Your homepage identifies you as a novelist, so I'm actually asking this question honestly: What's stopping you from, say, firing up a word processor on an iPad (or Galaxy Tab, if you prefer), and using a Bluetooth keyboard paired with it, to write a novel?
Is it solely the screen size? Is there something missing from the software? Is it just "too different"? Obviously, I don't think anybody expects you to write a book on a 3-4" phone screen with an on-screen keyboard taking up half the screen... but having written shorter-form essays, documentation and technical information in the 3-10 page range on a tablet, I'm curious what you feel is preventing you, and what you require from a PC that you can't get from a tablet?
Yep. Everybody knows that the only way to create anything is with a keyboard and a mouse. It's amazing that we managed to do anything even remotely creative before PC's.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
If people love it, sounds like it should be, "Final Score: Apple 1, Consumers 1."
Just because the mass market hasn't embraced YOUR preferred solution doesn't mean the solution they have embraced is bad. It means that your needs (and thus the best solutions for YOU) are not the same as those of the wider market.
Given that you're here on Slashdot, it's not particularly surprising that you'd have different needs and wants in your computer gear than the average computer user. Those tablets are still available, those netbooks are still available. Don't buy an iPad if it's not right for you.
Not to get too Apple fan boy-y, but Microsoft's investment wasn't *that* big.
In dollar terms, perhaps not. In crowd-psychology terms? It was huge. It was Apple being able to allay investors' fears: "Look, we have this commitment from a hugely successful hugely profitable company like Microsoft. Do you really think they'd give us this money and make this commitment if they thought we were circling the drain and about to fold?"
There's a reason why their stock went up about 33% that day, added ~800 million to their market cap, and effectively doubled their stock price from the time Gil Amelio left. When you're a publicly traded company that needs money to keep operating, having a big, wealthy company say "These guys are doing great things and we want to work with them," is a pretty helpful vote of confidence.
You wouldn't have to sit that far from it for it to qualify. Whether or not you could use the term would largely depend on whether or not Apple has trademarked the phrase.
20/20 vision is commonly accepted as the ability to distinguish between two patterns or objects that are separated by a 1 arcminute (1/60th of 1 degree) visual angle. Anything closer together than that, and - so Apple claims - the average human eye would be unable to distinguish between the two objects. Thus the closer the device is to the eye, the closer together the pixels must be in order to be less than one arcminute apart, and thus indistinguishable as two separate objects at that viewing distance.
Assuming a 1920x1080 resolution on a 40" display, the minimum viewing distance to get the "retina" effect would be about 62 inches - at the low end of "recommended" viewing distances for a 40" display by most manufacturers (viewing distance recommendations seem to range between 5 and 15 feet for displays of this size).
No, "Retina display" is a marketing term which Apple uses to describe "a display where the average human eye cannot distinguish individual pixels when viewed from an average viewing distnace."
In this case, for the ~16 inch minimum viewing distance they've assumed for the iPad, the new display certainly meets that criteria.
No, they sued Amazon for trademark infringement when Amazon opened the Android Appstore, claiming that "App Store" was trademarked by Apple, and complaining that Amazon's use of the mark was infringing.
There was no patent on "having an electronic store." There was no suit over "having an electronic store." It was a trademark dispute, in which Apple basically said "They should have to call it something else without using the phrase "App Store." Amazon went live with their Android Appstore anyway, and Microsoft has also filed a challenge on the trademark, claiming it was too generic to be a legitimate trademark.
The most recent I've heard, a few months back, the case is still working it's way through the federal courts.
Silly lawsuit? Probably. But the USPTO granted them the trademark in the first place, so I'm inclined to believe that the USPTO deserves a fair share of the blame for the waste of the lawsuit, also.
If security, confidentiality, and permanent ownership of the stuff stored are such overriding concerns, then it's likely that a cloud service isn't for you, and you should avoid using one.
