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?

#81

Post by coldtea » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 8:11 AM UTC

sincerely wrote: post #47

greglindahl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. As a highly educated person, I had no idea I was choosing inferior tools! Thanks for letting me know. I gave all my nieces and nephews tablets, and they all used them, I hope I didn’t destroy their lives. Seriously, I have a hard time believing you can quote any evidence that a paper book is much better than a tablet for everyone. Which appears to be your assertion, although it’s hard to tell.

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.

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

#82

Post by firmgently » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 8:22 AM UTC

jasonkostempski wrote: post #18

GuiA wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know students who have written essays, put together presentations, etc solely on their phones. If you really believe that the only thing “younger generations” do is post on social media, I suggest you spend more time around high schoolers (for example), particularly those with limited financial means.

I phrased my comment specifically trying to avoid sounding like I was saying that's the only thing they do. Guess I didn't do it right. It's awesome that those with limited funds can still get stuff done, and phones are great for consuming information, but I don't think there's much argument against the efficiency gain that hardware keyboards, mice and larger screens with multiple windows give when you get into thing…

It read fine to me. I didn't read any implication that young people don't do anything more complicated than social media posts - only that when do they could use a larger device.

(sorry I know posts like this don't make interesting reading, I just know how frustrating it can be when you put effort into writing something to avoid being misunderstood but still get taken the wrong way... so wanted to point out that at least for this reader the negative connotation was not there)

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

#83

Post by icc97 » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 8:39 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #60

sincerely wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have a printed book that's the same age as the U.S. constitution (now 231 years) and another printed book that's a few decades older (293 years), both of which are still completely legible. "Decades" feels like a big understatement to me. :-) We mostly think of paper as a poor archival medium because of a few decades, mainly at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, when high-acid wood…

I bought Heisenberg's quantum theory paper back from a second hand shop. It's 90 years old and in amazing condition with just sun damage to the spine. The pages are sewn together.

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

#84

Post by rhaps0dy » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 8:59 AM UTC

schtitt wrote: post #70

make3 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- e-ink has garbage level latency, which makes it useless for anything even slightly dynamic, including educational videos of course - e-ink doesn't have color, color is helpful in educational material to make it friendly and accessible - there are outlets everywhere, so unless you're going camping, the battery life is not that big of an advantage, more of a slight convenience thing all of these points are why tablet…

The ReMarkable has, by some black magic, managed to reduce the latency by quite a lot compared to, say, a Kindle.

Only for writing, not for getting to the next page.

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

#85

Post by BjoernKW » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 9:03 AM 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…

There were machines like the Commodore C64 - and later to some extent the Amiga as well - that more fully embraced and valued computing in that they booted into an environment which allowed you to create programs right away.

With the C64 in particular there was no real distinction between the operating system and the programming language, the programming language actually WAS the operating system. The machine booted into an empty canvas for you to create something with.

I still find that idea fascinating. Absurdly enough, the closest we've come to this again afterwards is Microsoft Excel. A spreadsheet application today is the closest general purpose computing equivalent to 'an empty canvas everyone can use to create something with right away'.

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

#86

Post by akvadrako » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 9:04 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #41

jaysonelliot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPad that could rule the world hasn't been made yet. Once iOS and OS X completely merge, then we'll see. It's sized for creating things, but running the OS of a device made for consuming things.

It has been, it's called Microsoft Surface. It's sized for creating things and is running on the OS made for productive work. But it's expensive and made by a company that's not very much liked by people.

It also has bad reviews and details like that really matter.

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

#87

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 9:33 AM UTC

greglindahl wrote: post #45

TeMPOraL wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow. As a highly educated person, I had no idea I was choosing inferior tools! Thanks for letting me know. I gave all my nieces and nephews tablets, and they all used them, I hope I didn’t destroy their lives. Seriously, I have a hard time believing you can quote any evidence that a paper book is much better than a tablet for everyone. Which appears to be your assertion, although it’s hard to tell.

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 and compare them

- they're much nicer on your eyes

Note again, I'm talking about education. That's different from recreational reading of fiction, and more akin to reading technical books - you need the ability to skim, skip, quickly move around and cross-reference stuff separated from each other by many pages.

