Maybe It’s Because He’s a Fox News Reader
It’s funny seeing some of the comments about the iPad. When a Fox reviewer wrote that his iPad had more or less replaced his laptop for him, one commenter complained:
This is a ridiculous article. There is no way that thing can replace a notebook for serious use. It has no multi-tasking. It has no peripherals. I’ve never heard of being able to plug in an external monitor. I can use my Dell notebook to print to my Brother printer. I can use a real mouse and a real keyboard with it. I can plug in cameras, external drives, burners, etc.
It kind of shows up the problem many people have with understanding exactly what the iPad is. As this writer points out, this device is not for the 5% who are serious techies and want full control over a wide range of processes–it’s for the other 95% of people who use their computers for relatively simple stuff. Remember, that’s what netbooks were supposed to be for–people who just wanted to browse, do email, and maybe get some light office suite chores done. The iPad does a lot more than that, of course; a big addition is playing games, something that a lot of people also want to do on mobile devices.
The commenter was clueless in a few other ways as well. Partly he just wasn’t paying attention. He said there was no multitasking a day after the big news was that the iPad will soon have multitasking. He seems to be oblivious to the external monitor adaptor, or the adaptors that allow you to connect digital cameras (though ideally, these will not be necessary once wireless connectivity improves, hopefully via apps or OS upgrades). He’s also not in touch, or else he would know that there are apps for printer sharing, and that Bluetooth keyboards can be synced with the iPad. He also doesn’t get the fact that the iPad is a mobile device, and it’s not intended to always be hooked up to cables; just get the right apps and you can wirelessly connect to remote disks. Or stream documents, even video files incompatible with the iPad, directly to the iPad screen.
But what really shows up the fact that he doesn’t get the device is his complaint that it can’t use a mouse. That’s like complaining that there’s no clutch pedal on your automatic transmission. It’s a touchscreen device, a mouse is what it is designed to replace.
Mostly, this guy just doesn’t understand what a mobile device is supposed to be. He’s thinking of his laptop as something that needs to have five or six cables hanging off of it, which, sadly, a lot of laptops now have. But the whole idea of mobile devices is to have something you can carry around with you and not be encumbered by cables or peripherals. In that regard, the laptop is not used as a truly mobile device, but rather as a desktop computer that can be easily relocated.
Editor: Retrieved from the spam basket.
The “no multitasking” thing is the most troubling.
This is the kind of propagandistic replacement of buzzwording for intelligent understanding we see with “death panels”, “socialism!” and whatever in the real world.
Back in the 90s the windows 95 people would say Macs didn’t have multitasking. We did, but it was cooperative, and it worked just as good as Windows 95 since their “preemptive” multitasking was still serialized on the Win16 layer — if a Win32 program hung when its thread of execution was in the Win16 code it would take out all other processes when they next tried to “thunk” into Win16. The symptom of this hanging was usually the Start button turning into a black rectangle as the system itself got stuck in Win16 land.
A fullscreen device doesn’t necessarily need multitasking if the apps are designed to quit & resume cleanly. The OS 4.0 multitasking just makes this more convenient and robust for app developers, but even when suspended apps will have no guarantee that they won’t be blown away so we have to save state on suspension anyway.
The few use cases Apple is supporting for background multitasking don’t interest me much. The iPad at 1.5 lbs is NOT a music player. The GPS stuff looks stupid.
The main good feature is apps can tell the system to wake them up (or relaunch them if quit) at a future time. That’s useful for a lot of stuff.
The necessity the writer feels to plug in extra crap is telling. About half the tech population just doesn’t Get It. They think they need to eat their food from the frying pan.
My comment disappeared into the ether, the system says I already posted it but it’s not showing.
Editor: Retrieved from the spam basket.
Let me try again:
The “no multitasking” thing is the most troubling.
This is the kind of propagandistic replacement of buzzwording for intelligent understanding we see with “death panels”, “socialism!” and whatever in the real world.
Back in the 90s the windows 95 people would say Macs didn’t have multitasking. We did, but it was cooperative, and it worked just as good as Windows 95 since their “preemptive” multitasking was still serialized on the Win16 layer — if a Win32 program hung when its thread of execution was in the Win16 code it would take out all other processes when they next tried to “thunk” into Win16. The symptom of this hanging was usually the Start button turning into a black rectangle as the system itself got stuck in Win16 land.
A fullscreen device doesn’t necessarily need multitasking if the apps are designed to quit & resume cleanly. The OS 4.0 multitasking just makes this more convenient and robust for app developers, but even when suspended apps will have no guarantee that they won’t be blown away so we have to save state on suspension anyway.
The few use cases Apple is supporting for background multitasking don’t interest me much. The iPad at 1.5 lbs is NOT a music player. The GPS stuff looks stupid.
The main good feature is apps can tell the system to wake them up (or relaunch them if quit) at a future time. That’s useful for a lot of stuff.
The necessity the writer feels to plug in extra crap is telling. About half the tech population just doesn’t Get It. They think they need to eat their food from the frying pan.
Editor: Retrieved from the spam basket.
Hello?
The “no multitasking” thing is the most troubling.
This is the kind of propagandistic replacement of buzzwording for intelligent understanding we see with “death panels”, “socialism!” and whatever in the real world.
Back in the 90s the windows 95 people would say Macs didn’t have multitasking. We did, but it was cooperative, and it worked just as good as Windows 95 since their “preemptive” multitasking was still serialized on the Win16 layer — if a Win32 program hung when its thread of execution was in the Win16 code it would take out all other processes when they next tried to “thunk” into Win16. The symptom of this hanging was usually the Start button turning into a black rectangle as the system itself got stuck in Win16 land.
A fullscreen device doesn’t necessarily need multitasking if the apps are designed to quit & resume cleanly. The OS 4.0 multitasking just makes this more convenient and robust for app developers, but even when suspended apps will have no guarantee that they won’t be blown away so we have to save state on suspension anyway.
The few use cases Apple is supporting for background multitasking don’t interest me much. The iPad at 1.5 lbs is NOT a music player. The GPS stuff looks stupid.
The main good feature is apps can tell the system to wake them up (or relaunch them if quit) at a future time. That’s useful for a lot of stuff.
The necessity the writer feels to plug in extra crap is telling. About half the tech population just doesn’t Get It. They think they need to eat their food from the frying pan.
Troy:
I don’t see it in moderation. I’ll do what I can at the blog level, but it probably won’t be much–best I can do is make sure WordPress is updated, short of the major task of choosing a new theme and overhauling that to suit my tastes–unless you know something you could suggest that I do, for which I would be grateful.Whoa. I forgot to check my spam filter. There they are. I am restoring them. Why did the spam filter stop them? I’ll have to try to figure that one out. Update: None of my special filters match any of the words you used in the stopped posts, so I am guessing that Askimet itself has a problem with one of the words common to your posts. Which that is is anyone’s guess–maybe “Win16” or “Win32,” or letter-number combos in general.But instead, maybe you can do what I do, both because of browser crashes and blog software glitches: select your comment and copy it to your clipboard, especially just before you submit. In fact, when I have more than just a few lines to write, I’ll actually compose my comments in my blog editor (where I have more HTML formatting tools anyway), and then copy and paste that to the blog where I am commenting. One small extra step, but it protects me from losing the message otherwise. I know that I tend to forget that composing in a browser text box is tenuous at best, because you are dependent upon two layers of often-buggy software working right, and there is no local memory of what you are typing.
Hey, maybe that’s an idea for a browser plug-in somebody could write–autosave text fields locally. Or have they already?
I’ll be goddamned. I just tested your message–I logged out as admin and submitted both halves of your message that got stopped, then submitted half of what got stopped by the spam filters, and half again, until I found the word that was tripping the spam filters.
It was “socialism.” I kid you not. What the frack? That’s not a word *I* stopped.
(BTW, it allowed me to use it. Admin privileges. But still, WTF?)
Just checked my .htaccess files. Nothing on socialism in there.