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+--- Thread: The iPad (/showthread.php?tid=5643)
The iPad - Unreadphilosophy - 2nd April 2010
http://www.apple.com/ipad/
Apple's newest toy will be hitting the market in just a few hours.
I honestly don't know how I feel about this thing. It's basically an Ipod Touch that's been increased in size. Also, the machine doesn't do anything that my netbook can't. Surf the web? Of course. Picture slide shows? You bet your sweet ass. Stream videos? You betcha ya.
There are two things that really turn me off to this thing: the memory and price. 500 dollars for 64 gb of memory? Uh, this isn't the 90s, Apple. I can buy a 600 gb desktop for $200 dollars less than your little touchscreen.
Overall, the thing does look pretty cool. However, I don't feel the price and memory justifies me forking over that much money.
What do you guys think?
The iPad - A Black Falcon - 2nd April 2010
I don't like Apple. The Apple II I have a bit of nostalgia for from elementary school, but other than that... no, I don't like Apple...
As for the actual thing, let's just say that I'm not anywhere near any of the target markets of the thing, with how I hate cellphones, don't care about portable music players, don't have a wi-fi modem (this is why I don't play my DS online), etc. :)
The iPad - Weltall - 2nd April 2010
I agree with our resident technology troglodyte, but for different reasons.
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 2nd April 2010
I think one day ABF will create a new society, "Amish II: Electric Boogaloo", which is like the Amish except it's permanently locked into the 1980's instead of the 1800's.
Yes that is the best name for a way of life you've ever heard.
The iPad... Not really interested. It's odd, I've seen all those Pads in Star Trek all the time, and they seemed cool, but now I just don't care. One day maybe, once they iron out the various issues with digitally distributed books (compressing my library from shelves onto a single pad would be a great convenience, and I doubt I'd ever go back to the paper format after that), but not today. As of right now, it's nothing more than an inflated iPod Touch, and I didn't bother with that either.
Even the Star Trek pads have standard controls instead of just a touch screen.
It's awesome that we live in an age where we can seriously compare and contrast the feature sets of real world tech with frickin' STAR TREK tech. For example, Star Trek "communicators" are hilariously outdated now.
The iPad - Weltall - 2nd April 2010
That's what happens when sci-fi writers lack a proper vision of the future.
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 2nd April 2010
In the sense that we'd have established permanent colonies outside of Earth by now, yeah, way off. However, keep in mind that those pads and communicators did accurately predict current tech. It really demonstrates more that they just weren't forward thinking ENOUGH. They never expected awesome 3D graphics would be so commonplace you could stick it in your pocket, for example, hence all those laughably outdated graphical "models" they point to all the time.
Also, instead of the physical hardware, that is robots, we've put far more development into raw software capability. That's part of the reason why modern Megaman is the "Battle Network" series with programs on the internet.
Heck, come to think of it, notice that all those Starships seem almost completely cut off from any sort of galactic sized network? At best they have a sort of rudimentary phone system set up, but no real internet to speak of. Too many episodes have someone complaining about how "our ship's database doesn't have any information on that", the sort of problem a Federation Internet could solve instantly. Heck, how many episodes could be solved if all the Federation engineers on all Starships could just instantly communicate and work with each other? Come across an ancient alien asteroid defense system that's mysteriously modified the phase variance of your warp drive so you can't escape? Call up all the star ships that AREN'T currently going through this surprisingly regular bulltonk and have a roundtable discussion!
The iPad - Weltall - 2nd April 2010
Honestly, the concept of a ubiquitous global network, to say nothing of its obvious evolution into an interplanetary/galactic network, seemed to completely elude most science fiction prior to the Internet.
The thing is, there isn't much in the way of common technology in Star Trek's 24th century that doesn't already exist today, even in experimental stages. FTL travel remains merely theoretical, but the rudiments of matter teleportation and replication exist.
Worse, even though the Star Trek series spans more than a century of in-universe time, there is little real difference in technology from beginning to end. It's absolutely inconceivable that technological advancement would be so stagnant considering how rapid it is today.
The iPad - Weltall - 2nd April 2010
Heh.
![[Image: 1268430770-25091.jpg]](http://www.gamers.ba/slikadana/1268430770-25091.jpg)
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 2nd April 2010
One thing that bugs me is how Star Trek, and other Sci-fi, making "scanning" work like magic. You can't just fire a "scan beam" at a planet and "lock onto his DNA signature". DNA doesn't give off energy like that, and any electromagnetism powerful enough to do a planetary scan for DNA would probably break it apart too. They can't "sniff" it out either, it's frickin' space. The way you examine an object is to use some sort of reaction( chemical, energy, physical, something) and more or less bounce it off the object. It depends on previously known behavior of how a specific thing interacts with that sort of scan. It also bugs me when they can physically see something, and their tricorder says "there's nothing there". Well obviously you should be able to at least detect frickin' LIGHT, because that's how your eyes work.
