I think for a tablet to really make it big in an office environment, it needs to replace two things:
a) Printed out documents b) Paper notepads
I can't see the iPad doing either of those things because it doesn't have a very accurate input system. Sure, you can read documents on it, but for it to replace paper versions I think you'll want a pen for annotations. Likewise I don't think the iPad's touchscreen would cut it for taking notes.
Er... you can get ADSL broadband for £6 (around $9) a month. That's (up to) 8Mb/s with a 10GB cap.
Perhaps your friend is very, very hard up, but although the UK doesn't have the cheapest broadband in the world, it's really not that bad, either. I think it compares reasonably well with the US.
There are already several Android tablet devices out there which you can buy right now.
Personally, I want something you can also draw on with a stylus for annotating documents, sketching etc. I'd like to use it at work to replace my notepad and printed out documents.
I'm guessing the first company who can do a good e-reader / e-notebook will do pretty well in businesses.
Er... you've been able to buy TomTom for WinMo for several years now - the maps are stored on a memory card. I have it on an old GPS-enabled Windows Mobile phone that I now only use for GPS. I've had both CoPilot and TomTom on it - both were installed to the memory card.
Back when I got that phone I was looking at dedicated GPS units and a lot of them were just GPS-enabled Windows Mobile PDAs.
It tends to only be the free navigation solutions (or the ones built for non-smartphones) that don't store the data locally.
Your point would have been more compelling if the shot from Shadow of the Colossus you linked to was taken from an actual PS2 in-game, but it's a promotional shot.
The quality of the healthcare may be excellent, but if large sections of the population don't have proper access to it, then the overall quality of healthcare for the country as a whole can surely not be rated as high.
I think they'll be able to get a robot to remove an appendix before they can get a digital actor to convincingly act.
I'm sure they'll hit the graphical realism required for a digital actor fairly soon, but you'll still need an actor and a large team of animators for some time.
If they've got to a place where actors can be completely replaced, I think it's safe to assume that by that time every single other profession will have been replaced as well. What is it that you do, exactly?
I assumed he meant that Clint would still play Dirty Harry, but they'd replace him with a digital version of his younger self.
In which case Clint would get the Oscar for the performance and you'd hope a technical Oscar would find its way to the company who did the digital version of him.
Do you think they would have been able to get the investment if they had stipulated that the company couldn't be sold? I'm sure they realised that there were risks in taking the path they took; but that was the cost of being able to afford enough developers to keep MySQL competitive.
Those prices are the subsidised, monthly contract prices though, aren't they? I expect when they release the droid over here in the UK you'll be able to get it free if you go for something like a 2-year £45/month contract.
My point is that most android phones at the moment are still 'premium' phones but I think that's about to change. There'll still be high-end Android phones, but it's also a cheap way for handset manufacturers (and telecom companies) to provide smartphone-y aimed at the lower end.
The original app store for the Android is pretty poor. Apparently it's improved with Android 2.0, but the one that came on my HTC hero doesn't feature screenshots, for example. The search is extremely limited and all you get to see of the app is the icon and a small paragraph of text. Sometimes you can find out a little more from the user comments, but it's not much to make a decision from.
Having said that, if you don't like an app you can uninstall it and get a refund with 24 hours.
My guess is that with a better featured store (screenshots, a better search etc) the android store will start to become profitable as more and more handsets appear. Next year I imagine you'll get Android handsets for less than £100 on Pay-As-You-Go contracts. Once handsets at that kind of price start appearing, the user base will *explode*. Also, I imagine sometime next year you'll be able to make payments directly through your phone bill rather than needing a google checkout account. Even though the average user won't spend as much on the store as the average iPhone user would (as they won't have as much money) the sheer volume of purchases will start to make a difference.
While it's true that Android phones support OpenGL ES, currently the iPhone is much better at taking advantage of it. Almost all current Android handsets (I think the Sholes / Droid is the unique exception in this) do not have floating point support on-chip. That combined with the iPhone running native code compared with Android running interpreted bytecode means that the iPhone completely beats the crap out of current Android handsets when it comes to 3d performance.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phone (HTC Hero) but it doesn't have the grunt of an iPhone.
I imagine someone will add it into one of the third-party browser apps out there. I already have it on the browser app they supply on the HTC Hero - now that the multitouch support comes as standard (rather than a HTC extension), it'll probably appear in quite a lot of apps very quickly.
However, although multitouch is nice 'n all, Android can run on phones with resistive screens so app writers shouldn't rely on it being there.
But really, what's the point of using WordPress if you're not going to use the admin panel? It shows a wonderful overview of comments, spam, drafts, and so forth. I would assume that the idea of never visiting the dashboard enough to notice new versions might be applicable to those use cases of individuals who make a post once every 2 months.
But to be honest I think that's a reasonable use case. It's the kind of use I make of Wordpress. I view my site as more of a homepage than a blog - I use Pages much more than Posts and make changes only rarely. As a result it'll often be several weeks between my visits to the admin page.
It's a shame; for people like me the notification mailing list would be perfect but for some reason the Wordpress folks don't make use of it. It's odd that they still encourage people to join it as it can give you a false sense of security.
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I'd fire anyone who doesn't understand the difference between British English and American English.
Just kidding, I'm a nice guy after all. But anyway - have a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#-ise.2C_-ize
For £6/month, I think a 10GB cap is fine. I bet there's huge swathes of people who never get anywhere near that.
Unlike the US, local calls are not free, so when you connect via a dialup modem you get charged by the minute.
The current BT charge to 0845 number ISPs is 2p/minute daytime or 0.5p/minute in the evening. (That's £1.20 hr daytime or 30p/hr evening).
