Funny how Ballmer said people can't afford 5 devices yet their tablet strategy is just that. Lots of smaller specialised tablets instead of one big one that does everything.
"The original Macintosh system software was partially based on the Lisa OS, previously released by Apple for the Lisa computer in 1983 and, as part of an agreement allowing Xerox to buy shares in Apple at a favorable rate, it also used concepts from the Xerox PARC Xerox Alto, which Steve Jobs and several other Macintosh team members had previewed."
The data was discovered after a German government request to see the data or source code was lodged with Google. Google didn't own up to it, they were forced to reveal it.
I would imagine it's a cheapo set rebadged with a nice big mark up. Those who know quality will return it, those who don't will make them a lot of profit.
He mentioned you can using the iWork suite which comes with the iPad.
It was completely redesigned for a touch user interface by Apple. If you use Word on a tablet PC then it will be awful to use since the head of the Office team at Microsoft refused to redesign the user interface for touchscreens as he "doesn't like them".
Needless to say if you want a touch screen device with a decent office suite the iPad is the best, the battery life is good and it will switch on instantly.
I think if you showed someone an iPad back in 1982/3 and asked which they preferred, a speccy or an iPad I think the iPad would win. Many households had one TV and you wouldn't be able to use the speccy all the time. Others had a portable, often black and white.
So if you showed someone back then a device with email, the web, 3D games, movies and music you can download (back in 1982/1983 it was all tape and vinyl, CD took much longer to become affordable) I think they would be astounded.
While you could program a spectrum, most people played games on them.
Any device is about the software, a Windows PC can't do much without installing some software. Same with the iPad. The pre-installed software does the basics, email, web, photo management etc..
Colour is just too expensive for many people to bother with. There's a reason barcodes were black and white, there's a reason why other tags are black and white, it's cheap to print on a mono laser or inkjet.
I can tolerate the less than perfect Mac OS desktop thanks to the dock and nice things like Expose. But I hate Gnome!
So much dev time is wasted in Linux land, writing open source and proprietary drivers (NVidia are paranoid about fully open source drivers, thinking competitors will steal its technology).
Honestly, they should spend all their time making a better OS and applications. They make all their money from Windows and Office still, so why go into other markets and make no money?
Given only recent versions of Android have added multitouch I think Apple were ahead. Or do you think pressing little + and - buttons in a brower to zoom is advanced?
It's not all about features, if I wanted a phone with loads of features I would have stuck with Windows Mobile or some Symbian rubbish. But what use is features with a god awful UI?
The thing that grates me about Android is knowing the apps are basically coded in Java. The class format is different and it's their own JVM. But it's still Java, garbage collected, compiler/interpreter language. It's no match for Objective C which compiles to native ARM code.
Government agency buys computer hardware, so what?
I've often thought that if the devices supplied to employees were nice looking and good to use that they wouldn't get left in Taxis so much. I'm sure that's how some employees try to get an upgrade for their dull plasticy laptops.
Mind you my theory fails since Apple lost a pre-production iPhone 4.
There are more developers of software the iPhone and iPad than the Mac. It's all about software, not the OS. An OS is just there to manage the data and run the apps.
Linux is a jack of all trades, it can be used in phones, set top boxes, TVs, computers and therefore there will be loads of stuff in the kernel to support all these different devices.
I think the days of being able to roll your own sensible kernel are starting to end, there's just too many options!
There are some very useful apps. It's a great device for reviewing photos after a photo shoot, it's also a great device for music composition on the move.
"Apple is crazy-innovative in terms of hardware and software design, but I can count the total number of software engineering advances they’ve made on one hand."
And what have Adobe ever done for software engineering?
Did they create a parallel processing engine and then give it away? Apple did.
What have Adobe given to the open source community?
Google have to be careful not to be too greedy. Once the quality of the service starts to swing towards making them money and not providing a good user experience then people will look elsewhere.
