Windows OS-based tablets do not all sell poorly. At a typical lecture at my university (U.S.; I hear Tablet PC usage higher in some other countries, and at some colleges, it's even mandatory), 20-30% of students will have a Tablet PC.
The UI created by Microsoft is somewhat dependent on an active screen, alla Wacom. People have asked me oh-haha-your-tablet-is-now-obsolete, what with the advent of the iPad, and I just shrug them off because the iPad is quite useless for notes, as without pressure sensitivity (or for that matter, a well-established note-taking system), the thing is pretty bad with handwriting. Unlike the iPad, Tablet PCs also often are convertible; mine is, so it comes with a hardware keyboard, which makes Matlab and Mathematica much more enjoyable.
Also, there's an entire piece of software within the Office suite (OneNote) that's made for the Windows Tablet PC user. It's been around since Office 2003, but the latest version is just amazing. It's got LaTeX-like math input, math input by pen (not too good, but acceptable for basic math), video, audio, picture recording with voice recognition/OCR for the latter two, among other features which are helpful for notetaking.
Quake 3 (Arena) works fine one tier up, though. Runs playable (50+fps) on a (clocked down) 800MHz C2D with that GMA X3100. (:
At this rate, mobile phone performance is likely to surpass the platform I'm on very soon. Just recently, Intel demo'd a 100fps Q3A on their prototype mobile phone.
Maybe one in ten notebooks on campus are tablets. I've got one; great being able to search through your notes instantaneously while taking a midterm or final. OneNote 2010 introduces math input, LaTeX style--typing any math is almost always faster than writing it, so nowadays I only "need" the tablet functionality for diagram-heavy classes (circuits class or devices class, stuff like that).
I haven't seen or touched an iPad yet (I've seen perhaps 50 Windows tablets, mostly IBM/Lenovos), but it wouldn't fill this same niche, at least not without stylus / pressure sensitivity.
Imagine if you could just eject your SIM card from your phone, plug it into your computer, and browse the net, take phone calls, etc., then eject it like it's a memory card, slap it back into your phone, and go off to school, work, wherever. Or using bluetooth so that as soon as you get home, it automagically resyncs all your e-mails, text messages, and more. There's so much the technology can do -- and the only reason it's not happening is because service providers want to charge for everything, rather than simply flat-rating everything on a per minute, day, or megabyte use.
My Sidekick recently lost the ability to send files to my computer over bluetooth. Why? Because of an OTA update that disabled that. So now I can't just sit my phone near my laptop and transfer my pictures out of it, I have to open the back up, eject the little card, plug it into my system, copy the files, and then do the reverse. Very cumbersome when before it was 'click icon, drag files'.
It's complete and utter bullshit that cell phones are as powerful now as desktops were ten years ago sitting in the palm of my hand, and yet they have less than a third of the capability.
You can eject your SIM card from your phone and plug it into your computer. My father actually has two SIM cards from T-Mobile; one resides in a UMTS modem in his laptop (unlocked, bought in Singapore), and the other is in a Blackberry. I'm not sure if there's software to take phone calls, but you can definitely Skype off of it.
I've got an HTC Touch Pro 2. It runs Windows Mobile 6.5 and it's now unlocked and can flash any firmware it wants (3rd party developers have even got Ubuntu and Android to run on it, although with less hardware support). However, even if it were locked, it can sync all my emails, texts, whatever over Bluetooth. With MyPhone (a pretty good Microsoft product), it syncs all that even into the cloud. MyPhone can sync documents, pictures, music, as well. I can pull pushmail off Gmail as well as calendar and contacts, so even if I flash a new 3rd party ROM, which is a really nice ability that isn't officially advertised, I can easily resync and be off again.
That said, all this I first experienced overseas. When I came to the US for college, I suddenly realized how much the mobile companies cripple their consumers. Because I couldn't really live without these capabilities (and others couldn't either!), it's easy to find information online to help you achieve what you're imagining.
I've used a convertible tablet notebook to take notes for the past two years in college. It's been good, but Microsoft has a OneNote 2010 in public beta, which has made everything infinitely better.
