The long music piracy fight between the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Minnesota native Jammie Thomas-Rasset shows no sign of ending anytime soon.
RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth last week said the industry association is beginning preparations for a third trial in the case after Thomas-Rasset rejected a $25,000 settlement offer it made earlier this week.
In an e-mailed comment, Duckworth expressed regret at Thomas-Rasset's refusal. "It is a shame that Ms. Thomas-Rasset continues to deny any responsibility for her actions rather than accept a reasonable settlement offer and put this case behind her," Duckworth said. "Given this, we will begin preparing for a new trial."
The RIAA accused Thomas-Rasset of illegally downloading and distributing 30 copyrighted songs belonging to six music labels. Thomas-Rasset is one of thousands who have been sued for music piracy by the RIAA, but her casse is only one of two that have gone to trial. The only other case involves a Boston University post-graduate studnet who was ordered last fall to pay $675,000 for illegally distributing 24 songs.
Her first trial, which ended in October 2007, a jury found Thomas-Rasset liable for copyright infringement and ordered her to pay $222,000 in damages to the six music companies. That verdict was later overturned on technical grounds and a new trial was ordered. In the second trial, which ended last June, a federal jury again found Thomas-Rasset liable of copyright infringement but this time ordered her to pay damages of $1.92 million or nearly nine times the original award.
Thomas-Rasset promptly asked for the damages to be reduced, arguing that it was unconstitutional and disproportional to any actual damages the music labels may have suffered as a result of the music piracy.
In a ruling last week, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis of the District of Minnesota reduced the $1.92 million damage award to $54,000. The reduced award, he said, was "significant and harsh" but no longer as "monstrous and shocking" as the original award had been. Davis also said the court would never have awarded such high damages if the decision has been at his discretion, rather than decided by a jury.
Shortly after Davis' action, the RIAA offered to settle its case against Thomas-Rasset for $25,000, but only if the court was willing to vacate or modify its ruling. According to the RIAA, portions of the judge's ruling were "inconsistent with Congressional intent and the law." The RIAA said that any money collected from Thomas-Rasset would be donated to a charity to help struggling musicians.
That offer, however, was quickly rejected by Thomas-Rasset. In an e-mailed comment, Joe Sibley, one of Thomas-Rasset's attorneys, reiterated her earlier position.
"She is going forward on principle," Sibley said. "We believe the copyright damages provisions are unconstitutional because they bear no relationship to any actual harm to the copyright holders. Jammie will never agree to pay them anything and will fight until the bitter end," he said.
The judge had previously noted that if a third trial were held in the case, it would focus only on the issue of damages. The copyright law under which Thomas-Rasset was tried allows for statutory damages of between $750 and $150,000 per infringement. In the first trial, the jury held that Thomas-Rasset needed to pay $9,250 per infringed song to the music labels. The second jury ordered her to pay $80,000 per song.
Several lawyers, rights groups and even the judges in the two music piracy cases that have gone to court have questioned the constitutionality of the damages. They have said that the laws were meant to be applied against commercial copyright infringers and not individuals such as Thomas-Rasset.
Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who has defended clients in RIAA lawsuits, said today that there is no statute or rule that limits the number of possible trials in the case. "In this case the verdict was set aside because the jury was unreasonable. Who's to say the next jury won't wind up being unreasonable, too?" he asked. "Hopefully the judge will provide them with some instructions, this time, which will make it clear that they can't pull the numbers out of a hat, but have to keep the statutory damages in some reasonable relationship to the actual damages," he said.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Smallville Season 9 Episode 10
Discipline:
Oliver's former mentor, the Dark Archer, seeks revenge on his pupil and launches attacks on Chloe, Lois, and Mia as part of his plan. When Oliver is driven to his limits and beyond, Clark must come to the aid of his friend.
Oliver's former mentor, the Dark Archer, seeks revenge on his pupil and launches attacks on Chloe, Lois, and Mia as part of his plan. When Oliver is driven to his limits and beyond, Clark must come to the aid of his friend.
