Re:Here come the DRM whiners
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Apple iPad Reviewed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I would argue this is only a limitation on apple device.
You're wrong. It's a limitation on Palm devices, it's a problem with Android, it can be a problem with Windows Mobile. It's therefore very very important for a mobile device that the interface doesn't feel laggy, and it's not a trivial problem.
But not more than that. You can't possibly begin to compare processors through UI responsiveness when they're running different operating systems.
As an end user, that's exactly what you'll do. You don't care about the particular processor, what you care about is whether the device you have in your hand is responsive and performs well - that's a combination of lots of factors, and it's perfectly valid to compare different devices based on their UI responsiveness, and attribute some of the speed to the processor (not all, but some).
Wouldn't it be easy if you had one card for ID, public transport, payments, building access, getting your treatment, etc? It probably should have some kind of Chip. Now this would be perfect day!
Nice until the government decides to revoke your access to all of the above on a whim.
But, yes, it's certainly possible for some software to look at the executable image for an iPhone OS app and figure out what it's linked with and what routines it's using.
Yes it is, and that's what Apple should have been doing from the start.
It's a bit harder to detect whether it uses, for example, dlopen() to load a library or framework at run time and then uses dlsym() to look up symbols in that library, unless dlopen() and company are on the Forbidden Interface List for iPhone OS apps and they bounce anything that uses them.
They are on the forbidden list - dlopen works in the simulator but not on the device.
Though this is just a first step toward an iPhone-like developer model, and I suspect they'll just introduce a mac store as an add-on first of all, and allow apps to be released in other ways, at least at first.
What scares me about this though is that Apple are gradually being sucked into their own hype; that only end-to-end control of the experience by Apple is the way to ensure quality. This in spite of the obvious failure in quality control in their store and the many inconsistencies in applying their policy. If there were some other option for getting apps onto the platform it wouldn't matter as much, but of course there isn't on iPhone.
This particular example probably isn't a good one, as the apps in question did use private APIs knowingly, which frankly they should not have done and is explicitly disallowed in the developer agreement. However it does bring into focus Apple's lacklustre quality control, ad-hoc and arbitrary approval process, and abuse of their powerful position as platform makers.
With the banning of some porn apps but not others, abuse of their power as arbiters on the app store to force out competitors (Google Voice), their casual indifference to the plight of pulled third party app developers, while leaving all sorts of crap on the app store, and their lawsuit against HTC for bullshit software patents (which makes them look like a fearful monopolist), Apple is in danger of becoming the next evil empire.
The hypocrisy is astounding, and is starting to make long-term Mac users rethink their commitment to both platforms, which are headed in a direction which is anti ethical to user and developer interests. A certain amount of control-freakery is good for the platform in that it keeps the hardware supported tight and the software selection high quality, but Apple have consistently overstepped the mark on iPhone OS and are now starting to abuse their power over the platform to their own ends. Jobs seems to be genuinely affronted that other platforms have 'stolen' their ideas, though of course he lives by the credo of 'great artists steal' himself and is not afraid to lift ideas from other sources.
As an iPhone/Mac user and developer, Android is looking a lot more interesting by the day, in spite of all its warts.
a simple otool -L would identify apps explicitly linked with the framework, but, unless you forbid using any interfaces that let you load libraries/frameworks at run time
What I don't understand is why, given the restrictions in the SDK agreement, they don't run otool automatically on any incoming binaries and flag up use of private frameworks as disallowed, thus giving developers the ability to rework their app before it gets to the store, and saving their reviewers time from manually trying to check for this. Some well known apps have been blocked for weeks in the past for using private APIs when in fact they don't, but the reviewer just assumed that they must be to be able to display the current wireless IP address, which shows you how incompetent their reviewers are.
If they'd scanned for linking to private frameworks from the start they wouldn't be in the position of removing apps after they'd been launched, but like many things on the app store, they're making up the rules as they go along.
What if there were two earths rotating around the sun at the same distance? Wouldn't the sun be stationary then? Hypothetical, but true, no?
The question to ask yourself is - stationary in relation to what?
In the solar system frame the sun is mostly stationary (because of its huge mass in relation to the planets), though not completely if you're being pernickety (also rotates and of course it is in orbit around a centre of mass with the planets, but we say they orbit it as shorthand).
In the galactic frame, it's orbiting the centre of the galaxy (along with the rest of the solar system) at something like 568,000 mph, and then the galaxy is moving in relation to others, etc etc.
I'm sure the iPad will find an audience and will sell by the truckload, but come on...are they really claiming that people won't pay for a netbook, but they will pay the same price for something with half the functionality and none of the openness, just because it's pretty?
Why, no, since you ask, I don't think they're saying that all.
They're saying that the iPad does a restricted set of things, but it does them so well that it'll blow right past the sales of netbooks running an operating system ill-adapted for their form factor. Apple may be wrong on this, but I suspect they're closer to the truth that the denizens of Slashdot.
For people who use their netbook for the internet and email the iPad is way better than a netbook (IMHO). For people who would like to try using Photoshop, Handbrake, MAME, etc etc on a netbook, the iPad has nothing to offer, but how many people realistically want to do that? If I want to get real work done I'll bring along a real computer (not a netbook), if I want to surf the web, I'd use something similar to an iPad, as it's better suited to that (again only in my opinion) than a netbook.
