[OS X TeX] TeXpad (LaTeX iPad editor app) dev's blog post on Mac OS X appstore sandboxing

[David Derbes]

On Apr 4, 2012, at 2:09 PM, Chris Goedde wrote:

> On Apr 4, 2012, at 1:35 PM, David Derbes wrote:
> 
>> Tthere is a lot of push toward cloud computing. I doubt that we will see anytime soon an iPad with sufficient storage and processing power to run a local copy of Mathematica; though surely Real Soon Now (if not already available) there are clients that can be run on an iPad to call a remote kernel. More and more people seem to want me to use Google Docs rather than MS Office (or equivalent) on my laptop. 
> 
> I don't want to argue about this, but this is one of my pet peeves, so I can't resist …
> 
> I first used Mathematica in the early/mid 90's on a Mac Centris 650 or maybe an IBM PC with a 80486 running windows 3.1. I think the iPad has a wee bit more processing power, memory, and storage than those machines, so I'm skeptical of claims that it can't run a local copy of Mathematica (or Matlab, or …). Maybe it can't run the desktop version with exactly the same performance, but it's certainly capable of running a very useful local version.
> 
> Chris

I ran a (* cough *) borrowed version of Mathematica 1.0 on a Mac Plus. Wasn't pretty. But that was a long time ago, more than twenty years. No question the iPad is far beefier than the old desktops. Is it more capable than current desktops are, or can be made? There will always be constraints of mass and space for iPads and lesser tablets. No such constraints (or at least no practical limits) obtain for a desktop. 

But the larger (perhaps philosophical) argument is not contra the capabilities of the iPad, but the issue of locality/ownership. 

David

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