Rann (2010) movie
Starring:
Amitabh Bachchan ... Vijay Harshvardhan Malik
Mohnish Bahl ... Amrish Kakkar
Neetu Chandra ... Yasmin Hussain
Ritesh Deshmukh ... Purab Shastri
Rajat Kapoor ... Naveen Shankalya
Ikhlaq Khan ... Pandey's man
Suchitra Krishnamoorthi ... Nalini Kashyap
Nina Kulkarni ... Lata Malik
Alok Nath ... Dig Vijay Hooda
Gul Panag ... Nandita Sharma
Paresh Rawal ... Mohan Pandey
Simone Singh ... Priya Malik Shankalya
Sudeep ... Jai Malik
Rajpal Yadav ... Anand Prakash Trivedi
Director:
Ram Gopal Varma
Dailymotion Links:
Friday, January 29, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI Motherboard
EVGA X58 SLI Classified 4-Way SLI Motherboard
* Intel® X58 Express Chipset with the ICH10R Southbridge
* 7 PCIe Slots for 2-Way, 3-Way, 4-Way SLI or CrossFireX Support
* 10 Phase Digital PWM with Switching Frequency of 1333KHz
* Low ESR/ESL Film Capacitor
* 100% Solid State Capacitors
* EVGA E-LEET Tuning Utility Software
* EVGA EVbot Support
* EVGA ECP V2 (EVGA Control Panel)
Cop Out (2010) HD Trailer
A comedy about two cops whose adventures include locating a stolen baseball card, rescuing a woman, and dealing with gangsters and their laundered money.
Six Reasons You Want an iPad, Six Reasons You Don't
Reasons to Buy:
1. Undeniably cool. The iPad looks like a giant iPod and the look supersizes quite nicely.
2. The best e-reader? The iPad is already generating comments that it will be a Kindle-beater and Nook-destroyer. The 16 GB $499 model may not be good for carrying around lots of movies and music, but it should hold a lot of books. I want to hear more about the hands-on reading experience, but early word is the iPad is an excellent place to enjoy a good book. Or a textbook, which is a huge potential market for the device.
3. Gaming. The iPhone became a surprise hit among gamers, or at least expanded the market to include lots of previous non-gamers (such as myself). Either way, the iPad is optimized to improve the iPhone gaming experience, allowing new elements to be added to games that can be played on both the iPhone/iPod touch and the new iPad.
4. The iPad makes it easy to share media. Not for a whole room, but you and a friend or two should be able to watch movies, listen to music, or pass the iPad back-and-forth for games. It's just the right size for sharing up-close and the lack of a keyboard makes the iPad easier to handle than a notebook.
5. Applications. With all the above going for it, the iPad almost doesn't have to do things like Web surfing and e-mail checking or document writing. But, it does them all and runs 140,000 iPhone apps besides. Sure, the best apps will be specially-written for the iPad, but you can use iPhone/iPod touch favorites right away.
6. Time may be on your side. The iPad may become much more compelling--thanks to new apps--between now and its March/April ship dates.
Reasons to Hold Off:
1. There is no subsidy on the 3G version. Apple wants you to pay $829 for the 64GB device, plus monthly wireless fees for AT&T's 3G. The first year total: $1,189.
2. The wrong screen. It's not clear why Apple didn't choose a 16:9 aspect ratio, the standard for widescreen entertainment, but not doing so makes the iPad much less interesting for watching movies.
3. It's not much of a work machine. New applications may hammer away at the iPad's limitations, but the truth is that a notebook or netbook or even (in many circumstances) an iPhone is much more useful. Maybe it isn't even fair to ask a device so well-tuned for entertainment to work at the office too, but Apple is promoting the iPad as a work tool. And right now, I have to respond, "No" in most circumstances.
4. If you don't need all the other features, a Kindle or Nook offer better battery life for e-reading, but lack the color screen.
5. The iPad is a "tweener," in the bad sense of the word. Not a computer, but not a smartphone, the iPad lacks the functionality of a notebook and the convenience of an iPhone or Droid. The iPad may be just one more thing to haul around if you already carry a notebook, which it doesn't come close to replacing.
6. By the time the iPad ships, the excitement may be over. Perhaps helping lots of people save money.
There are many more reasons, both pro and con, regarding an iPad purchase but the best one may be the simplest: You've either got to have one (and have the spare cash) or the iPad doesn't do much for you.
Since it won't be available until March or April (for the 3G models), you have lots of time to change your mind. And for the initial excitement to wear off.
1. Undeniably cool. The iPad looks like a giant iPod and the look supersizes quite nicely.
2. The best e-reader? The iPad is already generating comments that it will be a Kindle-beater and Nook-destroyer. The 16 GB $499 model may not be good for carrying around lots of movies and music, but it should hold a lot of books. I want to hear more about the hands-on reading experience, but early word is the iPad is an excellent place to enjoy a good book. Or a textbook, which is a huge potential market for the device.
3. Gaming. The iPhone became a surprise hit among gamers, or at least expanded the market to include lots of previous non-gamers (such as myself). Either way, the iPad is optimized to improve the iPhone gaming experience, allowing new elements to be added to games that can be played on both the iPhone/iPod touch and the new iPad.
4. The iPad makes it easy to share media. Not for a whole room, but you and a friend or two should be able to watch movies, listen to music, or pass the iPad back-and-forth for games. It's just the right size for sharing up-close and the lack of a keyboard makes the iPad easier to handle than a notebook.
5. Applications. With all the above going for it, the iPad almost doesn't have to do things like Web surfing and e-mail checking or document writing. But, it does them all and runs 140,000 iPhone apps besides. Sure, the best apps will be specially-written for the iPad, but you can use iPhone/iPod touch favorites right away.
6. Time may be on your side. The iPad may become much more compelling--thanks to new apps--between now and its March/April ship dates.
Reasons to Hold Off:
1. There is no subsidy on the 3G version. Apple wants you to pay $829 for the 64GB device, plus monthly wireless fees for AT&T's 3G. The first year total: $1,189.
2. The wrong screen. It's not clear why Apple didn't choose a 16:9 aspect ratio, the standard for widescreen entertainment, but not doing so makes the iPad much less interesting for watching movies.
3. It's not much of a work machine. New applications may hammer away at the iPad's limitations, but the truth is that a notebook or netbook or even (in many circumstances) an iPhone is much more useful. Maybe it isn't even fair to ask a device so well-tuned for entertainment to work at the office too, but Apple is promoting the iPad as a work tool. And right now, I have to respond, "No" in most circumstances.
4. If you don't need all the other features, a Kindle or Nook offer better battery life for e-reading, but lack the color screen.
5. The iPad is a "tweener," in the bad sense of the word. Not a computer, but not a smartphone, the iPad lacks the functionality of a notebook and the convenience of an iPhone or Droid. The iPad may be just one more thing to haul around if you already carry a notebook, which it doesn't come close to replacing.
6. By the time the iPad ships, the excitement may be over. Perhaps helping lots of people save money.
There are many more reasons, both pro and con, regarding an iPad purchase but the best one may be the simplest: You've either got to have one (and have the spare cash) or the iPad doesn't do much for you.
Since it won't be available until March or April (for the 3G models), you have lots of time to change your mind. And for the initial excitement to wear off.
Valentine's Day (2010) HD Trailer
Intertwining couples and singles in Los Angeles break-up and make-up based on the pressures and expectations of Valentine's Day.
Our Family Wedding (2010) HD Trailer
Plot
The weeks leading up to a young couple's wedding is comic and stressful, especially as their respective fathers (Whitaker and Mencia) try to lay to rest their feud.
The weeks leading up to a young couple's wedding is comic and stressful, especially as their respective fathers (Whitaker and Mencia) try to lay to rest their feud.
EVGA W555 dual-Xeon motherboard
The W555 is a dual-processor LGA1366 motherboard with a difference - unlike existing traditional workstation/server motherboards - it's designed to be overclocked.
Created by a design team led by Peter 'Shamino' Tan, the W555 was first unveiled at the CES show a couple of weeks ago.
a closer look at how this monster motherboard is shaping up.
As you can see, the W555 isn't exactly small. As we haven't had a chance to play with a board yet, the exact dimensions are unknown, but EVGA has confirmed that it is larger than either the E-ATX or SSI standards. Then again, any motherboard with two LGA1366 processor sockets, 12 DDR3 DIMM slots and seven expansion card slots isn't ever going to be small.