It happened with Vista, Microsoft lost the home user to add DRM and features for business.
Gordo listened to the banks when they said they wanted less regulation. He was suckered in and did as they said. Now they face going back to the amount of regulation they had before.
He should never have cut the red tape in the first place.
It is a bit too expensive when you contrast the price against the dull generic plasticy rubbish that HP, Dell and others produce.
It you look at how it fits in Apple's range then it makes more sense.
It's pretty obvious that if you produce a new category of product that many people won't get it. Such people had no interest in computers until the Internet arrived.
It's a device for people on the move who want more battery life than a laptop, more screen real estate than a smartphone and the convenience of a very long standby time (near instant switch on).
There are a few music production tools appearing, Korg's iElectribe for instance implements a setup that would have cost you about £800 a few years back.
It can also be used by photographers as a highly portable photo management tool. Import your photos, review and post to the web.
Just because you lack any imagination doesn't mean others don't. Some people simply can't see the point of something unless it can be pigeon holed into existing device categories.
While it's nice to dream that a HP tablet will be good. They've not made a decent PDA or mobile phone in years.
This tablet will be some quick bodge using a design they've had sitting about. It will be ugly, inefficient and there will be no software for it. It may run existing WebOS apps, but scaled up. It will be a while before a tablet version of the OS comes out.
I'm sure if Adobe were creating flash from scratch they would do things differently.
The whole reason flash is so bad is because it is so common. Abobe can't throw it all away and start again due to compatibility and all the time people have spent learning all the script language.
If they did they wouldn't bother with much of what it has. It largely grew out of Macromedia's director, multimedia presentations for CDROMs.
Apple will ensure that this alternative is good for mobile devices with input devices other than keyboard and mouse. Multitouch will be possible.
Browser plugins cripple the advancement of HTML and the web. If something isn't possible in the browser without a plugin then propose a standard, let people review it and improve it.
This is how the net used to work, people put out an RFC and others commented, it was then implemented.
Adobe are second only to Microsoft in churning out lazy minor evolutions of software and charging a fortune.
Who in their right mind pays £640 for a graphic tool? I bet 50% or more of Photoshop users are using a pirate copy.
I really hope Apple produce a rival to Photoshop at half or less of the price. I remember buying Logic Audio for about half RRP on Ebay thinking I had got a good deal. Then Apple released Logic Studio for less than what I had paid (approx £319) and they dropped the USB dongle, I upgraded for £129. This for a professional audio tool used by all manner of recording artists.
Contrast this with Cubase which was over £500 at the time. Now Cubase Studio 5 can be bought for £299!! So competition is good, it's about time Adobe had some competition so they can't charge their extortionate prices and release lazy bloat-ware.
Now that's a really old analogy, thankfully there are some of us around here who remember those days (I did tons of programming on the Amiga). I had 1.2 myself.
Amiga OS 2.0 was a lot more optimised and therefore it was often quicker to use the OS routines in 2.0. Of course there were some amazing programmers in those days, writing everything in assembler.
So an anti-trust case should be filed against those organisations that test cars and planes before they are allowed to be sold? How dare they demand quality!
Where's the anti-trust case against the Nintendo Wii because you can only code using their dev kit and by submitting your game to Nintendo who then take a royalty for every sale?
Same goes for Sony and Microsoft.
Since when did lack of portability = monopolistic practices?
That makes every computer system on the planet guilty, there are very few common APIs.
Register
2264 posts • joined Wednesday 13th December 2006 15:36 GMT
Page:
So what?
Microsoft didnt pay dividends until recently. Microsoft pays hardly any tax in the EU and US:
http://techrights.org/2010/05/17/ireland-tax-oligarch/
Why?
If it wasn't for his high standards the device wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful.
If only other companies had people at the top who expect something exceptional from their staff.
Range
Not to mention not much power use when stationary, which is a lot of the time for many people.
Of course the problem is lights, radio and air con all add to the power drain.
