Ouch. I'm not sure I want to download anything from a site with open sores. Are they using some sort of new HTML5 <oozy/> tag? Is there a browser plugin to protect against that?
I am surprised that reStructuredText hasn't been mentioned more in this conversation. I use vim in iTerm2 [not sure what the draw is for people to use MacVim versus just running vim in a terminal]. I write in LaTeX sometimes, but often will draft up whatever I'm writing in reStructuredText, convert to LaTeX with rst2latex.py, and then tweak as need in LaTeX. I've used Markdown some, but I'm not sure why it seems to be more popular than ReST. Granted, the latter is far from perfect, and sometimes costs me more time than it should. I'd be interested to see if anyone in this thread delves into the pro's and con's of one of the more frequently used markup languages than the other -- besides LaTeX. I mean one that focuses on human readability, yet still gives the ability to easily convey contextual meaning into LaTeX, or HTML, etc.
As for other styles of editing, I dabbled with LyX recently, but then realized that I really have no desire to do any textual work outside of vim. Besides the fact that I leave too many j's and k's scattered around forgetting that I'm not in normal mode, I give up too much and gain too little outside of vim. And I don't mean to start a religious war. I have great respect for anyone willing to risk the serious muscular damage necessary to do anything in emacs. I just think that it's hard to beat doing your grunt work in the plaintext editor of your choice and then converting at your whim to the format of your choice. As far as needing to see quick feedback on what you are doing, it usually only takes me a few keystrokes to render to pdf, and if I've already been looking at it in Preview, just changing window focus back to it usually auto updates to the new changes.
I started to agree with you, but then you went a bogus direction.
"Intelligent people" do understand that it's meaningless (though occasionally amusing) to argue whether vi/m or emacs is better, but that's because they understand that if you've invested the effort to truly learn and use either, that your text editing capability will be far superior to what can be done in any other text editing tool.
Yes, it's just text editing. While there are some new features that crop up from time to time as new tools or formats come along, the basic complexities of text manipulation have been pretty well figured out and solutions implemented for a long time. This is the reason why emacs and vi/m remain so successful, because they remain a collective memory of decades worth of solutions to text manipulation challenges (just as Linux is a collective memory of solutions to computing challenges). There's a whole world "in" there, it just takes a bit of devotion to explore it.
There have not been "superior" alternatives to both. There have been attempts to try to because emacs and vi have steep learning curves. The alternatives have invariably fallen short, however, because while you can dumb down an interface, you lose that ability to effectively tap into that vast pool of solutions emacs and vi offer. You also loose the efficiency gain from their ui philosophy, which may have originated in the 70's low-bandwidth terminal mentality, but guess what, it's still just text on the screen and those old mentalities still have more relevance than you may understand.
The alternatives also all tend to fail to capture the full scope of the capabilities that emacs and vi offer. Someone further up the thread called them 'esoteric'. If your job is to manipulate text all day long, those 'esoteric' factors can have a tremendous impact on your effectiveness.
Muscle memory is, indeed part of it, but not the full story. Its about effective use of my time. It's not that people that use emacs or vi are "thinking to hard", its that people who aren't are working too hard and maybe haven't though enough. While you're scratching your head and waving your mouse pointer around trying to find the right menu to do open to reveal some set of options from which you have to choose which one might or might not fully do the text manipulation task you need it to do, I've already done exactly what I wanted to do with a few keystrokes. The next time it needs to be done, you'll still be wandering through your menus, and it will still just be a few keystroke for me (possibly fewer if I've made a macro). Its about investing the time to learn from the folks that already figured it out, and having a system that makes future repetition of that process as streamlined as possible.
Oh, and universality... you may think Unix is niche, but there sure seems to be a lot of it around. It's pretty hard to find one that doesn't have vi, emacs, or both on it. Macs are also niche, I guess, but there again you'll find vi and emacs just a terminal prompt away. Maybe your world is Windows-centric. I'm sorry, but even there you can easily download either. The investment made in learning the capabilities of either are useable on any system you might encounter. There are few (if any) alternatives that can make the same claim and offer the same features.
