as well.
"See, in the real world, there are people who have these things called "files". A great way to transfer these "files" from one device to another is either a USB drive or a SD card. It's infinitely better than having to take your iPad, plug it in, load iTunes, and then go through it's horrific sync system that only syncs files for programs Apple chooses to let you sync from (I have an iPod and an iPhone, I'm well aware of the horrible flaws in iTunes sync). It's much easier if you can keep extra songs / pictures / movies / books / whatever on an SD card and just pop it in and read it off the card - that way if you go on a trip, you don't have to lug a laptop with you just to get more files over to the tablet."
Too bad there is no convenient, globally addressable network that these files could travel across. Maybe someday they will invent one and then I could get files onto my ipad. I mean, there's no way somebody could email me a Pages document, and I click on the link, and the iPad automatically grabs the file, puts it in my little pages doc library, and opens it.
Damn.
See the iPad is a *networked* device and in this day and age there is really no reason to lug a whole bitchton of files with you say, when you go on a trip. And even the base model certainly has enough space to throw books and movies on there to entertain you for your trip, in lieu of a network connection.
"Yes, but they have something that no one else has! A bright shiny apple on the back! That means that the average moron MUST have it or be a social outcast, despite the fact that there are other options (well, in the case of the iPad, there soon will be) that cost less and do more - but they don't have the shiny apple on the back, so they're inferior products."
I think people are buying iPads because you can't get a well constructed, easy to use, nice to look at, tablet computer that is anywhere near as thin, that has anywhere close to the same kind of battery life, and that works nearly as well for $500 from anybody BUT Apple. My 80 year old aunt got one, and she's literally never ever used a PC in her life. She is now browsing the web, buying apps, and playing scrabble with me over the internet. She hates scrabble, by the way, but she is just tickled pink by the idea of playing scrabble over the internet with her nephew from 2500 miles away. Apple has created another product like the iPhone and the iPod, one that would literally sell itself if they stopped advertising. The reason is because it fucking works.
"You seem to be confusing "I must have it because the TV tells me I have to have it in order to get attention and popularity" with "I really like device X and it does everything I want"."
You are really being a prick. Snidely suggesting that everybody who bought an iPad is stupid and bought it solely because they were utterly beguiled isn't only rude, but you must know it's just a lie. Most folks out there use computers to do three things - read email, browse the web, and use it as a fancy electronic typewriter. We're probably talking about at least 2/3rds of the people
Of course the cell phone lens is better. Your Nikon f/1.4 has several crippling limitations in comparison, including the requirement that the lens must be farther away from the film plane. The closer a lens is to the image plane (sensor, film), the higher quality your image plane image will be. Additionally, as you increase the size of the sensor, you are increasing the size of the image circle and this ensures lower image plane quality.
If you want to see your Nikon's ass get kicked, compare it to a similarly priced Voigtlander lens on a rangefinder camera. Or go one better and compare 21mm lenses, where the rangefinder has an even larger advantage.
A tiny lens shooting a tiny image circle, and bumped right up against the sensor, has theoretically better optical potential than an SLR lens, but the image quality is lower because smaller sensors suck. But this is not the fault of the lens.
Zeiss will be happy to show you their dirt cheap, optically magnificent camera phone lens next to a Hasselblad mount lens in CLN issue 19. They keep the specifications for both on their site, so you can read it for yourself.
Of course the purely aesthetic considerations such as bokeh, narrow depth of field, etc, have an impact on the final artistic merits of an image, and you can't get narrow DOF from a microscopic sensor. But saying your lens is better because your whole imaging system makes prettier pictures is not true at all.
Then compare, if you will, the resolution in lines per mm of a Minox 15mm f/3.5 lens with the Master Primes.
The Minox lens has a much higher resolution, because as your physical glass size increases it becomes more difficult to hold that micron accuracy across the entire lens.
"I actually thing that Android has been great for the smartphone market and specifically on iPhone development. They are definitely having an impact on the iPhone, both in software features and possibly in hardware, although on the hardware front, it's arguable that these are pretty common advances and it would get those in any case."
I think the Android is certainly a smartphone of some description. However, I don't think it is really worthy of being called a true competitor. My neighbor's redneck buddy, who is totally computer stupid, just got an Android. I don't know if it was Verizon's fault or what, but despite the specs of the hardware which might lead you to believe it's somehow fast, it was slow as molasses. Half the time, if you rotate the phone, it will not tilt the display because it's gone modal and needs you to click a button or go back a screen. My neighbor himself works for an Apple reseller so of course has an iPhone, and we were using them side by side to do things like browse the web, make calls, add contacts, and etc. Apple was, in every instance, much easier to use and much prettier to look at.