Except of course, when you install that shiny new OS that Apple likes to send out every year and discover half of your programs no longer work....God, seriously, how do guys not understand what a dependancy is?
That's not my experience, nowhere near it, certainly 'half the programs' is nowhere near correct. As I noted, dependencies on OS X come in the form of system libraries, bundled libraries inside app bundles or bundled libraries inside installers.
It's very rare (again, in my experience) for a system version to break many applications. I say this having worked with and upgraded through 10.1,10.2,10.3,10.4,10.5 and 10.6 - I can list the programs which stopped working on the fingers of one hand - a wacom tablet driver (for which a free update was available), an Adobe program (for which a free update was available), and perhaps some printer drivers. Which $300 program were you talking about?
They do this with every single update.
That's a remarkably broad claim. In my experience it's simply not the case; would you care to give us an example of a mainstream program that breaks for every single update?
I'm sure there have been some programs which broke with newly released versions of the OS libraries, but it's not a widespread problem, and there are definitely ways round it. Those developers under OS X have the option to start bundling the older library they depended on in their app package and link to that (no changes required), or upgrade/fix to depend on the new library if it was an Apple one or they don't want to bundle.
You're really not very convincing ranting about buying new software with every major OS X update, as that's simply not necessary, except in some isolated cases where a vendor chooses to charge for an update that should have been free (personally I've not encountered it, but I allow it is possible). I'm currently running mostly software bought for 10.3-10.4 on 10.6, which according to you should be impossible.
The only place I've noticed real dependency issues is when installing stuff intended for Linux via macports/fink - then it is possible to get stuck trying to install different versions of the same library for different programs, unless you know what you're doing. But typical users won't encounter this at all.
Again, please note I'm not saying Linux is much worse, just that OS X does not have a major problem with dependencies - for most users, they are completely transparent.
The idea that MacOS will magically banish all of your problems forever is just mindless nonsense.
If you start responding to what people actually said, you might have a meaningful conversation, rather than tilting at windmills.
As it is, your statement that:
This is in stark contrast to a Mac where you will first download your app and then be told to manually sort out dependencies.
Is laughably incorrect for anyone who has used OS X - if you have a mac or three you really should know that by now. Dependencies are either bundled with the OS, bundled inside the app, or (in very rare cases like Adobe) bundled inside an installer. Typically installation means drag the app to Applications, and typical users of OS X have no idea what 'dependency' means; because they don't need to.
That's not to say that Linux is necessarily worse, just different - there you use package managers to handle such things.
When you make videos showing people being tortured and beheaded -- soldiers, journalists, your own countrymen, tourists,
Are you talking about Abu Ghraib or Daniel Pearl?
The only difference I can think of is that the US didn't video it (that we know of), and release the videos, the only leaks were unofficial photographs, and didn't do any beheading, though people were certainly tortured, raped and killed.
The US Govt. sanctioned torture at the highest levels during the Iraq war and it was (and is being) applied on a systematic basis, in a network or prisons around the world; that's not more humane, and it's not in the past.
Both are of the same vein. Any time you are using civilian deaths as part of your war strategy - in whatever flavour it is then you are basically a war criminal.
So you think that the winning side in WWII are war criminals (America killed entire cities of civilians with nukes, Britain firebombed many cities causing horrific casualties)? Total war renders civilian deaths part of the strategy, and if one side starts doing it, the other follows quickly, as not to do so would mean defeat. By your logic most participants in most wars (even arguably the most justified one of the 20C) were war criminals.
When you're talking about warfare, which involves killing and maiming other humans, very little is sacrosanct, and very little is honourable about it. That's not platitudes, it's a serious point about the hollow nature of boasts of 'honourable warfare'. There is no such thing.
It's just as cowardly to sit insulated from a conflict thousands of miles away and pull the trigger on a blurry image of a possible suspect fighter, as it is to plant bombs trying to provoke terror in civilian populations thousands of miles from a conflict. Just as cowardly to drop cluster munitions or radioactive munitions near civilian populations. All these actions inflict massive damage on innocent civilian populations, just as part of the strategy. In one case they are labelled as infidels and unworthy of consideration, in the other they are called collateral damage and considered an acceptable price of war.
I don't necessarily disagree with you when you say 'We need to let people like that sink or swim', but in this world of tightly connected social networks where friendship among individuals governs their level of access to your details, I'm not so sure about that. You're only as secure as your weakest link. If one of your less technologically-savvy friends on Facebook happens to fall for this scheme and gives up his login information to the attackers, then your information is exposed to them, and you're put at risk.
Let this be a lesson that content put on a public network is never private. If you have stuff on Facebook you think is private, you should remove it right now, because Facebook has one of the worst track records for security and privacy breeches, and a demonstrable lack of concern for the privacy of your personal data (e.g. beacon fiasco).
What is incredibly important here is for people to realise that sites like Facebook *will never be truly private* and your value to them is precisely in the amount of information on yourself you're willing to give up (which it turns out is quite a lot), in return for a free service connecting you with your friends in a supposedly private manner.
