This whole Apple-products-just-work spiel is plain marketing BS. Two months ago my sister bought my dad an ipad. Guess who got to spend 5 hours this past weekend helping him try to get it working in various ways. That's right, me.
First he wanted to update the OS. So I read the instructions: Hook your ipad to a computer and then run iTunes. Follow the instructions from there. That's it. Well iTunes is a program on my father's ipad, it is a web site from which Apple sells music, and it is a program that one can get for their desktop machine. WTF are they talking about? In their effort to simplify everything for stupid people, Apple has named everything "iTunes", creating substantial confusion. iTunes is a program that gets music from Apple, it syncs your device's content, and it is used to update your device's OS. Of course.
So after my father realizes he forgot his "Apple ID", we play 20 questions to get a new password. ("This is like taking a God damn exam. Why can't I just get the update software?") Then the software starts downloading. An hour later we get "Unknown error 1602." Shit. Disconnect ipad. It won't run. It is foobarred. Our only option is to "Restore" the ipad, which it tells us will wipe all programs, books, videos, photos and music from the ipad. WTF!? Apple didn't put the OS on a different partition from the media? Are you serious? So we wipe the iPad and my dad spends a couple more hours putting stuff back on it.
Then he wants to hook the iPad to my TV set. So we go to a store for a video connector, because the video cable is nonstandard. (Good idea, buy a device with a nonstandard video out, mumble, mumble.) Store is out of them. Drive to another store. Pay an absurd amount of money for a six inch cable. Hook iPad to TV. Nothin'. Check cables, etc. etc. An hour later, read on web. It turns out that only certain programs can be displayed on the TV out. WTF?! Who would buy a device that limits what you can see on an external monitor? Apple is making Microsoft look good here. After another hour of mucking around with the device we finally get it to show the Netflix video on my TV. It looks like shit. The video is only half the size of my screen.
My dad is typing an email. He gripes about the screen not being easy to type on, but says you can get a keyboard for it. I say, I have keyboards! But, hey, there is no USB connector on the device! Are you serious? You can't just plug in a keyboard or mouse? WTF?
People buy Apple products due to hype, marketing, and they think the products make them look cool. That's it. I have fewer problems with my Linux laptop. It just works.
Unless your company is developing its own browser and its own OS, making it's own corporate standard on browsers is stupid. The standards that should have been followed here are the W3C standards. Not the "standards" of one company with one browser on one operating system.
Before 2000 there were computer standards in place. Not following those standards is now an obvious huge failure and now companies will be paying for it.
Porting a python run time would be a pain in the butt. And even if it worked what libraries would it have?
I wrote a python script on my laptop that grabs some data off the network and displays it in a GTK window for the user. I then copied that program to my N900 and it just worked. Try that on your Droid.
HTC and Motorola, install proprietary user interfaces to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience.... Compare this to iPhone, where every handset works the same.
Really Steve? The HTC iPhone works the same as the Motorola iPhone? Idiot.
Developing on Apple's phones does not get your stuff to work on Nokia's phones any more than developing for HTC phones gets your stuff to run on Motorola's phones. Many people had hoped that Android would make their programs run across platforms, but that has not yet materialized. That certainly does not make it worse than Apple products which will never run cross-platform.
I doubt Google's primary goal is a uniform cross-platform phone experience. Google's primary goal is to get handset manufacturers to use Google's software which will direct to Google's services.
Do you really think someone is going to sit outside his home with a laptop for an extended period of time just to post crap on some forums? Why would a spammer do that if he can just use the botnet from the comfort of his home? You are paranoid. I leave my wireless open. No, people who connect cannot access the rest of the machines on my network except through ssh. All my friends and visitors find it convenient, and probably some strangers too, just as I find other peoples' open networks convenient.
Good question: Why do Slashdoters care about a closed protocol on a closed platform?