I wish the Android the best, if only to make Apple open up the iOS a bit more, but I think somehow as long as Google lets the networks fuck up their individual Android phones, neutering features and making it look and run like shit, they will be a poor second.
"I do think that Android wouldn't exist today without iPhone, but folks would have to remember back a few years to recall just how horrible smart phones were in the first half of the decade. it was a game changer, and the interface and features on the first Droids were very close if not identical to Apple's (albeit not quite as polished). They did however improve on those features and have continued to do so. That and the fact that Android has a much larger hardware and vendor base will make them a strong competitor in the market and keep Apple on it's toes."
Well I think you are right about this. Apple has changed the game a few times over the last 30 years, maybe more than anybody else in the business. When they do something, the whole herd also does it, or gets as close as legally possible. Apple does work to stay ahead of the herd, and sometimes looks a bit awkward doing it. I think that iOS is an answer to the Android's multitasking abilities, and also a wink and a nod admission from Steve Jobs that he does have to watch his ass.
I have my beefs with Apple on several subjects, but I don't think I know anybody who has a Mac or an iPhone or an iPad who thought they spent too much money and felt ripped off. This is Apple's main power - customer satisfaction.
As another poster has said, the GUI zooming and scrolling and sliding is actually there to inform you about what you are doing. If you put your finger down and swipe it on the home screen, you can see the one page of app icons slide off at the same speed. If, mid-swipe, you decide you really didn't want to go to the next screen, you don't need to stop, let the next screen load, and then hit another button or actuate the scroll bar.
The swipe is much like a scroll bar, however the active size of the bar is the whole screen and the bar has the screen contents inside it.
I think the ipad is nice for a lot of people who may not like computers in general because they are often quite obtuse about what is going on. Controls are placed on the screen on a computer, given cryptic icons, and the user who has little experience is fucked. The ipad shows the user what is happening when they do something, and lets them know their actions are having an effect. Without the cryptic icons and widgets that are basically learned ad-hoc in a sort of memetic fashion, things happen in a natural way that allows people to explore and use the computer with feedback showing them what their actions will do.
Of course, hovering tooltips provide information these days, if the developer chooses to use the well, but I think more natural interaction is just progress of a good sort.
Yes, but your Viewsonic is nothing like the ipad. The Viewsonic is a thick, chunky vnc client that gets maybe 6 hours of battery life at idle.
The ipad gets 10 minimum, and that's watching HD video. I bought one and tested it out for my use case, which involves PDF reading, web browsing, a bit of ssh, and playing go, and I can get about 30 hours out of the ipad. Considering that this is all I do most of the time when I take my laptop with me, and that I can reach my desktop with vnc or ssh if I find I need to do some real computing, this is a boon.
I can't seriously believe that you think that using Windows from a pen-based portable screen is somehow anything like using an ipad, which of course does everything the Viewsonic does, and a hell of a lot more, and does it a hell of a lot better. Could you stretch any farther? I mean, will you suggest that a television does everything a computer does?
Because this is what they do all the time. They go where the money is.
If a new wonder connector comes out, and a lot of people buy the device with the wonder connector, you either have a stupid company that chooses not to participate in that market, or a smart company that does. Pretty soon a wonder connector becomes the industry standard, you know, in the same way that almost every other connector evolved from a proprietary technology to an IEEE or ISO standard.
"So it's Apple until proven otherwise? No, the burden is upon you to support your claim."
An easy one for anybody to support.
Apple tablet sales: huge, a million a month.
All other tablets combined, maybe moving a few thousand per month.
If you are somehow widening the competition for the iPad to "netbooks and other portable devices" you have missed the point. However, I doubt that a million netbooks of ANY other particular brand, make, or model were sold in April, whereas a million Apple branded iPads and about two million iPhones were sold.
What you are saying is similar to this: "The Prius is not in the pole position for hybrids, because there are plenty of trucks, planes, and sailboats out there." "Oh and the only reason anybody drives a Prius is because of hype, not because it's superior to the competition in any way." Ignoring that the Prius is competing with other hybrids and small cars, not trucks and planes and boats, and ignoring the fact that yes, while the Prius is a hip car it's mainly successful because it actually offers good mileage too.