As several eagle-eyed readers already spotted, the W555 has two LGA1366 processor sockets, however, that doesn't mean you'll be able to chuck in a pair of Core i7s and start overclocking. This is because Core i7s only have a single QPI link, which is used to talk to the motherboard X58 chipset. To run a pair of processors in SMP, you'll need a pair of Xeon W5000-series CPUs, each of which has a pair of QPI links, one to talk to the motherboard chipset, and one to talk to the other CPU.
The good news is that there is a whole range of Xeon W5000-series CPUs to choose from, but the bad news is that they're all considerably more expensive than the equivalent-frequency Core i7. That said, the prospect of being able to overclock a pair of 8-thread CPUs (four physical cores, four logical cores) is more than a little exciting for performance enthusiasts. What's more, you should be able to drop in a pair of Xeon-branded 12-thread Gulftown cored CPUs when they are launched later this year; that's 24 threads from one box if you're salivating so much you can't read your monitor anymore.
Each CPU socket is provided with its own bank of 6 DIMM sockets, just crying out for some high-speed triple channel DDR3. Generally speaking, Xeon 5500-systems are equipped with ECC registered DDR3, which although far less prone to errors than standard unbuffered DDR3, is a lot more expensive and is only available up to PC3-10600, i.e. 1,333MHz. However, the memory controller in the CPUs can support standard unbuffered DDR3 - something you'll almost certainly need to use for big overclocks.
we know that the seven 16x PCI-E 2.0 slots that take up nearly half of the surface area are powered by a combination of the Intel 5520 chipset and two nForce 200 controllers hidden underneath the massive black heatsink/fan.
Apparently the lanes are configured so that slots 1, 3, 5 and 7 each provide the full 16 lanes, or alternatively the first six slots each have 8 lanes and slot 7 has 16 lanes.
A side effect of using the nForce 200 controllers is that, unlike traditional Xeon workstation/server motherboards, the W555 will also be certified for both CrossFire and SLI.
However, given the dire state of both ATI and Nvidia's quad-GPU drivers, we really can't see much use for this capability, unless you buy a W555 just to try and get the fastest 3DMark score in the world. A far better use for the W555 would be as an all-in-one folding farm, running a combination of the bigadv clients on the CPUs in Linux and several GPU clients on whatever graphics cards you have to hand. This would yield a titanic number of points per day, as Folding@home, unlike CrossFire and SLI, scales efficiently across multiple GPUs.
We can also see that the First Look: EVGA W555 dual-Xeon motherboard Up close and personalW555 is equiped with eight SATA ports, allegedly six running at 3Gb/sec and the two red ports at 6GB/sec. Unfortunately, at this stage we don't which SATA controllers EVGA is planning on using on the final production model.
The real curiosity though is the IDE port lurking at the edge of the PCB. While your first reaction might be 'what on earth is an IDE port doing a dual-processor/multi-GPU motherboard launching in 2010?' it's not a completely daft choice.
This is because some extreme overclockers still favour IDE hard drives over SATA, as many benchmarks aren't affected by the speed of the drive, and IDE controllers are less sensitive to big overclocks than SATA controllers.
Those living in the real world will still want to stick on a SATA hard disk or SSD however.
With so many PCI-E slots on-board, EVGA has clearly put some thought into how to provide sufficient power to so many graphics cards.
First Look: EVGA W555 dual-Xeon motherboard Up close and personal
Thus, in addition to the 24-pin ATX and two 8-pin EPS12V power sockets dotted around the PCB, the W555 also sports three 6-pin PCI-E power sockets. This is a far better choice than sticking a load of Molex connectors on, like early multi-GPU motherboards had.
However, we're not quite sure how strictly necessary all this effort is. This because one of our folding rigs has six GeForce 9600 GTs and an overclocked Core i7-920 and has been happily running 24/7 at full load for the last six months without a hitch. There's also a question of which PSU could possibly power such a combination, or it'll take jump-starting a second alongside to provide the necessary connectors.
That's about all we can say about the EVGA W555 for now.