Unfortunately for this argument, laws vary from country to country, and so terms and conditions for any service must comply with relevant local laws in each country, and the wishes of the rights-holders regarding distribution of their product to those countries.
Did you really think that companies *prefer* having to build a different storefront with a different set of products, for every country they operate in? This isn't google forcing the restrictions, it's the content owners not granting google the rights to sell/distribute those products in the relevant markets, or the local laws preventing them from doing it for some reason.
They think your working class ethos means dick, and they want to actually get ahead in the world rather than working for The Man forever and ever for crap health insurance and a shot at that extra $0.30 raise at the end of the year
So one person's desire to "get ahead" in the world no matter the cost justifies their methods? Sounds remarkably like the thinking of "The Man" who believes that his profits and comfort supercede the rights and comfort of the people working for him. I guess it's true, we become what we most despise.
You might have heard of the most successful malware currently in use: It's called Facebook, and it's a scam that's become so popular that it has been incorporated and now has its own laison with the government (you know how much they hate competition in these kinds of things...)
What a load of utter tripe. It's of course cynical enough, and facebook-bashy enough to get you a +5 Insightful here on/., but pray tell, how does Facebook operate as "malware"? What scam is being perpetrated? "Oh no, I'm being given something of value in exchange for allowing a company to know that I love lolcats and Britney Spears, allowing them to show me some advertisements! The horror!" Don't like Facebook? Don't use it. It's not infecting your computer, it's not stealing your money, and it sure as shit isn't harming you unless you're the type of idiot who can't help but spend 8 hours a day glued to Farmville.
You do realize that by denying people access to employment after their jail term has ended, you're leaving them only one option: Criminal activity, correct?
That's not what he said - he never suggested that the man shouldn't be able to be employed. He said that any sane employer wouldn't trust him with access to their computer systems. And he's right: granting someone with a proven history of being untrustworthy with access to your most sensitive and critical data is a fool's wager, and would, at the very least, require intense oversight and monitoring - probably far more costly than any value he'd create in his role. But he could work in any number of other jobs that don't involve privileged access to a network & computer systems.
this doesn't mean he wouldn't be able to be a pen-tester or something like that
Absolutely, he'd probably make a great pen-tester... if you could trust him not to abuse/exploit the holes he finds during his pen testing, and do something illegal, unethical, or damaging with the information and access he's able to acquire during his pen testing.
Of course, given that he's exhibited a lack of trustworthiness in that exact scenario, the hiring decision would likely be based on how much hassle it would be for the company to keep him on an incredibly short leash, versus hiring a white hat with similar skills who has a record of trustworthiness and reliability to come with those skills.
The last couple of "terrorists" that I've read about didn't seem to be smart enough to plan an attack, let alone to build a bomb.
A fairly inflexible principle of warfare is that you don't blow up your planners & masterminds. You recruit cannon fodder, and let them get blown up. Doesn't take a lot of intelligence to follow a simple "Walk to this place. Push trigger." set of instructions.
You can certainly draw a fine line between "entrapment" and "catching the dumb ones," but your assumption that all the "real" terrorists are super intelligent evil geniuses who would never be caught by the Keystone Kops is a little odd. If you read up on "suicide bombers," you'll be struck by a similarity that many of them share: they tend to be younger people with limited prospects (education, disease, economic or social circumstances), who often already show signs of suicidal tendencies, and who've bought into the idea that they don't have a lot to live for in this life, so they might as well enter the next with a flourish.
The pedantry of fixating on some SBA definition in an attempt to show that "small and mid-size businesses" don't include the types of companies I'm talking about, when by your own defintion, which you apparently cannot or did not read, they're expressly included.
Size guidelines define the maximum size that a firm (including its affiliates) may be to qualify as a small business for most SBA programs.
Emphasis mine. Please note that these standards describe the *maximum size*, which means they include businesses "up to" the stated employee / annual receipts limit. I'm well aware of the definition the SBA uses.
