You don't "have to" post that as an Anonymous Coward. You chose to. If she's the kind of woman who would take serious offense at the insinuation that she hasn't changed since first grade, that might be something to take up in couples counseling.
High school reunions are notorious for their ability to "undo" decades worth of personal growth and maturity.
The basic problem is that people going to their high school reunions are (consciously or not) regressing to what they were like in high school, if only for that occasion. It's socially easier to pretend that all those years haven't passed than it is to try actually reacquaint yourself with people who you probably don't have all that much in common with anymore.
That's what I was wondering, too. There's no denying (as far as I know, anyway) that childhood trauma can impact someone's personality dramatically. From what I've read, sexual abuse, in particular, can have a big impact on talkativeness and self-minimizing behavior. The article doesn't seem to say that the study denies that, exactly, but it certainly seems to minimize it.
I was fascinated by this passage:
Talkative youngsters tended to show interest in intellectual matters, speak fluently, try to control situations, and exhibit a high degree of intelligence as adults. Children who rated low in verbal fluency were observed as adults to seek advice, give up when faced with obstacles, and exhibit an awkward interpersonal style.
So less talkative youngsters tend to grow up to be socially awkward? Gee, you don't say! Astounding insight, there. Do people really get paid to produce studies as daft as this?
I'm not really part of the "software community", and I do understand social convention. The social observations were interesting, even insightful, at times. But insightful and funny aren't synonymous. Social commentary coming out of the mouths of sociopaths is more sad than amusing.
First, the question isn't depth. It's iconic status. Different animal altogether. Second, Lennie Briscoe might have had some depth, and possibly Red, but Jack Bauer's character was never convincing as anything other than a badass. That's what people remember about him. And 24 itself was so badly written that Jack's most iconic line would have to be, "There's no time!". As for Picard, I don't think you could name anything iconic about the character. Captain Kirk was iconic, but that was off the air by the time the timeframe of the survey.
No one in any way involved with Seinfeld deserves so much as a dried-out piece of American cheese. That's got to be the most overrated show of all time. No sympathetic characters to speak of. And nothing particularly original. The show wasn't any more a "show about nothing" than any other sitcom on TV for the past 50 years. It was simply a place for Jerry Seinfeld to dump his stand-up humor alongside one-dimensional characters. And if you're going to have one-dimensional characters, that one dimension ought to be likable.
I assume that the persistent data can be saved via HTML5's local saving capability. But the user would have to initiate the save, I think. That's a little different from how ebooks save their place now. If I turn my Kindle off, it'll turn back on in the same place without me having to do anything to save my place.
Their battery power is actually typically measured in page-turns. This is because it only uses power to change the display.
You're right. I hadn't considered that. I don't think note-taking would be that much of a drain, but obviously a calendar/alarm app would be.
The thing that concerns me, in terms of mass appeal, is that the pool of people who just read is limited. The devices will have to be substantially cheaper for the casual reader to justify the purchase, and the features we're talking about (even the modest ones, like the touchscreen) add to the expense. And that's before you even start talking about color e-ink.
I'm thinking of something as simple as note-taking (not related to a specific book) and a calendar & alarm feature. It just makes sense to me that the ebook should be able to pop up an alarm about a meeting or phone call you have to make while you're reading. I suppose it's not a "must have", but it seems like such a simple thing that it would be weird to me if a successful device didn't have it.
But I would never use text-to-speech, and I don't really care how the device connects to anything else. USB is fine (especially if I can charge the device this way), and I have no idea what PIM is in this context.
Text-to-speech isn't important for the average user, but for the visually disabled, it's a must. It's a principle thing for me. I've got a friend who's blind and a technophile. It's offensive to me that this technology exists, yet publishing companies intentionally disable it. Amazon is working on enabling text-to-speech in the Kindle menu, which would make it a great device for blind users, if only the publishers would play ball.
Soem form of wireless is necessary to enable the user to buy a book from anywhere, which is really one of the coolest thing about the Kindle experience, IMO. Is it absolutely necessary, strictly speaking? No, but I don't see any device not having the feature achieving mass adoption.
Lending books isn't something I usually do, but it's the most common complaint I hear about e-books from avid readers. Part of the book-reading culture is lending your friend a good book. I don't think most bibliophiles will accept e-books without that ability. It also greatly expands the utility of the device, since you now not only have access to your books, but also your friends' books.
Um, what? Of course a reader can store the offset into the HTML document it's currently displaying. Most browsers simply won't, since their designers didn't see a need to; however, the data is available to Javascript as "window.pageYOffset".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think window.pageYOffset will do the trick. window.pageYoffset will show you where you currently are in a document, but what good is that once you've closed the book you're reading and gone to another book, or simply closed the book you're reading and shut the device off?
Making ebook market bigger will make the publishers act in less, not more, rationally. Greed gets a hold and overrides common sense.
How it seems to have worked with the music companies is this: Once it was shown that sufficient numbers of people wanted to buy their music online rather than on CD, there was an incentive to make it as seamless as possible. Without that insurance, companies (including publishing companies) will hold on to their intellectual property as tightly as possible. It's not until they're assured that many more people will buy their content than will steal it that they'll loosen up.
I'm really not sure why or what value the consumer sees from the use of proprietary formats. Simple is good, universal is good. DRM, proprietary formats and format wars are all bad.
Format wars are only bad until someone wins and becomes the standard format. The point of different formats is that they have different capabilities built into them. As has already been pointed out, you can't bookmark your place in HTML. PDF can't flow dynamically. Etc.
Eventually, a format will win. Right now, I think it's Amazon's to come up with. Amazon has a lead over the other players. I fully expect the publishing industry to drop DRM for e-books, but not soon. First, a device needs to be invented that convinces most people to drop paper. Here's what I think that device should look like:
You will be able to lend books from it. (The Nook's restrictions on lending mean that the current iteration doesn't do the job.)
It should be color e-ink.
It should have expandable memory.
It should have text-to-speech capabilities in all e-books.
It should have PIM capabilities.
It should have a touchscreen
That's all in addition to Wifi and 3G (or even 4G) capability.
No device that I know of has all of that right now, but when one does come along, the tide will turn and people will be more accepting of ebooks. At that point, the publishers will relax enough to remove the DRM. Right now, there's not enough money in ebooks, I think.
I think you're taking the snippet too literally. In order to demonstrate the metaphor, you have to create software around it. Otherwise, all you'd have is a few graphics.
Panspermia doesn't really answer where life comes from. It just sort of shifts the question off of Earth. When someone asks, "How did life come about?", the least informative answer you can give them is that it was seeded here by an asteroid or meteor. The real question is how did it arise on the object that the seeding object came from. Panspermia's just a cop-out.
Every review of the iPad I have seen was written on the iPad and every reviewer I have read has said that, while not quite as good as a physical keyboard it is quite sufficient for something like writing an article for a magazine or blog. If that's not good enough for sending emails or posting on facebook or slashdot then you aren't doing it right.
Mossberg had positive things to say about the iPad's keyboard (no surprise there), and Engadget didn't slam it, but they only really talked about "banging out e-mails" on it.
About the only thing the iPad's keyboard has going for it is that it's larger than some netbook keyboards. But you have to balance that against the fact that it's not tactile, so there's no touch typing.
I suppose that if you're used to typing on an iPhone, you'd love the iPad. But for those who need to do any type of document production -- other than short e-mails -- it's not going to work as a netbook replacement.
So what does the 44% mean? 440,000 people who would have bought a netbook or a laptop are not going to. What this also means is that tens of thousands of people who were vaguely looking for something like this are not going to choose the netbook solution.
Does anyone know how many netbooks were sold since the iPad was announced? What percentage of netbook sales does that 440,000 represent?
I don't think you can draw any conclusion from the people not surveyed. The only people you can assume aren't going to buy netbooks now that the iPad has been released are those people who wanted Web browsing and e-book reading without a keyboard. It sounds like the kind of demographic that's going to hurt smartphone sales more than netbook sales.
...someone who... knows you'll only use it for web browsing, iPhone-type games, and e-books.
Don't you realize that describes the majority of netbook users already?
Nice use of ellipses there, but I think you just proved my point by doing that.
Netbooks have keyboards. Whatever other merits the iPad has, it's fairly universally known that the iPad's software keyboard sucks for actual typing. that's why it doesn't make a good netbook replacement. Netbook users want to work on documents on the go, respond to e-mails, and do other things that you need a decent keyboard to do. People who want to play iPhone-type games already have...you know...iPhones. Obviously, the iPad gives you a substantially better Web experience than the iPhone, but netbooks can do things like running Flash, responding to forum posts, etc.
I'm certainly not saying that the iPad doesn't have a demographic it's good for. I just don't think that your average netbook user is it. Someone who's that casual about their Web browsing can use their smartphone,and anyone who buys the iPad to do any work on the road will be sorely disappointed.
Sales did not go down in October/November. The growth rate versus 2008 sales for that month showed a lower growth rate than for the previous period over 2008.
Good point. I sit corrected on that. But taht just makes the conclusion drawn by the article worse, I think.
Not only is it incredibly biased, but it offers nothing in the way of actual evidence that would persuade someone who'd advanced past third grade.
Think about it for a second: Only 44% of the people who bought iPads who were surveyed said that they did so instead of buying a netbook. How many people bought iPads, as compared to those who bought netbooks?
The other thing that's astonishing to me is that someone who writes a market research report could be so piss-poor at reading a graph. Sales of netbooks actually went down most in October/November 2009, well before the January announcement of the iPad. I'm kind of astonished that the author of the Fortune article could be that stupid.
The said, the iPad is damn expensive for a limited computing appliance.
I think that's the problem. I understand the cool factor, but even a netbook is so much more functional than an iPad that I can't really see the justification of going with an iPad over a netbook, unless you're someone who absolutely, positively despises keyboards and knows you'll only use it for web browsing, iPhone-type games, and e-books. It's unbelievable to me that the iPad could overwhelm netbook sales with that kind of demographic.
What matters to the end user (which would be males or lesbians, I suppose) is that the breasts in question feel natural. In terms of actually being natural, if they feel natural and look natural, for all intents and purposes, for the end user, they are natural.
As with all other prosthetics, what matters is the function and the perception, not the strict reality.
What you were born with naturally isn't part of your character traits. It's an accident of genetics. The only thing to be embarrassed about with prosthetic breasts is, therefore, poor workmanship.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't "have to" post that as an Anonymous Coward. You chose to. If she's the kind of woman who would take serious offense at the insinuation that she hasn't changed since first grade, that might be something to take up in couples counseling.
High school reunions are notorious for their ability to "undo" decades worth of personal growth and maturity.
The basic problem is that people going to their high school reunions are (consciously or not) regressing to what they were like in high school, if only for that occasion. It's socially easier to pretend that all those years haven't passed than it is to try actually reacquaint yourself with people who you probably don't have all that much in common with anymore.
Talkative youngsters tended to show interest in intellectual matters, speak fluently, try to control situations, and exhibit a high degree of intelligence as adults. Children who rated low in verbal fluency were observed as adults to seek advice, give up when faced with obstacles, and exhibit an awkward interpersonal style.
So less talkative youngsters tend to grow up to be socially awkward? Gee, you don't say! Astounding insight, there. Do people really get paid to produce studies as daft as this?
I'm not really part of the "software community", and I do understand social convention. The social observations were interesting, even insightful, at times. But insightful and funny aren't synonymous. Social commentary coming out of the mouths of sociopaths is more sad than amusing.
First, the question isn't depth. It's iconic status. Different animal altogether. Second, Lennie Briscoe might have had some depth, and possibly Red, but Jack Bauer's character was never convincing as anything other than a badass. That's what people remember about him. And 24 itself was so badly written that Jack's most iconic line would have to be, "There's no time!". As for Picard, I don't think you could name anything iconic about the character. Captain Kirk was iconic, but that was off the air by the time the timeframe of the survey.
Newman from Seinfeld.
No one in any way involved with Seinfeld deserves so much as a dried-out piece of American cheese. That's got to be the most overrated show of all time. No sympathetic characters to speak of. And nothing particularly original. The show wasn't any more a "show about nothing" than any other sitcom on TV for the past 50 years. It was simply a place for Jerry Seinfeld to dump his stand-up humor alongside one-dimensional characters. And if you're going to have one-dimensional characters, that one dimension ought to be likable.
I assume that the persistent data can be saved via HTML5's local saving capability. But the user would have to initiate the save, I think. That's a little different from how ebooks save their place now. If I turn my Kindle off, it'll turn back on in the same place without me having to do anything to save my place.
Their battery power is actually typically measured in page-turns. This is because it only uses power to change the display.
You're right. I hadn't considered that. I don't think note-taking would be that much of a drain, but obviously a calendar/alarm app would be.
The thing that concerns me, in terms of mass appeal, is that the pool of people who just read is limited. The devices will have to be substantially cheaper for the casual reader to justify the purchase, and the features we're talking about (even the modest ones, like the touchscreen) add to the expense. And that's before you even start talking about color e-ink.
About PIM abilities:
I'm thinking of something as simple as note-taking (not related to a specific book) and a calendar & alarm feature. It just makes sense to me that the ebook should be able to pop up an alarm about a meeting or phone call you have to make while you're reading. I suppose it's not a "must have", but it seems like such a simple thing that it would be weird to me if a successful device didn't have it.
But I would never use text-to-speech, and I don't really care how the device connects to anything else. USB is fine (especially if I can charge the device this way), and I have no idea what PIM is in this context.
Text-to-speech isn't important for the average user, but for the visually disabled, it's a must. It's a principle thing for me. I've got a friend who's blind and a technophile. It's offensive to me that this technology exists, yet publishing companies intentionally disable it. Amazon is working on enabling text-to-speech in the Kindle menu, which would make it a great device for blind users, if only the publishers would play ball.
Soem form of wireless is necessary to enable the user to buy a book from anywhere, which is really one of the coolest thing about the Kindle experience, IMO. Is it absolutely necessary, strictly speaking? No, but I don't see any device not having the feature achieving mass adoption.
Lending books isn't something I usually do, but it's the most common complaint I hear about e-books from avid readers. Part of the book-reading culture is lending your friend a good book. I don't think most bibliophiles will accept e-books without that ability. It also greatly expands the utility of the device, since you now not only have access to your books, but also your friends' books.
Um, what? Of course a reader can store the offset into the HTML document it's currently displaying. Most browsers simply won't, since their designers didn't see a need to; however, the data is available to Javascript as "window.pageYOffset".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think window.pageYOffset will do the trick. window.pageYoffset will show you where you currently are in a document, but what good is that once you've closed the book you're reading and gone to another book, or simply closed the book you're reading and shut the device off?
Making ebook market bigger will make the publishers act in less, not more, rationally. Greed gets a hold and overrides common sense.
How it seems to have worked with the music companies is this: Once it was shown that sufficient numbers of people wanted to buy their music online rather than on CD, there was an incentive to make it as seamless as possible. Without that insurance, companies (including publishing companies) will hold on to their intellectual property as tightly as possible. It's not until they're assured that many more people will buy their content than will steal it that they'll loosen up.
I'm really not sure why or what value the consumer sees from the use of proprietary formats. Simple is good, universal is good. DRM, proprietary formats and format wars are all bad.
Format wars are only bad until someone wins and becomes the standard format. The point of different formats is that they have different capabilities built into them. As has already been pointed out, you can't bookmark your place in HTML. PDF can't flow dynamically. Etc.
Eventually, a format will win. Right now, I think it's Amazon's to come up with. Amazon has a lead over the other players. I fully expect the publishing industry to drop DRM for e-books, but not soon. First, a device needs to be invented that convinces most people to drop paper. Here's what I think that device should look like:
You will be able to lend books from it. (The Nook's restrictions on lending mean that the current iteration doesn't do the job.)
It should be color e-ink.
It should have expandable memory.
It should have text-to-speech capabilities in all e-books.
It should have PIM capabilities.
It should have a touchscreen
That's all in addition to Wifi and 3G (or even 4G) capability.
No device that I know of has all of that right now, but when one does come along, the tide will turn and people will be more accepting of ebooks. At that point, the publishers will relax enough to remove the DRM. Right now, there's not enough money in ebooks, I think.
I can't mod you up, but +1 on that.
I think you're taking the snippet too literally. In order to demonstrate the metaphor, you have to create software around it. Otherwise, all you'd have is a few graphics.
Panspermia doesn't really answer where life comes from. It just sort of shifts the question off of Earth. When someone asks, "How did life come about?", the least informative answer you can give them is that it was seeded here by an asteroid or meteor. The real question is how did it arise on the object that the seeding object came from. Panspermia's just a cop-out.
You mean like happened with their acquisition of Writely? ;)
HP acquired Palm, so I would assume that their touch-enabled OS needs are covered right now.
Um...good point. :)
Universally known eh?
Every review of the iPad I have seen was written on the iPad and every reviewer I have read has said that, while not quite as good as a physical keyboard it is quite sufficient for something like writing an article for a magazine or blog. If that's not good enough for sending emails or posting on facebook or slashdot then you aren't doing it right.
David Pogue's Review
CNET's iPad Review
UberGizmo iPad Review
Mossberg had positive things to say about the iPad's keyboard (no surprise there), and Engadget didn't slam it, but they only really talked about "banging out e-mails" on it.
About the only thing the iPad's keyboard has going for it is that it's larger than some netbook keyboards. But you have to balance that against the fact that it's not tactile, so there's no touch typing.
I suppose that if you're used to typing on an iPhone, you'd love the iPad. But for those who need to do any type of document production -- other than short e-mails -- it's not going to work as a netbook replacement.
So what does the 44% mean? 440,000 people who would have bought a netbook or a laptop are not going to. What this also means is that tens of thousands of people who were vaguely looking for something like this are not going to choose the netbook solution.
Does anyone know how many netbooks were sold since the iPad was announced? What percentage of netbook sales does that 440,000 represent?
I don't think you can draw any conclusion from the people not surveyed. The only people you can assume aren't going to buy netbooks now that the iPad has been released are those people who wanted Web browsing and e-book reading without a keyboard. It sounds like the kind of demographic that's going to hurt smartphone sales more than netbook sales.
Don't you realize that describes the majority of netbook users already?
Nice use of ellipses there, but I think you just proved my point by doing that.
Netbooks have keyboards. Whatever other merits the iPad has, it's fairly universally known that the iPad's software keyboard sucks for actual typing. that's why it doesn't make a good netbook replacement. Netbook users want to work on documents on the go, respond to e-mails, and do other things that you need a decent keyboard to do. People who want to play iPhone-type games already have...you know...iPhones. Obviously, the iPad gives you a substantially better Web experience than the iPhone, but netbooks can do things like running Flash, responding to forum posts, etc.
I'm certainly not saying that the iPad doesn't have a demographic it's good for. I just don't think that your average netbook user is it. Someone who's that casual about their Web browsing can use their smartphone,and anyone who buys the iPad to do any work on the road will be sorely disappointed.
Sales did not go down in October/November. The growth rate versus 2008 sales for that month showed a lower growth rate than for the previous period over 2008.
Good point. I sit corrected on that. But taht just makes the conclusion drawn by the article worse, I think.
Not only is it incredibly biased, but it offers nothing in the way of actual evidence that would persuade someone who'd advanced past third grade.
Think about it for a second: Only 44% of the people who bought iPads who were surveyed said that they did so instead of buying a netbook. How many people bought iPads, as compared to those who bought netbooks?
The other thing that's astonishing to me is that someone who writes a market research report could be so piss-poor at reading a graph. Sales of netbooks actually went down most in October/November 2009, well before the January announcement of the iPad. I'm kind of astonished that the author of the Fortune article could be that stupid.
The said, the iPad is damn expensive for a limited computing appliance.
I think that's the problem. I understand the cool factor, but even a netbook is so much more functional than an iPad that I can't really see the justification of going with an iPad over a netbook, unless you're someone who absolutely, positively despises keyboards and knows you'll only use it for web browsing, iPhone-type games, and e-books. It's unbelievable to me that the iPad could overwhelm netbook sales with that kind of demographic.
What matters to the end user (which would be males or lesbians, I suppose) is that the breasts in question feel natural. In terms of actually being natural, if they feel natural and look natural, for all intents and purposes, for the end user, they are natural.
As with all other prosthetics, what matters is the function and the perception, not the strict reality.
What you were born with naturally isn't part of your character traits. It's an accident of genetics. The only thing to be embarrassed about with prosthetic breasts is, therefore, poor workmanship.