Slashdot used to be a place where we made fun of people who wanted their closed protocols on their closed platforms. Now its a bunch of Apple fans and corporate apologists. I've been using SIP and Skype and Jabber and etc on my N900 for months. Get a clue people! I'm pining for the good old days. I must be getting old.
This could be glossing over quite a bit of useful work for Oracles customers.
You are glossing over the point of the article. 1. Redhat writes lots of great Linux stuff that make the kernel better (11.6% of the kernel). 2. Oracle passes it off as their own. (They only contribute 1.3%, less that 1/10 that of Red Hat).
A social network that limits it's audience to a specific group of people isn't very 'social'. It would fail if it was only for those interested in FOSS,
While everyone can install and run their own copy of Diaspora, they won't have to. Just as most people do not run their own mail server, I'm sure there will be plenty of hosting companies through which you will be able to get service. And if you are not happy with that company's service, you change providers.
Hell, I got an N900 6 months ago, and it's already EOL'd as far as updates to the OS are concerned.
I suppose I could wait till there's a port of Android or something, because the three coders on the project are doing a fine job, in less than a year I'll have the same functionality as a 3210.
Brakemen may have been eliminated, but trains still run with 3 men on board. If one keels over from a heart attack or bad food, the others can handle it. If you have one pilot on a plane and he keels over from heart attack or bad food, what happens?
Youtube works great on my N900. However, other sites do not, like the Daily Show. But of course, sometimes the Daily Show videos don't work on my PC either. Original post has some merit.
Just because I solicit suggests does not mean that I have to implement them. The fact remains that people develop the open source software primarily because they want something that they can use themselves.
And quite frankly, I doubt anyone on the Gimp development team actually wrote, "Fuck off."
Odds are they will be met the same way my father was met by the GIMP developers, i.e told to fuck off and do the changes himself,
As well they should. That is the source of open source software. Open source software is developed by people who use it for themselves; they do not develop it for other people. (Well, a few do, if they can make $ at it). If you happen to be in the same business, then you luck out and have a product that you can use. Do newspaper companies develop software for their use? Sure! See djangoproject.org. I use that software to make software for my local pool. I do not expect the django developers to do anything special to please my needs and wants. Likewise, if I were to release my pool software, anyone who uses it gets it as is. If they want something different, I do not have time to change it. But they have the ability to change it themselves, or hire someone who knows how to change it.
Why did I develop my pool software out of django rather than buying a commercial product? Because I could not find a commercial that did everything I wanted it to. Now I have one.
The bottom line: If you want a product to do specifically what you want you have to do it yourself. (Or hire someone to do it for you.)
My "most modern phone", the N900, is not bound to any carrier, and I am quite certain that my carrier does not have the ability or a clue how to install anything on it. I'm root. Not them.
Apple and Android folks: Enjoy being someone else's bitch.
Was this post obnoxious? Yes, in a very nerdy way.
Because in the time that I save writing the program in Python rather than Java, I can run my program a million times. And even if I run it a million more times, computer time is nearly free, so it does not matter. And when it really does matter, in less time than it takes to write in Java, I can rewrite the single time consuming routine in C, and exceed Java's performance.
Slashdot Mirror
it's making products that work
This whole Apple-products-just-work spiel is plain marketing BS.
Two months ago my sister bought my dad an ipad. Guess who got to spend 5 hours this past weekend helping him try to get it working in various ways. That's right, me.
First he wanted to update the OS. So I read the instructions:
Hook your ipad to a computer and then run iTunes. Follow the instructions from there.
That's it. Well iTunes is a program on my father's ipad, it is a web site from which Apple sells music, and it is a program that one can get for their desktop machine. WTF are they talking about? In their effort to simplify everything for stupid people, Apple has named everything "iTunes", creating substantial confusion. iTunes is a program that gets music from Apple, it syncs your device's content, and it is used to update your device's OS. Of course.