Electric motors are amazingly powerful, they can snap a driveshaft if the power isn't phased in gradually.
Funny
Funny how Ballmer said people can't afford 5 devices yet their tablet strategy is just that. Lots of smaller specialised tablets instead of one big one that does everything.
Stole?
Apple licenced Xerox Parcs software.
It was Microsoft that stole it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS
"The original Macintosh system software was partially based on the Lisa OS, previously released by Apple for the Lisa computer in 1983 and, as part of an agreement allowing Xerox to buy shares in Apple at a favorable rate, it also used concepts from the Xerox PARC Xerox Alto, which Steve Jobs and several other Macintosh team members had previewed."
Ballmer
He was at Harvard University with Gates. Jobs for old friends and all that.
What are you on about?
It's one of the worst kept secrets that iPhone OS 4.0 will have multitasking.
Firewire 800 is even better
Obviously native eSATA is better, but for everything other than hard disks FW800 rocks!
Dynamo hub
If you have a dynamo hub then there is no rub or resistance. I don't see why this wouldn't work?
Just ignore Ballmer
He just sounds off about Apple and says it won't catch on. He said it about the iPhone.
It's funny how Microsoft are on about making even more restricted products than the general purpose iPad.
Google for forced to reveal this
The data was discovered after a German government request to see the data or source code was lodged with Google. Google didn't own up to it, they were forced to reveal it.
Design
At least if you are after an Android tablet you can get one that looks nice, instead of the usual drab plastic rubbish most brands seem to pump out.
Rebadged.
"No Alan, It's called a Rover Metro now"
"They've rebadged it you fool"
I would imagine it's a cheapo set rebadged with a nice big mark up. Those who know quality will return it, those who don't will make them a lot of profit.
Eh?
He mentioned you can using the iWork suite which comes with the iPad.
It was completely redesigned for a touch user interface by Apple. If you use Word on a tablet PC then it will be awful to use since the head of the Office team at Microsoft refused to redesign the user interface for touchscreens as he "doesn't like them".
Needless to say if you want a touch screen device with a decent office suite the iPad is the best, the battery life is good and it will switch on instantly.
Have a read:
http://www.macworld.com/article/145941/2010/01/iwork_ipad.html
Three
Three's coverage is better than some networks. Have a look at the tests done by the Register. 3 came out top.
O2 were throttling bandwidth to 128k.
Hmmm
I think if you showed someone an iPad back in 1982/3 and asked which they preferred, a speccy or an iPad I think the iPad would win. Many households had one TV and you wouldn't be able to use the speccy all the time. Others had a portable, often black and white.
So if you showed someone back then a device with email, the web, 3D games, movies and music you can download (back in 1982/1983 it was all tape and vinyl, CD took much longer to become affordable) I think they would be astounded.
While you could program a spectrum, most people played games on them.
Any device is about the software, a Windows PC can't do much without installing some software. Same with the iPad. The pre-installed software does the basics, email, web, photo management etc..
Colour
Colour is just too expensive for many people to bother with. There's a reason barcodes were black and white, there's a reason why other tags are black and white, it's cheap to print on a mono laser or inkjet.
A bad knock off
I can tolerate the less than perfect Mac OS desktop thanks to the dock and nice things like Expose. But I hate Gnome!
So much dev time is wasted in Linux land, writing open source and proprietary drivers (NVidia are paranoid about fully open source drivers, thinking competitors will steal its technology).
Who says it's for video calls?
It might actually be for webcam style chat as well?
Video calls were the big gimmick for 3G, I've yet to make one in the three years I've had a 3G phone. You can only make one with really good coverage.
Why do they bother?
Honestly, they should spend all their time making a better OS and applications. They make all their money from Windows and Office still, so why go into other markets and make no money?
Multitouch
Given only recent versions of Android have added multitouch I think Apple were ahead. Or do you think pressing little + and - buttons in a brower to zoom is advanced?
