What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote? • Hacker News Board

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#101

Post by gpdpocketer » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:06 PM UTC

alankay wrote: post #76

radicaldreamer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm curious about is what is the Parc Alto of today?

A very important question! I don't know the answer, but I think it would be something that included FPGAs -- Intel has been making interesting hybrid chips that combine an ARM variant with a lot of FPGA real estate, and that would likely be a good basis.

What are your thoughts on the home-grown effort to produce small, portable .. and open .. computing devices, as represented by such as the Pyra Handheld and so on?

http://pyra-handheld.com/

Earlier iterations of the machines supported by this community utilized ARM-based CPU's that had smaller cores onboard that could be repurposed for other things .. audio and video codecs, 3d engines and so on.. maybe you have yet to see the Pyra/Pandora classes of devices?

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#102

Post by goshx » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:15 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #81

sincerely wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

books can last decades. an ipad absolutely won’t.

ebooks can migrate from ipad to ipad (or any other system) without any damage to their contents. books can't.

And you can create backups of them

And you can search through the content

And you can carry thousands or millions of them in a single device

And you can add a new one to your collection without having to physically go anywhere to buy

And you can draw and make marks without damaging the content forever

And you can create bookmarks in multiple ebooks and have them all available at the same location, also with search functionallity

And the device you use to read can be lighter than an actual book, at least it will always have the same weight regardless of how many ebooks you carry

There is probably more.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#103

Post by goshx » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:17 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #93

coldtea wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a starting point, can you quote any evidence that a tablet is better than a paper book? Both for reading and for more general educational activities? Have we regressed to the point where the simplest statement requires third party ("scientific" references)? A table offers 100x the functionality of a paper book. Even just in reading mode, it can carry 1000s of books in it, one can take notes, highlight, search th…

I meant, "a tablet". A table offers different kinds of functionality...

Still 100x the functionallity of a paperbook

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#104

Post by Fnoord » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:20 PM UTC

greglindahl wrote: post #46

ekianjo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are better devices for reading. Objectively.

And the source you are citing is... ? And it would have to be a lot better to be the obvious choice for 100% of readers that some folks in this thread appear to think that it is.

E-readers, for example. The battery lasts far and far longer, they're a lot cheaper (at least 50% of the price), and probably lighter. Source: my own experience with them two Kobo devices.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#105

Post by Fnoord » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #38

greglindahl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I read on a tablet all of the time, I guess that makes me a prisoner of hype! Minority view, yes.

Education is not about just reading, but regardless - you know what's better for reading than an iPad? A paper book . And if your concern is weight, you know what combines the best qualities of a paper book and a tablet? An e-book reader with e-Ink display. (This is sad, really. As I understand, e-Ink tech is patented to death, so there's little progress there.) Still, I'm not saying iPads are useless in general. The…

Good points, but if children resort to Android devices I am not sure that makes me happy given they fall pray to advertising and profiling.

An e-reader has some disadvantages compared to a tablet. For example, it does not have a capacitive screen and does not have the ability to draw (low refresh rate) or use a stylus as input. It is a great tool for reading and it does that better than any other device (if you agree with its advantages over paper book which is weight vs amount of content) but not for say practice and exams.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#106

Post by axaxs » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

greglindahl wrote: post #56

axaxs wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a k12 student? If not, why are you replying at all? Anyone who asserts that iPads are a good choice for education are completely out of touch at best, or ignorant at worst. I'm sorry if this borders on a personal attack, but it feels like you're just looking for a reason to be offended.