I find it surprising that someone doesn't see this as an opportunity. Many of the respondents in this thread have indicated they use Macs now at home. Those that don't seem to do so more out of a political/religious dislike for the company rather than an actual preference for the functionality of Windows over OSX in all areas but gaming. To me, though, a solid financial management tool really stands out as a missing piece of Mac software. That and a Visio-type tool, which someone mentioned further up the thread, seem to be open doors for someone to come in and make a good product and profit.
Readers of Slashdot use WYSIWYG word processors? I thought we gave only grief and ridicule to anyone who wasn't still using ed to write TeX for all of their office documents. The idea of using various too-brightly colored squares to interface with text does strike me a ludicrous, but then I've been criticized before for using LaTeX (a real geek wouldn't rely on someone else's macros, but would have rolled their own).
Maybe in Twitter, but just casually glancing around a bit I see/. user numbers in the >1.7 mil range. When you get that many people signed up to read your tweets, then come back and talk smack.
BTW, nice score on the press creds, Taco. Have a great time. Hope the weather clears and they get that thing off the ground.
I have long discounted Free/Open Source software for productivity tools.
...
I don't completely discount them, as there are some (Firefox and Chrome, for example) that surpass their non-FOSS counterparts. Of course I'm being generous in considering browsers "productivity" tools, but they can be in a work environment where the applications are heavily web-based. Sadly, none of the FOSS attempts at spreadsheets has been able to truly match Excel, and even non-FOSS competitors (Numbers, which I have made honest attempts to switch to) fall short. In many office environments, spreadsheets are too much of a core component to overlook, and seemingly minor issues of missing functionality, when encountered regularly in a "why won't this do what I know the other program will" kind of way adds up quickly to equal major user dissatisfaction.
...Usability is not something you can do as an afterthought. Either you have it designed in from the start, or it won't be there.
I very much agree. While I've been impressed with the strides made by Ubuntu, it still lacks a lot of the intuitive usability you get from OS X or even Windows. Its hard for many/.'ers to set aside their experienced view, put themselves in the mindset of a person with limited computer experience, and really understand how baffling a new OS can be if not built for an intuitive user experience.
and poor interoperability."
While many in this thread have scoffed at the idea of drivers remaining an issue, and perhaps they are for printing, I have had several generations of great scanners now that never did and never will work with Linux. It is very frustrating in an office environment to have the need to do something trivial, like scan a document, and be told that it isn't possible because the correct drivers don't exist. Could you please wait a few months for someone in your IT department to try their hand at coding a driver and then try to scan again? Maybe they could have simply gone out and purchased the right scanner hardware. I'm guessing there are some pieces of software out there for Linux that make document capturing easy to use, but I've never seen them because I've never managed to get that far before the need to get the job done overcame my stubbornness for doing it in Linux.
The.xslx point was a good one. There are many times where a document in a Microsoft format "can" be opened in a FOSS tool, but in which the formatting is off by enough to make it a big mess. Calls for going back to MS only takes an one upper management type getting badly embarrassed in an important meeting when the fancy PowerPoint presentation he made at home in Microsoft chokes and dies in the FOSS software that his IT shop told him was compatible.
How is Microsoft's response here not them trying desperately to spin their way past the latest Pwn2Own results from CanSecWest? Safari, Firefox and IE8 all went down pretty quickly. Chrome wasn't even attempted. Nobody there had a way to take it down. Money was left on the table.
( http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2010/02/15/pwn2own-2010 )
Then try to convince people Chrome is somehow worse.
Seem's like that makes your choice to either accept that a company like Google knows what information you're looking for [turn off the option, heck even use a different browser. I'm sure they can figure it out anyway.] or letting random anyhacker access ALL the data on your system.
While that might be "a" way to change the password, the MobileTerminal program provides a convenient shell from which passwd works just fine. It is strongly recommended that the root and the "mobile" accounts' passwords are changed from their default. Instructions for doing so abound even with screen shots for people who can't be bothered to read. While there is the "hassle" of having to install MobileTerminal, I'm not sure this is really too much trouble for someone that has gone to the effort to jailbreak in the first place.
That being said, Saurik should be able to make the installation process for OpenSSH ask the user to change the passwords. It also should not be enabled by default, or turn itself back on after it is turned off (in my experience the OpenSSH program has a tendency to do both).
It might make an interesting study to compare the success of kids with "late" birthdays who started on-time/early versus those who had to wait an extra year.
I thought I'd heard of a similar study where kids with winter birth dates excelled at sports because they tended to miss cut-off dates for teams, and therefore were older, larger, faster, and more mature than the kids they were teamed with each year. This leads to them getting more time handling the ball as they grow up.
Seriously. If you can't read well written cursive then you shouldn't just "feel" illiterate, you should acknowledge that you are, in fact, not literate. At least in my opinion.
This leads to the discussion of whether or not reading and writing in cursive is an "expected standard of familiarity." I believe that it is. It might be argued, however, that our society either no longer expects -- or expects but no longer requires -- the capability to read and write script. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that true English language literacy (both using cursive and spelling as examples) is no longer required for adequate social acceptance and job performance due to the capability of our machines to be literate for us.
Except that according to the wiki page on the ship (already linked above) the draft of the Vandenberg is 24' and it's 71.5' wide. Add to that a significant amount of freeboard and superstructure (judging by the picture). Not sure how close that would put the top of the ship to standard recreational diving limits (~60') but PADI Advanced Open Water (AOW) cert allows for diving up to ~100' and the "deep diver" certifications (130') putting most of the ship within reach.
Perhaps I just read it differently, but I think you're projecting "racism" where none was intended.
Internet usage penetration by population is still tends to be larger in countries with Euro-Centric histories. Isn't UNESCO headquarters also in Europe?
My take on the GP's statement was that it is unsurprising that European texts are more largely represented at first in terms of quantity that have been digitized. Would it be "racist" to point out the fact that the WDL was based on work already started by the [US] Library of Congress (which is probably a bit Euro-heavy).
When looked at in terms of potential for being added to the collection, I would think that the current amount of current Middle Eastern texts is indeed "paltry", and it was correctly pointed out that the percentages should change as the project grows. With the heavy financial contributions coming from the Middle East, the vast potential for ancient material from both there and from East Asia yet to be digitized, and the internet usage number (especially in E. Asia), I'd think those numbers should be very different before long.
But again, it's about more than whether it's easy or difficult to hack the device. It's about being treated with respect by the vendor. A vendor that gives you specs and drivers is better than one that gives you no support and makes you fend for yourself, even if it's a fun challenge to reverse engineer their hardware. A vendor that lets you install your own software right out of the box is better than one that makes you violate their recommendations and terms (and, potentially, the law) in order to do the same thing.
That is a point I will concede. While there is some consolation to be found in Apple's rather passive attitude towards their devoted hacker community (compared to other companies who more aggressively try to put the kibosh on things), it would be hard to argue that things would be much sunnier if Apple were more permissive. Even if they didn't actively support independent developers, dropping the veiled legal threat would be progress.
Only a masochist would prefer the difficult way just for the sake of adding difficulty to his life.
I will posit that there are numerous tangible and intangible benefits gained from the "difficult way" that have nothing to do with masochism (at least I hope not).
The bulk of the folks bitching in this thread seem to follow the same line of logic: Android does stuff that you can do without hacking your iPhone.
So? The parent makes the key point... when you jailbreak it, the iPhone is really magnificent. It's pretty slick to begin with, but when you open it up to non-restricted apps, it's starts to really shine. Great UI. Lots of flexibility. Everything Apple gives you combined with everything the dev-team groupies have to offer.
And yet you wine about having to "hack" it?
First off, the process of jailbreaking an iPhone is so trivial that "hack" hardly does the process justice. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to describe it as a non-Apple approved upgrade.