It's not all about features, if I wanted a phone with loads of features I would have stuck with Windows Mobile or some Symbian rubbish. But what use is features with a god awful UI?
The thing that grates me about Android is knowing the apps are basically coded in Java. The class format is different and it's their own JVM. But it's still Java, garbage collected, compiler/interpreter language. It's no match for Objective C which compiles to native ARM code.
Where's the story?
Government agency buys computer hardware, so what?
I've often thought that if the devices supplied to employees were nice looking and good to use that they wouldn't get left in Taxis so much. I'm sure that's how some employees try to get an upgrade for their dull plasticy laptops.
Mind you my theory fails since Apple lost a pre-production iPhone 4.
Quality
Why would anyone bother with sound quality if they're playing compressed lossy files?
It seems pretty stupid that you get more advanced audio on bluray now than CD.
16-Bit 44.1Khz was just something possible in the early 80s. Why are we still constrained by such low standards?
24-bit 96Khz should be standard across the board now.
Marketshare
Maybe the market share of home users is rising, but businesses won't buy Apple computers, they prefer dull, cheap Dell and HP boxes.
Not to mention that if you had Apple corporate laptops a lot of them would go missing when people leave the company.
Apps
There are more developers of software the iPhone and iPad than the Mac. It's all about software, not the OS. An OS is just there to manage the data and run the apps.
Jack of all trades, master of none
Linux is a jack of all trades, it can be used in phones, set top boxes, TVs, computers and therefore there will be loads of stuff in the kernel to support all these different devices.
I think the days of being able to roll your own sensible kernel are starting to end, there's just too many options!
*sigh*
Just because you lack the imagination to own one.
There are some very useful apps. It's a great device for reviewing photos after a photo shoot, it's also a great device for music composition on the move.
Rights to what?
There's two rights, rights to the recordings and the rights to the sheet music (the actual song itself).
I doubt any record label would sell rights to the recordings, so I would imagine Jacko had the rights to the music.
Proprietary lenses
There's no way someone should go for a system where you spend loads of money on lenses for a mount system that could be dead a few years later.
You'll lose more money than buying a high end BMW and selling it on used.
Adobe
"Apple is crazy-innovative in terms of hardware and software design, but I can count the total number of software engineering advances they’ve made on one hand."
And what have Adobe ever done for software engineering?
Did they create a parallel processing engine and then give it away? Apple did.
What have Adobe given to the open source community?
Wifi
At least there may be a wifi fix by the time it gets here. Personally I think it will be the multitasking which will be worth waiting for.
Caution
Google have to be careful not to be too greedy. Once the quality of the service starts to swing towards making them money and not providing a good user experience then people will look elsewhere.
It happened with Vista, Microsoft lost the home user to add DRM and features for business.
Gordo
Gordo listened to the banks when they said they wanted less regulation. He was suckered in and did as they said. Now they face going back to the amount of regulation they had before.
He should never have cut the red tape in the first place.
Too expensive
It is a bit too expensive when you contrast the price against the dull generic plasticy rubbish that HP, Dell and others produce.
It you look at how it fits in Apple's range then it makes more sense.
It's pretty obvious that if you produce a new category of product that many people won't get it. Such people had no interest in computers until the Internet arrived.
It's a device for people on the move who want more battery life than a laptop, more screen real estate than a smartphone and the convenience of a very long standby time (near instant switch on).
Embedded
Under a minute is too slow for embedded devices.
You want to switch on your tablet device and have it ready for use in about 10 seconds or less.
80%
I'm sure the 80% is related to the fact that it has glitches like the Wifi problem.
Music production, photo management
There are a few music production tools appearing, Korg's iElectribe for instance implements a setup that would have cost you about £800 a few years back.
It can also be used by photographers as a highly portable photo management tool. Import your photos, review and post to the web.
Just because you lack any imagination doesn't mean others don't. Some people simply can't see the point of something unless it can be pigeon holed into existing device categories.