I'm not offended, so if that's what you're reacting to, now you know. Instead, I was giving a personal anecdote in reaction to a statement which looked like an over-generalization. My nieces and nephews were k12 when I gave them tablets. Apparently I missed the news that tablets were terrible 100% of the time! Which appears to be what you're saying, but I can't really tell, what with all the names you called me. "Out…

Perhaps we are looking at it from two different angles. It seems you may be looking at it from the 'educational to have one', while i'm looking at it from feasibility at an institutional level, which I thought OP was referring to. I know nothing about ipads, so I'm not questioning it as a device. What I'm questioning is why anyone thinks it is realistic for schools to spend the money on the, vs similar options at a fraction of the cost. Teachers in multiple states are walking out over pay, right now. Teachers in most states are underpaid. Most students are on free lunches. Where does the money come from to buy kids an ipad? Seems the state doesn't have it, nor the parents.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#107

Post by fsloth » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

enitihas wrote: post #94

TeMPOraL wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this subthread is getting out of hand... My assertion is in context of education . If you're going to use a tablet as an electronic version of paper books, then paper books are better, because: - they're much faster to skim through and search through - print has better resolution than screen - you can actually make notes on them - I mean free-form notes, made in an efficient way - you can pull out multiple books…

How on earth are paper books faster to search through?

Not OP but I can second this. When I have a really hard topic I need to understand that requires rapid context switching to check on details nothing beats a book. Highlighters and post it book marks make it much faster to browse through than PDF on my IPad.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#108

Post by chiph » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

alankay wrote: post #66

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #7

> (the Mac was done in 1984, 11 years after the more powerful and capable Parc Alto, which started working in 1973). I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sure, the Alto may have been more powerful, but if it was financially out of reach of almost everybody, it'…

We understood Moore's Law, so it made sense in the early 70s to make a personal computer in 1973 that would have the power of much less expensive personal computers 10 or more years later. Why? Because the new SW and UI takes a lot of work to invent -- this allowed us to show Steve "the 80s" in 1979. (Worth pondering this way of going about things.) What was disappointing is that the market couldn't value personal co…

I was able to buy an Apple ][+ with my high school job at a supermarket. The Lisa was amazing (when it came out a few years later) but obviously not affordable by me. ;) Nor the Macintosh when I was on military pay a few years after that. Maybe I wasn't their target market by then. :(

But I don't think the Lisa was right for the corporate market either - since it didn't have connectivity to the firm's mainframe or midrange. On the Lisa, you had a mouse port, parallel port, and two serial ports. The serial ports could have worked, but IIRC the SNA network stack needed wasn't on the Lisa (and Apple would have been quite hostile to IBM if they'd tried to add it). So firms would have had to share data via sneakernet, and that was the same thing they'd been doing with their Apple ]['s for several years now -- so the 10x price difference wasn't worth it, even if the UI was gorgeous.

There was also the matter of the installed base of machines the company might have had. The Apple ][ used standard Shugart 5-1/4" mechanisms, but the Lisa (originally) used their new FileWare "Twiggy" drives which placed the top/bottom heads on opposite ends of the diskette. So information couldn't be shared between Lisa and Apple ][ users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_FileWare

Also - this may be my only chance to say Thank You for your work. So .. Thank you very much.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#109

Post by JKCalhoun » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:50 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #7

> (the Mac was done in 1984, 11 years after the more powerful and capable Parc Alto, which started working in 1973). I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sure, the Alto may have been more powerful, but if it was financially out of reach of almost everybody, it'…

Irritating? Not me. A bit of braggadocio? Sure. But I'll allow him that.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#110

Post by tambre » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:50 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #89

da02 wrote: post #16

What is it about Quora that draws so many prestigious people to answer?

The same reason Facebook took off like it did. In Facebook's case, it was famously harvard.edu. A lot of people want to belong to or participate in exclusive clubs. Something other people are widely excluded from. The commons is Answers.com or Yahoo Answers. The people writing junk and spam questions & answers on Yahoo Answers, are not participating on Quora. In Quora's case, it was that it originated / spread out of…

> similar to why Stack Overflow isn't overflowing with trash despite its immense scale

Oh boy. You haven't checked out the newest questions page on SO, have you? There are oh so many new low-quality questions. That said, they're mostly so badly written, that they rarely show up on Google. But if you're actually trying to answer questions, then good luck finding any worth answering.

I simply gave up answering questions unless I stumble upon them while googling.