Yesterday, while I was off in Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill, one of my colleagues, Magnetic Inductance Force, sent me this article [Link] by Jason Hiner entitled “Tablets: What Amazon and Apple know that all the CES tablet peddlers are still missing”.
What they are missing is slavery.
In effect, what Mr. (?) Hiner is proposing is that the iPud and the Kindled Smolder are not tools but chains, or perhaps, more correctly, tasp appliances, with apologies to Dr. Niven.
This certainly explains a lot of my ambiguity and uncertainty about the devices. I had about settled on the hypothesis that the tablet is much like swimming, that until one is thrown off the end of the pier into deep water and has to learn to swim or sink into the depths, one cannot grok swimming.
So until one lives with a tablet one cannot grok tablet?
Hiner’s thesis however, is that the tablet is fundamentally a prosthesis of bogs, and not very intelligent ones at that, a pipeline for carefully selected and censored content that is under the control of an organization of which the user is not a member, much less a master.
Waiting is, with apologies to the Grand Master. Cogitation is necessary.