We don't have any rudiments of teleportation or replication. Recently some scientists have managed to do some "spooky action at a distance", and at a quantum level, things do kinda "teleport" into positions, but that's a far far cry from macro scale Star Trek transporters. In fact, there's really no way to build up these tests TO such a thing. I think there's a lot more hope in wormholes, and that's considering those can actually exist. They're predicted, and so far relativity holds up to a lot of other predictions, but it could very well just be a mathematical artifact and not something reality actually allows. Further, even if we can make a wormhole, the issue of the sheer gravitational sheering tearing apart anything getting close to either entrance needs to be overcome.
Matter replicating, well to a very small extent we can replicate CERTAIN things, but it depends on very specific chemical reactions that ONLY work for those things. We'd need to build a new reaction from the ground up for each thing we wanted built, and really complicated stuff, like a freshly cooked pizza or "gakh", just aren't going to happen like that. Firstly, we'd need to destroy one real pizza to actually scan what we're going to make. Secondly, laying down each new thing would take a lot of work. Assuming ALL this work is done in advance, maybe, but it'll never be like on Star Trek. A more efficient method would be biologically growing a self cooking pizza tree, with some sort of hyper metabolism. Even then, each one would need to be individually designed.
As much as I'd love to see a lot of those things, the real world doesn't seem to oblige us. There's no real explanation on how transporters, a solution to the problem of low budgets for taking off and landing to begin with, even work. How do you "convert someone entirely to energy" without them simply exploding, and keep track of it, and do it all remotely with a laser beam from space. Or, how would you scan the entirety of someone's body, without damaging it, while it is moving (heart beating, blood flowing, you can't stop that easily without harm), and somehow magically "destroy" the original to make your data copy with some sort of magical replicator, back on the starship.
I think we may very well be able to create a paradise on Earth with a post-scarcity economic, where we're provided for not by the sweat of our brow or by the government collecting everyone's wages, but simply by a vast automated system maintained by more automated systems. So long as that system doesn't become self aware and destroy humanity, it'll be great. It won't resemble Star Trek though. It'll be genetically modified super-gardens, some super-fast public transport system that's always available (tubes like Futurama?), and people working because they want to, since the machines won't be programmed to prevent us from doing what we enjoy. Crimes, aside from only being motivated by sociopathy, not slum lifestyles, would be far harder to pull off, not least because it's hard to kill someone who's brain is stored in a cloud networking solution.
Of course that's all blind speculation, but IF we ever have anything like a paradise, I think that'll be what it most resembles. A future Star Trek reboot (and I mean a real reboot, not just splitting off a new parallel universe like the movie did, where original Spock can literally pal around with alternate Spock, and I assume in the future they may even have Picard or Sisko show up, but not Janeway) would more resemble this. The big question then, if it's a trek in the stars, is how to actually GET to the stars without time dilation being a problem. Maybe it'll never be doable. In a real sense, the "future" of those stars doesn't even exist here until 4 years from now (at the closest star other than the sun), not just that we can't see that future, but that right here, their future doesn't even exist, so we go there, we don't exist to Earth for 4 years. I really doubt that long term space travel will be done by modern humans too. It's more likely we'll have modified versions that are specifically adapted to a zero G environment do the job.
Oh yeah, and those forehead aliens... Next Generation had ONE episode that tried to explain it, with the revelation that all humanoid races in the galaxy were the result of a single original humanoid species seeding thousands of worlds with genes to "force" evolution of at least one branch to become humanoid. I loved that, until they decided to NEVER talk about that again. They did come up with some truly alien aliens, like those founders, but that only stood to really demonstrate just how uninteresting their various variations of humanoids had become. You can only introduce so many "warrior races" before it gets stale. I want some truly alien psychology, like those bird/plant things in that one old story that thought in terms of, for example, every single word said follows rules describing the ENTIRE situation, so that as you move through a day, you use different words to describe an object. THAT was interesting alien design. It's also why whenever someone talks about "the greys" as something that seriously exists and visits us, I just have to laugh. Sure artistically, they're pretty interesting, and it's a part of our culture, and all that, but really, a hominid? That's the best you could do?
Well enough of all that. All that said, I still like Next Generation :D.
Oh, and I suppose the next part of that series is the iHouse? I still have no idea what the "i" stands for.
