Why Apple’s iPad adds up to a whole lot of Fail.

The iPad is a major disappointment for me, both in its naming and its specifications.  For a device which was hyped for months as the gadget to change the world and Steve's next big thing it fails to deliver the goods.

Some of the rumours had me genuinely excited.  The device was to have cameras front and back that would open the doors to augmented video conferencing able to build up a composite of the speaker's surroundings and use GPS to correctly place the speakers' in 3D space. 

There was the rumour that the device would capitalise on the technological and miniaturisation advances of the last few years to finally make this form factor a reality.  Running the latest hardened Snow Leopard, consumers and business users would use the applications they were familiar with in an easily portable form factor.  Photographers could carry their portfolio and make changes and adjustments on the fly.  Software profits of native Mac iWork suite would finally get corporate prime time rather than meekly handing the baton to browser based tools like Google applications. And then there was the rumour that Apple had solved the problem of pressure sensitivity on the screen would have made every graphic designer in the world sit down and have a quiet private moment.

So what did we get?

Not wishing to detract from the whole by examining the sum of the parts lets look at the base model.
$500US buys you a pitiful 16Gb device that sounds like a tampon commercial with no wifi, no 3g and iPhone OS. 

*Queue crickets*

Let's have a think at the type of applications that run on the iPhone for a minute.  You have 25 000 light weight rather insubstantial applications.  You have a veritable cornucopia of Twitter clients but I have yet to find a RSS client that doesn't crumble under the weight of a hundred feeds.  Photoshop for iPhone as an example of a photo editor is an absolute joke.

So you decide that tablets with no wifi only work in Startrek and upgrade; maybe you splash out and get yourself a 64Gig model with 3g and wifi.  You are now squarely in Macbook territory and maybe this is the reason for the iPhone OS choice in the first place.  Product lines which eat other product lines for breakfast are bad for business.

The other thing people are going to love is the giant kindergarten virtual keyboard that devours half your screen realestate every time you need to use it.  Sure posting a comment to Facebook or sending an email and it's not a big deal but try and do real world things like edit a video or work on a spreadsheet and and I'll guarantee it quickly becomes a throbbing haemorrhoid of frustration.  How would this keyboard scale for tools like Photoshop or Excel or Video editors which try to maximise user workspace?  Toolbars are bad enough for developers trying to read as many lines of source code as they can fit into a Courier 8 font without the Marshmallow man of keyboards getting in the way.

So for a base model with no wifi and no 3g you essentially have a neutered device which is blind (no camera) and dumb (in not being able to communicate with the outside world).  2009 paved the way for augmented reality applications that use location awareness, either through GPS or video, to provide rich local content and pundits are touting this as an avenue that will explode with growth in 2010.  The iPad will not be in a position to benefit from this.

Are there any pros then in this rather bleak landscape.  Book and print media content will look very good on the iPad and students with spinal deformations from heavy book bags will rejoice, but how many books or Kindles do you have to buy to get a return on investment for splashing out on an iPad?

For me, sadly, what all the hype actually boils down to is an iPod Touch for giants which adds up to a whole lot of fail in my book.

Posted via email from f/9

Why Apple’s iPad adds up to a whole lot of Fail.

The iPad is a major disappointment for me, both in its naming and its specifications.  For a device which was hyped for months as the gadget to change the world and Steve's next big thing it fails to deliver the goods.

Some of the rumours had me genuinely excited.  The device was to have cameras front and back that would open the doors to augmented video conferencing able to build up a composite of the speaker's surroundings and use GPS to correctly place the speakers' in 3D space. 

There was the rumour that the device would capitalise on the technological and miniaturisation advances of the last few years to finally make this form factor a reality.  Running the latest hardened Snow Leopard, consumers and business users would use the applications they were familiar with in an easily portable form factor.  Photographers could carry their portfolio and make changes and adjustments on the fly.  Software profits of native Mac iWork suite would finally get corporate prime time rather than meekly handing the baton to browser based tools like Google applications. And then there was the rumour that Apple had solved the problem of pressure sensitivity on the screen would have made every graphic designer in the world sit down and have a quiet private moment.

So what did we get?

Not wishing to detract from the whole by examining the sum of the parts lets look at the base model.
$500US buys you a pitiful 16Gb device that sounds like a tampon commercial with no wifi, no 3g and iPhone OS. 

*Queue crickets*

Let's have a think at the type of applications that run on the iPhone for a minute.  You have 25 000 light weight rather insubstantial applications.  You have a veritable cornucopia of Twitter clients but I have yet to find a RSS client that doesn't crumble under the weight of a hundred feeds.  Photoshop for iPhone as an example of a photo editor is an absolute joke.