Slashdot Mirror
"School administrators that I worked with (I did Novell support for a few schools, and integrating their MacBooks into NetWare was nontrivial, but went pretty well) complained the most about having to re-image drives. They spent quite a bit of time optimizing that process, but there are only a few ways to re-image a MacBook, and none are fast enough. I could not get ZenWorks to do it, despite some heroic work by Novell engineers as a pet project. Oh well..."
Jeez, why not use Apple's own Disk Utility software, which works great for re-imaging single machines, or their Server tools which allow you do the same thing for multiple ones.
Sounds like you were trying to use every method but the one that's obvious.
"Our little business did well providing non-warranty repairs until both Apple and Apple dealers realized they were being cut out of the loop in a big way. I left before Apple got hard and cut off parts access. That was the end."
You can't order your parts from a distributor like every normal person?
Unfortunately Linux penetration into actual businesses is actually pretty low.
It may run on server farms or the local "do everything" web box at small and medium businesses, but the people actually working at their jobs there, whose job is not taking care of the server, they use Windows.
It's clear you never set foot inside a business if you believe otherwise. It's unfortunate and stupid, but it's the truth.
I think this is why the media is making a big deal out of the situation. I know here in Portland that one school required all the parents to purchase laptops, but they went with Windows like all good citizens. That this school has the gall to require its students to use the commie infested Macs is reason enough for news sites to sound the alarm for the good of the nation.
After all, only Microsoft deserves to be a requirement, tight?
The input might be random, but the output will likely be fast for the majority of the transfer.
Flash is dead, man. It took most of the major sites about a week to convert completely away from it, once the ipad came out. Ebay used to be a mess of flash garbage flickering on the frontier of the screen, now it is nice and simple and fast. Google has even nodded to the ipad and enhanced several of their products for it.
As far as what the ipad does, it does nearly everything I would wish it to. Sure, I could use a root shell, and it'd be nice to have background apps running all the time(which are coming in about a week or so with iOS 4).
There's a lot of shit on the app store for sure, but there is a lot of good stuff as well. For anything else, that Steve Jobs doesn't like on the app store for example, I can compile and install it myself. I'm still mystified that you are under the impression that your Android phone can magically do stuff the ipad or iphone can't, aside from multitasking. What's most baffling is that a product comes along that is literally a game changer - nothing exists as competition to it - one that's clearly going to be a tough act to follow, and one that has set the competitors ascramble, spurring the possibility of newer and better devices, and you are disgusted with Apple for even having dreamed it up. What the hell man? Without the ipad your little android or webos tablet would never happen.
I think you proved my point for me. Who wouldn't come up with any excuse they could muster to evade the legal system? Damn near everything has been tried, and depression and anxiety do not fare well as excuses go. I believe less than a tenth of a percent of insanity pleas result in clemency or acquittal.
"He admitted his crime, apparently freely. That takes bollocks."
Bollocks? Maybe. But I also think it he revealed his guilt (quite extensively to the media, by the way) to show off. A competent lawyer would have told him to keep his mouth shut.
"How charming, Afghanis don't even get a show trial! If McKinnon is extradited you'll see him put in front of jury not of his peers that will find him guilty"
I'm not entirely pleased with what passes for justice around here. It's not perfect in Britain either.
"Oh, spare us. The Crown will not decide this man's fate: no appeal would reach this far up. The new government is halting these procedings (perhaps only temporarily) because we, the people are demanding it not because Her Majesty is having second thoughts.
Please, before you think about making another snarky comment about the political system that spawned yours bear in mind one thing: For some time, the monarch has held much of their power only on the condition that it isn't exercised."
The monarch holds and exercises power quite adroitly. It's just not obvious.
I'm glad to know that anybody who manages to get a script for some antidepressants can also now use them as an excuse for their actions and avoid facing the same consequences that other people might. After all the doctors only ever use them extremely rarely, right? And of course, doctors are not allowed to receive gifts from pharma companies as rewards for writing those scripts.
Fuck you and fuck your whole program. I don't care what kind of looped out crazy bullshit your doctor gave you to munch on, if you commit an act you are responsible.
Ignoring the fact that he actually committed some serious crimes, of course, you are right.
