Posted on 03/06/2012 1:48:40 PM PST by Hojczyk
Amid all the hullabaloo surrounding the new iPad launch tomorrow, one company, which claims to be channeling Steve Jobs' spirit, declares that the iPad 3 (or HD) will kill the PC, thanks to one new ingredient.
This video fell into my in-box, as if from the skies. It purports to show the iPad 3 with an indispensable component--a standalone keyboard that attaches neatly to the machine.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.cnet.com ...
>> Compilers and sophisticated editors.<<
Compilers? In my day, we wrote it in binary and poked it directly into memory! Object code only — AND WE LIKED IT!
I coded in binary, and sometimes we didn’t even have the 1s.
Windows pad? What’s that?
Desktops are more like servers/backup storage now.
>>I coded in binary, and sometimes we didn’t even have the 1s.<<
Ah man — having to borrow 1s at loan shark rates sucked!
“inferior computers “
Oh, please, that’s just retarded to say the PC is “inferior”. Don’t be a myopic nerd.
Yes, Grok is a Heinlein term. Darned good one, too. From “Stranger In a Strange Land,” if memory serves.
Let’s see it play Call of Duty: MW3 at max graphics settings.
Screenshots of MS Office for the iPad have already been leaked. It is coming. The enterprise IS adopting the iPad. And if you cannot wait for Office, there is iWork. And with iCloud and Versions, anything I do to a doc on my iPad is automatically updated on my Mac, and vice versa.
And Flash? I have installed Flash inhibitors on all of my Macs, and the only time I have an issue is when traveling, and looking for restaurant menus on my iPad or iPhone. If they do the menu in Flash only, we skip that place, and if we can, we let them know it.
MS Excel doesn’t work on an iPad (at least that’s what the salesman told me).
Me too. I was entering 7 pages of boot code via the front panel of an HP2100 computer. It was a 21 bit word, so each word was listed in octal in 7 groups on a line. My fingers were well tuned to translate the octal to 3-bit patterns at a time with my fingers. That was the bootstrap to start the cassette deck to read the read software into the core memory. That was 1977 to 1980.
A bit later, I was tickled to write code on graph paper for 6800, 6502 and 8085. I hand assembled, calculated offsets, then entered in hexadecimal on the keyboard. More convenient than octal and not bad for 1980. My Heathkit H8 was even more convenient with ability to write fairly modern assembler, assemble it and save as S9 format files. Writing devices drivers for HDOS and CP/M was fun in those days.
In 1983, the Radio Shack Color Computer afforded a cool way to write in assembler for the 6809 as well as C. The Flex09 and OS/9 operating systems had a great Pascal compiler. My wife wrote pretty good Pascal in those days. By August 1983, I had a Radio Shack TRS80 Model 16A running Xenix. I really preferred a UNIX like OS. Still do today, but mostly Fedora/RHEL at the office. I did relent in 1991 and built my first Windows NT machine. I had written my resume in the UNIX environment using MM macros, but didn't have a good printer driver at home. In the process of trying to put a second boot partition on my Xenix disk, the immature FreeBSD release trashed my Xenix. I replaced it with Windows NT 3.1. No problems with a printer driver at that point.
I certainly wouldn't (see Ubuntu Unity and Windows 8 Metro) ... but those are personal preferences, and they are just a simple software application away from becoming reality.
I use the Asus Eee as my eBook.
It has Microsoft Reader on it as well as Nook for PC, Kindle for PC, Mobi Book Reader and some others. I can read an eBook in any format. Plus, the Asus Eee netbook allows me to rotate the display 90 degrees so I can read it like a traditional paper book. It travels with me everywhere.
>>. It’s distressing to lose your train of thought while waiting for the machine to echo your last keystroke. <<
That explains many an FR post, though...
Definitely a big shift hit when the laptop became cheap enough to be the primary personal computer of anybody who feels the need to be mobile. Tablets are a number of generations away from having the raw power to be a primary device, most of the folks I know who can claim to use them as a primary device remote desktop (or equivalent app) from them into “real” computers, so while it’s the device they touch the most it’s not really their primary. The business market, and people like me who feel no need to be mobile in their computing, will keep the desktop alive, though probably never again the primary section of the market, for a long time, just because the larger version of technology is always cheaper than the smaller, and desktops have the space to use the larger parts. There’s always going to be that section of the market who wants to maximize their power to dollar ratio and is willing to sacrifice mobility, especially with huge monitors dirt cheap.
10” tablet that runs Windows 8. The one I saw had 8G RAM and 32G storage. Could run office and Visual Studio. And is dockable.
Isn’t there supposed to be a Office iPad app “rumored” for the iPad 3?
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