When it comes to the two-term administrations of Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton, the first question one must ask any critic is, "what didn't you like, the peace or the prosperity?"
And I have an 8-track, but that doesn't mean I expect anybody to sell me new albums that work with it.
Thanks for that tip, AC. I'll look into those options.
And there you have it folks. You expect a phone. When you see how well it does movies compared to your phone instead of how poorly it does compared to your computer, you're happy.
The interface simplicity also emphasizes this. We associate complicated interfaces with complex, difficult to use machinery. A 747 cockpit has a ridiculous number of switches, gauges & dials, a door just has a knob.
Yeah, but who wants a 747 filling the entry way to the bathroom, when a door does the job so well?
A lot of things about a 747 which make it very valuable, but comparisons of different tools, meant for different jobs, is completely silly.
I don't know, but when I discovered that the iPad can't print, even to a printer plugged right in to their "AirPort" hub, which supports printer sharing, I decided to pass on getting any of the iWork apps.
Fuck including a camera. Lack of printing is my biggest disappointment with the device.
That said, it's fantastic for the tasks I actually bought it for (mostly VNC), so I'm mostly happy with it. I just won't be selling off my laptop unless iPhone OS 4 addresses my few nitpicks like the printing issue.
Yeah, how does the battery hold up playing h.264 video on the "Jupiter" pad?
Oh yeah, that's right, it can't do it.
So one of the big selling features of the iPad... can't be done with that gizmo.
Okay, what does WiFi broadband surfing do to battery perfor... Oh.
Fine, how about when you turn on 3G for cell conne... Oh.
So, this is basically like comparing the Sony Walkman to the first iPod... Except that the Sony Walkman was an actual market success that people enjoyed owning.
Making it a small fraction of the price in inflation-adjusted dollars might have something to do with it.
Nothing could ever compel me to spend $1000 in in '98 on a touch-screen computer (with a non-touch OS).
But $500 in 2010? Shit, I think I could dig that kind of cash out of my couch cushions.
As long as the power company has to install power lines to get power from the plant to where it's used, and all those lines have to cross government land
Only so long as government is a significant land owner. Some people believe it ought not be.
That's not evidence that private enterprise can't do it, merely that it's not allowed to.
The second we take away the roads, power, water, garbage collection, phone, net access, schools, other fundamental services of a first world nation, we become a third world nation. You can say "free market" all you want, but history shows that companies will not deliver these fundamental services if they don't forced to do so. If you lived in small town America, away from high density populations, you did not get power for years after the rest of the country. The same goes for phones.
I want to live in a first world nation, where I have cheep, reliable access to these services.
In my town, power, garbage collection, phone, and net access is all provided by private enterprise responding to market demand. Even in the case of schools, where government provides it, private enterprise generally does a better job with a higher rate of consumer satisfaction. The only reason government is the sole water-line and sewage provider is because their own regulations protect their monopoly on it.
If your town can't have any of those things without government giving them to you, then maybe you should move to a "First World" city.
I use it for live applications at least as much as for recording. And besides, some of the finest recordings in history were done on 8, 4, and even 2-track devices.
Besides one word that makes this screen vastly higher-res than it's physical dimensions, my friend:
Zoom
>I think that there is less difference between older and newer ipods than there is between P100 and Opteron 270 though.
Capacity, color screens, photos, games, video playback, web browsing...
If anything, the difference is MORE pronounced between a 10 year old iPod and a new one than between a 10 year old PC an a new one.
Heck, the only reason I'm not still using my "main" computer from 8 years ago is that it was destroyed by a lightning strike.
Old iPods can be kind of handy if you have need for portable storage larger than a USB thumb drive, but not as bulky as a full-sized hard drive. Sneakernet is not quite a dead concept yet.
I'm getting one mainly for one app: VNC.
I've got one headless mac running my music studio. I've been running it by logging on to it with my laptop, but a laptop is a pain in the neck when you're rehearsing, recording, etc., especially if you're standing up most of the time. It also means I don't need to print up lyric sheets if I'm learning a new song, since I can just read them off the iPad screen as easily as a book.
The studio computer is rack-mounted in a road case with my PA amp. Using an iPad, I can run sound for a full band from anywhere in the club with no need for a cable snake. Just garageband, WiFi, a shared desktop, and any laptop or smartphone running VNC. I've been doing it this way for a while and it's AWESOME, and will be even better using an iPad for the controller.
I also have a mac driving my media center. I don't care to turn on my projection screen just to launch iTunes so I can listen to music, so I remote to it. Doing so with a laptop sucks.
For the rare times when I do want to accomplish something that I would normally do on a laptop. (Photoshop? Web design? Video editing), I can just plug it into the keyboard dock, and remotely run one of my other computers, where the "heavy" apps will actually live from now on.
So there's no need for a "desktop replacement" laptop for me anymore. Just an iPad as a thin client to my "real" computers. I honestly can hardly wait.
Two things:
1. It sounds like you could be diabetic or have other medical factors that are hurting your vision.
2. If you've been doing this for 25 years, most of them have probably been spent gazing into cathode rays, not reading LCD screens. My office didn't switch to LCD monitors until about a year and a half ago.
What for? The iPad is little more than an iPod Touch that won't fit in your pocket, and the market will judge it accordingly.
The iPod Touch sells like hotcakes, and the biggest drawback to using it for some tasks (such as book reading) is the small screen size.
So your description of it is one of the better arguments I've heard for why the iPad will be a big seller.
It's obvious that YOU won't buy one, but I'm guessing you have no interest in owning an iPod Touch either. I think the execs at Apple made the calculation that they don't need to sell one to BrokenHalo from Slashdot for their new gizmo to make money. We'll see whether they are right about that in a couple months.
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky
