I really don't understand the prevailing wisdom that MobileMe is a failure. The email, calendaring and contacts work brilliantly, and I've been happily using it for over 2 years. It's properly cross-platform, and despite a warning window even works on Internet Explorer 8 at work. The only part that sucked a bit was iDisk, and even that was pretty good (I only dropped it when I realised how great DropBox is). I understand that Jobs was unhappy with MobileMe, but I'm not sure exactly what the issue was other than a soundbite. Either way, I can't see how iCloud is actually different on the email/calendar/contacts front.
I'm sure many people have regrets after switching platform for one reason or another, we were talking about the ridiculous idea that people continue to buy Apple "because it's Apple" - I'm sure if the majority shared the view of your friends, Apple would be on a steep downhill slope to oblivion. I would suggest that your friends sell their Macs - one of the many benefits of a Mac over a PC is they tend to hold their value for a lot longer.
Do you really think people would keep shelling out money for things that don't work and don't fulfil their requirements? People do buy Apple products because they're Apple products, but that choice is based on the fact that their previous experience with Apple products has been good. The concept is known as trust - presuming that previous experience will continue. If Apple started churning out rubbish products that didn't fulfil peoples needs and expectations, then they might last one generation, but they would soon lose their reputation.
The Nano was soldered on, but that was a much later, flash-based product. We were debating (I thought) the idea that iPods revolutionised the mp3 player market, and could therefore be credited to Apple as an area in which they contributed greatly to the advancement of technology, so later products like the Nano isn't really part of that discussion. Also, I would have thought it would be commonplace for ultra-miniturised mp3 players like the Nano so have soldered-on parts, there just isn't space in the case for replaceable batteries.
Thanks for the rewrite of history. Apple were certainly inspired by Xerox (and hired a load of their engineers and designers) but the Mac/Lisa GUI was the interface that inspired all the rest. The Xerox GUI was a text-heavy modal interface; in other words it had more in common with the horrible MS-DOS pseudo-GUIs than with the Mac/Lisa.
Checkout this photographic record to see the work Apple put in to developing the Mac/Lisa GUI. Along the way, they invented: pull-down menus; pop-up dialog boxes; icon-based file management; palates of tools/colours/shades etc.. They pretty much wrote the book on user/computer interaction for the next 20 years, and deserve far more credit for that than they get.
It's true that Xerox gave them a very good starting point, but the idea that they "nicked... and popularized" something that Xerox developed is simply not true, and if you wanted to be that simplistic then the credit would be due to Douglas Engelbart.
The guy who was shot was a criminal. We don't yet know all the details of what happened. A crowd did form a peaceful protest. The riots that followed were mostly people who had no political statement, they just jumped on a bandwagon and went out to smash things up and steal things for themselves.
These riots were nothing to do with "cuts in... deprived areas". It's been a festival of lawlessness and thuggery with destruction of property and widescale theft. Not one person has gone to the media with a political statement, demand, issue etc.
Ordinary. People. Do. Not. Want. To. Sysadmin. Their. Phones.
I did an engineering degree and used to be in IT, but I'm in a completely different profession now, and not only do I not want to Sysadmin my phone or Laptop, I don't even want to do proper file management. What I'm really, really hoping is that Apple will resurrect the metadata dream and have a proper self-organising filesystem.
Right now, the only visible organisation in iOS is organisation by App, and in each iWork App you get one level of folders - fine for 20 files, useless for 200. Also quite annoying because I might remember saving a document, but if it was e.g. a work roster, did I do it in Pages or Numbers?
I'm hoping Apple will move to tagging files with metadata, so each file is tagged with not only its App, but any number of arbitrary tags. Then I could filter the files I see based on the tags I select - which project the file is to do with, where it originally came from (e.g. emailed to me by someone), and do away with folders entirely.
This is pretty much the only direction I could see Apple going in - they can't go back to a structured hierarchical folder-based filesystem, and they certainly won't be able to keep the current "big flat list of files" when people are running into hundreds of documents, and people will get fed up with having to go via each individual App to find their files. Despite all the Apple-bashing on Slashdot, I think this is going to happen, and it will be yet another area in which Apple introduces a game-changer to IT.
That's not what I said. To aid your reading comprehension: if he's avoiding Apple because they litigate, he should avoid pretty much every other tech company too.
You do realise that all the companies selling any computer or telephony gear that you might want to own have been the initiator or the subject of litigation at one time or another? If you don't want to own tech from any company that has ever brought an injunction or started a lawsuit over fear of patent infringement then you should stay away from: Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, Google, Oracle/Sun, HP, Dell, Samsung, Nokia, Sony, Nintendo etc., etc.. This is normal for the tech industry, even if you just use a truly free Linux distro like Debian you wouldn't be able to buy any decent hardware to run it on.
Re-read what you've written: improved on what Apple has done. It's the "what Apple has done" bit that may indicate patent infringement. Rightly or wrongly, patents are used by companies to protect their revenue-making ability. You have to be totally blind to not see the Galaxy S as (at least in part) a copy of Apple's case design and GUI.
