When you say, "back in the day," when exactly do you mean? AltaVista was indeed a great service in the mid-to-late 1990s, until it succumbed to spam, porn, and advertisement corruption, like the rest of them.

        dZ.

That's been a piece of revisionist history, propagated by Google itself during the mid '00s, as a branding tactic. Google was a mere geek's toy during its first couple of years.

People started switching because the other search engines were full of spam, porn, and advertisements, and along came Google with its PageRank algorithm, which proved very effective at the time.

People suffered through all other search engines' "portals" for years and would not have switched if the only thing Google had to offer was a "page free from clutter."

Of course, eventually Google turned into another advertisement-riddled, cluttered portal, full of spam and irrelevant junk. The more things change...

        dZ.

LOL! In Slashdot and Reddit, at least.

Plus it's kind of icky.

Well, you can't switch arguments mid-way.

All those people that you claimed replaced their smartphones with tablets when they go to conferences, used to bring laptops before smartphones. Weren't you paying attention?

So it went from paper pads, to tablets, to smartphones, to tablets.

That means that at least some businesses did dump laptops in favor of smartphones for at least some functions.

I know you are trying to be all smarty-pants with your straw-man argument pointing out how tablets are not going to replace laptops completely, in every facet of business--but nobody is claiming that.

What some of us are saying is that, there are some functions for which laptops and desktop computers used to be regarded as the most appropriate tool, and now tablets are taking their place.

Not only that, but tablets are being put to some uses by businesses to which laptops or smartphones weren't even considered.

          -dZ.

The trick is providing something that is truly useful without cannibalizing Laptop/Desktop sales.

And therein lies the business problem: the use case for tablets overlaps and even extends beyond that of the traditional PC. Moreover, they seem to fulfill the promises of ease of use, portability, multimedia capabilities, and personal adaptability that PCs have been making for two decades now. As such, the tablet market appears to be bigger than the one for traditional PCs.

If a business insists in ignoring this to avoid the cannibalization of their current PC cash-cow, a competitor will come along and do it for them.

Oops! I guess they already have.

      dZ.

You do know that the iPad supports Multi-Touch, right? You could use both thumbs at the same time. In fact, as someone already answered above, some games offer multiple buttons that when pressed performed different functions--exactly like games such as Defender used to do.

For more complex games such as first-person-shooters, it is not uncommon to have one side of the screen offer a "move" control and the other a "tilt head" control. It's even more versatile than that: some games even make the distinction between a press-and-slide (move) and a tap (fire). And it all works wherever your thumb happens to land.

Clearly you have not tried any of this or you would see how obvious and intuitive it can be, and clearly you have no imagination to even conceive its possibility.

So, go ahead and continue believing that iPads suck at anything other than watching cat videos. I don't think anybody would care too much that you are missing all the fun and cool stuff.

        dZ.

You mean, the things they used to do on a smartphone that they previously used to do on a Laptop? Do you see how this is going?

You should pay more attention. They're there.

          -dZ.

Can AdBlock block the ads embedded in the video? I don't recall that function.

I think he meant it has nothing that anybody wants to pay to watch. It's popular right now because it's free, but cat videos may not pay the hosting service by themselves.

We are also The Exception.

Fanny packs in the mainstream? Not quite. Pocket protectors only "died out" among the nerd population--the mainstream never adopted them.

Pocket protectors. 20-sided dice. Fanny packs. Floppy diskettes.

You should wear your fanny pack wit pride, and ignore what we say behind your back. Heck, put on camouflage cargo-pants and a pocket protector. We won't mind, really.