Of course, they could always just toggle the feature of LOADing incompatible feature code into memory in the first place, but that it too complicated for Apple. With Apple, your device Just Works... until the day that Apple decides for you that won't work as well anymore.
Don't complain about your slow old phones, OK? That is a conspiracy theory. Anything that does not conclude Apple is totally in the ethical clear for updating old phones into obsolescence, is clearly a Conspiracy Theorist.
Get Greenify. Permanently hibernate every damn thing you aren't planning to use within the next hour. Android's 'any installed app can run in the background whenever it wants' regime is strictly for amateurs. Drove me absolutely insane until I found Greenify.
Let this post not be seen as any kind of Google endorsement. Clearly Google is just trying to spy on us all with this system of near-unkillable apps. Unlike Apple, which would never do anything as evil as what Google does. That's why when there are holes in Apple's security, they aren't 'backdoors', because everyone trusts Apple, so if only Apple has access to your porn collection, then it automatically isn't a 'back door' because Apple can be automatically trusted. QED.
You're right. Supporting older devices is more difficult. Good thing Apple has my best interests at heart; it is that special quality of Apple, which is not like other OS companies, that allows it to make a half-assed attempt at such a difficult job and ship the update to me, regardless.
That's precisely the kind of move that won Apple my heart.
I do in fact have a most laudable bulk -- thank you for noticing. This page is the first time I have visited Slashdot in many years, and I am very encouraging by how everyone seems to instantly grok my posts. I heard the commenting community had degenerated here, but obviously I was misinformed...
And they still do! And you can put your complete trust in them, EXCEPT for allowing them to put anything new on your computer without at least a 4-hour session of Googling for advice from total strangers.
This is how I defend Apple because everyone should know that Apple is not like other companies. They have your best interests at heart.
Why are we even talking about hard drives? That was a throwaway line. I shouldn't have even referenced it. Mobile devices have flash drives, not hard drives, and much like solid state GPS antennas, solid state flash drives, on average, begin to lose structural integrity and shake apart within several weeks of purchase, in a long degenerative process that you'd be LUCKY to see last 2 years. Therefore, Apple can stuff whatever non-functional shit on these already non-functional devices they damn well please. Electronics die in hours, you see. But Apple is forever!
That's because hard drives have moving parts, which make them more durable. That's why they can last as long as two years or more. Solid state stuff, however, like memory chips and GPS antennas, will clearly disintegrate before lunch. Therefore, Apple is not at fault for pushing slow software onto old devices -- it's a miracle those devices still run at all! Be grateful for what you have. No one promised you could own something that works for more than a year.
Of course I back up my data! Because electronic equipment is the most unreliable substance in the universe. I can practically see it disintegrating before my eyes. I like this fact because it excuses Apple of any wrongdoing.
You're right. Electronic equipment ages so fast. I've never seen a hard drive last more than a couple of years, and we are lucky if a memory chip lasts more than six months! There is nothing less reliable in the long-term than solid state electronics gear with no moving parts.
It's clearly your fault for upgrading without doing extensive research, first, as another user here on Slashdot has just informed me. I have to admit, my loyalty was threatened a little by what happened to my iPhone 3G, and Apple is a great company, you see, with our best interests at heart. To take advantage of all of this enormous corporate beneficence and goodwill, you just have to remember not to trust a single update that Apple ever offers for a device without doing extensive research, first!
Apple: The Computer for the Rest of Usà as long as we stay Ever Vigilant to fall prey to Apple update fuckery.
Clearly iOS is the superior smartphone ecosystem.
"Do your research before upgrading an old phone" = "Don't trust Apple". Are you suggesting that I should NOT in fact trust my sacredest of sacred cows? Blasphemy!
For a moment there, I suspected Apple might have slowed down my old iPhone 3G to an unuseable crawl intentionally, but after reading the above, I finally understand that it wasn't intentionally done to annoy me. They simply pushed a wrongly optimised update to a phone that couldn't run it well, because they no longer gave a shit about me, since I was not upgrading to the latest device.