Now, if your friend is spending several hours a day online, it'd be much cheaper for him to move to broadband.
I think for a tablet to really make it big in an office environment, it needs to replace two things:
a) Printed out documents
b) Paper notepads
I can't see the iPad doing either of those things because it doesn't have a very accurate input system. Sure, you can read documents on it, but for it to replace paper versions I think you'll want a pen for annotations. Likewise I don't think the iPad's touchscreen would cut it for taking notes.
o_O
Er... you can get ADSL broadband for £6 (around $9) a month. That's (up to) 8Mb/s with a 10GB cap.
Perhaps your friend is very, very hard up, but although the UK doesn't have the cheapest broadband in the world, it's really not that bad, either. I think it compares reasonably well with the US.
There's a sufficiently large section of the population that cannot give blood that such a suggestion would be unworkable.
I should have said that I don't think any of the Android tablets are as good the iPad yet though.
There are already several Android tablet devices out there which you can buy right now.
Personally, I want something you can also draw on with a stylus for annotating documents, sketching etc. I'd like to use it at work to replace my notepad and printed out documents.
I'm guessing the first company who can do a good e-reader / e-notebook will do pretty well in businesses.
Do you ever open .pdf files?
Er... you've been able to buy TomTom for WinMo for several years now - the maps are stored on a memory card. I have it on an old GPS-enabled Windows Mobile phone that I now only use for GPS. I've had both CoPilot and TomTom on it - both were installed to the memory card.
Back when I got that phone I was looking at dedicated GPS units and a lot of them were just GPS-enabled Windows Mobile PDAs.
It tends to only be the free navigation solutions (or the ones built for non-smartphones) that don't store the data locally.
I've finished the game, but the graphical quality although good is not quite as good as the promotional shot suggests.
http://www.psxextreme.com/ps2-screenshots2/50743-564.html
Your point would have been more compelling if the shot from Shadow of the Colossus you linked to was taken from an actual PS2 in-game, but it's a promotional shot.
The quality of the healthcare may be excellent, but if large sections of the population don't have proper access to it, then the overall quality of healthcare for the country as a whole can surely not be rated as high.
I think they'll be able to get a robot to remove an appendix before they can get a digital actor to convincingly act.
I'm sure they'll hit the graphical realism required for a digital actor fairly soon, but you'll still need an actor and a large team of animators for some time.
If they've got to a place where actors can be completely replaced, I think it's safe to assume that by that time every single other profession will have been replaced as well. What is it that you do, exactly?
I assumed he meant that Clint would still play Dirty Harry, but they'd replace him with a digital version of his younger self.
In which case Clint would get the Oscar for the performance and you'd hope a technical Oscar would find its way to the company who did the digital version of him.
Do you think they would have been able to get the investment if they had stipulated that the company couldn't be sold? I'm sure they realised that there were risks in taking the path they took; but that was the cost of being able to afford enough developers to keep MySQL competitive.
Those prices are the subsidised, monthly contract prices though, aren't they? I expect when they release the droid over here in the UK you'll be able to get it free if you go for something like a 2-year £45/month contract.
My point is that most android phones at the moment are still 'premium' phones but I think that's about to change. There'll still be high-end Android phones, but it's also a cheap way for handset manufacturers (and telecom companies) to provide smartphone-y aimed at the lower end.
The original app store for the Android is pretty poor. Apparently it's improved with Android 2.0, but the one that came on my HTC hero doesn't feature screenshots, for example. The search is extremely limited and all you get to see of the app is the icon and a small paragraph of text. Sometimes you can find out a little more from the user comments, but it's not much to make a decision from.
Having said that, if you don't like an app you can uninstall it and get a refund with 24 hours.
My guess is that with a better featured store (screenshots, a better search etc) the android store will start to become profitable as more and more handsets appear. Next year I imagine you'll get Android handsets for less than £100 on Pay-As-You-Go contracts. Once handsets at that kind of price start appearing, the user base will *explode*. Also, I imagine sometime next year you'll be able to make payments directly through your phone bill rather than needing a google checkout account. Even though the average user won't spend as much on the store as the average iPhone user would (as they won't have as much money) the sheer volume of purchases will start to make a difference.
9mm is obviously better because it's Metric.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids
While it's true that Android phones support OpenGL ES, currently the iPhone is much better at taking advantage of it. Almost all current Android handsets (I think the Sholes / Droid is the unique exception in this) do not have floating point support on-chip. That combined with the iPhone running native code compared with Android running interpreted bytecode means that the iPhone completely beats the crap out of current Android handsets when it comes to 3d performance.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phone (HTC Hero) but it doesn't have the grunt of an iPhone.
I imagine someone will add it into one of the third-party browser apps out there. I already have it on the browser app they supply on the HTC Hero - now that the multitouch support comes as standard (rather than a HTC extension), it'll probably appear in quite a lot of apps very quickly.
However, although multitouch is nice 'n all, Android can run on phones with resistive screens so app writers shouldn't rely on it being there.
But really, what's the point of using WordPress if you're not going to use the admin panel? It shows a wonderful overview of comments, spam, drafts, and so forth. I would assume that the idea of never visiting the dashboard enough to notice new versions might be applicable to those use cases of individuals who make a post once every 2 months.
But to be honest I think that's a reasonable use case. It's the kind of use I make of Wordpress. I view my site as more of a homepage than a blog - I use Pages much more than Posts and make changes only rarely. As a result it'll often be several weeks between my visits to the admin page.
It's a shame; for people like me the notification mailing list would be perfect but for some reason the Wordpress folks don't make use of it. It's odd that they still encourage people to join it as it can give you a false sense of security.
Or rather, they won't.