Thanks for the non sequitur. I don't deny that doctors make mistakes (and bear in mind that back pain is notoriously difficult to diagnose), but the debate was that "the [computer] program was better at diagnosing medical conditions than the doctors", to which your story adds no information. I'm pretty sure that a computer program could have helped provide a list of possibilities for your condition, but ultimately it was a good doctor who got you sorted.
It's also interesting to note the intuition of the anaesthetist who noticed your problem - something that a computer program would probably never do, because the anaesthetics program would just do anaesthetics and not notice the obvious discomfort of the other person in the room who wasn't even its patient.
As an IT troubleshooter you can probably bear witness to the fact that there is currently no algorithm that can successfully fix an intermittent problem with a computer - it requires the complexity and intuition of human thought - even though the spectrum of problems that can affect a computer system is orders of magnitude less than that of the human body.
If you knew anything about medicine, you would know that no computer has come close to out-diagnosing an experienced clinician. Computers are great at giving lists of possibilities, but real medicine is all about risk and uncertainty, where intuition and clinical skills play a big part. How do you think a computer would even be able to form a reliable diagnosis without an experienced clinician performing an examination?
"Doctors are the third leading cause of death in this country". Bullshit. Heart disease, Cancer, Stroke, Chronic lower respiratory diseases and Accidents are the top 5 causes in the US, according to CDC. Doctors and other health professionals work hard to prevent disease. Why prevent people from peddling quack therapies? Perhaps you don't have many friends or family that you love and care about, but most people will know at least one person that means a lot to them, who doesn't have the means to properly understand medical information, and wastes their money - or even worse risks their health - on quackery. That's why I vocally oppose quacks.
Yes - the choice to move creative people out of an environment that they find familiar that supports their creative workflow into one preferred by technical people who should have the pre-exisiting skills to adjust to a heterogeneous mix of hardware/software but nevertheless have a reputation for being inflexible and narrow-minded would definitely be made by bad management.
What about if you attacked someone in order to free slaves? Should the attack be condemned on the basis that "motivation is irrelevant" according to GP, or should it be applauded on the basis that freeing slaves is right?
Slashdot Mirror
Since when were there schedules to release versions of Windows?
It's not legal, you can't put terms in a contract like that, there's no way that would ever stand up in court.
"Microsoft Word is a professional text processor (like LaTeX)."
LMFAO
I really don't understand the prevailing wisdom that MobileMe is a failure. The email, calendaring and contacts work brilliantly, and I've been happily using it for over 2 years. It's properly cross-platform, and despite a warning window even works on Internet Explorer 8 at work. The only part that sucked a bit was iDisk, and even that was pretty good (I only dropped it when I realised how great DropBox is). I understand that Jobs was unhappy with MobileMe, but I'm not sure exactly what the issue was other than a soundbite. Either way, I can't see how iCloud is actually different on the email/calendar/contacts front.
I'm sure many people have regrets after switching platform for one reason or another, we were talking about the ridiculous idea that people continue to buy Apple "because it's Apple" - I'm sure if the majority shared the view of your friends, Apple would be on a steep downhill slope to oblivion. I would suggest that your friends sell their Macs - one of the many benefits of a Mac over a PC is they tend to hold their value for a lot longer.
Do you really think people would keep shelling out money for things that don't work and don't fulfil their requirements? People do buy Apple products because they're Apple products, but that choice is based on the fact that their previous experience with Apple products has been good. The concept is known as trust - presuming that previous experience will continue. If Apple started churning out rubbish products that didn't fulfil peoples needs and expectations, then they might last one generation, but they would soon lose their reputation.
The Nano was soldered on, but that was a much later, flash-based product. We were debating (I thought) the idea that iPods revolutionised the mp3 player market, and could therefore be credited to Apple as an area in which they contributed greatly to the advancement of technology, so later products like the Nano isn't really part of that discussion. Also, I would have thought it would be commonplace for ultra-miniturised mp3 players like the Nano so have soldered-on parts, there just isn't space in the case for replaceable batteries.
The batteries were not soldered into the units, I replaced many myself.
You know iTunes was made mandatory well after the iPod was market leader?
Thanks for the rewrite of history. Apple were certainly inspired by Xerox (and hired a load of their engineers and designers) but the Mac/Lisa GUI was the interface that inspired all the rest. The Xerox GUI was a text-heavy modal interface; in other words it had more in common with the horrible MS-DOS pseudo-GUIs than with the Mac/Lisa.
Checkout this photographic record to see the work Apple put in to developing the Mac/Lisa GUI. Along the way, they invented: pull-down menus; pop-up dialog boxes; icon-based file management; palates of tools/colours/shades etc.. They pretty much wrote the book on user/computer interaction for the next 20 years, and deserve far more credit for that than they get.
It's true that Xerox gave them a very good starting point, but the idea that they "nicked... and popularized" something that Xerox developed is simply not true, and if you wanted to be that simplistic then the credit would be due to Douglas Engelbart.
The guy who was shot was a criminal. We don't yet know all the details of what happened. A crowd did form a peaceful protest. The riots that followed were mostly people who had no political statement, they just jumped on a bandwagon and went out to smash things up and steal things for themselves.
These riots were nothing to do with "cuts in... deprived areas". It's been a festival of lawlessness and thuggery with destruction of property and widescale theft. Not one person has gone to the media with a political statement, demand, issue etc.
Ordinary. People. Do. Not. Want. To. Sysadmin. Their. Phones.
I did an engineering degree and used to be in IT, but I'm in a completely different profession now, and not only do I not want to Sysadmin my phone or Laptop, I don't even want to do proper file management. What I'm really, really hoping is that Apple will resurrect the metadata dream and have a proper self-organising filesystem.
Right now, the only visible organisation in iOS is organisation by App, and in each iWork App you get one level of folders - fine for 20 files, useless for 200. Also quite annoying because I might remember saving a document, but if it was e.g. a work roster, did I do it in Pages or Numbers?
I'm hoping Apple will move to tagging files with metadata, so each file is tagged with not only its App, but any number of arbitrary tags. Then I could filter the files I see based on the tags I select - which project the file is to do with, where it originally came from (e.g. emailed to me by someone), and do away with folders entirely.
This is pretty much the only direction I could see Apple going in - they can't go back to a structured hierarchical folder-based filesystem, and they certainly won't be able to keep the current "big flat list of files" when people are running into hundreds of documents, and people will get fed up with having to go via each individual App to find their files. Despite all the Apple-bashing on Slashdot, I think this is going to happen, and it will be yet another area in which Apple introduces a game-changer to IT.
That's not what I said. To aid your reading comprehension: if he's avoiding Apple because they litigate, he should avoid pretty much every other tech company too.
You do realise that all the companies selling any computer or telephony gear that you might want to own have been the initiator or the subject of litigation at one time or another? If you don't want to own tech from any company that has ever brought an injunction or started a lawsuit over fear of patent infringement then you should stay away from: Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, Google, Oracle/Sun, HP, Dell, Samsung, Nokia, Sony, Nintendo etc., etc.. This is normal for the tech industry, even if you just use a truly free Linux distro like Debian you wouldn't be able to buy any decent hardware to run it on.
Re-read what you've written: improved on what Apple has done. It's the "what Apple has done" bit that may indicate patent infringement. Rightly or wrongly, patents are used by companies to protect their revenue-making ability. You have to be totally blind to not see the Galaxy S as (at least in part) a copy of Apple's case design and GUI.
Thanks for the non sequitur. I don't deny that doctors make mistakes (and bear in mind that back pain is notoriously difficult to diagnose), but the debate was that "the [computer] program was better at diagnosing medical conditions than the doctors", to which your story adds no information. I'm pretty sure that a computer program could have helped provide a list of possibilities for your condition, but ultimately it was a good doctor who got you sorted.
It's also interesting to note the intuition of the anaesthetist who noticed your problem - something that a computer program would probably never do, because the anaesthetics program would just do anaesthetics and not notice the obvious discomfort of the other person in the room who wasn't even its patient.
As an IT troubleshooter you can probably bear witness to the fact that there is currently no algorithm that can successfully fix an intermittent problem with a computer - it requires the complexity and intuition of human thought - even though the spectrum of problems that can affect a computer system is orders of magnitude less than that of the human body.
If you knew anything about medicine, you would know that no computer has come close to out-diagnosing an experienced clinician. Computers are great at giving lists of possibilities, but real medicine is all about risk and uncertainty, where intuition and clinical skills play a big part. How do you think a computer would even be able to form a reliable diagnosis without an experienced clinician performing an examination?
"Doctors are the third leading cause of death in this country". Bullshit. Heart disease, Cancer, Stroke, Chronic lower respiratory diseases and Accidents are the top 5 causes in the US, according to CDC. Doctors and other health professionals work hard to prevent disease. Why prevent people from peddling quack therapies? Perhaps you don't have many friends or family that you love and care about, but most people will know at least one person that means a lot to them, who doesn't have the means to properly understand medical information, and wastes their money - or even worse risks their health - on quackery. That's why I vocally oppose quacks.
What risks and liability do you think lie behind putting some software on a thumb drive?
That's right, because enforcing policy is the main profit-making activity of most business.
Yes - the choice to move creative people out of an environment that they find familiar that supports their creative workflow into one preferred by technical people who should have the pre-exisiting skills to adjust to a heterogeneous mix of hardware/software but nevertheless have a reputation for being inflexible and narrow-minded would definitely be made by bad management.
What about if you attacked someone in order to free slaves? Should the attack be condemned on the basis that "motivation is irrelevant" according to GP, or should it be applauded on the basis that freeing slaves is right?
Yes - the only way to maintain Internet freedom is to avoid exercising it. Good plan.
Still, neither were relevant.