So this was a totally "innocent" move! My trust in Apple is restored!
Thank you, Slashdot, for informing me of "what the graphs don't show". I am so reassured.
For a moment there I thought I was going to have to look askance at my most sacredest cow.
Equivalency between any of those things is not required for that post to be dead accurate about the logical flaw in the typical defence for censorship, capitalist-style.
Ever heard of reductio ad absurdum? "But what *I* choose to apply my logic to is *not* absurd!" -- that is not a valid defence.
There is *no* way to recover the data on a modern drive after a single wipe. It is actually impossible. It cannot be done.
The reason is simple - although you may be able to detect a tiny tiny bit of data from the previous recording, you've no idea how strongly overwritten it is. Now, with old drives which used simple on/off pulses to write data to the disk, it would be possible to see if the bit you're looking at is a little higher or lower than it should be, and infer the previous value from that. Modern drives use a system similar to QAM - quadrature amplitude modulation - to pack more bits of data into each transition on the disk. Since the signal is essentially analogue, you'd need to know how badly degraded the print-through was. You can't do this, so you can't recover data after it's been overwritten even once.
Well, you could just assume it's all been overwritten exactly once. I imagine that this would allow you to reconstruct a fair amount of data -- particularly if people take the advice in TFA seriously.
Their problems don't disappear at all in a double-blind test. They just fail to correlate with the actual presence of the signal. Often their 'problems' become exacerbated and they send themselves mentally into a crisis because of their belief that they are being subjected to RF, even though it happens to be off in that part of the test. These trials usually end up with a significant number of people dropping off due to such 'crises'.
Mind you, the symptoms of the 'sensitives' are actually real and can be life-threatening, so they should absolutely be taken very seriously and they never 'disappear'. They just aren't caused by what they are convinced they are caused by.
...would have predisposed the human mind to perform poorly in an environment of multiple potentially dangerous stimuli which demand a minimum level of awareness......oh wait. I've just noticed that I'm talking complete nonsense. Never mind.
Welcome to the post of the minority opinionator, where your opinion matters. Unless it agrees with that of the majority. Then you are obviously being coopted and brainwashed. Only those who hold minority opinions can possibly have logic on their side. No, this isn't sore-loser whining: it's principle! Anyone who agrees with the majority obviously has no principles, since the only explanation for this common opinioin is that the holders of it are afraid of the majority. I am unafraid therefore I am right. Your Mileage Must Vary.
Um... no. Not unless you're comparing high end 10 years ago to low end today.
A starter name-brand desktop system complete with monitor and keyboard in the mid-'90s would generally hover just below $2000 and sometimes break above it: this was true for both Mac and PC. Nowadays they tend to hover just above $1000, sometimes breaking into the $1500 range. A significant change, but not nearly as radical as you suggest.
The last time I can remember hearing about typical 'average' (non-pro) Mac users spending $4000 on their systems was in 1984. From there until the 1990 it was more like $3000 as an upper range. After 1990 (but still well before the clone era) prices precipitously dropped to around to $2000 level for starter systems. And after 2000 they have been dipping toward that magic $1000 mark and sometimes with the odd product even hitting it, like with the eMac and the very lowest end iMacs. (The Mac mini crossed it like many bargain basement PC vendors, but that also depends on what you do for a monitor and a keyboard.)
Things changed much more before the Mac cloning era than they have since.
The USA defeated the communist Soviet Union by outspending them in the specific industry of aerospace technology.
Wait, what? Did I miss a piece of history somewhere along the way where the Soviet Union was "beaten", rather than fizzled out?
What you missed was the widespread mainstream American adoption of the section of Republican talking points in which they yelled 'pwned!' after the Soviet Union tripped over itself.
We should all be rejoicing at the prospect that Apple's ridiculously walled garden of a smartphone app distribution model might crumble into ringtones and other nonsense, since the more it is taken seriously the more our future handheld freedoms are in danger through copycatting and industry-wide adoption (think it won't happen? cf. PlaysForSure + iPod = Zune).
Sadly, however, TFA'S argument is bogus, since on desktop systems, people publish extremely complex apps for free, every day. Oh well. Guess it's back to hold out all of our wrists for velvet handcuffs...
That advantage is very simple. People with pirated copies of Windows cannot get security updates, due to DRM. People with pirated copies of OS X get all the updates, no questions asked. Viruses do not discriminate and are more likely to fluorish (and therefore threaten *your* machine) in an environment with a certain number of unprotected machines. All of the pirate copies of Windows out there become that vector, by Microsoft's design. Therefore, the installed Mac OS X userbase is at a massive architectural advantage for security compared to the Windows userbase, simply because Microsoft places the almighty dollar above all other considerations.
Ignore the dorky gestures and focus on the 'real-world pixels' -- pixels that are aware of not only their coordinates on a digital surface, but also their coordinates in the room at large. This is the big leap forward here, not all the arm-waving.
Try to see the whole, bud.
You should have RTFA. The interface in Minority Report is based on Oblong's G-speak, not vice versa. In fact, G-speak has been in development for more than a decade, and the creator of G-speak was the science advisor on the film. so if anybody is "unimaginative" it's the makers of the film, not the makers of this interface.
So I am making a prediction,and the prediction is this: That 5 years from now any mention of "cloud computing" will be strictly in a past tense. As will most likely Youtube,Netfix on demand,etc.
Cloud computing, yes, you're right. Simply put, it's nonsense, it's a technologically inferior way to store your data, and it truly benefits nobody except those who are slavering at the prospect of putting unassailable walls around your data. However, Youtube, Netflix, and other on-demand-video -- definitely no, those services will stay as is, but will not advance anywhere close to what people think in five years.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, they could always just toggle the feature of LOADing incompatible feature code into memory in the first place, but that it too complicated for Apple. With Apple, your device Just Works... until the day that Apple decides for you that won't work as well anymore. Don't complain about your slow old phones, OK? That is a conspiracy theory. Anything that does not conclude Apple is totally in the ethical clear for updating old phones into obsolescence, is clearly a Conspiracy Theorist.
Get Greenify. Permanently hibernate every damn thing you aren't planning to use within the next hour. Android's 'any installed app can run in the background whenever it wants' regime is strictly for amateurs. Drove me absolutely insane until I found Greenify. Let this post not be seen as any kind of Google endorsement. Clearly Google is just trying to spy on us all with this system of near-unkillable apps. Unlike Apple, which would never do anything as evil as what Google does. That's why when there are holes in Apple's security, they aren't 'backdoors', because everyone trusts Apple, so if only Apple has access to your porn collection, then it automatically isn't a 'back door' because Apple can be automatically trusted. QED.
You're right. Supporting older devices is more difficult. Good thing Apple has my best interests at heart; it is that special quality of Apple, which is not like other OS companies, that allows it to make a half-assed attempt at such a difficult job and ship the update to me, regardless. That's precisely the kind of move that won Apple my heart.
I do in fact have a most laudable bulk -- thank you for noticing. This page is the first time I have visited Slashdot in many years, and I am very encouraging by how everyone seems to instantly grok my posts. I heard the commenting community had degenerated here, but obviously I was misinformed...
And they still do! And you can put your complete trust in them, EXCEPT for allowing them to put anything new on your computer without at least a 4-hour session of Googling for advice from total strangers. This is how I defend Apple because everyone should know that Apple is not like other companies. They have your best interests at heart.
Why are we even talking about hard drives? That was a throwaway line. I shouldn't have even referenced it. Mobile devices have flash drives, not hard drives, and much like solid state GPS antennas, solid state flash drives, on average, begin to lose structural integrity and shake apart within several weeks of purchase, in a long degenerative process that you'd be LUCKY to see last 2 years. Therefore, Apple can stuff whatever non-functional shit on these already non-functional devices they damn well please. Electronics die in hours, you see. But Apple is forever!
