How can the iPad be as popular as it is?

[Russ Abbott]

It has a horrible editor, and it doesn't have an undo button. Touch it in the wrong place, and it does something that you don't expect. And it's often hard to touch it in the right place.

But that's only when you want to navigate from page to page or enter information. It's even terrible when you want to use something that's already created but that Apple doesn't own. I wanted to run an applet. Forget it.  An alternative was a Java Web start version of the same application. Forget it.  Nor can one download a jar file and run that. In other words,  forget using Java or anything written in Java on your iPad.

So I decided to look at some documentation. Too bad it was packaged in a zip file. Can't read that either.

The iPad may be pretty, but it's awfully dumb. How can we all be so taken in by its looks?

It seems to me that Apple is the new Microsoft. It wants to have a walled garden and won't let anything in or out unless it has complete control.  We didn't stand for this with Microsoft. Why are we putting up with it with Apple?

Or am I wrong about all this?  Is there a way to these things, and I just don't know the secret handshake?

 

-- Russ

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[Russell Standish]

On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 11:07:32PM -0700, Russ Abbott wrote:
>
> Or am I wrong about all this?  Is there a way to these things, and I just
> don't know the secret handshake?
>

No, you are not wrong in all this.

Personally, I don't get the iPad at all - seems anything it can do is
done better with my Samsung netbook running Linux, and there are many
things my Sammy can do that the iPad can't. As you have just
noted. Yet the netbook has similar form factor, similar battery life
and is about half the cost. Go figure.

Cheers

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish                  Phone [phone] (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics      [hidden email]
University of New South Wales          http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Russ Abbott]

After writing the previous message I thought that perhaps if I signed up as a developer I'd be able to do more. So I did. The best I could determine, one has to download the developer IDE to a Mac. The web page suggests that one can then run something one develops on both the IDE's iPad (and iPhone and iPod) simulator and on the real thing. But I wasn't able to find the place where it said how to run something one developed on the real thing.  Of course I don't have a Mac to use as a IDE platform in any case so it's all theoretical anyway.

Which reminds me that last evening while looking through Witten, Data Mining, a book I'm using for a Data Mining course, I came across a discussion of the problem of having too many attributes. Theoretically, additional attributes should not hurt. But in practice they do.

Question: What's the difference between theory and practice?
Answer: There is no difference between theory and practice, in theory. But in practice there is.

 

-- Russ

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 1:18 AM, Russell Standish <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 11:07:32PM -0700, Russ Abbott wrote:
>
> Or am I wrong about all this?  Is there a way to these things, and I just
> don't know the secret handshake?
>

No, you are not wrong in all this.

Personally, I don't get the iPad at all - seems anything it can do is
done better with my Samsung netbook running Linux, and there are many
things my Sammy can do that the iPad can't. As you have just
noted. Yet the netbook has similar form factor, similar battery life
and is about half the cost. Go figure.

Cheers

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish                  Phone [phone] (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics      [hidden email]
University of New South Wales          http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org