Personally, I treat content I put on the internet (for all values of internet) as public, and don't put anything up I wouldn't be happy for the world to see, unless I have personally overseen the security measures used and am happy with them (and even then it's risky). You are always one exploit away from revealing all the information on Facebook etc. Walled garden sites like Facebook give a false sense of security to some people, and this sort of simple phishing should be a wake-up call that online accounts can and will be compromised frequently and should not contain lots of private info that you would not want public.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is up with you e-ink greybeards? LCD does not 'melt your eyes' literally or figuratively. Do you read this page and all other websites using an eink screen? If not, why does an LCD suffice for most computing activities (including reading), but is then suddenly inappropriate for reading?I look at an LCD perhaps 8 hours a day with no eyestrain, as do millions of office workers.
LCD is a much better general purpose screen, deals with colour for photography and diagrams, lets you use the device to browse the web and play games, by sacrificing some battery life.
For this reason I think general purpose devices like the apple slate will overtake ereaders very quickly in the marketplcae. You're welcome to your eink screens though; I won't try to claim that they make your eyes bleed, they're just less useful than an LCD or OLED.
It's like saying the iPod wont be a premier mp3 player.
No, it's like saying that the iPod/iTunes will change a lot of people's habits and encourage them to use AAC instead of MP3, which it did.
I don't use the browser on my touch simply because 90% of the sites just aren't functional these days without flash support of some kind.
I guess we surf different sites - I rarely disable flashblock, and nowhere near 90% of the sites I visit use Flash for any non-advertising content (closer to 20%).
Unless Apple has struck a deal with Adobe to allow flash on the tablet, there are going to be a lot of web sites that aren't accessible from the tablet.
I suppose another way to look at that is that unless Apple strike a deal with Adobe, there are going to be lots of web sites scrambling to make a website which is accessible from the growing legion of their customers who use iPhones and tablets. At the very least they'll have an HTML version as well as flash, at which point, the question arises, why bother with Flash at all? Flash can pretty much be replaced by HTML5 nowadays, and Apple is definitely hostile to it (and rightly so).
I imagine that's the game plan, and while it's audacious, it might just work.
There are a few apps available on the iPhone which let you cache tiles from many online maps (Atlas, Offmaps, etc). Surely there are analogous ones for Android (or will be coming soon)?
Actually, I think there are far more people than you think around the world who read the NYTimes and would be willing to pay a small price to read it online and on their slate/kindle/device of the future. I know I would happily pay a subscription of a few $ a month for it, which if you added it up could come to an awful lot out of the over 300 million people on Earth who read in English. It has better international coverage than other US papers, and that many here in the UK.
The problem with newspapers nowadays is that not many people bother to buy dead tree products when they can get the same thing online, and papers have ended up subsidising their online operations with a shrinking revenue from a dying branch of the business and paltry advertising revenue. So long as they don't price themselves out of the market, this is great news I think, though if they tried putting columnists only behind a paywall, they'd soon find out how much people think their wittering is worth.
PS I'm unconvinced that the NYT subscriber figures were consistently falling before they even had a website in 1996, but can't find subscriber figures, can you?
That is exactly what Nokia has been trying to do, but Apple doesn't agree to the terms
That is exactly what Apple has been trying to do, but Nokia doesn't agree to the terms.
Disagreement works both ways, unless you believe a priori that one side is right, and we're not going to be able to tell from some news story (on Slashdot, no less!) whether the many patents in question are valid. Good excuse for a flamefest though.
According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), Baidu is making gains in the main cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
These are the only stats on market share I can find. Where did you get your information on Google market share in China? From a government run organisation like the CNNIC perhaps? Looks to me like you're just parroting the government line on this. Why would Google pull out of a market they were making money in, regardless of whether they've lost market share?
The far more likely explanation is they got sick of all the silly restrictions on content (which cost money), the bribes they had to pay, plus the obvious attempt by the Chinese government to install a stooge company as the incumbent in the market place to better enforce control, and then these attempts to actually break into their servers and steal information were just one step too far.
This sounds more like an ultimatum made publicly, and if you say something like that publicly you have to follow through or risk looking like a liar and a hypocrite.
They already have followed through. Top result on Google news tech section:
Google defies Chinese internet censors Times Online - Jane Macartney - 59 minutes ago Images of students crushed under tanks in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown are available for the first time on Google's China server.
As described, this was more than simply spying, more like a full-scale cyber attack sponsored by the Chinese government, which China is beginning to get a reputation for, so I'm not surprised Google wanted to draw a line in the sand.
There are no more Original Ideas, there are only rehashes of existing ideas, set in places nobody has imagined before.
Oh really? When did that happen? When the very first story was told? Or the second? How many stories are there in your learned opinion?
This is why I liked Avatar. The plot was a rehash of a couple other movies, done on some alien world. Of course, the geeks who didn't like the movie because it was "too spiritual" or failed on some Physics law or whatever, entirely miss the point.
Or maybe they thought it was trite, vacuous, nonsense dressed up in pretty special effects, which didn't even bother to be internally consistent. Maybe they thought there was no discernible point to the whole spectacle?
If you want original, stop watching movies, you'll only be disappointed.
2 far superior sci-fi movies came out last year, both of which were pretty original - Moon and District 9. I'm sure you can find some antecedents which are similar in some way on Wikipedia, but not films which combine all of those elements in the same way. If you choose to watch unimaginative tripe like Avatar though, I guess you will remain perpetually unsurprised and can continue to believe that there is nothing that you haven't seen before.