Created by a design team led by Peter 'Shamino' Tan, the W555 was first unveiled at the CES show a couple of weeks ago.
a closer look at how this monster motherboard is shaping up.
As you can see, the W555 isn't exactly small. As we haven't had a chance to play with a board yet, the exact dimensions are unknown, but EVGA has confirmed that it is larger than either the E-ATX or SSI standards. Then again, any motherboard with two LGA1366 processor sockets, 12 DDR3 DIMM slots and seven expansion card slots isn't ever going to be small.
As several eagle-eyed readers already spotted, the W555 has two LGA1366 processor sockets, however, that doesn't mean you'll be able to chuck in a pair of Core i7s and start overclocking. This is because Core i7s only have a single QPI link, which is used to talk to the motherboard X58 chipset. To run a pair of processors in SMP, you'll need a pair of Xeon W5000-series CPUs, each of which has a pair of QPI links, one to talk to the motherboard chipset, and one to talk to the other CPU.
The good news is that there is a whole range of Xeon W5000-series CPUs to choose from, but the bad news is that they're all considerably more expensive than the equivalent-frequency Core i7. That said, the prospect of being able to overclock a pair of 8-thread CPUs (four physical cores, four logical cores) is more than a little exciting for performance enthusiasts. What's more, you should be able to drop in a pair of Xeon-branded 12-thread Gulftown cored CPUs when they are launched later this year; that's 24 threads from one box if you're salivating so much you can't read your monitor anymore.
Each CPU socket is provided with its own bank of 6 DIMM sockets, just crying out for some high-speed triple channel DDR3. Generally speaking, Xeon 5500-systems are equipped with ECC registered DDR3, which although far less prone to errors than standard unbuffered DDR3, is a lot more expensive and is only available up to PC3-10600, i.e. 1,333MHz. However, the memory controller in the CPUs can support standard unbuffered DDR3 - something you'll almost certainly need to use for big overclocks.
we know that the seven 16x PCI-E 2.0 slots that take up nearly half of the surface area are powered by a combination of the Intel 5520 chipset and two nForce 200 controllers hidden underneath the massive black heatsink/fan.
Apparently the lanes are configured so that slots 1, 3, 5 and 7 each provide the full 16 lanes, or alternatively the first six slots each have 8 lanes and slot 7 has 16 lanes.
A side effect of using the nForce 200 controllers is that, unlike traditional Xeon workstation/server motherboards, the W555 will also be certified for both CrossFire and SLI.
However, given the dire state of both ATI and Nvidia's quad-GPU drivers, we really can't see much use for this capability, unless you buy a W555 just to try and get the fastest 3DMark score in the world. A far better use for the W555 would be as an all-in-one folding farm, running a combination of the bigadv clients on the CPUs in Linux and several GPU clients on whatever graphics cards you have to hand. This would yield a titanic number of points per day, as Folding@home, unlike CrossFire and SLI, scales efficiently across multiple GPUs.
We can also see that the First Look: EVGA W555 dual-Xeon motherboard Up close and personalW555 is equiped with eight SATA ports, allegedly six running at 3Gb/sec and the two red ports at 6GB/sec. Unfortunately, at this stage we don't which SATA controllers EVGA is planning on using on the final production model.
The real curiosity though is the IDE port lurking at the edge of the PCB. While your first reaction might be 'what on earth is an IDE port doing a dual-processor/multi-GPU motherboard launching in 2010?' it's not a completely daft choice.
This is because some extreme overclockers still favour IDE hard drives over SATA, as many benchmarks aren't affected by the speed of the drive, and IDE controllers are less sensitive to big overclocks than SATA controllers.
Those living in the real world will still want to stick on a SATA hard disk or SSD however.
With so many PCI-E slots on-board, EVGA has clearly put some thought into how to provide sufficient power to so many graphics cards.
First Look: EVGA W555 dual-Xeon motherboard Up close and personal
Thus, in addition to the 24-pin ATX and two 8-pin EPS12V power sockets dotted around the PCB, the W555 also sports three 6-pin PCI-E power sockets. This is a far better choice than sticking a load of Molex connectors on, like early multi-GPU motherboards had.