So you decide that tablets with no wifi only work in Startrek and upgrade; maybe you splash out and get yourself a 64Gig model with 3g and wifi.  You are now squarely in Macbook territory and maybe this is the reason for the iPhone OS choice in the first place.  Product lines which eat other product lines for breakfast are bad for business.

The other thing people are going to love is the giant kindergarten virtual keyboard that devours half your screen realestate every time you need to use it.  Sure posting a comment to Facebook or sending an email and it's not a big deal but try and do real world things like edit a video or work on a spreadsheet and and I'll guarantee it quickly becomes a throbbing haemorrhoid of frustration.  How would this keyboard scale for tools like Photoshop or Excel or Video editors which try to maximise user workspace?  Toolbars are bad enough for developers trying to read as many lines of source code as they can fit into a Courier 8 font without the Marshmallow man of keyboards getting in the way.

So for a base model with no wifi and no 3g you essentially have a neutered device which is blind (no camera) and dumb (in not being able to communicate with the outside world).  2009 paved the way for augmented reality applications that use location awareness, either through GPS or video, to provide rich local content and pundits are touting this as an avenue that will explode with growth in 2010.  The iPad will not be in a position to benefit from this.

Are there any pros then in this rather bleak landscape.  Book and print media content will look very good on the iPad and students with spinal deformations from heavy book bags will rejoice, but how many books or Kindles do you have to buy to get a return on investment for splashing out on an iPad?

For me, sadly, what all the hype actually boils down to is an iPod Touch for giants which adds up to a whole lot of fail in my book.

Posted via email from f/9

All Hail the Fungus Overlords

Carl Zimmer, scientific writer over at one of my favourite blogs ‘The Loom‘, introduces us to the fascinating parasitic ability of the Cordyceps fungus and how it can penetrate the exoskeleton of an ant completely controlling it’s mind and it’s will.

Article: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/07/28/respect-for-the-fungus-overlords/

Video by David Attenborough:

Carl has written a fascinating book about parasites call Parasite Rex

Posted via email from The Thought Menagerie

Terry Pratchett – on belief in God

'I'd much rather be a rising monkey than a falling angel'
-Terry Pratchett

Posted via email from The Thought Menagerie

The Entire Universe in 6 Minutes

 

Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

Posted via email from The Thought Menagerie

Internet filter plan may extend further, says Broadband Minister | Herald Sun

Internet filter plan may extend further, says Broadband Minister | Herald Sun: “The Government’s internet censorship plan may extend to filter more web activity than first thought, the Broadband Minister said today.

In a post on his department’s blog, Senator Stephen Conroy today said technology that could filter data sent directly between computers would be tested as part of the upcoming live filtering trial.

‘Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial,’ Senator Conroy said.

Peer-to-peer file-sharing technology is the most common way for web users to share video, picture and music files between computers over the internet. “

What does Australia have in common with Iran and China?

Meteorite lights up the Canadian sky

More info here.

Achtung! Blog Feedback Wanted

I have been trialling the excellent site content management system Squarespace over on stuartforsyth.com and am more than happy to turn over to that site the photography related portion of my life.  Squarespace, in spite of all it’s strengths, has one major failing as far as I’m concerned and that is forcing you to choose a single page or journal as a default.  I have made the photography journal the default for that site and as such the thoughtmenagerie is not immediately visible or accessible.

The idea behind having all your on-line eggs in one basket is an appealing one and I thought, incorrectly as it turns out, that consolidating all blogs and journals under one umbrella would be a good strategy.  The problem is the majority of debate and collaboration has occurred here on wordpress and the exposure to the same content over on squarespace, due to the aforementioned technical constraints, just isn’t as good.

So I’m giving serious thought to keeping my day to day journal at WordPress.  

So here is my question to all readers who have been gracious enough to leave both intelligent debate and snark.  What is it you’ve enjoyed from this blog up till now and what topics would you rather not see more of?

My preferences currently, and not including much photography, is to carry on blogging about technology, science and belief (from my atheistic standpoint of course ; I’d really appreciate your feedback.

Early notes on GoogleApps

I’m really pissed at Microsoft. Why? They wasted billions on Vista when they should have been virtualizing Windows and making their developers’ investments apply to the net. I know it sounds outlandish, but it really isn’t. Amazon doesn’t offer EC2 for Windows, just Linux. And I’m stuck with two Windows boxes at my hosting company, hosting a dead fucking end. My bet on Microsoft in the late 90s just ran out of gas.

- Dave Winer

Early notes on GoogleApps (Scripting News)

SPACE.com — Merging Man and Machine to Reach the Stars

 

Robots and humans always seem to end up at odds, whether it’s battling over pieces of NASA’s budget or literally fighting in science fiction stories such as “The Matrix” and “Battlestar Galactica.”