That's because hard drives have moving parts, which make them more durable. That's why they can last as long as two years or more. Solid state stuff, however, like memory chips and GPS antennas, will clearly disintegrate before lunch. Therefore, Apple is not at fault for pushing slow software onto old devices -- it's a miracle those devices still run at all! Be grateful for what you have. No one promised you could own something that works for more than a year.
Of course I back up my data! Because electronic equipment is the most unreliable substance in the universe. I can practically see it disintegrating before my eyes. I like this fact because it excuses Apple of any wrongdoing.
You're right. Electronic equipment ages so fast. I've never seen a hard drive last more than a couple of years, and we are lucky if a memory chip lasts more than six months! There is nothing less reliable in the long-term than solid state electronics gear with no moving parts.
It's clearly your fault for upgrading without doing extensive research, first, as another user here on Slashdot has just informed me. I have to admit, my loyalty was threatened a little by what happened to my iPhone 3G, and Apple is a great company, you see, with our best interests at heart. To take advantage of all of this enormous corporate beneficence and goodwill, you just have to remember not to trust a single update that Apple ever offers for a device without doing extensive research, first! Apple: The Computer for the Rest of Usà as long as we stay Ever Vigilant to fall prey to Apple update fuckery. Clearly iOS is the superior smartphone ecosystem.
"Do your research before upgrading an old phone" = "Don't trust Apple". Are you suggesting that I should NOT in fact trust my sacredest of sacred cows? Blasphemy!
For a moment there, I suspected Apple might have slowed down my old iPhone 3G to an unuseable crawl intentionally, but after reading the above, I finally understand that it wasn't intentionally done to annoy me. They simply pushed a wrongly optimised update to a phone that couldn't run it well, because they no longer gave a shit about me, since I was not upgrading to the latest device. So this was a totally "innocent" move! My trust in Apple is restored! Thank you, Slashdot, for informing me of "what the graphs don't show". I am so reassured. For a moment there I thought I was going to have to look askance at my most sacredest cow.
Equivalency between any of those things is not required for that post to be dead accurate about the logical flaw in the typical defence for censorship, capitalist-style. Ever heard of reductio ad absurdum? "But what *I* choose to apply my logic to is *not* absurd!" -- that is not a valid defence.
There is *no* way to recover the data on a modern drive after a single wipe. It is actually impossible. It cannot be done.
The reason is simple - although you may be able to detect a tiny tiny bit of data from the previous recording, you've no idea how strongly overwritten it is. Now, with old drives which used simple on/off pulses to write data to the disk, it would be possible to see if the bit you're looking at is a little higher or lower than it should be, and infer the previous value from that. Modern drives use a system similar to QAM - quadrature amplitude modulation - to pack more bits of data into each transition on the disk. Since the signal is essentially analogue, you'd need to know how badly degraded the print-through was. You can't do this, so you can't recover data after it's been overwritten even once.
Well, you could just assume it's all been overwritten exactly once. I imagine that this would allow you to reconstruct a fair amount of data -- particularly if people take the advice in TFA seriously.
Their problems don't disappear at all in a double-blind test. They just fail to correlate with the actual presence of the signal. Often their 'problems' become exacerbated and they send themselves mentally into a crisis because of their belief that they are being subjected to RF, even though it happens to be off in that part of the test. These trials usually end up with a significant number of people dropping off due to such 'crises'. Mind you, the symptoms of the 'sensitives' are actually real and can be life-threatening, so they should absolutely be taken very seriously and they never 'disappear'. They just aren't caused by what they are convinced they are caused by.
...would have predisposed the human mind to perform poorly in an environment of multiple potentially dangerous stimuli which demand a minimum level of awareness... ...oh wait. I've just noticed that I'm talking complete nonsense. Never mind.