The iPad - Unreadphilosophy - 2nd April 2010
Quote:I still have no idea what the "i" stands for.With the amount of money that Apple charges for their products, I'm going to say idiot.
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 2nd April 2010
Heh, but I truly want to know though. Did they just tack it on or does it actually mean something? I had considered "internet" but many "i" devices have no online functionality at all.
The iPad - Weltall - 2nd April 2010
Quote:We don't have any rudiments of teleportation or replication.
Certainly not as Star Trek depicts such technologies, no. But, then again, if FTL travel is ever devised, assuming some subversion of Einsteinian principles, do you really think it's going to involve dilithium crystals?
Given my belief that a person will, eventually, no longer need to be tied to a specific physical body, teleportation would be reduced to sending a packet of information comprising the vital data which make up a person's unique intelligence/persona from Pt. A to Pt. B, whereupon it can, if needed, be installed into a physical shell constructed at the remote location. And, with nanoassemblers capable of those kinds of feats, the concept of replication is already rendered obsolete.
The iPad - A Black Falcon - 2nd April 2010
Quote:Heck, come to think of it, notice that all those Starships seem almost completely cut off from any sort of galactic sized network? At best they have a sort of rudimentary phone system set up, but no real internet to speak of. Too many episodes have someone complaining about how "our ship's database doesn't have any information on that", the sort of problem a Federation Internet could solve instantly. Heck, how many episodes could be solved if all the Federation engineers on all Starships could just instantly communicate and work with each other? Come across an ancient alien asteroid defense system that's mysteriously modified the phase variance of your warp drive so you can't escape? Call up all the star ships that AREN'T currently going through this surprisingly regular bulltonk and have a roundtable discussion!
Star Wars does have HoloNet... it's described somewhere as having been extremely expensive to set up, because it's a Republic-wide network it requires a lot of hardware to work... lots of floating transmission relays, etc. I know it sort of just seems like a phone thing, but I'm pretty sure it's internet too, or at least they added that to it after the web got popular. :) I think it was there from the start though, really.
But that does relate to my point -- people can't really predict the future. We can guess based on what current circumstances are, but we can't guess accurately the way things will go in the future. People trying to guess the future usually end up wrong, because things usually do not go as we think they will, as you have described. As a result of that it's natural that sci-fi shows will not really reflect the future. They can't, the people creating them had no idea what the future would be like! I don't hold that against them; how should they possibly have been expected to guess the future, when we know humans really can't do that?
Sci-fi shows are more about the time that they were made in than really about the future, really. I love them anyway, but it's true.
Oh yeah, and as you pretty much say, transporters and forehead aliens are just budget things. I'm not sure about transporters (why not have them, it's science fiction), but for forehead aliens, I completely agree that the whole concept is utterly absurd.
Of course, we only know life as we know it, so we can't really predict what form aliens would really look like... that is part of the explanation. But they don't even try, they just use humans with bumpy foreheads. Sigh... just like with medieval fantasy videogames and movies and such, it's one of many things that reminds me of how much more accurate books are than any movies or games. Fantasy books often actually create believable, realistic medieval fantasy style worlds. Games and films... pretty much never, you usually end up with inane random mishmashes of stuff aimed at being something the current mass market will find acceptably familiar and that make no sense if you think about them for two seconds, which of course you are not supposed to do. The same goes for sci-fi, really. There's a huge gulf between the books and movies or games. At least with sci-fi there are a few movies which come closer, but with fantasy even that's sketchy...
You care about silly the science, I care about the silly cultures and societies. Makes sense that I've mostly studied history and politics in college, doesn't it. :)
Weltall Wrote:Honestly, the concept of a ubiquitous global network, to say nothing of its obvious evolution into an interplanetary/galactic network, seemed to completely elude most science fiction prior to the Internet.
The internet's existed since like the 1960s, though... the web is not the internet, it's just one facet of it. Of course pre-web the internet was quite different and very very very much less popular, but it was there.
The iPad - Weltall - 2nd April 2010
The very fact that the old ARPANET eventually transformed into the modern Internet insists that people with this vision were definitely out there. I'm simply surprised that the idea rarely manifested in sci-fi of the era. The primitive state of the Web is immaterial. H. G. Wells was describing concepts like interplanetary space travel and energy weapons years before the discovery of manned flight and more than half a century before the invention of the laser.
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 2nd April 2010
Weltall Wrote:Certainly not as Star Trek depicts such technologies, no. But, then again, if FTL travel is ever devised, assuming some subversion of Einsteinian principles, do you really think it's going to involve dilithium crystals?