I'm also well aware - as you seem not to be - that "Annual receipts of 7, 25, all the way up to 33.5 million per year" is not a particularly large company, as employee numbers go. What sort of headcount do you imagine the average software shop with 10-20 million per year in annual receipts has? And how many IT people would you actually need to support the *perhaps* couple dozen people working there?
You're right - I work at a very large company with half a dozen locations in the US spread across 3 timezones, plus a major presence in Europe and India.
Face to face meetings aren't possible in a lot of cases, but my company has actually made an effort to consolidate the majority of people on a particular project team into one or two sites, and encourages managers to rotate "off-site" people through by bringing them to the project's main site for a couple weeks at a time. It works well.
Our schedules tend to be very flexible, but we're all encourage to set (and keep!) "office hours" a couple times a week, where we'll commit to being available for in-person meetings at the office, as well as using instant messaging, screen sharing, and voice chat to keep in touch as-needed.
It's not as good and convenient as being able to pop your head over the cubicle wall and ask the guy next door a question, but it is possible to be fairly effective while working "virtually." But it's definitely more effort.
For what jobs? Really, go on, list them? In an on-going economic downturn, with millions unemployed and no sign of where to find jobs, you advocate retraining en masse? In what field? It's not a case of "each person will decide for himself," since most of these people already have decided, and those jobs have all gone away.
Are you really that thick? We're talking about some (fairly small %) of IT personnel being affected by centralization of service providers in the IT industry - not the elimination of a whole industry and its related services and manufacturing. You make it sound as if this centralization of services means half the IT industry would stop existing, and all the people working in it will be left destitute, with completely useless skills.
I wouldn't have thought buggy whip makers, people who work with leather, would have gone into mechanical engineering. I would have thought they would be more likely to go into clothing, bootmaking, textiles, that sort of thing.
... and people with IT skills will go into other development jobs, or system administration jobs, or database jobs, or any of the entire fucking galaxy of other IT jobs that will remain, untouched, unchanged, and still quite relevant and necessary, even after companies consolidate into shared cloud services.
Nice meaningless counter-argument you've constructed there. Perhaps you'd like to actually address the substance of my comment, rather than hand-waving it away because it's inconvenient for you to use logic?
No, I'm saying that "small and mid-sized businesses" tend to be the companies without dedicated IT personnel, or under-utilized IT personnel: companies who could get by with "half" a full-time employee, or some other fraction of an FTE where a fraction of an FTE still represents a significant part of their IT expenditure.
And despite your pedantry, the point still stands. The paper under discussion talks about *small and mid-size* businesses taking advantage of cloud services being the driver for this growth. Not the large organizations that are running huge IT departments and who would have to outsource more-or-less as-is to a service provider because of that immense size.
Good thing we don't need to EVOLVE the skills we need to survive in a cloud service dominated world, and can instead LEARN them via an educational system that's already in place.
On a side note, did you also really think it took millions of years of evolution to turn buggy whip makers into auto manufacturers?
If there were no benefits to moving to the cloud, because the same resources were needed, then these cloud service providers couldn't lower costs much.
What about all of the myriad smaller companies where a fraction of a person is the only real resource needed for IT, and which a centralized (read: shared) provider suddenly makes a lot of services accessible to them?
Because when faced with the proposition of hiring a "full time IT guy for salary to do 8 hours a week worth of work," most small businesses don't have the revenues to pay for another full time employee, so somebody who already works for them ends up putting on an IT hat 8 hours a week. Because the law tends to frown on dismemberment, hiring a fraction of a person is only generally possible in scenarios where a pool of employers is able to each pay a fraction of a single person's salary.
Sure you can. You assume that large companies are the ones who would be moving to this, when the summary specifically states small & mid-sized businesses "being able to use these services" would be where most of the creation would come from.