If my door is poorly locked and you come in here and start rifling through my shit, I am going to shoot you. I'm sure you thought you were just helping me out by showing me how shitty my door lock was. Uncle Sam I am sure is misunderstanding Gary in the same fashion.
This excuse would not cut it in my house, and does not cut it for Uncle Sam either.
Well he was crassly stupid and completely fucked when he admitted he broke into the computers and found UFOs. If he would have kept his fuckin mouth shut as I am sure his lawyer was begging him to do he might not have had any problems. But he admitted his offense and is now sounding like a whiny little bitch for failing to man up and face the music.
You may think that breaking into US DOD computers is minor, but Gary's just lucky he's not an Afghani who did it, or else he'd be dead now. Uncle Sam is serious about stuff like this, even if you and Gary aren't, and guess what? Uncle Sam has a lot more clout with the Crown than you or Gary.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
Your sarcasm meter must be broken.
Relax, cheer up, and blow into this bag for a minute.
People do make stuff like this up all the time. Heck, I know people with other, unrelated mental problems who feign anxiety attacks because it gets them the attention they crave. Babies and little kids do this shit, and I think a lot of people who "suffer" from such ailments never just grew the fuck out of it usually due to a lack of actual parenting effort by the people who biologically formed them, combined with a total lack of understanding of the concept of personal responsibility.
The point of the matter is that, he had cognition when he broke into those computers, knew what he did, and got busted for it. Then he did the worst thing ever, admitting to it! If I was that dumb and knew it was almost impossible to run or hide I would be suffering from anxiety, depression, and panic attacks too. But just because I am nervous because I was dumb should not be an excuse to evade personal responsibility. This is what Gary is possibly doing and it fucking reeks.
Of course it is a sympathy act.
Besides, if you had the entire US Federal Government out for your blood and hide, you'd probably suffer from anxiety, depression, and panic attacks too! I know I would!
Everybody I know who isn't poor drives their cars into the ground.
The few people I know who always have to have a new car are up to their eyeballs in debt.
The trick with the ipad is not just its physical form factor. It's the package, software and hardware. People would not be lining up to use Windows over RDP on the iPad if that were what it ran for its software component, even if it was half as thick and had twenty times the battery it has now.
Windows over RDP may be a solution for you, but that totally negates any benefit of having a nice small touchscreen device as you need a stylus to poke at UI nubbins. Meanwhile on the ipad i'm tilting and rotating and using my hand to enlarge or shrink stuff.
In this day and age, printing is pointless especially if you have a nice tiny device that practically runs forever to read and edit documents on.
If some other douchebag doesn't have an iPad yet you can email the document to them, and they can print it. Or you can drag n drop the document from its spot in itunes and then print it yourself if you want to carry around paper for some increasingly pointless reason.
Or you can email your documents to your free gmail account and access them from anywhere that has a printer, and print them. Printers tend to actually be hooked to computers you know, where you find one the other is usually a meter or two away at the farthest.
The point of this thing is to be a portable device, that you take by itself because you don't need anything fancier at the moment. You don't throw it into a gym bag along with a printer and a raid array all hooked to a big lead acid battery to run it all for all of 3 minutes. You grab the shit you need, and leave the rest on the network.
Now that printing's out of the way, who said anything about not being able to save? I can save damn near anything I can find on the internet, to the ipad. I can then email it. Or heck, I can use my ipad to ssh into my computer here, and use wget to grab it.
It's a fucking tiny little device, designed to be mobile and thin and run a long time. If you really have a problem with the app situation, pay your $99, get your certificate, compile whatever the hell you want, and put it on the ipad yourself. Steve Jobs doesn't care what you install on your machine in this case.
"I'll take something useful over something pretty anyday. Useful AND pretty is a bonus. However, like the iPad, pretty and not useful is an epic fail."
I don't think anybody can hear you, over the millions of people who are sometimes physically duking it out over places in line to buy the iPad, yelling and screaming themselves hoarse trying to buy them.
Seriously, epic fail? A million units a month, which is the kind of volume companies would probably kill for if it would help them, is an epic fail?
Can you think of another gadget that is selling like that? I can only think of a few that ever have. None at this high of a price point though.
The geekiest people I know all have iPads now, despite it being crippled. We just all paid our $99 tax to Apple and can compile and stick whatever we want on there. You get a buttload of certificates, so I can hook up people who didn't pay the tax as well.