The premise of the plot is good, I agree - Asimov was always good at that side of things. However the writing is atrocious, the characterisation paper-thin, and the pseudo-science around the psychohistory pseudo-science is really a little tiring after a while. I'd say his earlier books have better writing. Haven't read the original short-stories though - maybe they'd be a good jumping off point.
As to updating the science fiction used - why? The value of stories is not in the imaginary context in which they take place, but in what they tell us which feels a universal comment on human life - much of sci-fi (Foundation included) is really speculative fiction about dystopias, utopias and every muddled type of social organisation in between.
For the second time you set up the same strawman that I am arguing that a two-button mouse is better because it is what people are used to. Stop doing this.
Please read the statement from you that I quoted directly above that. Doesn't really matter as we agree on that small point.
Sophistication doesn't mean complexity. It means presenting all the options desired in the most elegant way.
Well, yes, and sophistication that means taking options away and presenting them in a different way, not adding them.
Nobody is going to take away your two button mouse, but trying to argue that another system is inherently inferior because it doesn't require one ignores the point above - that sometimes streamlining an interface leads to something clearer, more intuitive and more elegant (IMHO). This is really a subjective matter and depends on deeper assumptions about what good design, and sophistication, amount to. I'd say the iPhone OS is more elegant than Mac OS X, because it dumps a whole load more assumptions that we don't need, and it doesn't even have a one button mouse!
What you interpret as misunderstanding or passing over what you are saying is probably just that we are starting from different assumptions about what makes a good interface, and whether it is right to lump everything the developer feels like into some miscellaneous 'other' menu that appears when you right click.
Your casting of a 'select/do' and 'other' menu choice as "whacky, inconsistent and difficult" mystifies me.
Actually, I think this one word sums up everything that is wrong with Tablet PCs currently on the market and those announced at CES. They're trying to run desktop apps on a mobile platform with no keyboard and mouse and make it a convincing replacement for laptops or desktops. A tablet will not be a convincing replacement for those machines.
I agree this would be a dream tool for an artist, I'd love one, but it's not possible yet in a convincing package. You don't want to run photoshop on a low-power device, particularly with limited memory, because it would suck. Photoshop only runs on intel processors, and Atom's take loads of power, so that's another count against it, and finally, the interface of Photoshop (being a desktop app) is in no way optimised for use as a tablet, so you'd require at the very least a stylus.
So, back to reality, the Apple tablet will be a consumer device, like an iPod or an iPhone, not a smaller desktop computer. There is no way it will run Photoshop, or other desktop apps, but it will probably run iPhone apps (or something similar). It'll be expensive, under-specced, low-powered, and wildly popular with people who are not geeks.
The reason for introducing 5 button mice was to provoke a discussion of what exactly made 2 (as opposed to 1, or 5) a good number of buttons. Unfortunately that didn't happen. I see complexity increasing with the number of ways you can interact with a device. In some cases (e.g. a keyboard for english with more than 1 letter), that's a good thing, in others, I'm not so convinced.
I think you mean 'e.g.' rather than 'i.e.'.
I meant i.e., because I see Windows and people who grew up with it as at the heart of this problem - Linux interfaces at present have a bad case of 'well, Windows does it this way, so we should too', which means they inherit a lot of the early mistakes of Windows. But as you point out e.g. works better if you want to include other operating systems in the discussion.
Therefore, costs being negligible, we should support the solution that offers us greatest choice and software writers can code as they wish. Although, they will of course code to a two-button standard as this is (a) what most people are used to and (b) offers greater sophistication.
Don't imply that my argument had anything to do with what people are used to or that I ever said what people are used to equates to what is good.
I'm not implying anything, both quotes above are from you. That was not the entirety of your argument, but it was the first part of it. I don't accept that point at all, because many things that lots of people do are wrong.
The other side of the argument (the stronger side really) for two button mice is that the increased complexity gives you more functionality at no cost. I had hoped pointing out that a 5 button mouse gives increased complexity at an obvious cost in confusion (how do I use this thing?) would indicate that I think adding 2 buttons similarly costs too much in terms of user confusion. Now OS X supports multi-button mice, the one I use right here has one obvious button, and lots of hidden functions (including gestures, right taps etc) I can enable if I wish. Mostly I just use it to point and click and scroll, and feel that should be the default function exposed to the user, otherwise software producers will think of all sorts of whacky, inconsistent and difficult interfaces for their products which rely on two button mice, and sometimes will only expose features in that hidden menu requiring a right click (see Windows).
And a two-button mouse is demonstrably more capable than a one-button mouse
I disagree. Depending on the software design, two buttons can be completely superflous (e.g. OS X, iPhone), or just confusing and inelegant (e.g. Windows, where what appears in a contextual menu is never clearly defined, and can sometimes encompass most of the actions you take in a program, and sometimes not). It's lazy interface design to just dump stuff in a menu that appears when you right click, and I'm glad that OS X has thus far forced developers to think about their interface and always allow for use of a one button mouse.
So I suppose it's a philosophical difference about the importance of simplicity in designs which won't be resolved by discussion - you feel extra complexity = free sophistication, and I don't agree that it comes at no cost. An interface should present as many choices as are absolutely necessary to get the job done, and no more.