I take many classes that use formulae and diagrams, so OneNote's equation support is a godsend. I'm able to search through all the typed text (never tried searching through equations themselves, actually), am able to use quasi-LaTeX syntax in all the equations that I use, and I'm able to copy down all those weird diagrams. If I need to take notes during a meeting, I can voice-record and then type up notes at the same time, and on review, the voice-notes are searchable and are linked to the text it's near to. I'm able to type much faster than I write, so this has been good to me.
To give an idea of what classes I've taken, over the last two quarters, it's been, I think, quantum/statistical mechanics, complex analysis, diffeq, programming shop, European literature, introduction to political science and then comparative politics, signals/systems/transforms. I've yet to encounter a situation where my current set-up doesn't put me at an advantage to other students.
When it comes to mobile phones, tablets, and the like Apple may be at the bleeding edge of innovation.
Sorry to be a bit argumentative, but I always thought Microsoft was at the "bleeding edge of innovation" in terms of tablets. Linux is really lacking, and the new iPad is, really, an eBook with 10 hours battery life and a touch screen.
Windows 7, on the other hand, has better "tablet" support than Windows Vista, which has better tablet support than Windows XP Tablet Edition -- they've definitely been improving with every iteration, and if you've ever used a Tablet PC, you can tell.
The problem with this which Google hasn't fixed yet, despite lots of screaming users, is that when you try to search from that search box, it... doesn't work. It redirects you back to the original Google homepage, which isn't very smooth.
Meanwhile here I'll sit with my eeePC running some flavor of Linux wondering when I'll get a tablet that provides support for open source.
To be honest, I'm not sure an open source tablet would make it that big. There's not excellent support throughout, say, Linux, yet. At least it's not as mature as that of Windows 7, which is much better than that of Windows Vista, which was super-awesome compared to that of Windows XP. Plus, OneNote is what makes Tablet PCs pretty good on Windows (although Evernote, I hear, is pretty good too).
If you can find an edition of OneNote 2010 (Technical Preview, currently), it's even better. OneNote 2010 has equation editing similar to that of Word 2007, which, if you've actually used, you'd realize has all sorts of Latex-like features, just that it's transcribed on the fly.
You can type
\int_-\infty^\infty 5xdx
or whatever, just the same way. Matrices are a bit different, but very much possible;
Microsoft is finally getting bit by cultivating and preying on the culture of Good Enough. XP supports current hardware, runs current apps, ISVs are still writing for it. Users are comfortable with it, it handles games well (hey, check out the number of Big Name Games that require DX10), and while it's a security nightmare, most competent shops know enough to be able to keep their machines STD-free.
Vista is a host of new problems, support issues, and sucks on the same hardware XP zips on. Windows 7 isn't officially out yet... and when it is, most IT shops are going to wait. They'll poke it with a stick, sniff it like a dog, and rather it's a genuine improvement or not, they're not going to hop on it until they have to.
I'm not sure. I recently installed XP onto my Vista-happy computer since I needed a 32-bit version of Windows for some application (I had installed 64-bit Vista a few weeks back).
XP needed me to install audio drivers, graphics drivers, motherboard drivers, fingerprint device drivers,... all told, I had to manually put in at least 20 things in Device Manager before it would be happy. Vista had 2 missing: fingerprint and mouse.
Of course, that's just anecdotal evidence. But also consider that 64-bit Windows doesn't have as many drivers built-in and that the XP didn't pick up my tablet immediately while the Vista installation did... I'm pretty sure for the end-user experience and installation, Vista is far superior to XP. But that's just anecdotal evidence.
I think it's better to have multiple smaller drives than a single big one. My 2 500 gigers were $65 each. I have everything important on both so when one goes, it won't be a major loss.
Keep redundancy away from Creative, though: mein leben!
Note: I own many Creative products, including soundcards, and they have yet to fail on me. (:
Actually, speaking of these things... why'd they name a robot Stair when it can't even climb stairs?!... Unless the pivot wheel is just a distraction from the folks at Stanford. *scrutinizes image.* Perhaps to prevent us from thinking it's Skynet-brood, as noted by parent...
Urine is water with stuff dissolved in it. Remove the solutes, and you get water again, which is all that this process is doing. There is nothing special about it, nature has been doing this for a long__________ time, as has the republic of Singapore
Indeed. I've lived in Singapore for some 12 years and I've got friends who actually prefer the taste of bottled NEWater (distilled human waste, if you must) over the tap water. That said, the tap water in some regions is already supplemented by NEWater, so the difference isn't so clear anymore...
