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| 7/19 |
| 2011/3/12-4/20 [Consumer/CellPhone, Computer/HW/Laptop] UID:54057 Activity:nil |
3/12 I am curious what others think of tablets like iPad. They don't seem
useful to me, but I use my computer for more than web browsing,
Facebook, and Twitter. Why would I buy one instead of a laptop?
They seem like a disabled laptop to me, but at a higher price.
\_ You are most likely a coder. iPad is not for coders. They are
what you get your non-technical friends. Or musicians. Look at
the amplitude app. Saves a tonne of gear shlepping. Wolfram Alpha,
etc: http://csua.org/u/sr0 and http://csua.org/u/sr1
And i'm not even going into how i used mine to replace a shelf of
technical books that I realized were kinda annoying without an
automated grep mechanism. But to write code on? never.
\_ http://csua.org/u/sr2 - this is a replacement newspaper for upper
management. The guys with the families, with the mistresses the
100k/yr golf memberships etc. EG. not you. They would like to
replace their daily printed reports with the latest in male jewelry
and hey if they can get interactive graphs showing your coding
teams' productivity whilst on the golf course in real time
so much the better.
\_ Lol i remember reading these 70s fiction books about "electronic
clipboards".
\_ Upper mgmt read those too, as twenny somethings. Natch, they
want ipads now.
\_ I am curious what other think of cookers like the microwave. They
don't seem useful to me, but I use my oven for more than heating up
leftovers, boiling water, and making brownies. Why would I buy one
instead of an oven? They seem like a disabled oven to me, but at a
higher price.
\_ microwave owners would trade good tasting food for a quick meal.
if you're making fun of the poster not understanding that
different users have different computing needs I'm right with you
\_ Interestingly, I don't own a microwave either for exactly those
reasons. I don't find it useful for cooking anything I would
want to eat. It's an unnecessary expense and takes up
counter space. Mine (received as a gift) broke a few years back
and I have no desire to replace it. I would buy an iPad if
it cost a lot less than a laptop, but it costs the same.
Would you buy a microwave if it cost the same as a range?
\_ define what you want the ipad for? and what you want the laptop
for?
\_ Here, these popular programs might show you who wants to use iPads:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/12/ipad_for_work
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/07/apple_ipad_as_business_device
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/09/top_ten_free_ipad_apps |
| 7/19 |
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| csua.org/u/sr0 -> www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/19/10_smartest_and_10_stupidest_ipad_apps/page9.html Not everyone loves WolframAlpha, but anything that can provide this breadth of info is high on my list They say: "Get answers. Whoever you are and whatever you do, WolframAlpha delivers insight and understanding into any facet of your life." The Reg says: WolframAlpha is an iPad-using info-junkie's best friend. This app gives you quick access to facts and figures on everything from math to stat to culture to astonomy to music to finance. WolframAlpha provides a rich set of examples on how to access a boatload of information drawn from a wide variety of sources -- and, yeah, Wikipedia is one of its many sources, but not for all categories, not by a long shot. After using a canned example, you can substitute your own terms -- for example, under Satellites, you can change the default example of Echostar 1 and Echostar 2 to Sputnik and Telstar, and see all the stats you might care to know about those two classic satellites, including a chart of their routes. Portable Tanning Machine Portable Tanning Machine All hail the utter pointlessness and stunning stupidity of Portable Tanning Machine They say: "Portable Tanning Machine is the 100-percent safe and non-effective way to get a deep, glistening tan, right on your iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch!" The Reg says: This app simulates, as you can see from the screenshot above, the enhanced-UVB lamps used in tanning beds. After a brief start-up -- complete with sparking sounds -- the Portable Tanning Machine simply glows and hums until you turn it off. And, no, an iPad's LED-backlit in-plane-switching display will not give you a tan. Props to PTM's developers for calling it "non-effective," at least. Tanning Pad (99), which doesn't even provide the start-up animation nor the sound effects -- its tanning lights simply blink. It's a toss-up as to which is more stupid, an app that goes to the trouble of allowing you to fire up your ersatz tanning bed and then hums eternally, or one that simply sits there and blinks. I'm voting for the one whose developers put time and trouble into polishing it. Deciding to waste precious brain cells on Portable Tanning Machine was stupid. |
| csua.org/u/sr1 -> www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/09/top_ten_free_ipad_apps/ Free whitepaper - The Register Guide to Enterprise Virtualization Either you just bought an iPad and you wallet is now depleted, you're thinking of buying one and you'd like to know how you can stuff it with apps for zero dollars, or you're simply curious about how free iPad apps compare with free iPhone apps. Or you're merely intrigued by the whole media-fed iPad hysteria. We installed and tested dozens of the most attractive - and free - iPad apps available on the iTunes App Store, and chose the ten that best show off the iPad's advantages over its smaller-screened sibling. Some - most, actually - are apps that already exist in iPhone form, but which have done a fine job of exploiting the iPad's expanded acreage. In addition to our top ten, we also picked a dozen runners-up. You may - you will, if you're a true Reg reader - disagree with our top ten, but you may find something of interest