So after my father realizes he forgot his "Apple ID", we play 20 questions to get a new password. ("This is like taking a God damn exam. Why can't I just get the update software?") Then the software starts downloading. An hour later we get "Unknown error 1602." Shit. Disconnect ipad. It won't run. It is foobarred. Our only option is to "Restore" the ipad, which it tells us will wipe all programs, books, videos, photos and music from the ipad. WTF!? Apple didn't put the OS on a different partition from the media? Are you serious? So we wipe the iPad and my dad spends a couple more hours putting stuff back on it.
Then he wants to hook the iPad to my TV set. So we go to a store for a video connector, because the video cable is nonstandard. (Good idea, buy a device with a nonstandard video out, mumble, mumble.) Store is out of them. Drive to another store. Pay an absurd amount of money for a six inch cable. Hook iPad to TV. Nothin'. Check cables, etc. etc. An hour later, read on web. It turns out that only certain programs can be displayed on the TV out. WTF?! Who would buy a device that limits what you can see on an external monitor? Apple is making Microsoft look good here. After another hour of mucking around with the device we finally get it to show the Netflix video on my TV. It looks like shit. The video is only half the size of my screen.
My dad is typing an email. He gripes about the screen not being easy to type on, but says you can get a keyboard for it. I say, I have keyboards! But, hey, there is no USB connector on the device! Are you serious? You can't just plug in a keyboard or mouse? WTF?
People buy Apple products due to hype, marketing, and they think the products make them look cool. That's it. I have fewer problems with my Linux laptop. It just works.
Python is included in the distn by default. Java is not.
Developers can develop in C or Python without adding a run time to the system.
If your corporate IT standards mandate ...
That's the point: standards.
Unless your company is developing its own browser and its own OS, making it's own corporate standard on browsers is stupid.
The standards that should have been followed here are the W3C standards. Not the "standards" of one company with one browser on one operating system.
Before 2000 there were computer standards in place. Not following those standards is now an obvious huge failure and now companies will be paying for it.
Porting a python run time would be a pain in the butt. And even if it worked what libraries would it have?
I wrote a python script on my laptop that grabs some data off the network and displays it in a GTK window for the user. I then copied that program to my N900 and it just worked. Try that on your Droid.
HTC and Motorola, install proprietary user interfaces to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience. ... Compare this to iPhone, where every handset works the same.
Really Steve? The HTC iPhone works the same as the Motorola iPhone? Idiot.
Developing on Apple's phones does not get your stuff to work on Nokia's phones any more than developing for HTC phones gets your stuff to run on Motorola's phones.
Many people had hoped that Android would make their programs run across platforms, but that has not yet materialized. That certainly does not make it worse than Apple products which will never run cross-platform.
I doubt Google's primary goal is a uniform cross-platform phone experience. Google's primary goal is to get handset manufacturers to use Google's software which will direct to Google's services.
what is up with the obvious story troll?
Apparently the story posters have not been reading /. today:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/18/0321200/Why-Microsoft-Is-So-Scared-of-OpenOffice
Do you really think someone is going to sit outside his home with a laptop for an extended period of time just to post crap on some forums? Why would a spammer do that if he can just use the botnet from the comfort of his home?
You are paranoid.
I leave my wireless open. No, people who connect cannot access the rest of the machines on my network except through ssh. All my friends and visitors find it convenient, and probably some strangers too, just as I find other peoples' open networks convenient.
Good question: Why do Slashdoters care about a closed protocol on a closed platform?
Slashdot used to be a place where we made fun of people who wanted their closed protocols on their closed platforms. Now its a bunch of Apple fans and corporate apologists.
I've been using SIP and Skype and Jabber and etc on my N900 for months. Get a clue people!
I'm pining for the good old days. I must be getting old.
Why would I want to hack on a platform specifically designed not to be hacked?
There are plenty of hackable platforms out there for TV watching, Popcorn Hour, Captiveworks 4000HD, etc.
Slashdotters, true to stereotype, don't understand anything
Slashdotters are basically wedded to the fantasy that they are living inside a dystopian cyberpunk novel
Slashdotters that are blind, self-defeating enthusiasts
Says the guy who reads and posts on slashdot.