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You're wrong. It's a limitation on Palm devices, it's a problem with Android, it can be a problem with Windows Mobile. It's therefore very very important for a mobile device that the interface doesn't feel laggy, and it's not a trivial problem.
But not more than that. You can't possibly begin to compare processors through UI responsiveness when they're running different operating systems.
As an end user, that's exactly what you'll do. You don't care about the particular processor, what you care about is whether the device you have in your hand is responsive and performs well - that's a combination of lots of factors, and it's perfectly valid to compare different devices based on their UI responsiveness, and attribute some of the speed to the processor (not all, but some).
Wouldn't it be easy if you had one card for ID, public transport, payments, building access, getting your treatment, etc?
It probably should have some kind of Chip. Now this would be perfect day!
Nice until the government decides to revoke your access to all of the above on a whim.
But, yes, it's certainly possible for some software to look at the executable image for an iPhone OS app and figure out what it's linked with and what routines it's using.
Yes it is, and that's what Apple should have been doing from the start.
It's a bit harder to detect whether it uses, for example, dlopen() to load a library or framework at run time and then uses dlsym() to look up symbols in that library, unless dlopen() and company are on the Forbidden Interface List for iPhone OS apps and they bounce anything that uses them.
They are on the forbidden list - dlopen works in the simulator but not on the device.
Twenty years from now Mac's will only be able to get applications from Apple's approved store?
This may be closer than you think:
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/05/apple-seeking-to-stimulate-mac-development-with-99-mac-dev-program/
Though this is just a first step toward an iPhone-like developer model, and I suspect they'll just introduce a mac store as an add-on first of all, and allow apps to be released in other ways, at least at first.
What scares me about this though is that Apple are gradually being sucked into their own hype; that only end-to-end control of the experience by Apple is the way to ensure quality. This in spite of the obvious failure in quality control in their store and the many inconsistencies in applying their policy. If there were some other option for getting apps onto the platform it wouldn't matter as much, but of course there isn't on iPhone.
This particular example probably isn't a good one, as the apps in question did use private APIs knowingly, which frankly they should not have done and is explicitly disallowed in the developer agreement. However it does bring into focus Apple's lacklustre quality control, ad-hoc and arbitrary approval process, and abuse of their powerful position as platform makers.
With the banning of some porn apps but not others, abuse of their power as arbiters on the app store to force out competitors (Google Voice), their casual indifference to the plight of pulled third party app developers, while leaving all sorts of crap on the app store, and their lawsuit against HTC for bullshit software patents (which makes them look like a fearful monopolist), Apple is in danger of becoming the next evil empire.
The hypocrisy is astounding, and is starting to make long-term Mac users rethink their commitment to both platforms, which are headed in a direction which is anti ethical to user and developer interests. A certain amount of control-freakery is good for the platform in that it keeps the hardware supported tight and the software selection high quality, but Apple have consistently overstepped the mark on iPhone OS and are now starting to abuse their power over the platform to their own ends. Jobs seems to be genuinely affronted that other platforms have 'stolen' their ideas, though of course he lives by the credo of 'great artists steal' himself and is not afraid to lift ideas from other sources.
As an iPhone/Mac user and developer, Android is looking a lot more interesting by the day, in spite of all its warts.
a simple otool -L would identify apps explicitly linked with the framework, but, unless you forbid using any interfaces that let you load libraries/frameworks at run time
What I don't understand is why, given the restrictions in the SDK agreement, they don't run otool automatically on any incoming binaries and flag up use of private frameworks as disallowed, thus giving developers the ability to rework their app before it gets to the store, and saving their reviewers time from manually trying to check for this. Some well known apps have been blocked for weeks in the past for using private APIs when in fact they don't, but the reviewer just assumed that they must be to be able to display the current wireless IP address, which shows you how incompetent their reviewers are.
If they'd scanned for linking to private frameworks from the start they wouldn't be in the position of removing apps after they'd been launched, but like many things on the app store, they're making up the rules as they go along.
What if there were two earths rotating around the sun at the same distance? Wouldn't the sun be stationary then? Hypothetical, but true, no?
The question to ask yourself is - stationary in relation to what?
In the solar system frame the sun is mostly stationary (because of its huge mass in relation to the planets), though not completely if you're being pernickety (also rotates and of course it is in orbit around a centre of mass with the planets, but we say they orbit it as shorthand).
In the galactic frame, it's orbiting the centre of the galaxy (along with the rest of the solar system) at something like 568,000 mph, and then the galaxy is moving in relation to others, etc etc.
I'm sure the iPad will find an audience and will sell by the truckload, but come on...are they really claiming that people won't pay for a netbook, but they will pay the same price for something with half the functionality and none of the openness, just because it's pretty?
Why, no, since you ask, I don't think they're saying that all.
They're saying that the iPad does a restricted set of things, but it does them so well that it'll blow right past the sales of netbooks running an operating system ill-adapted for their form factor. Apple may be wrong on this, but I suspect they're closer to the truth that the denizens of Slashdot.
For people who use their netbook for the internet and email the iPad is way better than a netbook (IMHO). For people who would like to try using Photoshop, Handbrake, MAME, etc etc on a netbook, the iPad has nothing to offer, but how many people realistically want to do that? If I want to get real work done I'll bring along a real computer (not a netbook), if I want to surf the web, I'd use something similar to an iPad, as it's better suited to that (again only in my opinion) than a netbook.