Small & mid-size. You know, the types of businesses that don't have dedicated IT departments, or who have hires in their IT departments who aren't 100% utilized. The types of companies where there's only a need for maybe 10 hours a week of IT support, for whom hiring a full time "IT guy" doesn't make financial sense. But if you take 4 companies that each need 10 hours a week of IT support and convince them to pay an equivalent amount, you just created a new job. Each client pays for their 10 hours/wk - a slight increase in their overall spend, but the guy who was providing that 10 hours / week as a sideline (let's call him "Bob, the sales and accounting guy") can spend that 10 hours a week on doing things that are more valuable to the company.
Slashdot Mirror
Your homepage identifies you as a novelist, so I'm actually asking this question honestly: What's stopping you from, say, firing up a word processor on an iPad (or Galaxy Tab, if you prefer), and using a Bluetooth keyboard paired with it, to write a novel?
Is it solely the screen size? Is there something missing from the software? Is it just "too different"? Obviously, I don't think anybody expects you to write a book on a 3-4" phone screen with an on-screen keyboard taking up half the screen... but having written shorter-form essays, documentation and technical information in the 3-10 page range on a tablet, I'm curious what you feel is preventing you, and what you require from a PC that you can't get from a tablet?
Yep. Everybody knows that the only way to create anything is with a keyboard and a mouse. It's amazing that we managed to do anything even remotely creative before PC's.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
And that's a damned good start. Once we have keg coolers made like this, the sky's the limit.
If people love it, sounds like it should be, "Final Score: Apple 1, Consumers 1."
Just because the mass market hasn't embraced YOUR preferred solution doesn't mean the solution they have embraced is bad. It means that your needs (and thus the best solutions for YOU) are not the same as those of the wider market.
Given that you're here on Slashdot, it's not particularly surprising that you'd have different needs and wants in your computer gear than the average computer user. Those tablets are still available, those netbooks are still available. Don't buy an iPad if it's not right for you.
In dollar terms, perhaps not. In crowd-psychology terms? It was huge. It was Apple being able to allay investors' fears: "Look, we have this commitment from a hugely successful hugely profitable company like Microsoft. Do you really think they'd give us this money and make this commitment if they thought we were circling the drain and about to fold?"
There's a reason why their stock went up about 33% that day, added ~800 million to their market cap, and effectively doubled their stock price from the time Gil Amelio left. When you're a publicly traded company that needs money to keep operating, having a big, wealthy company say "These guys are doing great things and we want to work with them," is a pretty helpful vote of confidence.
You wouldn't have to sit that far from it for it to qualify. Whether or not you could use the term would largely depend on whether or not Apple has trademarked the phrase.
20/20 vision is commonly accepted as the ability to distinguish between two patterns or objects that are separated by a 1 arcminute (1/60th of 1 degree) visual angle. Anything closer together than that, and - so Apple claims - the average human eye would be unable to distinguish between the two objects. Thus the closer the device is to the eye, the closer together the pixels must be in order to be less than one arcminute apart, and thus indistinguishable as two separate objects at that viewing distance.
Assuming a 1920x1080 resolution on a 40" display, the minimum viewing distance to get the "retina" effect would be about 62 inches - at the low end of "recommended" viewing distances for a 40" display by most manufacturers (viewing distance recommendations seem to range between 5 and 15 feet for displays of this size).
You can play with numbers and resolutions here: http://bhtooefr.org/displaycalc.htm
I might be surprised, if they weren't the sort of thing that everybody wants, you mean!
Well sure, but if they made Gazzonyx dolls, I'm sure we'd all want one of those, too.
No, "Retina display" is a marketing term which Apple uses to describe "a display where the average human eye cannot distinguish individual pixels when viewed from an average viewing distnace."
In this case, for the ~16 inch minimum viewing distance they've assumed for the iPad, the new display certainly meets that criteria.
That's just crazy talk.
EVERYBODY wants an American Girl doll.