Welcome to the post of the minority opinionator, where your opinion matters. Unless it agrees with that of the majority. Then you are obviously being coopted and brainwashed. Only those who hold minority opinions can possibly have logic on their side. No, this isn't sore-loser whining: it's principle! Anyone who agrees with the majority obviously has no principles, since the only explanation for this common opinioin is that the holders of it are afraid of the majority. I am unafraid therefore I am right. Your Mileage Must Vary.
Back then a computer was $4000
Um ... no. Not unless you're comparing high end 10 years ago to low end today.
A starter name-brand desktop system complete with monitor and keyboard in the mid-'90s would generally hover just below $2000 and sometimes break above it: this was true for both Mac and PC. Nowadays they tend to hover just above $1000, sometimes breaking into the $1500 range. A significant change, but not nearly as radical as you suggest.
The last time I can remember hearing about typical 'average' (non-pro) Mac users spending $4000 on their systems was in 1984. From there until the 1990 it was more like $3000 as an upper range. After 1990 (but still well before the clone era) prices precipitously dropped to around to $2000 level for starter systems. And after 2000 they have been dipping toward that magic $1000 mark and sometimes with the odd product even hitting it, like with the eMac and the very lowest end iMacs. (The Mac mini crossed it like many bargain basement PC vendors, but that also depends on what you do for a monitor and a keyboard.)
Things changed much more before the Mac cloning era than they have since.
The USA defeated the communist Soviet Union by outspending them in the specific industry of aerospace technology.
Wait, what? Did I miss a piece of history somewhere along the way where the Soviet Union was "beaten", rather than fizzled out?
What you missed was the widespread mainstream American adoption of the section of Republican talking points in which they yelled 'pwned!' after the Soviet Union tripped over itself.
We should all be rejoicing at the prospect that Apple's ridiculously walled garden of a smartphone app distribution model might crumble into ringtones and other nonsense, since the more it is taken seriously the more our future handheld freedoms are in danger through copycatting and industry-wide adoption (think it won't happen? cf. PlaysForSure + iPod = Zune). Sadly, however, TFA'S argument is bogus, since on desktop systems, people publish extremely complex apps for free, every day. Oh well. Guess it's back to hold out all of our wrists for velvet handcuffs...
That advantage is very simple. People with pirated copies of Windows cannot get security updates, due to DRM. People with pirated copies of OS X get all the updates, no questions asked. Viruses do not discriminate and are more likely to fluorish (and therefore threaten *your* machine) in an environment with a certain number of unprotected machines. All of the pirate copies of Windows out there become that vector, by Microsoft's design. Therefore, the installed Mac OS X userbase is at a massive architectural advantage for security compared to the Windows userbase, simply because Microsoft places the almighty dollar above all other considerations.
Ignore the dorky gestures and focus on the 'real-world pixels' -- pixels that are aware of not only their coordinates on a digital surface, but also their coordinates in the room at large. This is the big leap forward here, not all the arm-waving. Try to see the whole, bud.
You should have RTFA. The interface in Minority Report is based on Oblong's G-speak, not vice versa. In fact, G-speak has been in development for more than a decade, and the creator of G-speak was the science advisor on the film. so if anybody is "unimaginative" it's the makers of the film, not the makers of this interface.
So I am making a prediction,and the prediction is this: That 5 years from now any mention of "cloud computing" will be strictly in a past tense. As will most likely Youtube,Netfix on demand,etc.
Cloud computing, yes, you're right. Simply put, it's nonsense, it's a technologically inferior way to store your data, and it truly benefits nobody except those who are slavering at the prospect of putting unassailable walls around your data. However, Youtube, Netflix, and other on-demand-video -- definitely no, those services will stay as is, but will not advance anywhere close to what people think in five years.
The article uses the phrase "Mac tax," which one commenter points out is a recent Microsoft marketing canard.
Gotcha!!