HP
While it's nice to dream that a HP tablet will be good. They've not made a decent PDA or mobile phone in years.
This tablet will be some quick bodge using a design they've had sitting about. It will be ugly, inefficient and there will be no software for it. It may run existing WebOS apps, but scaled up. It will be a while before a tablet version of the OS comes out.
Dim.
With an image that dim you'd be better carrying a large magnifier around.
Because it will be multitouch aware
I'm sure if Adobe were creating flash from scratch they would do things differently.
The whole reason flash is so bad is because it is so common. Abobe can't throw it all away and start again due to compatibility and all the time people have spent learning all the script language.
If they did they wouldn't bother with much of what it has. It largely grew out of Macromedia's director, multimedia presentations for CDROMs.
Apple will ensure that this alternative is good for mobile devices with input devices other than keyboard and mouse. Multitouch will be possible.
Erm....
Did you not see the multithreading technology Apple developed and then gave away to the wider world?
Did you not see the improvements they did to KHTML and gave the changes back?
If you want "proprietary shit" then Microsoft is number 1.
So?
How many phone models does Nokia have? quite a lot. Apple have two (3G and 3GS).
Nokia phones are cheap.
Ford sell more cars than Porsche.
Specs
Was reviewing the specifications and it was ok until I saw "Stylus".
Argh, who in their right mind produces a phone with a stupid stick these days?
Price
Contrast the price of the 3G version at £529 with an unlocked iPhone.
E.g
http://www.superetrader.co.uk/apple-iphone-3gs-32gb-ukblack-sim-free-mobile-phone-p-4308.html?gad=CMDIu8kDEgg-s_Nh2Zr1URiY3OT-AyCY9p4z&
£787!
Or with a PAYG iPhone:
http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone?mco=MTAyNTQzMTI
£449!!!
I think the iPad is pretty cheap compared with a sim free mobile. It is more powerful in terms of CPU and the screen is higher res.
Just shows
Browser plugins cripple the advancement of HTML and the web. If something isn't possible in the browser without a plugin then propose a standard, let people review it and improve it.
This is how the net used to work, people put out an RFC and others commented, it was then implemented.
POP3, NNTP and SMTP all started that way.
Adobe
Adobe are second only to Microsoft in churning out lazy minor evolutions of software and charging a fortune.
Who in their right mind pays £640 for a graphic tool? I bet 50% or more of Photoshop users are using a pirate copy.
I really hope Apple produce a rival to Photoshop at half or less of the price. I remember buying Logic Audio for about half RRP on Ebay thinking I had got a good deal. Then Apple released Logic Studio for less than what I had paid (approx £319) and they dropped the USB dongle, I upgraded for £129. This for a professional audio tool used by all manner of recording artists.
Contrast this with Cubase which was over £500 at the time. Now Cubase Studio 5 can be bought for £299!! So competition is good, it's about time Adobe had some competition so they can't charge their extortionate prices and release lazy bloat-ware.
Rubbish
Even if you can use an Adobe tool to translate, you will still need Apple's toolchain to compile, package and test it.
All Adobe's tool does is convert flash to iPhone SDK code. You still have to compile it!
Workbench
Now that's a really old analogy, thankfully there are some of us around here who remember those days (I did tons of programming on the Amiga). I had 1.2 myself.
Amiga OS 2.0 was a lot more optimised and therefore it was often quicker to use the OS routines in 2.0. Of course there were some amazing programmers in those days, writing everything in assembler.
Whatever next?
So an anti-trust case should be filed against those organisations that test cars and planes before they are allowed to be sold? How dare they demand quality!
Bonkers
Where's the anti-trust case against the Nintendo Wii because you can only code using their dev kit and by submitting your game to Nintendo who then take a royalty for every sale?
Same goes for Sony and Microsoft.
Since when did lack of portability = monopolistic practices?
That makes every computer system on the planet guilty, there are very few common APIs.
Page: