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Apple's 'What's a Computer?' Ad is Annoying People: Business Insider (businessinsider.com)
Can an iPad replace your computer? It has been the topic of debate for years, with plenty of people advising against it. Apple sure begs to differ. It has been running a commercial in which it predicts a world where a computer is extinct and a child with an iPad doesn't even know what the word "computer" means. Business Insider reports that plenty of people are finding that commercial annoying. From the report: "Does this commercial tick anybody else off?" writes one commenter on a snippet of the commercial that was posted to Facebook. "I want to smack this kid. What's a computer? You know what a computer is you disrespectful smarta--!!" Plenty of other social media posts, some with thousands of retweets, have made the same observation.
An iPad is a computer. I am at a loss to understand the outrage. Does it do everything everyone might want? No. Does any other computer do anything anyone might want? No.
Ads are generally dumb. There is no reason to get mad.
_ALL_ads are annoying!
Some of the Superbowl ads are entertaining.
I know it's an extra step, but please tap the "send to" and select "request desktop site" before posting to Slashdot.
m.slashdot.org doesn't handle Unicode.
The desktop site is still pretty crippled, but it's able to handle U+2018 (‘), U+2019 (’), U+201C (“), and U+201D (”) correctly.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
It's also a perfect example of exponential backoff.
It doesn't annoy me. It's just Apple actually TELLLING us what we've long observed: that they don't want real computing being done with their hardware. They want you to be a media consumer in their walled garden. No arbitrary programming languages, no installing your own OS on the hardware, none of the things that we associate with computers.
They want to kill computers. That's Apple's vision of the future--children never seeing an actual computer. They want it to be like my early childhood, except with a fancier TV.
Apple has its spaceship castle. Time to raise the drawbridge.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've never had any problems using my Apple "toys" with non-Apple devices. I print stuff. I use a VPN to log into other networks that don't use Apple routers. I remote desktop into windows/linux machines all the time. I SSH into non-Apple computers. I mount NFS shares from non-Apple servers. I sometimes use them as remote controls for my Rokus. I'm confused. What problems are you describing? My home is mixed with Apple and non-Apple stuff and they can all talk to each other just fine.
So the supercomputers being run by NCAR are not computers because you cannot program them yourself?
The owners of those supercomputers can program them themselves. The owner of an iPad cannot program it without additionally purchasing a sufficiently recent Mac, whose price typically exceeds that of the iPad. A used pre-2010 Mac will not work, nor will a computer other than a Mac.
Some of the apathy toward fixing encoding is a legacy of vandals abusing Unicode control characters to mess with the layout and abusing foreign language characters to post obscene glyph art. If Unicode support matters to you, you could always use SoylentNews instead.