"See, in the real world, there are people who have these things called "files". A great way to transfer these "files" from one device to another is either a USB drive or a SD card. It's infinitely better than having to take your iPad, plug it in, load iTunes, and then go through it's horrific sync system that only syncs files for programs Apple chooses to let you sync from (I have an iPod and an iPhone, I'm well aware of the horrible flaws in iTunes sync). It's much easier if you can keep extra songs / pictures / movies / books / whatever on an SD card and just pop it in and read it off the card - that way if you go on a trip, you don't have to lug a laptop with you just to get more files over to the tablet."
Too bad there is no convenient, globally addressable network that these files could travel across. Maybe someday they will invent one and then I could get files onto my ipad. I mean, there's no way somebody could email me a Pages document, and I click on the link, and the iPad automatically grabs the file, puts it in my little pages doc library, and opens it.
Damn.
See the iPad is a *networked* device and in this day and age there is really no reason to lug a whole bitchton of files with you say, when you go on a trip. And even the base model certainly has enough space to throw books and movies on there to entertain you for your trip, in lieu of a network connection.
"Yes, but they have something that no one else has! A bright shiny apple on the back! That means that the average moron MUST have it or be a social outcast, despite the fact that there are other options (well, in the case of the iPad, there soon will be) that cost less and do more - but they don't have the shiny apple on the back, so they're inferior products."
I think people are buying iPads because you can't get a well constructed, easy to use, nice to look at, tablet computer that is anywhere near as thin, that has anywhere close to the same kind of battery life, and that works nearly as well for $500 from anybody BUT Apple. My 80 year old aunt got one, and she's literally never ever used a PC in her life. She is now browsing the web, buying apps, and playing scrabble with me over the internet. She hates scrabble, by the way, but she is just tickled pink by the idea of playing scrabble over the internet with her nephew from 2500 miles away. Apple has created another product like the iPhone and the iPod, one that would literally sell itself if they stopped advertising. The reason is because it fucking works.
"You seem to be confusing "I must have it because the TV tells me I have to have it in order to get attention and popularity" with "I really like device X and it does everything I want"."
You are really being a prick. Snidely suggesting that everybody who bought an iPad is stupid and bought it solely because they were utterly beguiled isn't only rude, but you must know it's just a lie. Most folks out there use computers to do three things - read email, browse the web, and use it as a fancy electronic typewriter. We're probably talking about at least 2/3rds of the people
Of course the cell phone lens is better. Your Nikon f/1.4 has several crippling limitations in comparison, including the requirement that the lens must be farther away from the film plane. The closer a lens is to the image plane (sensor, film), the higher quality your image plane image will be. Additionally, as you increase the size of the sensor, you are increasing the size of the image circle and this ensures lower image plane quality.
If you want to see your Nikon's ass get kicked, compare it to a similarly priced Voigtlander lens on a rangefinder camera. Or go one better and compare 21mm lenses, where the rangefinder has an even larger advantage.
A tiny lens shooting a tiny image circle, and bumped right up against the sensor, has theoretically better optical potential than an SLR lens, but the image quality is lower because smaller sensors suck. But this is not the fault of the lens.
Zeiss will be happy to show you their dirt cheap, optically magnificent camera phone lens next to a Hasselblad mount lens in CLN issue 19. They keep the specifications for both on their site, so you can read it for yourself.
Of course the purely aesthetic considerations such as bokeh, narrow depth of field, etc, have an impact on the final artistic merits of an image, and you can't get narrow DOF from a microscopic sensor. But saying your lens is better because your whole imaging system makes prettier pictures is not true at all.
Then compare, if you will, the resolution in lines per mm of a Minox 15mm f/3.5 lens with the Master Primes.
The Minox lens has a much higher resolution, because as your physical glass size increases it becomes more difficult to hold that micron accuracy across the entire lens.
"I actually thing that Android has been great for the smartphone market and specifically on iPhone development. They are definitely having an impact on the iPhone, both in software features and possibly in hardware, although on the hardware front, it's arguable that these are pretty common advances and it would get those in any case."
I think the Android is certainly a smartphone of some description. However, I don't think it is really worthy of being called a true competitor. My neighbor's redneck buddy, who is totally computer stupid, just got an Android. I don't know if it was Verizon's fault or what, but despite the specs of the hardware which might lead you to believe it's somehow fast, it was slow as molasses. Half the time, if you rotate the phone, it will not tilt the display because it's gone modal and needs you to click a button or go back a screen. My neighbor himself works for an Apple reseller so of course has an iPhone, and we were using them side by side to do things like browse the web, make calls, add contacts, and etc. Apple was, in every instance, much easier to use and much prettier to look at.