Except of course, when you install that shiny new OS that Apple likes to send out every year and discover half of your programs no longer work....God, seriously, how do guys not understand what a dependancy is?
That's not my experience, nowhere near it, certainly 'half the programs' is nowhere near correct. As I noted, dependencies on OS X come in the form of system libraries, bundled libraries inside app bundles or bundled libraries inside installers.
It's very rare (again, in my experience) for a system version to break many applications. I say this having worked with and upgraded through 10.1,10.2,10.3,10.4,10.5 and 10.6 - I can list the programs which stopped working on the fingers of one hand - a wacom tablet driver (for which a free update was available), an Adobe program (for which a free update was available), and perhaps some printer drivers. Which $300 program were you talking about?
They do this with every single update.
That's a remarkably broad claim. In my experience it's simply not the case; would you care to give us an example of a mainstream program that breaks for every single update?
I'm sure there have been some programs which broke with newly released versions of the OS libraries, but it's not a widespread problem, and there are definitely ways round it. Those developers under OS X have the option to start bundling the older library they depended on in their app package and link to that (no changes required), or upgrade/fix to depend on the new library if it was an Apple one or they don't want to bundle.
You're really not very convincing ranting about buying new software with every major OS X update, as that's simply not necessary, except in some isolated cases where a vendor chooses to charge for an update that should have been free (personally I've not encountered it, but I allow it is possible). I'm currently running mostly software bought for 10.3-10.4 on 10.6, which according to you should be impossible.
The only place I've noticed real dependency issues is when installing stuff intended for Linux via macports/fink - then it is possible to get stuck trying to install different versions of the same library for different programs, unless you know what you're doing. But typical users won't encounter this at all.
Again, please note I'm not saying Linux is much worse, just that OS X does not have a major problem with dependencies - for most users, they are completely transparent.
The idea that MacOS will magically banish all of your problems forever is just mindless nonsense.
If you start responding to what people actually said, you might have a meaningful conversation, rather than tilting at windmills.
As it is, your statement that :
This is in stark contrast to a Mac where you will first download your app and then be told to manually sort out dependencies.
Is laughably incorrect for anyone who has used OS X - if you have a mac or three you really should know that by now. Dependencies are either bundled with the OS, bundled inside the app, or (in very rare cases like Adobe) bundled inside an installer. Typically installation means drag the app to Applications, and typical users of OS X have no idea what 'dependency' means; because they don't need to.
That's not to say that Linux is necessarily worse, just different - there you use package managers to handle such things.
When you make videos showing people being tortured and beheaded -- soldiers, journalists, your own countrymen, tourists,
Are you talking about Abu Ghraib or Daniel Pearl?
The only difference I can think of is that the US didn't video it (that we know of), and release the videos, the only leaks were unofficial photographs, and didn't do any beheading, though people were certainly tortured, raped and killed.
The US Govt. sanctioned torture at the highest levels during the Iraq war and it was (and is being) applied on a systematic basis, in a network or prisons around the world; that's not more humane, and it's not in the past.
Both are of the same vein. Any time you are using civilian deaths as part of your war strategy - in whatever flavour it is then you are basically a war criminal.
So you think that the winning side in WWII are war criminals (America killed entire cities of civilians with nukes, Britain firebombed many cities causing horrific casualties)? Total war renders civilian deaths part of the strategy, and if one side starts doing it, the other follows quickly, as not to do so would mean defeat. By your logic most participants in most wars (even arguably the most justified one of the 20C) were war criminals.
When you're talking about warfare, which involves killing and maiming other humans, very little is sacrosanct, and very little is honourable about it. That's not platitudes, it's a serious point about the hollow nature of boasts of 'honourable warfare'. There is no such thing.
It's just as cowardly to sit insulated from a conflict thousands of miles away and pull the trigger on a blurry image of a possible suspect fighter, as it is to plant bombs trying to provoke terror in civilian populations thousands of miles from a conflict. Just as cowardly to drop cluster munitions or radioactive munitions near civilian populations. All these actions inflict massive damage on innocent civilian populations, just as part of the strategy. In one case they are labelled as infidels and unworthy of consideration, in the other they are called collateral damage and considered an acceptable price of war.
I don't necessarily disagree with you when you say 'We need to let people like that sink or swim', but in this world of tightly connected social networks where friendship among individuals governs their level of access to your details, I'm not so sure about that. You're only as secure as your weakest link. If one of your less technologically-savvy friends on Facebook happens to fall for this scheme and gives up his login information to the attackers, then your information is exposed to them, and you're put at risk.
Let this be a lesson that content put on a public network is never private. If you have stuff on Facebook you think is private, you should remove it right now, because Facebook has one of the worst track records for security and privacy breeches, and a demonstrable lack of concern for the privacy of your personal data (e.g. beacon fiasco).
What is incredibly important here is for people to realise that sites like Facebook *will never be truly private* and your value to them is precisely in the amount of information on yourself you're willing to give up (which it turns out is quite a lot), in return for a free service connecting you with your friends in a supposedly private manner.
Personally, I treat content I put on the internet (for all values of internet) as public, and don't put anything up I wouldn't be happy for the world to see, unless I have personally overseen the security measures used and am happy with them (and even then it's risky). You are always one exploit away from revealing all the information on Facebook etc. Walled garden sites like Facebook give a false sense of security to some people, and this sort of simple phishing should be a wake-up call that online accounts can and will be compromised frequently and should not contain lots of private info that you would not want public.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is up with you e-ink greybeards? LCD does not 'melt your eyes' literally or figuratively. Do you read this page and all other websites using an eink screen? If not, why does an LCD suffice for most computing activities (including reading), but is then suddenly inappropriate for reading?I look at an LCD perhaps 8 hours a day with no eyestrain, as do millions of office workers.
LCD is a much better general purpose screen, deals with colour for photography and diagrams, lets you use the device to browse the web and play games, by sacrificing some battery life.
For this reason I think general purpose devices like the apple slate will overtake ereaders very quickly in the marketplcae. You're welcome to your eink screens though; I won't try to claim that they make your eyes bleed, they're just less useful than an LCD or OLED.
It's like saying the iPod wont be a premier mp3 player.
No, it's like saying that the iPod/iTunes will change a lot of people's habits and encourage them to use AAC instead of MP3, which it did.
I don't use the browser on my touch simply because 90% of the sites just aren't functional these days without flash support of some kind.
I guess we surf different sites - I rarely disable flashblock, and nowhere near 90% of the sites I visit use Flash for any non-advertising content (closer to 20%).
Unless Apple has struck a deal with Adobe to allow flash on the tablet, there are going to be a lot of web sites that aren't accessible from the tablet.
I suppose another way to look at that is that unless Apple strike a deal with Adobe, there are going to be lots of web sites scrambling to make a website which is accessible from the growing legion of their customers who use iPhones and tablets. At the very least they'll have an HTML version as well as flash, at which point, the question arises, why bother with Flash at all? Flash can pretty much be replaced by HTML5 nowadays, and Apple is definitely hostile to it (and rightly so).
I imagine that's the game plan, and while it's audacious, it might just work.
There are a few apps available on the iPhone which let you cache tiles from many online maps (Atlas, Offmaps, etc). Surely there are analogous ones for Android (or will be coming soon)?
Actually, I think there are far more people than you think around the world who read the NYTimes and would be willing to pay a small price to read it online and on their slate/kindle/device of the future. I know I would happily pay a subscription of a few $ a month for it, which if you added it up could come to an awful lot out of the over 300 million people on Earth who read in English. It has better international coverage than other US papers, and that many here in the UK.
The problem with newspapers nowadays is that not many people bother to buy dead tree products when they can get the same thing online, and papers have ended up subsidising their online operations with a shrinking revenue from a dying branch of the business and paltry advertising revenue. So long as they don't price themselves out of the market, this is great news I think, though if they tried putting columnists only behind a paywall, they'd soon find out how much people think their wittering is worth.
PS I'm unconvinced that the NYT subscriber figures were consistently falling before they even had a website in 1996, but can't find subscriber figures, can you?
That is exactly what Nokia has been trying to do, but Apple doesn't agree to the terms
That is exactly what Apple has been trying to do, but Nokia doesn't agree to the terms.
Disagreement works both ways, unless you believe a priori that one side is right, and we're not going to be able to tell from some news story (on Slashdot, no less!) whether the many patents in question are valid. Good excuse for a flamefest though.
According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), Baidu is making gains in the main cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
These are the only stats on market share I can find. Where did you get your information on Google market share in China? From a government run organisation like the CNNIC perhaps? Looks to me like you're just parroting the government line on this. Why would Google pull out of a market they were making money in, regardless of whether they've lost market share?
The far more likely explanation is they got sick of all the silly restrictions on content (which cost money), the bribes they had to pay, plus the obvious attempt by the Chinese government to install a stooge company as the incumbent in the market place to better enforce control, and then these attempts to actually break into their servers and steal information were just one step too far.
This sounds more like an ultimatum made publicly, and if you say something like that publicly you have to follow through or risk looking like a liar and a hypocrite.
They already have followed through. Top result on Google news tech section:
Google defies Chinese internet censors
Times Online - Jane Macartney - 59 minutes ago
Images of students crushed under tanks in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown are available for the first time on Google's China server.
As described, this was more than simply spying, more like a full-scale cyber attack sponsored by the Chinese government, which China is beginning to get a reputation for, so I'm not surprised Google wanted to draw a line in the sand.
There are no more Original Ideas, there are only rehashes of existing ideas, set in places nobody has imagined before.
Oh really? When did that happen? When the very first story was told? Or the second? How many stories are there in your learned opinion?
This is why I liked Avatar. The plot was a rehash of a couple other movies, done on some alien world.
Of course, the geeks who didn't like the movie because it was "too spiritual" or failed on some Physics law or whatever, entirely miss the point.
Or maybe they thought it was trite, vacuous, nonsense dressed up in pretty special effects, which didn't even bother to be internally consistent. Maybe they thought there was no discernible point to the whole spectacle?
If you want original, stop watching movies, you'll only be disappointed.
2 far superior sci-fi movies came out last year, both of which were pretty original - Moon and District 9. I'm sure you can find some antecedents which are similar in some way on Wikipedia, but not films which combine all of those elements in the same way. If you choose to watch unimaginative tripe like Avatar though, I guess you will remain perpetually unsurprised and can continue to believe that there is nothing that you haven't seen before.