If only they'd just make it compatible with every bluetooth keyboard on the market.
*sigh*
If only.
No, they sued Amazon for trademark infringement when Amazon opened the Android Appstore, claiming that "App Store" was trademarked by Apple, and complaining that Amazon's use of the mark was infringing.
There was no patent on "having an electronic store." There was no suit over "having an electronic store." It was a trademark dispute, in which Apple basically said "They should have to call it something else without using the phrase "App Store." Amazon went live with their Android Appstore anyway, and Microsoft has also filed a challenge on the trademark, claiming it was too generic to be a legitimate trademark.
The most recent I've heard, a few months back, the case is still working it's way through the federal courts.
Silly lawsuit? Probably. But the USPTO granted them the trademark in the first place, so I'm inclined to believe that the USPTO deserves a fair share of the blame for the waste of the lawsuit, also.
If security, confidentiality, and permanent ownership of the stuff stored are such overriding concerns, then it's likely that a cloud service isn't for you, and you should avoid using one.
Unfortunately for this argument, laws vary from country to country, and so terms and conditions for any service must comply with relevant local laws in each country, and the wishes of the rights-holders regarding distribution of their product to those countries.
Did you really think that companies *prefer* having to build a different storefront with a different set of products, for every country they operate in? This isn't google forcing the restrictions, it's the content owners not granting google the rights to sell/distribute those products in the relevant markets, or the local laws preventing them from doing it for some reason.
So one person's desire to "get ahead" in the world no matter the cost justifies their methods? Sounds remarkably like the thinking of "The Man" who believes that his profits and comfort supercede the rights and comfort of the people working for him. I guess it's true, we become what we most despise.
What a load of utter tripe. It's of course cynical enough, and facebook-bashy enough to get you a +5 Insightful here on /., but pray tell, how does Facebook operate as "malware"? What scam is being perpetrated? "Oh no, I'm being given something of value in exchange for allowing a company to know that I love lolcats and Britney Spears, allowing them to show me some advertisements! The horror!" Don't like Facebook? Don't use it. It's not infecting your computer, it's not stealing your money, and it sure as shit isn't harming you unless you're the type of idiot who can't help but spend 8 hours a day glued to Farmville.
That's not what he said - he never suggested that the man shouldn't be able to be employed. He said that any sane employer wouldn't trust him with access to their computer systems. And he's right: granting someone with a proven history of being untrustworthy with access to your most sensitive and critical data is a fool's wager, and would, at the very least, require intense oversight and monitoring - probably far more costly than any value he'd create in his role. But he could work in any number of other jobs that don't involve privileged access to a network & computer systems.
Absolutely, he'd probably make a great pen-tester... if you could trust him not to abuse/exploit the holes he finds during his pen testing, and do something illegal, unethical, or damaging with the information and access he's able to acquire during his pen testing.
Of course, given that he's exhibited a lack of trustworthiness in that exact scenario, the hiring decision would likely be based on how much hassle it would be for the company to keep him on an incredibly short leash, versus hiring a white hat with similar skills who has a record of trustworthiness and reliability to come with those skills.
A fairly inflexible principle of warfare is that you don't blow up your planners & masterminds. You recruit cannon fodder, and let them get blown up. Doesn't take a lot of intelligence to follow a simple "Walk to this place. Push trigger." set of instructions.
You can certainly draw a fine line between "entrapment" and "catching the dumb ones," but your assumption that all the "real" terrorists are super intelligent evil geniuses who would never be caught by the Keystone Kops is a little odd. If you read up on "suicide bombers," you'll be struck by a similarity that many of them share: they tend to be younger people with limited prospects (education, disease, economic or social circumstances), who often already show signs of suicidal tendencies, and who've bought into the idea that they don't have a lot to live for in this life, so they might as well enter the next with a flourish.
The pedantry of fixating on some SBA definition in an attempt to show that "small and mid-size businesses" don't include the types of companies I'm talking about, when by your own defintion, which you apparently cannot or did not read, they're expressly included.