Thank you for the belly laugh. I needed one.
Mac OS, which has superior social benefits
Dude, you are obviously a bigtime fanboy, and very ignorant of the benefits of diverse array other systems available.
This could be glossing over quite a bit of useful work for Oracles customers.
You are glossing over the point of the article.
1. Redhat writes lots of great Linux stuff that make the kernel better (11.6% of the kernel).
2. Oracle passes it off as their own. (They only contribute 1.3%, less that 1/10 that of Red Hat).
A social network that limits it's audience to a specific group of people isn't very 'social'. It would fail if it was only for those interested in FOSS,
While everyone can install and run their own copy of Diaspora, they won't have to. Just as most people do not run their own mail server, I'm sure there will be plenty of hosting companies through which you will be able to get service. And if you are not happy with that company's service, you change providers.
I lust for the day when every piece of media I have can be played from a single device. I suspect it'll never happen.
This one works for me.
http://www.captiveworks.com/cw4000hd.php
Hell, I got an N900 6 months ago, and it's already EOL'd as far as updates to the OS are concerned.
I suppose I could wait till there's a port of Android or something, because the three coders on the project are doing a fine job, in less than a year I'll have the same functionality as a 3210.
Or you can read a little farther and see that upgrades are already available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo
Brakemen may have been eliminated, but trains still run with 3 men on board. If one keels over from a heart attack or bad food, the others can handle it. If you have one pilot on a plane and he keels over from heart attack or bad food, what happens?
Youtube works great on my N900.
However, other sites do not, like the Daily Show. But of course, sometimes the Daily Show videos don't work on my PC either. Original post has some merit.
But within months of the official release, I switched to Linux.
Windows 95 drove me to try Linux too, but much faster than months. It only took about a week. Never went back. Win 95 really sucked. Thank you, M$!
At least you can do more with a Sheevaplug than an iphone, and this is supposed to be a site for hacker types.
Another reason I am happy I bought an N900. I can uninstall anything, including OOPS! programs that make my phone work.
Seriously however, to uninstall the important stuff you have to drop to a shell and know what you're doing. Or half know what you are doing...
http://pyjs.org/examples/asteroids/output/Space.html
using pyjamas http://pyjs.org/
Just because I solicit suggests does not mean that I have to implement them. The fact remains that people develop the open source software primarily because they want something that they can use themselves.
And quite frankly, I doubt anyone on the Gimp development team actually wrote, "Fuck off."
Odds are they will be met the same way my father was met by the GIMP developers, i.e told to fuck off and do the changes himself,
As well they should.
That is the source of open source software. Open source software is developed by people who use it for themselves; they do not develop it for other people. (Well, a few do, if they can make $ at it). If you happen to be in the same business, then you luck out and have a product that you can use.
Do newspaper companies develop software for their use? Sure! See djangoproject.org. I use that software to make software for my local pool. I do not expect the django developers to do anything special to please my needs and wants. Likewise, if I were to release my pool software, anyone who uses it gets it as is. If they want something different, I do not have time to change it. But they have the ability to change it themselves, or hire someone who knows how to change it.
Why did I develop my pool software out of django rather than buying a commercial product? Because I could not find a commercial that did everything I wanted it to. Now I have one.
The bottom line: If you want a product to do specifically what you want you have to do it yourself. (Or hire someone to do it for you.)
You are eating two happy meals.
My "most modern phone", the N900, is not bound to any carrier, and I am quite certain that my carrier does not have the ability or a clue how to install anything on it. I'm root. Not them.
Apple and Android folks: Enjoy being someone else's bitch.
Was this post obnoxious? Yes, in a very nerdy way.
Because in the time that I save writing the program in Python rather than Java, I can run my program a million times. And even if I run it a million more times, computer time is nearly free, so it does not matter. And when it really does matter, in less time than it takes to write in Java, I can rewrite the single time consuming routine in C, and exceed Java's performance.