Now a former NASA historian and an American University professor suggest that the future of space exploration could very well depend on a merging of metal and flesh.

Their new book “Robots in Space” (2008, The Johns Hopkins University Press) looks at the competing visions for robotic vs. human space exploration, and concludes that neither will get far beyond the solar system without one another.

SPACE.com — Merging Man and Machine to Reach the Stars

Arthur C. Clarke Died today

Today is a very sad day indeed; Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of 90. Author of books like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood’s End and Rendezvous with Rama – Clarke was one of the most influential authors from my early childhood onwards.

Some of my favourite quotes:

• “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
• “If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run – and often in the short one – the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.”
• “Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what’s over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you’d go crazy”

And in his famous 10 word story:

“God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.”

His vision and optimism about the continuance of our species will be sorely missed.

Pioneers of Early Photography

Take a look at the photograph below.

This is the earliest photograph ever taken. Entitled View from the Window at Le Gras, this was taken by Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 and had an eight hour exposure time.

What about this one?

Taken in 1904 by Edward Steichen this photograph is of Long Island New York and was sold in 2006 for a cool $2.6 million making it the most expensive photograph ever sold.

From the long exposures to the incredible chemical wizardry and patience of the earliest proponents of the art, this website gives you the tiniest taste of what it took to be a photographer back in days before the magic and convenience of our modern cameras.

Source: more here

Back to the Source of the Legend

I am a recent convert to audible.com.  Having access to good literature to listen to on my morning and evening commute is an absolute joy.  As some readers may be aware I have a love/hate relationship with the movie ‘I am Legend’; loved the portrayal of the loneliness and internal conflict Smith portrayed in Robert Neville’s role; hated the religious overtures and the anticipation [betrayed] that the creatures were something more than mindless automatons.

 

This story dates back to a novel written in 1954 by Richard Matheson and is the inspiration and the source of three movies to date.  I figured that if the story inspired 3 movies and much of the Zombie genre’ then it should at least be a pretty good listen so I downloaded it last night to my iPod.  This morning, on the train on the way to work, I started listening to it.

The early story sees Neville spending much of his day collecting things essential for his survival, repairing the damage of the terrible creatures which visit him in the night and destroying the slumbering undead which he stumbles upon in his foraging.  In the evening he his haunted by memories of a life he once enjoyed, items around the house make him remember his wife for example, while the noises and taunts of the things stalking outside drive him to the brink of madness not even the medicinal effects of alcohol can blunt.

I am still quite early on in the story but so far I am loving it, it is clever and very well written with much of the horror (and the subsequent effects on Neville’s mind) are hinted at which for me builds in a much more effective way than coarse descriptions of  lewd and graphic horror.  We get a deep sense of the man and his mental downward spiral through his internal monologues which replace conversations with people in standard novels.

I really believe Smith had the capabilities to do justice to this great literary character however the actor is only part of the story; perhaps the director felt that great stories are not enough and I feel he subsequently flubbed it badly.

I will revisit this story when I am done with it but in the interim I’d advise you head on over to Audible.com or Amazon and get yourself a version if this is a genre of story you enjoy; damn good stuff in my opinion.

Warning sounded over Zim equity law

A new equity law passed by President Robert Mugabe to ensure the population gets a majority stake in public-owned firms will plunge Zimbabwe into deeper economic woes, analysts predicted on Monday. “It will entail the destruction of the economy,” Harare-based economist Godfrey Kanyenze said.

Warning sounded over Zim equity law
Fanuel Jongwe
Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:12:00 GMT

Catholic Church furthers Hypocrisy

[Source: Boing Boing ...]

In the sixth century, Pope Gregory handed down a list of “seven cardinal vices.” Now the Vatican has issued an additional seven “social sins.”

You offend God not only by stealing, taking the Lord’s name in vain or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by wrecking the environment, carrying out morally debatable experiments that manipulate DNA or harm embryos,” said [Bishop Gianfranco] Girotti, who is responsible for the body that oversees confessions.

The seven social sins are:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control

2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research

3. Drug abuse

4. Polluting the environment

5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor

6. Excessive wealth

7. Creating poverty

The original deadly sins:

1. Pride

2. Envy

3. Gluttony

4. Lust

5. Anger

6. Greed

7. Sloth

One of the best comments for this posting was by Takuan

AH those crazy kids at the world’s largest real estate operation! How about the child raping huh? Or the targeting of the poor for recruits and the increasing of the ranks of the poor by opposing family planning? All those vatican art treasures gathering dust when they could be sold for food for the hungry. Aboriginal people everywhere still badly wounded from having the native beat out of them. All those nuns,monks and priests with blighted lives from having their natural sexuality crushed in the name of subjugation to church power. Gay people everywhere, murdered by church sanction and still being made to fight for basic human rights. Cultural treasures lost to the bonfires of the church in South America, The Inquisition, the retarding of science, the wilfull delay of medical advances, the overweening hypocrisy , the brutality, the greed, the ignorance……

How dare they show their faces much less preach about “sin”?