Emphasis mine. Please note that these standards describe the *maximum size*, which means they include businesses "up to" the stated employee / annual receipts limit. I'm well aware of the definition the SBA uses.
I'm also well aware - as you seem not to be - that "Annual receipts of 7, 25, all the way up to 33.5 million per year" is not a particularly large company, as employee numbers go. What sort of headcount do you imagine the average software shop with 10-20 million per year in annual receipts has? And how many IT people would you actually need to support the *perhaps* couple dozen people working there?
You're right - I work at a very large company with half a dozen locations in the US spread across 3 timezones, plus a major presence in Europe and India.
Face to face meetings aren't possible in a lot of cases, but my company has actually made an effort to consolidate the majority of people on a particular project team into one or two sites, and encourages managers to rotate "off-site" people through by bringing them to the project's main site for a couple weeks at a time. It works well.
Our schedules tend to be very flexible, but we're all encourage to set (and keep!) "office hours" a couple times a week, where we'll commit to being available for in-person meetings at the office, as well as using instant messaging, screen sharing, and voice chat to keep in touch as-needed.
It's not as good and convenient as being able to pop your head over the cubicle wall and ask the guy next door a question, but it is possible to be fairly effective while working "virtually." But it's definitely more effort.
Are you really that thick? We're talking about some (fairly small %) of IT personnel being affected by centralization of service providers in the IT industry - not the elimination of a whole industry and its related services and manufacturing. You make it sound as if this centralization of services means half the IT industry would stop existing, and all the people working in it will be left destitute, with completely useless skills.
Nice meaningless counter-argument you've constructed there. Perhaps you'd like to actually address the substance of my comment, rather than hand-waving it away because it's inconvenient for you to use logic?
No, I'm saying that "small and mid-sized businesses" tend to be the companies without dedicated IT personnel, or under-utilized IT personnel: companies who could get by with "half" a full-time employee, or some other fraction of an FTE where a fraction of an FTE still represents a significant part of their IT expenditure.
And despite your pedantry, the point still stands. The paper under discussion talks about *small and mid-size* businesses taking advantage of cloud services being the driver for this growth. Not the large organizations that are running huge IT departments and who would have to outsource more-or-less as-is to a service provider because of that immense size.
Good thing we don't need to EVOLVE the skills we need to survive in a cloud service dominated world, and can instead LEARN them via an educational system that's already in place.
On a side note, did you also really think it took millions of years of evolution to turn buggy whip makers into auto manufacturers?
What about all of the myriad smaller companies where a fraction of a person is the only real resource needed for IT, and which a centralized (read: shared) provider suddenly makes a lot of services accessible to them?
Because when faced with the proposition of hiring a "full time IT guy for salary to do 8 hours a week worth of work," most small businesses don't have the revenues to pay for another full time employee, so somebody who already works for them ends up putting on an IT hat 8 hours a week. Because the law tends to frown on dismemberment, hiring a fraction of a person is only generally possible in scenarios where a pool of employers is able to each pay a fraction of a single person's salary.
Sure you can. You assume that large companies are the ones who would be moving to this, when the summary specifically states small & mid-sized businesses "being able to use these services" would be where most of the creation would come from.
Small & mid-size. You know, the types of businesses that don't have dedicated IT departments, or who have hires in their IT departments who aren't 100% utilized. The types of companies where there's only a need for maybe 10 hours a week of IT support, for whom hiring a full time "IT guy" doesn't make financial sense. But if you take 4 companies that each need 10 hours a week of IT support and convince them to pay an equivalent amount, you just created a new job. Each client pays for their 10 hours/wk - a slight increase in their overall spend, but the guy who was providing that 10 hours / week as a sideline (let's call him "Bob, the sales and accounting guy") can spend that 10 hours a week on doing things that are more valuable to the company.