Second, are you hainging out on the right website? It used to be the Slashdot mantra that the easy way was less desirable. Isn't this the website where countless threads proselytizing the good of Linux over the evils of Windows glossed over the x windows settings you used to have to tweak in your console based text editor after having freshly compiled yourself a new kernel, all to get to a point where the mouse cursor would move across the desktop. And you complain now of the difficulty involved with a gui-based nearly brick-proof software hack?
If I had a mod up point, I'd give it to you. It takes me longer to relearn how to do things in Office 2007 that I was proficient at in Office 2003, than it does to learn something else (OO or iWork) from scratch.
It did indeed take me five minutes to figure out how to print.
And in Excel, why did they screw up the 'formula bar'? MS had in Excel, the one piece of the office bundle that none of the other packages had ever managed to get quite right, and then they had to muck it up.
I think the parent makes two good points. Apple gains from this and people will indeed pay more to avoid Vista.
My anecdote: I bought 3 new computers for the house last year. The desktop for myself was my chance to escape from dual-booting and run a purely Linux system. I'd been happy enough with Ubuntu finally to do it, and plus I could afford system two... the windows computer to appease my wife who had always complained bitterly (and still holds it against me) when I'd tried to get her to use Linux. Since I just got her a cheap system, it didn't have an XP option. I figured she'd be happy with the shiny Vista interface. Only I had to upgrade the store bought - pre installed with Vista system with more RAM in order to get it to function.
System 3 was a laptop that we would both use. After much debate, I managed to talk the Mrs into letting me get an Apple. She was very apprehensive, not being the sort that takes well to technology changes, so is what I consider to be an "average consumer". She didn't like the Mac at first, and to be honest, it took me a bit to figure out how to get the default settings fixed so that I could right-click.
Long story short, she's been exposed to all 4 OS's now. When her company got her a work laptop, she requested a Mac. Her IT shop refused to support Apples so she made them downgrade a Dell to XP from Vista. I'm betting the time it took their IT shop to reload OS and get it working (taking into account their 'competence') cost her company a good bit more than $150.
Even though she occasionally uses the Vista machine at home, she doesn't like it and she uses my MacBook Pro more. I anticipate that there will never be another Windows box in our house. Thank you, MS for giving us Vista.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, a lot of slashdotters were apparently simultaneously familiar with trailer hitches (or had googled 3-way balls already).
Maybe he meant 3-ball or 3-way trailer hitch. Google Images will give you better, surprisingly G-rated results.
"Nowadays"? I remember that as being a feature of Mosaic circa 1993.
Ouch. I'm not sure I want to download anything from a site with open sores. Are they using some sort of new HTML5 <oozy/> tag? Is there a browser plugin to protect against that?
I am surprised that reStructuredText hasn't been mentioned more in this conversation. I use vim in iTerm2 [not sure what the draw is for people to use MacVim versus just running vim in a terminal]. I write in LaTeX sometimes, but often will draft up whatever I'm writing in reStructuredText, convert to LaTeX with rst2latex.py, and then tweak as need in LaTeX. I've used Markdown some, but I'm not sure why it seems to be more popular than ReST. Granted, the latter is far from perfect, and sometimes costs me more time than it should. I'd be interested to see if anyone in this thread delves into the pro's and con's of one of the more frequently used markup languages than the other -- besides LaTeX. I mean one that focuses on human readability, yet still gives the ability to easily convey contextual meaning into LaTeX, or HTML, etc.
As for other styles of editing, I dabbled with LyX recently, but then realized that I really have no desire to do any textual work outside of vim. Besides the fact that I leave too many j's and k's scattered around forgetting that I'm not in normal mode, I give up too much and gain too little outside of vim. And I don't mean to start a religious war. I have great respect for anyone willing to risk the serious muscular damage necessary to do anything in emacs. I just think that it's hard to beat doing your grunt work in the plaintext editor of your choice and then converting at your whim to the format of your choice. As far as needing to see quick feedback on what you are doing, it usually only takes me a few keystrokes to render to pdf, and if I've already been looking at it in Preview, just changing window focus back to it usually auto updates to the new changes.