Given my belief that a person will, eventually, no longer need to be tied to a specific physical body, teleportation would be reduced to sending a packet of information comprising the vital data which make up a person's unique intelligence/persona from Pt. A to Pt. B, whereupon it can, if needed, be installed into a physical shell constructed at the remote location. And, with nanoassemblers capable of those kinds of feats, the concept of replication is already rendered obsolete.
Hey cool I've thought of exactly that! I suppose if all you care about is getting your mind somewhere else, that could be considered teleportation. I was thinking actually bringing physical matter from one place to another though.
As for nanoassembly, again you'll need a specific set of nanoassemblers, or at least a very diverse set with specific instrutions, for every single type of thing you might want to assemble. As for how feasible it is, well we are LIVING proofs of concept. Cells basically ARE nanoassemblers, however keep in mind that even after millions of years of selection, it still takes months to years for large things to develop, and very specific compounds. Remember that making molecules is a lot easier than making atoms, and making atoms unleashes a lot of energy, which presents certain problems. That's one of the limitations of us organics, we don't have fusion and fission reactors in our bodies, so if we want something basic like iron or calcium, we've got to scrounge it up ourselves. Earth's got the same amount of those base elements as when it first congealed. (Cue "made of star stuff" speech.) Fortunatly after millions of years, all the iron and calcium and so on on the surface seems to be in the great food chain, ready for us to eat it.
Ya know, one thing about Star Trek is the complete lack of genetic alteration. Apparently this is because of Star Trek's eugenics wars with Kahn and so on, but I'd think in the real world we'd be able to do it more responsibly. There's this Outer Limits episode where people genetically altered themselves to the point where they couldn't breed, leading to extinction, but that's kinda short sighted isn't it? Let's say such a scenario as "inability to breed" actually happened. Certainly a society capable of genetically altering themselves to that degree could simply genetically alter a large group to BE capable of breeding.
The big desire to explore space and colonize other worlds has declined a lot. I can understand the want to get our own planet in order before bothering other worlds, but eventually we're going to want to expand, at least I'd think so.
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 2nd April 2010
It's true HG Wells described space travel and "energy weapons", but he can hardly be said to have "forseen" any of it. He could never have actually done it, and the details are very important. What HG Wells established was simply that people wanted to explore, and as we find out more about things, we find out about more places we aren't but would like to stick a flag. Energy weapons for him were just beams. Those universal "beams" of the old silver age of comics where you just "found the right frequency" and you could CONTROL PEOPLE'S MINDS. He hardly predicted lasers. It's easy to form fit modern inventions onto past stories and say "they predicted it", but it's the same sort of loose force fit that Nostradamus prophecies "work" by. No one's looking at Journey to the Center of the Earth as a prediction, because as it turns out the underground is full of liquid fire, not ancient subterranean mole men and dinosaurs.
At the same time, I can certainly appreciate it on the level of people who just loved to imagine what COULD lie at the edges of that era's knowledge, and then inventing a narritive to capture other's imagination, and say "but just think, what is REALLY down there? wouldn't you love to find out?". There may not be any deep cave systems or mole men, but the reality is still very compelling, an explanation of what causes the very ground to shake, volcanos to burst, and a compelling history of how the very land masses of the planet have shifted. We now know the moon is made of Earth, from some ancient collision.
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 2nd April 2010
I've read a lot of HP Lovecraft lately. He certainly knew how to make truly bizarre alien societies, with full histories discovered in very unusual monuments, designed around their alien bodies and really inhospitable to us humans.
Now it seems there may have been a 3rd hominid group alive at the same time as neandertals and homosapians. Interesting, though considering how much invented hatreds we can come up with with something as dumb as skin color, I wonder just what would have happened had they stuck around as long as we have, actually truly thinking somewhat differently at least at the level of a typical Star Trek alien.
The iPad - A Black Falcon - 2nd April 2010
Yeah, and his spaceship got out of earth orbit by being shot out of a giant cannon, and they opened the windows up there in space and stuff... :)
Still, considering most of what people thought at that time it was amazing work. There's no way he could have known those missing things... but that was my point, people can't really guess the future because guessing about what we don't know isn't something humans do that well.
Quote:Now it seems there may have been a 3rd hominid group alive at the same time as neandertals and homosapians. Interesting, though considering how much invented hatreds we can come up with with something as dumb as skin color, I wonder just what would have happened had they stuck around as long as we have, actually truly thinking somewhat differently at least at the level of a typical Star Trek alien.
The question is, did they just die off or did Homo Sapiens finish them off...
Either way, that does make me think of that season of Enterprise where the enemies were from that planet with four or five completely different species that all live on the same planet. As mediocre as the show was, that at least was an interesting concept...
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 2nd April 2010
Remember you are personally at fault for it being cancelled :D.