Well said!

The Universe Is 13.73 Billion Years Old

CaptainCarrot writes “Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer has summarized for his readers the new results released by NASA from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been surveying the 3K microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang. Some of the most interesting results: The age of the universe is now known to unprecedented accuracy: 13.73 billion years old, +/- 120 million. Spacetime is flat to within a 2% error margin. And ordinary matter and energy account for only 4.62% of the universe’s total. Plait’s comment on the age result: ‘Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.‘”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When is enough … well enough?

I was interested to note that RSS aggregator netvibes has gone social with the release of their upgrade codenamed ‘ginger’.  At first glance it appears netvibes is reaching into the social networking space by offering functionality seen in other social networking sites like Facebook.  You still have your back-end reader and widget pages but now you can register your ‘universe’ on netvibes and have a public face with your selection of apps and widgits.

I will play with it a little, tech tinkering for want of a better phrase, but at the end of the day enough is enough which in a way is a pity because I just can’t keep up.

Here is a short list of areas I am plugged into (top items of highest importance) and keeping track of these is fast becoming more hard work than fun.

Social Networks

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pownce

Blog

• WordPress
• Ipernity

Photo Sharing

• Flickr
• Ipernity
• Redbubble
• iStockPhoto
• Facebook

RSS

• Newsgator
• Google Reader
• Netvibes

Messaging

• Skype
• MSN Messenger
• Meebo
• Google Talk

And the list goes on.  So as new companies bring new content to the web I find less time and less inclination to actually go and look at them.  Sure App A may be technically superior or more beautiful than App B but as in the case of Facebook, my network is there, most of my friends are there; I’m not going to persuade them to move to the latest new thing so I will keep using Facebook.  Same thing with Pownce – awesome functionality – nobody there I know yet.

Google’s open social network excites me a little; I believe that opening up the web and providing common bits of code which can run independently across different companies is a way of unlocking us so we aren’t necessarily tied into one application for too long.

The big problem for new startups however is that unless you’re first to market or able to provide a radical new service, something so outrageous as to attract a huge cloud of interest and potential migration up front, breaking in to the existing spaces like social networking  is going to be a hard and unrewarding slog.  So although netvibes has some cool new features and wizzbang widgits I am not likely to change from my existing social platform any time soon.

 

p.s. There are some tools to help manage these various services.  My preference for pulling Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress & del.icio.us under one roof is the Flock browser.  Flock is built on Firefox but has additional hooks into all of the aforesaid applications giving you complete control over all of them right from your browser.

Dungeons & Dragons Creator Gary Gygax Passes Away

 A sad day with my thoughts going to the man who, in my opinion, created the greatest game in the world and filled my developmental years playing in worlds contained wholly in the mind and limited only by the bounds of imagination.  RIP Gary.

I wish more kids would get off the inane World of Warcraft and give Dungeons and Dragons a go, D&D version 4 is soon to be released.

According to a post on Troll Lord Games, the company that had published his most recent work, Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has passed away. In 2003, on the now defunct kcgeek.com, we ran an interview with Gygax. I have republished it over on Gadgets. Tiamat consume you fully, Gary. You brought untold amount of fun and joy into my life. This excerpt tickles me:

Q. As far as you know, what was the basic evolution of polyhedral dice? If they existed prior to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, what were they used for?

To the best of my knowledge I introduced them to gaming, en masse, with D&D in 1974. I found sets of the five platonic solids for sale in a school supply catalog back in 1972, and of course ordered them, used them in creating the D&D game.

Link to interview with discussion [BBG]

London cops declare war on photography

 

Thomas Hawk sez, “In what I can only view as troubling and a move surely to invite more backlash against photographers, London’s Metropolitan police has launched a new counter-terrorism PR campaign complete with anti-photography propaganda. The campaign is meant to encourage people to turn in ‘odd’ seeming people that they see taking photographs.”

“Thousands of people take photos every day,” reads their advertisement being run in London’s major newspapers. “What if one of them seems odd?”

Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

Useful Latin Quotes

http://www.dbooth.net/internerd/latin.cfm

I found a great tag-line for the week:

Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione.

which translates to:  I’m not interested in your dopey religious cult.

The part of my reptilian brain that still appreciates high school humour enjoyed Estne volumen in toga, an solum tibi libet me videre?