among the also-rans that you can promote into your own personal top-ten list. Distimo claim that Games is the largest iPad-app category. The reason for this omission is simple: we're not gamers, and for us to rate games would be as silly as, say, for someone who has never used an iPad to have strong opinions about it. Bloomberg Bloomberg iPad app Apple must be doing something right Bloomberg's iPhone app is among our daily go-to sources of info, and its iPad app is a notable step-up in presentation quality. In it you'll find continually updating news, equity indices, bond and commodity info, current rates for 25 top currencies, and audio podcasts that you can listen to while navigating around the rest of the app. A My Stocks feature lets you set up your personal portfolio and track its health, or simply keep an eye on companies you're interested in. For example, as we're writing this on Friday morning, Apple's stock is up 077 per cent and Google's is down 027 per cent. Business PCs powered by the 2nd generation Intel Core(TM) vPro(TM) processor family deliver performance you can see-in maximized hardware-assisted security, easier remote PC ... |
| csua.org/u/sr2 -> www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/07/apple_ipad_as_business_device/ " Mellmo founder and president Quinton Alsbury tells The Reg. On April 3, when the tablet finally hit stores, Roambi was the first app that appeared when you visited the "business" section of the iPad App Store - appearing smack dab in the middle of the "spotlighted" tools - and it was joined by 65 other business apps, including IPadian clients for use with WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Rackspace Cloud Servers. sole purpose of putting business apps on the Apple iPhone. This was before Steve Jobs deigned to offer a SDK for the handheld - and well before the world realized that the Jobsian handheld was a viable business device. Roambi debuted on the Jesus Phone in May of last year, and naturally, now that the app is on the iPad, the company is equally confident that the Jobsian tablet will prove to be viable business device as well - and even a replacement for the laptop. But Alsbury - the man who designed the Romabi iPad app - argues that at the least at the top end of a company, keyboards aren't that important. Upper-management types, he says, don't need a full laptop. There are a huge number of business users who don't need a whole laptop." Peter Jackson, CEO of the San Francisco-based GroundWork, an outfit that offers tools for managing IT infrastructure, concurs. And when it is time for creation, the iPad's software keyboard - at least in landscape mode - lets you type at a halfway decent clip. And the Roambi client is designed specifically for these sorts of non-creator execs. It's a new window into data sitting housed by back-end tools such as SAP and Salesforce, turning them into the kind of interactive Jobsian graphics an executive can surely relate to. It might grab SAP data and, say, turn into interactive bar graph. Roambi for iPad Roambi on Jobsian talent The question is whether other business types will carry the iPad. Mike Mayo, who designed the Rackspace Cloud Pro app, a means of managing server instances on the company's so-called infrastructure cloud, argues that the device at least makes sense for IT professionals, pointing out that the company already has a large number of admins using its iPhone app. The Rackspace client lets you backup server instances, create new servers from backups, reboot instances, rename them, resize them, and delete them. And Mayo acknowledges it can't replace the admin's laptop. But IT types have been known to carry, shall we say, multiple devices. With the free Roambi Lite web service, you can publish reports pulled from Excel and the like. With the for-pay Roambi Pro, another web service, you can grab data from Excel, Google spreadsheets, or Salesforce CRM. And with Romabi Enterprise Server (ES), an app you install on your own servers, you can tap SAP Crystal Reports as well. Next Monday, April 12, the company will introduce a new version of its Enterprise Server - ES3. This will play with IBM Cognos, Microsoft Reporting Services, and Microsoft SharePoint. It wil also tap Google Apps - which, though supported in Roambi Pro, isn't currently an option with ES. ES3 pricing will start at $795 per user, with a minimum of 50 users. This white paper looks at Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which is the Microsoft implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), an initiative to establish standards for accessing and sharing management information in an enterprise network. Business PCs powered by the 2nd generation Intel Core(TM) vPro(TM) processor family deliver performance you can see-in maximized hardware-assisted security, easier remote PC ... |
| www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/12/ipad_for_work -> www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/12/ipad_for_work/ On Demand Webcast : The realities of SaaS and security Comment It hasn't taken long for the iPad to be seen as a bit more than a pointless and expensive luxury lifestyle accessory. Just nine weeks - and in that time the hardware spec hasn't changed at all. But last week's iPhone 40 preview, which isn't due on the iPad until autumn, already makes it look much more attractive as a netbook or laptop replacement than it did on Wednesday. When the first models emerged at least they had their size going for them. Now they're bigger and more expensive, but mostly dog slow. Size and weight matters to me, and the iPad has had these advantages from the start. The disadvantages of an iPad over a laptop were many, but the lack of multitasking was the biggest. That's been fixed now - at least well enough so most people don't notice. Lack of a physical keyboard is another problem, but iPhone 40 gets proper third-party Bluetooth keyboard support. Apple's official keyboard accessory, the 'iPad Keyboard Dock', is very unlike-Apple. It