There's some evidence of a small group of humans meeting neanderthals, but from everything I've read the evidence tends more towards neanderthals dying, if anything, indirectly from simply not being able to compete with humans. They stuck with local families, and humans were starting up clans and networks between other clans. There's also some evidence of some limited trade between the two groups. As for this new group, it's just been discovered, there's no way to know if humans had anything to do with it.
It's sure interesting that we like making "slightly different" sorts of humans so much in our fiction. From dwarves and elves to forehead aliens, we like tweaking ourselves slightly into alternate species and then having us interact with them a lot. Heck, superintelligent AI and robots are simply the latest example. I think the earliest example are "elemental spirits"...
The iPad - Unreadphilosophy - 2nd April 2010
People, people, people! How did we get to Star Trek and Lovecraft in a thread about an Apple product?
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 2nd April 2010
Well I thought about the data pads in Star Trek, and welcome to Tendo City.
The iPad - Great Rumbler - 2nd April 2010
Weltall Wrote:The very fact that the old ARPANET eventually transformed into the modern Internet insists that people with this vision were definitely out there. I'm simply surprised that the idea rarely manifested in sci-fi of the era. The primitive state of the Web is immaterial. H. G. Wells was describing concepts like interplanetary space travel and energy weapons years before the discovery of manned flight and more than half a century before the invention of the laser.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep touched briefly on the concept of a kind of global network. It wasn't a central plot point but the network, dubbed "Mercer" based on the name of the figure who was central to the network, that allowed people to share emotions through their Mercer boxes with other people who also had their Mercer boxes turned on. Basic stuff, but the concept was there.
The iPad - Geno - 3rd April 2010
The iPad looks so uninspiring. It's a giant iPhone without the phone, or a Netbook with a touchscreen that you can hook a keyboard or mouse too, essentially turning it into a computer. As I already own a Droid (similar enough to an iPhone) and a laptop computer, I have no interest in owning an iPad whatsoever. Plus, the thing is just... ugly. Since when did technology start getting bigger again? I thought the philosophy behind the modern technological revolution was that smaller is better. Steve Jobs sure showed me, eh?
The iPad - Weltall - 6th April 2010
I am posting this on an iPad at Best Buy. To be honest, it is a rather handy little gadget, and typing on it is surprisingly not so bad this is the 16gb model and costs $700. If it cost, say, $200, I'd almost say it'd be worth having.
The iPad - lazyfatbum - 7th April 2010
The "i" simply means personal, its your identity, an extension of yourself. The i means you, even literally with the shape of the lowercase i relating to a person.
I laughed too.
The word bed looks like a bed from the side.
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 7th April 2010
If that's the case lazy, that's really insulting. I is supposed to be in upper case. If they're referring to us in the lower case, they really must think of us as mere money fodder.
The iPad - Unreadphilosophy - 7th April 2010
Ryan,
The touchscreen keyboard works well? That's surprising. I may be a little bias with that statement. I've tried using the touchscreen keyboard on the iphone. Trust me: it's a painful endeavor.
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 7th April 2010
Wow, bed does look like a bed from the side... well those old beds with footboards anyway. Bed looks like one with a massive headboard with shelves and stuff.
bed
BeD
A bunkbed.
The iPad - Weltall - 8th April 2010
Unreadphilosophy Wrote:Ryan,
The touchscreen keyboard works well? That's surprising. I may be a little bias with that statement. I've tried using the touchscreen keyboard on the iphone. Trust me: it's a painful endeavor.
It works better than on the iPhone, primarily because it's easier to be accurate on a larger surface.
However, it's still nowhere near as intuitive as a normal keyboard under normal conditions, because you still have to type one-handed, and you still have to open up sub-menus to locate most punctuation and numbers.
People who think this is going to kill the laptop (or netbook) are painfully deluded. It's still not going to be seen as a serious piece of equipment for business use. It's a toy, and like almost everything else Apple manufactures, it's vastly overpriced for its level of actual functionality.
The iPad - lazyfatbum - 8th April 2010
...So why do we all want one?
DJ/ dont be surprised. Wii uses the same idea, the two ii's bow like Japanese men (or performers who are bowing) in the Wii's animated logo. In Nintendo's first advertising campaign the ii's actually ran around like people themselves mimicking the gestures of the launch titles.
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 8th April 2010
I suppose I just don't get it. An i is kinda, a weird looking person to put it mildly. I guess it kinda looks like a midgit with a floating head, no arms and one leg.
The iPad - lazyfatbum - 10th April 2010
OK <--- A person
The iPad - Dark Jaguar - 10th April 2010
?