The premise of the plot is good, I agree - Asimov was always good at that side of things. However the writing is atrocious, the characterisation paper-thin, and the pseudo-science around the psychohistory pseudo-science is really a little tiring after a while. I'd say his earlier books have better writing. Haven't read the original short-stories though - maybe they'd be a good jumping off point.
As to updating the science fiction used - why? The value of stories is not in the imaginary context in which they take place, but in what they tell us which feels a universal comment on human life - much of sci-fi (Foundation included) is really speculative fiction about dystopias, utopias and every muddled type of social organisation in between.
For the second time you set up the same strawman that I am arguing that a two-button mouse is better because it is what people are used to. Stop doing this.
Please read the statement from you that I quoted directly above that. Doesn't really matter as we agree on that small point.
Sophistication doesn't mean complexity. It means presenting all the options desired in the most elegant way.
Well, yes, and sophistication that means taking options away and presenting them in a different way, not adding them.
Nobody is going to take away your two button mouse, but trying to argue that another system is inherently inferior because it doesn't require one ignores the point above - that sometimes streamlining an interface leads to something clearer, more intuitive and more elegant (IMHO). This is really a subjective matter and depends on deeper assumptions about what good design, and sophistication, amount to. I'd say the iPhone OS is more elegant than Mac OS X, because it dumps a whole load more assumptions that we don't need, and it doesn't even have a one button mouse!
What you interpret as misunderstanding or passing over what you are saying is probably just that we are starting from different assumptions about what makes a good interface, and whether it is right to lump everything the developer feels like into some miscellaneous 'other' menu that appears when you right click.
Your casting of a 'select/do' and 'other' menu choice as "whacky, inconsistent and difficult" mystifies me.
QED
Photoshop
Actually, I think this one word sums up everything that is wrong with Tablet PCs currently on the market and those announced at CES. They're trying to run desktop apps on a mobile platform with no keyboard and mouse and make it a convincing replacement for laptops or desktops. A tablet will not be a convincing replacement for those machines.
I agree this would be a dream tool for an artist, I'd love one, but it's not possible yet in a convincing package. You don't want to run photoshop on a low-power device, particularly with limited memory, because it would suck. Photoshop only runs on intel processors, and Atom's take loads of power, so that's another count against it, and finally, the interface of Photoshop (being a desktop app) is in no way optimised for use as a tablet, so you'd require at the very least a stylus.
So, back to reality, the Apple tablet will be a consumer device, like an iPod or an iPhone, not a smaller desktop computer. There is no way it will run Photoshop, or other desktop apps, but it will probably run iPhone apps (or something similar). It'll be expensive, under-specced, low-powered, and wildly popular with people who are not geeks.
The reason for introducing 5 button mice was to provoke a discussion of what exactly made 2 (as opposed to 1, or 5) a good number of buttons. Unfortunately that didn't happen. I see complexity increasing with the number of ways you can interact with a device. In some cases (e.g. a keyboard for english with more than 1 letter), that's a good thing, in others, I'm not so convinced.
I think you mean 'e.g.' rather than 'i.e.'.
I meant i.e., because I see Windows and people who grew up with it as at the heart of this problem - Linux interfaces at present have a bad case of 'well, Windows does it this way, so we should too', which means they inherit a lot of the early mistakes of Windows. But as you point out e.g. works better if you want to include other operating systems in the discussion.
Therefore, costs being negligible, we should support the solution that offers us greatest choice and software writers can code as they wish. Although, they will of course code to a two-button standard as this is (a) what most people are used to and (b) offers greater sophistication.
Don't imply that my argument had anything to do with what people are used to or that I ever said what people are used to equates to what is good.
I'm not implying anything, both quotes above are from you. That was not the entirety of your argument, but it was the first part of it. I don't accept that point at all, because many things that lots of people do are wrong.
The other side of the argument (the stronger side really) for two button mice is that the increased complexity gives you more functionality at no cost. I had hoped pointing out that a 5 button mouse gives increased complexity at an obvious cost in confusion (how do I use this thing?) would indicate that I think adding 2 buttons similarly costs too much in terms of user confusion. Now OS X supports multi-button mice, the one I use right here has one obvious button, and lots of hidden functions (including gestures, right taps etc) I can enable if I wish. Mostly I just use it to point and click and scroll, and feel that should be the default function exposed to the user, otherwise software producers will think of all sorts of whacky, inconsistent and difficult interfaces for their products which rely on two button mice, and sometimes will only expose features in that hidden menu requiring a right click (see Windows).
And a two-button mouse is demonstrably more capable than a one-button mouse
I disagree. Depending on the software design, two buttons can be completely superflous (e.g. OS X, iPhone), or just confusing and inelegant (e.g. Windows, where what appears in a contextual menu is never clearly defined, and can sometimes encompass most of the actions you take in a program, and sometimes not). It's lazy interface design to just dump stuff in a menu that appears when you right click, and I'm glad that OS X has thus far forced developers to think about their interface and always allow for use of a one button mouse.
So I suppose it's a philosophical difference about the importance of simplicity in designs which won't be resolved by discussion - you feel extra complexity = free sophistication, and I don't agree that it comes at no cost. An interface should present as many choices as are absolutely necessary to get the job done, and no more.