Now tablets could be better if electronic textbooks actually exploited the medium they're using - the way Bret Victor has been talking about for ages now. See e.g. http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ or http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt... (just got on HN frontpage, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16836530). However, I'm yet to see that happening in the wild.

Ultimately, my point isn't that tablets are bad. Hell, I'm happy user of such devices, and they definitely help me read on the go (they beat Kindle for technical books, due to color and better workflow with PDFs). My point is that tablets get dumped on schools and are used to view textbooks, which is something at which they're worse than regular textbooks. Both teachers and publishers have little clue on how to use these devices to their full potential, and there doesn't even seem to be a movement to help them get that clue.

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

#88

Post by eecc » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 9:43 AM UTC

eitland wrote: post #77

eecc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the file format is documented, also bits remain completely legible throughout time. Perhaps we haven’t yet worked on a redundantly encoded, self documenting file format but eventually we will. At that point in time - assuming all relevant content won’t be copyrighted to death for 1000 years, that’s a big one - we will be able to simultaneously have unfettered access to any content

Disks exist in two states: - broken - about to break Even poor quality books are mostly readable after decades. I don't know for certain a single example of any of my disks that have survived since 1990ies although I could hope.

Also books exist in few states, of which only one is useful: well preserved, wet, burnt, torn apart. That’s how entropy works folks! One advantage of books is that the information density is lower so the loss of one specimen isn’t that significant, unless it’s unique

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

#89

Post by adventured » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

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 prestigious tech circles. A small group of connected, rather elite, techies out of Silicon Valley seeded the site in its early days. Those people were connected to other prestigious tech people, and so it went.

Adam D'Angelo is one of Quora's two founders, the former CTO of Facebook, and is a near-billionaire that went to Exeter with Zuckerberg and then CIT. Elite + connected.

Then last but not least, Quora enforces fairly high standards on quality, similar to why Stack Overflow isn't overflowing with trash despite its immense scale.

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

#90

Post by icc97 » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 10:57 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #35

hyperpallium wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fitting in a pocket is a great advantage for a portable device, to everyone. The market seems to be saying: if I need something that I have to lug around, I might as well have a keyboard. i.e. a laptop. Another effect is people are doing everything they can on a phone, because of the convenience. This leads to slightly larger phones every year, and now a 5.5" phone is no longer considered a "phablet", and apple is ru…

iOS and Android turn tablets into oversized phones, so no surprise they lose against phones - they have the same (or usually worse, at a given price point) capabilities while being larger, thus less convenient to carry and more fragile. These days I'm not using much Windows for desktop (HN took over the time I had for games), but I do sincerely hope this OS will live on for at least couple more years, because Microso…

Windows did try the same as Android and iOS with Windows RT, thankfully that was a disaster. Netbooks are ridiculously useful, I used to have a 15 minute bus ride to work with an Asus EEE and would manage to fill that 15 minutes with active moonlighting development time every day. The work I did on that bus became the frontend for what now 10 years later is a $50m company.

I realise I'm making a slightly different point as I'm purely talking about netbooks/laptops. But having the full power of an OS on a tablet is definitely the way to go.

Certainly that's one of the bad points about iOS and Android they are so locked down that you have to jump through hoops if you wanted to use them as a work machine.

For my current job I bought myself a $350 refurbished Thinkpad (T430 8GB SSD core i5), this brings me in all my income. You can compare this to my nephew that is paying $1000 for an iPhone X because he got bored of his iPhone 8.

Further to that I bought exactly the same spec Thinkpad for my 5 year old daughter. The Thinkpad T-series are great because you can pour a litre of liquid over them without problem [0] plus they're built like a brick, so basically perfect for kids. My daughter immediately covered the grey brick with shiny stickers and gave it a name (she has an iPad, but that's always just called 'iPad'). It has the full capability to do everything she'll ever need in theory for the rest of her life/career. Further to that it's got Ubuntu installed and I can then install Sugar [1] for her to use (the same used for One Laptop Per Child).

The possible drawback is that it doesn't have a touchscreen. But with my experiment of buying a laptop with a touch screen I found I pretty much never wanted to use the touch screen, it's a slower interface than keyboard and mouse. You want the screen in front of you at arms length but then you have to reach with your arm to touch the screen.

I can now teach her over the years what it means to have real freedom with your software and hardware.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U5n2WaMMHo

[1]: https://sugarlabs.org/