can only be used on a flat surface, and doesn't look toddler proof: it places a lot of strain on a fragile connection. The Apple Wireless Keyboard will work, but it's a generic device. It doesn't make typing on your lap practical, as a custom-designed keyboard might*. Apple_own_ipad_case Even with the sleeve, it's less obtrusive than most laptops But the iPad has gained VPN support and crypto, two strong candidates for grown-up computing. ssh clients can now sprout standard features such as port forwarding remains to be seen. I have no fear of jailbreaking to get at such raw features, but plenty of people quite understandably do. Apple's version of multitasking may almost be good enough. I liked the observation that "if you see a stylus, they blew it. True, but Apple's method gets weary and RSI-inducing very quickly. Remember that most of us, most of the time, switch between just two tasks. Dragon Dictation iPad app Our Rik tries out Dragon Dictation But I think with the OS update, the iPad will be finding its way into potential buying decisions in a way it didn't at launch. Give me real USB In January I had three good reasons to dismiss it as a laptop alternative: price, multitasking and the lack of a USB port. I consider the latter an essential gateway to a wider world of hardware such as cameras, card readers, controllers and things we haven't thought of yet. Well, USB obviously isn't going to be fixed in this year's model, and may never be. It clashes with the purity, or puritanism, of the Steve approach. The price for UK users still hasn't been revealed - so that's a variable. Obviously I'm not going to be writing a book on an iPad. But quite unexpectedly, it's looking like a useful bit of daily computing kit. Each time, against my better judgement, I thought it might work. This white paper explains why such protection is necessary for corporate networks and provides a technological overview of the detection methodologies used by BitDefender solutions. This white paper looks at Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which is the Microsoft implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), an initiative to establish standards for accessing and sharing management information in an enterprise network. |
| www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/07/apple_ipad_as_business_device -> www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/07/apple_ipad_as_business_device/ " Mellmo founder and president Quinton Alsbury tells The Reg. On April 3, when the tablet finally hit stores, Roambi was the first app that appeared when you visited the "business" section of the iPad App Store - appearing smack dab in the middle of the "spotlighted" tools - and it was joined by 65 other business apps, including IPadian clients for use with WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Rackspace Cloud Servers. sole purpose of putting business apps on the Apple iPhone. This was before Steve Jobs deigned to offer a SDK for the handheld - and well before the world realized that the Jobsian handheld was a viable business device. Roambi debuted on the Jesus Phone in May of last year, and naturally, now that the app is on the iPad, the company is equally confident that the Jobsian tablet will prove to be viable business device as well - and even a replacement for the laptop. But Alsbury - the man who designed the Romabi iPad app - argues that at the least at the top end of a company, keyboards aren't that important. Upper-management types, he says, don't need a full laptop. There are a huge number of business users who don't need a whole laptop." Peter Jackson, CEO of the San Francisco-based GroundWork, an outfit that offers tools for managing IT infrastructure, concurs. And when it is time for creation, the iPad's software keyboard - at least in landscape mode - lets you type at a halfway decent clip. And the Roambi client is designed specifically for these sorts of non-creator execs. It's a new window into data sitting housed by back-end tools such as SAP and Salesforce, turning them into the kind of interactive Jobsian graphics an executive can surely relate to. It might grab SAP data and, say, turn into interactive bar graph. Roambi for iPad Roambi on Jobsian talent The question is whether other business types will carry the iPad. Mike Mayo, who designed the Rackspace Cloud Pro app, a means of managing server instances on the company's so-called infrastructure cloud, argues that the device at least makes sense for IT professionals, pointing out that the company already has a large number of admins using its iPhone app. The Rackspace client lets you backup server instances, create new servers from backups, reboot instances, rename them, resize them, and delete them. And Mayo acknowledges it can't replace the admin's laptop. But IT types have been known to carry, shall we say, multiple devices. With the free Roambi Lite web service, you can publish reports pulled from Excel and the like. With the for-pay Roambi Pro, another web service, you can grab data from Excel, Google spreadsheets, or Salesforce CRM. And with Romabi Enterprise Server (ES), an app you install on your own servers, you can tap SAP Crystal Reports as well. Next Monday, April 12, the company will introduce a new version of its Enterprise Server - ES3. This will play with IBM Cognos, Microsoft Reporting Services, and Microsoft SharePoint. It wil also tap Google Apps - which, though supported in Roambi Pro, isn't currently an option with ES. ES3 pricing will start at $795 per user, with a minimum of 50 users. This white paper looks at Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which is the Microsoft implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), an initiative to establish standards for accessing and sharing management information in an enterprise network. Business PCs powered by the 2nd generation Intel Core(TM) vPro(TM) processor family deliver performance you can see-in maximized hardware-assisted security, easier remote PC ... |