Posts by Thomas Davie 85 publicly visible posts • joined 15 May 2008
Removal of optical drive: What makes you suppose the guy is any more likely to forget to copy some movies to his computer than he is to forget to pack some DVDs in his hand luggage?
Removal of ethernet: If you need etherenet, you need to carry around the cable with you as well, because there's *never* one where you need it... Just attach the thunderbolt dongle to the end of your carry around cable, and you're done, it'll even handily protect that stupid plastic clip from breaking.
Lower storage: uhh... you can buy a 768GB SSD for these things... that's more than apple have ever offered on any laptop (including as a spinning platter).
Why do it in cities – one of the great things about this kind of service is that it allows us to get on with useful work without needing to be in a city. Shouldn't we be pushing to make sure every town has it first so that we can stop with the overcrowding and crime problems that cities produce?
Not really true at all. Android has far far far more variation in hardware specs. This can impact on devs in trivial ways (e.g. having to support every screen resolution from 120x80 to 1280x800) to extremely difficult to work around ways (e.g. having to support everything from no graphics card at all to Tegra 3s). Either you cut your available market, or you have to target some pretty insanely low end hardware.
Compare this to the iOS world where you must support exactly 2 resolutions – 320x480 and 1024x768 points (note, points, all you do to support retina displays is provide images with 2 pixels to the point), and where you can rely on every single person with an iPhone in the last 3-4 years having at least a PowerVR SGX 535, and an iOS you're *way* better off.
Note – this is the most commonly used logic in industry for not supporting Android, along with the fact that users seem far less willing to pay for software on Android than on iOS.
Saying "we have this mathematical model for what's going on, the results don't agree with that, therefore the results must be wrong" is exactly the opposite of what scientists should be doing. Instead, they should be going "hey, that's weird, we need a new theory (once we've verified the results)"
I don't understand why anyone would buy a Nikon starting out at the moment. Canon allowing their low-end DSLRs to use EF lenses (admittedly at a crop) makes them infinitely superior to me. It allows you to buy a beginners body, then buy lenses that will work on a future better body.
If you asked most people what they do with their computer, they wouldn't be able to tell you. The reason – because they use it for a lot of random small tasks, not one major task.
Some examples of what I do with my iPad:
1) Read recipes off it in the kitchen.
2) Take notes in meetings on it – being able to draw diagrams and take photos as well as just type is bloody useful.
3) Play games.
4) Sit in bed and browse about the place.
This is the geek definition of "perfectly good" right? The one where it actually means "well, it works 60% of the time, if you spend 3 hours tinkering with it first". I've never met one single person who actually uses DLNA for anything, and that's not through lack of trying – they just can't get it to work reliably enough to not tear their hair out.
The write lifetime "issue" is swept under the carpet because it's a non issue. For any reasonably large SSD (read around the 128GB mark) the point at which they'll hit the write cycle cap at *maximum write speed* continuously is around about 5-6 years down the line. Given that that's about the average lifetime of an HDD anyway, and a vast underestimate of life time, that's fine.
If you're in a meeting or a lecture fondleslaps are great. The touch keyboard works almost as well as a normal keyboard, you don't have a big screen in front of you, and you can easily draw diagrams/take photos. Way better than a laptop.
It's very useful for a tablet. My primary use case for such a device is sitting on the sofa chatting to people on skype... If I want to switch to showing them the baby instead, the back facing camera is absolutely a boon. I don't get why it needs to be so high res (especially when it certainly won't have the optics to match), but it's certainly useful.
Other people have pointed out that your cost estimation is probably low; but even if it isn't... The number sounds ballpark right. I can imagine that each of these councilors is printing out at least one new report or draft of the same report from yesterday, every single day. It would only take a 100 page report a day to roughly hit your estimate.
1) You claim the iPad doesn't work as an eBook reader because it doesn't last for weeks on battery. I ask instead, why I'd want that in my house. I don't read for weeks on end, I might push 10 hours on a *really* long day with a *really* good book, but that's about the limit of reading realistically. After that, I dump it in a dock, and am done, simple. The only time I can think that you might want ultra long life is while going away on say, a camping holiday, and well, that's never been a problem for all our mp3 players for example that we'd want to last all week either.
2) You claim that the VGA output doesn't work with keynote, which is just plain wrong.
3) Your article actually really neatly sums up what the iPad is for, as you mention so many things you might want to do with it – it's for *everything*, it's good at all sorts of little things that you don't want to have a full size laptop about for.
One of the major points of paying a license fee was that the BBC would provide everyone with easy to access, free (other than the license), unbiassed (theoretically) news. Why are they being told that they're not allowed to carry out their basic remit?
The point here is that Apple controls the HTML 5 implementation on the iPhone. The test shouldn't be comparing against *all* HTML5 implementations and concluding that lots of them suck so flash is no worse. Instead, it should be comparing against the HTML 5 implementation written by apple, on an apple designed platform and concluding that HTML5 is 2 to 3 times more efficient than Flash. It's no good claiming "flash is at least as good" because Mozilla's implementation is the same speed, when Mozilla's implementation won't be used – apple's will.
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