That said, water in Singapore is much more potable than, say, the LA area where I'm living now.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
Actually, you CAN crash the whole browser, not just individual pages. Try typing "about:%" in the address bar. The entire browser crashes before you even see the %.
You fool! That's our easter-egg-benchmark-suite! Don't disclose it to everybody.
--Chrome Beta Development Team
P.S. Our in-house top score was 0.003ms. Do we beat yours?
I must be doing it wrong, since I've got five tabs open in Fx (iGoogle, the Economist, the article, this reply box, and a Wiki article open), and I'm at 771,372kb of this memory usage stuff. Browser uptime's about 30 hours, with a long break while I slept and wandered out...
*blinks.* Oh right, using Vista.... *retracts complaint, then.*:D
Tomato firmware is so nice; it's just under Bandwidth: Monthly.
Over the last three months, my mean average is 84GB down, 16GB up; this makes for a total of 100GB damage to my ISP.
I'm probably in the lower range of/.'s, since I'm a) living overseas, b) haven't been torrenting very much lately, and c) wasn't home for the first half of that first month.:D We're sustaining a family of four on this, with a 1400kbps streaming video connection to Taipei that comes on, say, every night for two to three hours. The connection sets us back about 35 USD for 10 Mb/s down, 1 Mb/s up.
It's harder to prove the existence of nothing than it is to show that something exists. With OSes, at least.
For example, try Windows XP Tablet PC edition. Then try the Tablet PC functionality on Vista (available basically across the board, unless you're using Home Basic).
Come back and tell me that XP was more enjoyable; then, your statements might be valid. I'm all for bashing Vista's perceived slowness, but the zomg-broad statements about how Vista has "NOTHING" are starting to get annoying, even by/. pro-OSS standards...
Another poster has already noted that it's more of a "chan ting" than anything else, but I figure it's worth elaborating on the subject a bit more.
"Can" is the ideograph for meal, and if/. takes Unicode, it would look like . "Ting," , is the ideograph for a large room, give or take a bit of description.
Oh, and it seems that/. doesn't like Unicode. Sad!
Selling windows and selling an anti-virus program, is like selling a car and then separately selling a lock and key system.
Well, technically speaking, it's like selling a shiny bank safe that has fourteen million signs saying, "Rob me! Rob me!" in a brightly colored rainbow marquee, distributing the GPS coordinates of that safe to every safe cracker in the world, and then offering aforementioned safe crackers sub-orbital transportation devices to quickly get to aforementioned safe... and then selling the door separately.
But Slashdot has a penchant for car analogies, so you win. (:
Y'know what's great? If I take my overseas SIM card (Singapore Telecom) over to the US, I'm charged 40 (US) cents for every SMS sent. Incoming SMSes for us are... still free. And I'd be able to use AT&T, Sprint, SunCom, and T-Mobile networks, depending on whatever one's network has the most coverage there. Or whichever I choose on my phone.
Kicker is, before the US dollar crashed, our SMSes would probably cost even less than 20 cents over there... I guess it's cheaper to deal with roaming customers than with your own.
Thing is, if you look at the statistics, only 0.7% of the US population is employed by agriculture. Our farming is so corporate and mechanized now; we really don't need that many farmers (compare us now to China at ~50% farmers in 2001 or India at ~53% in 2004).
You'd definitely need a different group to generalize for the statistic of 20%...
I'd say that the impossible part of "learning these concepts in a normal high school" is probably the limitations of your peers. The most challenging computer course I've had hitherto is one offered by CTY, where, in three weeks, we covered all those--hash tables, binary trees, heapsort, quicksort, Big-O, linked lists, stacks, and queues.
The biggest problem with a normal high school is that many of your peers don't actually care about the subject matter; they might only care about joy!-college!. At programs that truly try to challenge students (and I have no doubt you'd've probably been a much better candidate than I was; I was and still am a horrible CS student) and inspire them, students learn a lot quicker. Example for how much the kiddies at CTY were interested in CS? They were salivating over the prof's depiction of the sorting algorithm of Big-O of n. And to date, bucket sort is still my favorite sort (as limited as it is). Way back then, it didn't even have a Wikipedia article...
Slashdot Mirror
Windows OS-based tablets do not all sell poorly. At a typical lecture at my university (U.S.; I hear Tablet PC usage higher in some other countries, and at some colleges, it's even mandatory), 20-30% of students will have a Tablet PC.
The UI created by Microsoft is somewhat dependent on an active screen, alla Wacom. People have asked me oh-haha-your-tablet-is-now-obsolete, what with the advent of the iPad, and I just shrug them off because the iPad is quite useless for notes, as without pressure sensitivity (or for that matter, a well-established note-taking system), the thing is pretty bad with handwriting. Unlike the iPad, Tablet PCs also often are convertible; mine is, so it comes with a hardware keyboard, which makes Matlab and Mathematica much more enjoyable.
Also, there's an entire piece of software within the Office suite (OneNote) that's made for the Windows Tablet PC user. It's been around since Office 2003, but the latest version is just amazing. It's got LaTeX-like math input, math input by pen (not too good, but acceptable for basic math), video, audio, picture recording with voice recognition/OCR for the latter two, among other features which are helpful for notetaking.
Quake 3 (Arena) works fine one tier up, though. Runs playable (50+fps) on a (clocked down) 800MHz C2D with that GMA X3100. (:
At this rate, mobile phone performance is likely to surpass the platform I'm on very soon. Just recently, Intel demo'd a 100fps Q3A on their prototype mobile phone.
Maybe one in ten notebooks on campus are tablets. I've got one; great being able to search through your notes instantaneously while taking a midterm or final. OneNote 2010 introduces math input, LaTeX style--typing any math is almost always faster than writing it, so nowadays I only "need" the tablet functionality for diagram-heavy classes (circuits class or devices class, stuff like that).
I haven't seen or touched an iPad yet (I've seen perhaps 50 Windows tablets, mostly IBM/Lenovos), but it wouldn't fill this same niche, at least not without stylus / pressure sensitivity.
Imagine if you could just eject your SIM card from your phone, plug it into your computer, and browse the net, take phone calls, etc., then eject it like it's a memory card, slap it back into your phone, and go off to school, work, wherever. Or using bluetooth so that as soon as you get home, it automagically resyncs all your e-mails, text messages, and more. There's so much the technology can do -- and the only reason it's not happening is because service providers want to charge for everything, rather than simply flat-rating everything on a per minute, day, or megabyte use.
My Sidekick recently lost the ability to send files to my computer over bluetooth. Why? Because of an OTA update that disabled that. So now I can't just sit my phone near my laptop and transfer my pictures out of it, I have to open the back up, eject the little card, plug it into my system, copy the files, and then do the reverse. Very cumbersome when before it was 'click icon, drag files'.
It's complete and utter bullshit that cell phones are as powerful now as desktops were ten years ago sitting in the palm of my hand, and yet they have less than a third of the capability.
You can eject your SIM card from your phone and plug it into your computer. My father actually has two SIM cards from T-Mobile; one resides in a UMTS modem in his laptop (unlocked, bought in Singapore), and the other is in a Blackberry. I'm not sure if there's software to take phone calls, but you can definitely Skype off of it.
I've got an HTC Touch Pro 2. It runs Windows Mobile 6.5 and it's now unlocked and can flash any firmware it wants (3rd party developers have even got Ubuntu and Android to run on it, although with less hardware support). However, even if it were locked, it can sync all my emails, texts, whatever over Bluetooth. With MyPhone (a pretty good Microsoft product), it syncs all that even into the cloud. MyPhone can sync documents, pictures, music, as well. I can pull pushmail off Gmail as well as calendar and contacts, so even if I flash a new 3rd party ROM, which is a really nice ability that isn't officially advertised, I can easily resync and be off again.
That said, all this I first experienced overseas. When I came to the US for college, I suddenly realized how much the mobile companies cripple their consumers. Because I couldn't really live without these capabilities (and others couldn't either!), it's easy to find information online to help you achieve what you're imagining.
I've used a convertible tablet notebook to take notes for the past two years in college. It's been good, but Microsoft has a OneNote 2010 in public beta, which has made everything infinitely better.
I take many classes that use formulae and diagrams, so OneNote's equation support is a godsend. I'm able to search through all the typed text (never tried searching through equations themselves, actually), am able to use quasi-LaTeX syntax in all the equations that I use, and I'm able to copy down all those weird diagrams. If I need to take notes during a meeting, I can voice-record and then type up notes at the same time, and on review, the voice-notes are searchable and are linked to the text it's near to. I'm able to type much faster than I write, so this has been good to me.
To give an idea of what classes I've taken, over the last two quarters, it's been, I think, quantum/statistical mechanics, complex analysis, diffeq, programming shop, European literature, introduction to political science and then comparative politics, signals/systems/transforms. I've yet to encounter a situation where my current set-up doesn't put me at an advantage to other students.
When it comes to mobile phones, tablets, and the like Apple may be at the bleeding edge of innovation.
Sorry to be a bit argumentative, but I always thought Microsoft was at the "bleeding edge of innovation" in terms of tablets. Linux is really lacking, and the new iPad is, really, an eBook with 10 hours battery life and a touch screen.
Windows 7, on the other hand, has better "tablet" support than Windows Vista, which has better tablet support than Windows XP Tablet Edition -- they've definitely been improving with every iteration, and if you've ever used a Tablet PC, you can tell.
This has been extant for a very long time.
... doesn't work. It redirects you back to the original Google homepage, which isn't very smooth.
The problem with this which Google hasn't fixed yet, despite lots of screaming users, is that when you try to search from that search box, it
Other than that, however, it's fine!
Meanwhile here I'll sit with my eeePC running some flavor of Linux wondering when I'll get a tablet that provides support for open source.
To be honest, I'm not sure an open source tablet would make it that big. There's not excellent support throughout, say, Linux, yet. At least it's not as mature as that of Windows 7, which is much better than that of Windows Vista, which was super-awesome compared to that of Windows XP. Plus, OneNote is what makes Tablet PCs pretty good on Windows (although Evernote, I hear, is pretty good too).
Yup, second OneNote.
:D
If you can find an edition of OneNote 2010 (Technical Preview, currently), it's even better. OneNote 2010 has equation editing similar to that of Word 2007, which, if you've actually used, you'd realize has all sorts of Latex-like features, just that it's transcribed on the fly.
You can type
\int_-\infty^\infty 5xdx
or whatever, just the same way. Matrices are a bit different, but very much possible;
\matrix(1&0@0&1)
Creates a 2x2 identity matrix.
That said, don't pirate software.
I'm not sure. I recently installed XP onto my Vista-happy computer since I needed a 32-bit version of Windows for some application (I had installed 64-bit Vista a few weeks back).
... all told, I had to manually put in at least 20 things in Device Manager before it would be happy. Vista had 2 missing: fingerprint and mouse.
XP needed me to install audio drivers, graphics drivers, motherboard drivers, fingerprint device drivers,
Of course, that's just anecdotal evidence. But also consider that 64-bit Windows doesn't have as many drivers built-in and that the XP didn't pick up my tablet immediately while the Vista installation did... I'm pretty sure for the end-user experience and installation, Vista is far superior to XP. But that's just anecdotal evidence.
I think it's better to have multiple smaller drives than a single big one. My 2 500 gigers were $65 each. I have everything important on both so when one goes, it won't be a major loss.
Keep redundancy away from Creative, though: mein leben!
Note: I own many Creative products, including soundcards, and they have yet to fail on me. (:
Or, alternatively, these things.
... Unless the pivot wheel is just a distraction from the folks at Stanford. *scrutinizes image.* Perhaps to prevent us from thinking it's Skynet-brood, as noted by parent...
Actually, speaking of these things... why'd they name a robot Stair when it can't even climb stairs?!
Urine is water with stuff dissolved in it. Remove the solutes, and you get water again, which is all that this process is doing. There is nothing special about it, nature has been doing this for a long__________ time, as has the republic of Singapore
Indeed. I've lived in Singapore for some 12 years and I've got friends who actually prefer the taste of bottled NEWater (distilled human waste, if you must) over the tap water. That said, the tap water in some regions is already supplemented by NEWater, so the difference isn't so clear anymore...
That said, water in Singapore is much more potable than, say, the LA area where I'm living now.
