>>>>>>>something like the mi2 or mi3 from xiaomi sound more interesting. Have you had such in your hands ?
>>>>>
>>>>>They'll ship to you via Merimobiles or DealExtreme. I have 4 devices currently. Zopo C2 Platinum probably my favourite. I prefer iPad to the tablets, very latest phablets are amazing.
>>>>
>>>>I was an excellent dad on Friday and gave my younger daughter an iPad for her 21st birthday. At first she said she didn't know what she would use it for. Like most tablet users I have known, she quickly found uses she didn't know she had.
>>>>
>>>>Charles H., please forgive me, but here is another tribute to Apple. For one company to come up with the Apple II, the Mac, the iMac, the iPhone, and the iPad, that's amazing. Here is the visionary in top form. (Neither he nor Woz could have done it without the other. They literally met in a garage).
>>>>
>>>>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftf4riVJyqw>>>
>>>Not as amazing at it might seem.
>>>Take a look at what HP has done since its founding -also in a garage- or Intel - a few brilliant guys with an idea.
>>>
>>>HP especially. It blows my mind when I think of what that company did.
>>>It's a shame that that great company lost its way when the founders passed on.
>>>
>>>The most under-applauded company though.. is those guys who all wore blue suits... IBM.
>>>Just about everything we do is based on architecture developed first by IBM on mainframes.
>>>Data channels, priority interrupts, virtual memory, multi-threading, the wide application of the serial port (RS232), DOS (Disk Operating System - even the word "byte" are inherited from IBM 360 and 370 concepts of the 60's and 70's.
>>>If you look closely at the original IBM PC, you'll see an IBM 370 drastically reduced in size to a few chips and an MS DOS that closely resembles the DOS that shipped with the IBM 370.
>>>
>>>
>>>Trivia question:
>>>Does anyone know what the "RS" in RS232 stands for?
>>
>>I respect you but it astounds me that you consider the original PC a milestone product. It did legitimize the PC market to corporate America, true. But there was nothing revolutionary about it and it was nothing like a 370. If you want to debate IBM mainframes, I'll BXLE that ;-)
>
>I think the technical and the business decisions have to be separated in order to make sense of computing in the 80s. Apple was technically wonderful. The business decision to control every aspect of the hardware and software marginalized it.
>
>CPM was a good OS but Gary K. was ... Gary K.
>
>IBM did make corporate America at least think about PCs ("Nobody every got fired for buying IBM") but blew in not getting an exclusive on the OS and enabling the clone market, nearly lost the farm on micro channel architecture which was a great technical innovation but a bad business call.
>
>Amiga blew the doors off of everything that was out there and could have easily sidelined Apple - if Steve Jobs had been running Commodore. I was part of a flagship Amiga users group in 87 when the 500 cam out and we couldn't get anyone from Commodore - which was located about 3 miles from where we met - to send anyone over to talk to us. Software developers were pretty much on their own. Europe loved it, but the American marketing and community support was amazingly bad.
I favored the Atari ST1040 as the ideal business machine: running DR's GEM OS "the second operating system that runs on everything" (meaning on the Atari ST and the IBM PC). Starting in '86 I ran dBMan on the ST, and then on my first IBM clone.