I wish the Android the best, if only to make Apple open up the iOS a bit more, but I think somehow as long as Google lets the networks fuck up their individual Android phones, neutering features and making it look and run like shit, they will be a poor second.
"I do think that Android wouldn't exist today without iPhone, but folks would have to remember back a few years to recall just how horrible smart phones were in the first half of the decade. it was a game changer, and the interface and features on the first Droids were very close if not identical to Apple's (albeit not quite as polished). They did however improve on those features and have continued to do so. That and the fact that Android has a much larger hardware and vendor base will make them a strong competitor in the market and keep Apple on it's toes."
Well I think you are right about this. Apple has changed the game a few times over the last 30 years, maybe more than anybody else in the business. When they do something, the whole herd also does it, or gets as close as legally possible. Apple does work to stay ahead of the herd, and sometimes looks a bit awkward doing it. I think that iOS is an answer to the Android's multitasking abilities, and also a wink and a nod admission from Steve Jobs that he does have to watch his ass.
I have my beefs with Apple on several subjects, but I don't think I know anybody who has a Mac or an iPhone or an iPad who thought they spent too much money and felt ripped off. This is Apple's main power - customer satisfaction.
As another poster has said, the GUI zooming and scrolling and sliding is actually there to inform you about what you are doing. If you put your finger down and swipe it on the home screen, you can see the one page of app icons slide off at the same speed. If, mid-swipe, you decide you really didn't want to go to the next screen, you don't need to stop, let the next screen load, and then hit another button or actuate the scroll bar.
The swipe is much like a scroll bar, however the active size of the bar is the whole screen and the bar has the screen contents inside it.
I think the ipad is nice for a lot of people who may not like computers in general because they are often quite obtuse about what is going on. Controls are placed on the screen on a computer, given cryptic icons, and the user who has little experience is fucked. The ipad shows the user what is happening when they do something, and lets them know their actions are having an effect. Without the cryptic icons and widgets that are basically learned ad-hoc in a sort of memetic fashion, things happen in a natural way that allows people to explore and use the computer with feedback showing them what their actions will do.
Of course, hovering tooltips provide information these days, if the developer chooses to use the well, but I think more natural interaction is just progress of a good sort.
Yes, but your Viewsonic is nothing like the ipad. The Viewsonic is a thick, chunky vnc client that gets maybe 6 hours of battery life at idle.
The ipad gets 10 minimum, and that's watching HD video. I bought one and tested it out for my use case, which involves PDF reading, web browsing, a bit of ssh, and playing go, and I can get about 30 hours out of the ipad. Considering that this is all I do most of the time when I take my laptop with me, and that I can reach my desktop with vnc or ssh if I find I need to do some real computing, this is a boon.
I can't seriously believe that you think that using Windows from a pen-based portable screen is somehow anything like using an ipad, which of course does everything the Viewsonic does, and a hell of a lot more, and does it a hell of a lot better. Could you stretch any farther? I mean, will you suggest that a television does everything a computer does?
Because this is what they do all the time. They go where the money is.
If a new wonder connector comes out, and a lot of people buy the device with the wonder connector, you either have a stupid company that chooses not to participate in that market, or a smart company that does. Pretty soon a wonder connector becomes the industry standard, you know, in the same way that almost every other connector evolved from a proprietary technology to an IEEE or ISO standard.
"So it's Apple until proven otherwise? No, the burden is upon you to support your claim."
An easy one for anybody to support.
Apple tablet sales: huge, a million a month.
All other tablets combined, maybe moving a few thousand per month.
If you are somehow widening the competition for the iPad to "netbooks and other portable devices" you have missed the point. However, I doubt that a million netbooks of ANY other particular brand, make, or model were sold in April, whereas a million Apple branded iPads and about two million iPhones were sold.
What you are saying is similar to this: "The Prius is not in the pole position for hybrids, because there are plenty of trucks, planes, and sailboats out there." "Oh and the only reason anybody drives a Prius is because of hype, not because it's superior to the competition in any way." Ignoring that the Prius is competing with other hybrids and small cars, not trucks and planes and boats, and ignoring the fact that yes, while the Prius is a hip car it's mainly successful because it actually offers good mileage too.