I love the RSS feed. :D
Actually, you CAN crash the whole browser, not just individual pages. Try typing "about:%" in the address bar. The entire browser crashes before you even see the %.
You fool! That's our easter-egg-benchmark-suite! Don't disclose it to everybody.
--Chrome Beta Development Team
P.S. Our in-house top score was 0.003ms. Do we beat yours?
I must be doing it wrong, since I've got five tabs open in Fx (iGoogle, the Economist, the article, this reply box, and a Wiki article open), and I'm at 771,372kb of this memory usage stuff. Browser uptime's about 30 hours, with a long break while I slept and wandered out...
... *retracts complaint, then.* :D
*blinks.* Oh right, using Vista.
Tomato firmware is so nice; it's just under Bandwidth: Monthly.
/.'s, since I'm a) living overseas, b) haven't been torrenting very much lately, and c) wasn't home for the first half of that first month. :D We're sustaining a family of four on this, with a 1400kbps streaming video connection to Taipei that comes on, say, every night for two to three hours. The connection sets us back about 35 USD for 10 Mb/s down, 1 Mb/s up.
Over the last three months, my mean average is 84GB down, 16GB up; this makes for a total of 100GB damage to my ISP.
I'm probably in the lower range of
It's harder to prove the existence of nothing than it is to show that something exists. With OSes, at least.
/. pro-OSS standards...
For example, try Windows XP Tablet PC edition. Then try the Tablet PC functionality on Vista (available basically across the board, unless you're using Home Basic).
Come back and tell me that XP was more enjoyable; then, your statements might be valid. I'm all for bashing Vista's perceived slowness, but the zomg-broad statements about how Vista has "NOTHING" are starting to get annoying, even by
Another poster has already noted that it's more of a "chan ting" than anything else, but I figure it's worth elaborating on the subject a bit more.
/. takes Unicode, it would look like . "Ting," , is the ideograph for a large room, give or take a bit of description.
/. doesn't like Unicode. Sad!
"Can" is the ideograph for meal, and if
Oh, and it seems that
Also, err, first post? How?
Everyone else was busy reading the article. ... You must be new here. (:
Selling windows and selling an anti-virus program, is like selling a car and then separately selling a lock and key system.
Well, technically speaking, it's like selling a shiny bank safe that has fourteen million signs saying, "Rob me! Rob me!" in a brightly colored rainbow marquee, distributing the GPS coordinates of that safe to every safe cracker in the world, and then offering aforementioned safe crackers sub-orbital transportation devices to quickly get to aforementioned safe ... and then selling the door separately.
But Slashdot has a penchant for car analogies, so you win. (:
Y'know what's great? If I take my overseas SIM card (Singapore Telecom) over to the US, I'm charged 40 (US) cents for every SMS sent. Incoming SMSes for us are... still free. And I'd be able to use AT&T, Sprint, SunCom, and T-Mobile networks, depending on whatever one's network has the most coverage there. Or whichever I choose on my phone.
Kicker is, before the US dollar crashed, our SMSes would probably cost even less than 20 cents over there... I guess it's cheaper to deal with roaming customers than with your own.
Mod parent up!
He actually knows his history and gov't/politics.
Thing is, if you look at the statistics, only 0.7% of the US population is employed by agriculture. Our farming is so corporate and mechanized now; we really don't need that many farmers (compare us now to China at ~50% farmers in 2001 or India at ~53% in 2004).
You'd definitely need a different group to generalize for the statistic of 20%...
I'd say that the impossible part of "learning these concepts in a normal high school" is probably the limitations of your peers. The most challenging computer course I've had hitherto is one offered by CTY, where, in three weeks, we covered all those--hash tables, binary trees, heapsort, quicksort, Big-O, linked lists, stacks, and queues.
The biggest problem with a normal high school is that many of your peers don't actually care about the subject matter; they might only care about joy!-college!. At programs that truly try to challenge students (and I have no doubt you'd've probably been a much better candidate than I was; I was and still am a horrible CS student) and inspire them, students learn a lot quicker. Example for how much the kiddies at CTY were interested in CS? They were salivating over the prof's depiction of the sorting algorithm of Big-O of n. And to date, bucket sort is still my favorite sort (as limited as it is). Way back then, it didn't even have a Wikipedia article...