I think you mean:
s/arms/nuclear weapons/g
I started to agree with you, but then you went a bogus direction.
"Intelligent people" do understand that it's meaningless (though occasionally amusing) to argue whether vi/m or emacs is better, but that's because they understand that if you've invested the effort to truly learn and use either, that your text editing capability will be far superior to what can be done in any other text editing tool.
Yes, it's just text editing. While there are some new features that crop up from time to time as new tools or formats come along, the basic complexities of text manipulation have been pretty well figured out and solutions implemented for a long time. This is the reason why emacs and vi/m remain so successful, because they remain a collective memory of decades worth of solutions to text manipulation challenges (just as Linux is a collective memory of solutions to computing challenges). There's a whole world "in" there, it just takes a bit of devotion to explore it.
There have not been "superior" alternatives to both. There have been attempts to try to because emacs and vi have steep learning curves. The alternatives have invariably fallen short, however, because while you can dumb down an interface, you lose that ability to effectively tap into that vast pool of solutions emacs and vi offer. You also loose the efficiency gain from their ui philosophy, which may have originated in the 70's low-bandwidth terminal mentality, but guess what, it's still just text on the screen and those old mentalities still have more relevance than you may understand.
The alternatives also all tend to fail to capture the full scope of the capabilities that emacs and vi offer. Someone further up the thread called them 'esoteric'. If your job is to manipulate text all day long, those 'esoteric' factors can have a tremendous impact on your effectiveness.
Muscle memory is, indeed part of it, but not the full story. Its about effective use of my time. It's not that people that use emacs or vi are "thinking to hard", its that people who aren't are working too hard and maybe haven't though enough. While you're scratching your head and waving your mouse pointer around trying to find the right menu to do open to reveal some set of options from which you have to choose which one might or might not fully do the text manipulation task you need it to do, I've already done exactly what I wanted to do with a few keystrokes. The next time it needs to be done, you'll still be wandering through your menus, and it will still just be a few keystroke for me (possibly fewer if I've made a macro). Its about investing the time to learn from the folks that already figured it out, and having a system that makes future repetition of that process as streamlined as possible.
Oh, and universality... you may think Unix is niche, but there sure seems to be a lot of it around. It's pretty hard to find one that doesn't have vi, emacs, or both on it. Macs are also niche, I guess, but there again you'll find vi and emacs just a terminal prompt away. Maybe your world is Windows-centric. I'm sorry, but even there you can easily download either. The investment made in learning the capabilities of either are useable on any system you might encounter. There are few (if any) alternatives that can make the same claim and offer the same features.
I find it surprising that someone doesn't see this as an opportunity. Many of the respondents in this thread have indicated they use Macs now at home. Those that don't seem to do so more out of a political/religious dislike for the company rather than an actual preference for the functionality of Windows over OSX in all areas but gaming. To me, though, a solid financial management tool really stands out as a missing piece of Mac software. That and a Visio-type tool, which someone mentioned further up the thread, seem to be open doors for someone to come in and make a good product and profit.
Readers of Slashdot use WYSIWYG word processors? I thought we gave only grief and ridicule to anyone who wasn't still using ed to write TeX for all of their office documents. The idea of using various too-brightly colored squares to interface with text does strike me a ludicrous, but then I've been criticized before for using LaTeX (a real geek wouldn't rely on someone else's macros, but would have rolled their own).
Maybe in Twitter, but just casually glancing around a bit I see /. user numbers in the >1.7 mil range. When you get that many people signed up to read your tweets, then come back and talk smack.
BTW, nice score on the press creds, Taco. Have a great time. Hope the weather clears and they get that thing off the ground.
...
I have long discounted Free/Open Source software for productivity tools.
...