However, we're not quite sure how strictly necessary all this effort is. This because one of our folding rigs has six GeForce 9600 GTs and an overclocked Core i7-920 and has been happily running 24/7 at full load for the last six months without a hitch. There's also a question of which PSU could possibly power such a combination, or it'll take jump-starting a second alongside to provide the necessary connectors.
That's about all we can say about the EVGA W555 for now.
Apple Unveils Ipad
Demonstrating the iPad at an event in San Francisco, Jobs showed how it could be used for e-mail and Web browsing, viewing photos, managing calendars and contacts, listening to music, and viewing video.
The iPad is a half-inch thick, weighs 1.5 pounds, and has a 9.7-inch LCD screen. It's run by a custom-made 1GHz CPU, and comes with 16, 32, or 64GB of flash storage. For connectivity, it has 802.11n, WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1. Jobs claimed it will get up to 10 hours of battery life.
Check out the video here:
The iPad is a half-inch thick, weighs 1.5 pounds, and has a 9.7-inch LCD screen. It's run by a custom-made 1GHz CPU, and comes with 16, 32, or 64GB of flash storage. For connectivity, it has 802.11n, WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1. Jobs claimed it will get up to 10 hours of battery life.
Check out the video here:
Apple's Ipad Mistakes
The iPad has a lot going for it, but is also a big disappointment in many ways. Almost no product could have lived up to the insane hype leading up to Steve Jobs's announcement today, but the iPad certainly could have had more groundbreaking features. If Apple really wants to change the world with the iPad and popularize a whole new computing category, they may need to do better. If the iPad had the following features, it would have blown us away.
Multitasking
There's no multitasking in the OS at all, and not even multiple active web pages in Safari. You can't listen to Pandora while you surf the Web, or switch back and forth between Facebook at Twitter, or write a document in Pages while talking on a VOIP call.
Adobe Flash
For better or worse, it's just not the real Web without support for Adobe Flash. We want to watch Hulu on the iPad. It's sort-of okay on a small phone-sized device, but it's not okay on a 9.7 inch screen.
Camera / iChat
We don't expect people to hold up a big slate to take pictures with a back-facing camera, though some augmented reality apps might be neat on the larger screen. What the iPad is really lacking is a front-facing camera and video chat. A device like this would be perfect for such an application. With a front-facing camera, the iPad could be the perfect device for filming and editing personal YouTube videos (you could even see yourself in-frame as you record).
Better Video and HDMI
Video support is very similar to what you find on the iPhone and iPod Touch - limited to 720p H.264 Main Profile. There should be support for Advanced Profile video, and while we're at it, a mini HDMI port to push video to our HDTVs.
16:9 Aspect Ratio
The 4:3 aspect ratio is convenient for using iPhone apps in full screen mode, but it's less desirable for media. From YouTube videos to TV shows to movies, the world is rapidly shifting exclusively to widescreen formats, and those black bars are getting real old, real fast.
Wireless Sync
If your computer with my iTunes account associated with it is on my local network, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to sync your iPad over Wi-Fi. With the 802.11n networking, it would even be pretty fast. If Microsoft can do it with the Zune, why can't Apple?
Handwriting Recognition
A soft keyboard is one thing, but it's still not good enough to touch-type on. On a tablet sized device, people sometimes just want to jot down a note or two. Sometimes, writing by hand is simply more convenient.
A New Interface
The interface is basically a slightly modified, scaled-up version of the iPhone interface. That's nice and familiar, but it doesn't make the best use of the bigger screen. We wanted something more, perhaps with pertinent info from Twitter, Facebook, Feeds, Weather, Email, and more pushed to the home screen.
File Access
Clearly, Apple expects us to not just consume on the iPad, but create. iWork has been ported to the platform, and the art application Brushes was prominently featured in Jobs's presentation. There should be a folder where I can access my documents and images, drag them to and from my desktop, and save documents from the Web (or services like Dropbox).
Periodicals
The iBook store seems like a great start for books, but many were expecting the iPad to save the newspaper and magazine publishers, and there's just nothing there. Where are the newspaper and magazine publishers in the iBook store? The world's publishing companies aren't all going to release their own apps like The New York Times, and frankly, we don't want separate apps to read all our periodicals.
Openness
Nobody expects an Apple product to be truly "open" - that's like expecting the Pope to endorse Hinduism - but Apple missed some opportunities to make this device a little better at working together outside of the Apple ecosystem. Will ePub format books from stores other than iBook appear on your bookshelf? Will Google Voice get to publish a real app for the iPad? Why are all the cool Photo features related to location and tagging reliant on iPhoto (and thus, a Mac) instead of working with existing photo metadata? But hey, kudos to Apple for selling the devices with 3G unlocked and letting you use any carrier willing to give you a GSM micro SIM card.
iPants
Docks with keyboards are one thing, but Apple missed out on the perfect opportunity to introduce iFashion with the iPants - pants with pockets big enough for your iPad.
Multitasking
There's no multitasking in the OS at all, and not even multiple active web pages in Safari. You can't listen to Pandora while you surf the Web, or switch back and forth between Facebook at Twitter, or write a document in Pages while talking on a VOIP call.
Adobe Flash
For better or worse, it's just not the real Web without support for Adobe Flash. We want to watch Hulu on the iPad. It's sort-of okay on a small phone-sized device, but it's not okay on a 9.7 inch screen.
Camera / iChat
We don't expect people to hold up a big slate to take pictures with a back-facing camera, though some augmented reality apps might be neat on the larger screen. What the iPad is really lacking is a front-facing camera and video chat. A device like this would be perfect for such an application. With a front-facing camera, the iPad could be the perfect device for filming and editing personal YouTube videos (you could even see yourself in-frame as you record).
Better Video and HDMI
Video support is very similar to what you find on the iPhone and iPod Touch - limited to 720p H.264 Main Profile. There should be support for Advanced Profile video, and while we're at it, a mini HDMI port to push video to our HDTVs.
16:9 Aspect Ratio
The 4:3 aspect ratio is convenient for using iPhone apps in full screen mode, but it's less desirable for media. From YouTube videos to TV shows to movies, the world is rapidly shifting exclusively to widescreen formats, and those black bars are getting real old, real fast.
Wireless Sync
If your computer with my iTunes account associated with it is on my local network, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to sync your iPad over Wi-Fi. With the 802.11n networking, it would even be pretty fast. If Microsoft can do it with the Zune, why can't Apple?
Handwriting Recognition
A soft keyboard is one thing, but it's still not good enough to touch-type on. On a tablet sized device, people sometimes just want to jot down a note or two. Sometimes, writing by hand is simply more convenient.
A New Interface
The interface is basically a slightly modified, scaled-up version of the iPhone interface. That's nice and familiar, but it doesn't make the best use of the bigger screen. We wanted something more, perhaps with pertinent info from Twitter, Facebook, Feeds, Weather, Email, and more pushed to the home screen.
File Access
Clearly, Apple expects us to not just consume on the iPad, but create. iWork has been ported to the platform, and the art application Brushes was prominently featured in Jobs's presentation. There should be a folder where I can access my documents and images, drag them to and from my desktop, and save documents from the Web (or services like Dropbox).
Periodicals
The iBook store seems like a great start for books, but many were expecting the iPad to save the newspaper and magazine publishers, and there's just nothing there. Where are the newspaper and magazine publishers in the iBook store? The world's publishing companies aren't all going to release their own apps like The New York Times, and frankly, we don't want separate apps to read all our periodicals.
Openness
Nobody expects an Apple product to be truly "open" - that's like expecting the Pope to endorse Hinduism - but Apple missed some opportunities to make this device a little better at working together outside of the Apple ecosystem. Will ePub format books from stores other than iBook appear on your bookshelf? Will Google Voice get to publish a real app for the iPad? Why are all the cool Photo features related to location and tagging reliant on iPhoto (and thus, a Mac) instead of working with existing photo metadata? But hey, kudos to Apple for selling the devices with 3G unlocked and letting you use any carrier willing to give you a GSM micro SIM card.
iPants
Docks with keyboards are one thing, but Apple missed out on the perfect opportunity to introduce iFashion with the iPants - pants with pockets big enough for your iPad.
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