I don't completely discount them, as there are some (Firefox and Chrome, for example) that surpass their non-FOSS counterparts. Of course I'm being generous in considering browsers "productivity" tools, but they can be in a work environment where the applications are heavily web-based. Sadly, none of the FOSS attempts at spreadsheets has been able to truly match Excel, and even non-FOSS competitors (Numbers, which I have made honest attempts to switch to) fall short. In many office environments, spreadsheets are too much of a core component to overlook, and seemingly minor issues of missing functionality, when encountered regularly in a "why won't this do what I know the other program will" kind of way adds up quickly to equal major user dissatisfaction.
...Usability is not something you can do as an afterthought. Either you have it designed in from the start, or it won't be there.
I very much agree. While I've been impressed with the strides made by Ubuntu, it still lacks a lot of the intuitive usability you get from OS X or even Windows. Its hard for many /.'ers to set aside their experienced view, put themselves in the mindset of a person with limited computer experience, and really understand how baffling a new OS can be if not built for an intuitive user experience.
and poor interoperability."
While many in this thread have scoffed at the idea of drivers remaining an issue, and perhaps they are for printing, I have had several generations of great scanners now that never did and never will work with Linux. It is very frustrating in an office environment to have the need to do something trivial, like scan a document, and be told that it isn't possible because the correct drivers don't exist. Could you please wait a few months for someone in your IT department to try their hand at coding a driver and then try to scan again? Maybe they could have simply gone out and purchased the right scanner hardware. I'm guessing there are some pieces of software out there for Linux that make document capturing easy to use, but I've never seen them because I've never managed to get that far before the need to get the job done overcame my stubbornness for doing it in Linux.
The .xslx point was a good one. There are many times where a document in a Microsoft format "can" be opened in a FOSS tool, but in which the formatting is off by enough to make it a big mess. Calls for going back to MS only takes an one upper management type getting badly embarrassed in an important meeting when the fancy PowerPoint presentation he made at home in Microsoft chokes and dies in the FOSS software that his IT shop told him was compatible.
Umm, that would be the "SitOrSquat: Bathroom Finder" app [http://www.sitorsquat.com/sitorsquat/mobile/index], sponsored by Charmin.
How is Microsoft's response here not them trying desperately to spin their way past the latest Pwn2Own results from CanSecWest? Safari, Firefox and IE8 all went down pretty quickly. Chrome wasn't even attempted. Nobody there had a way to take it down. Money was left on the table.
( http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2010/02/15/pwn2own-2010 )
Microsoft's response?
First claim that Windows 7 isn't really meant to prevent you from hacking into it.
( http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9174309/Microsoft_defends_Windows_7_security_after_Pwn2Own_hacks )
Then try to convince people Chrome is somehow worse.
Seem's like that makes your choice to either accept that a company like Google knows what information you're looking for [turn off the option, heck even use a different browser. I'm sure they can figure it out anyway.] or letting random anyhacker access ALL the data on your system.
I'll take option A thanks.
You deserve a mod point, not that I have one handy.
You do not know what you are talking about.
While that might be "a" way to change the password, the MobileTerminal program provides a convenient shell from which passwd works just fine. It is strongly recommended that the root and the "mobile" accounts' passwords are changed from their default. Instructions for doing so abound even with screen shots for people who can't be bothered to read. While there is the "hassle" of having to install MobileTerminal, I'm not sure this is really too much trouble for someone that has gone to the effort to jailbreak in the first place.
That being said, Saurik should be able to make the installation process for OpenSSH ask the user to change the passwords. It also should not be enabled by default, or turn itself back on after it is turned off (in my experience the OpenSSH program has a tendency to do both).
Shut up, Steve, and go back to figuring out how to get people to think that Windows 7 is as cool as Binging things on their Zune.
It might make an interesting study to compare the success of kids with "late" birthdays who started on-time/early versus those who had to wait an extra year.
I thought I'd heard of a similar study where kids with winter birth dates excelled at sports because they tended to miss cut-off dates for teams, and therefore were older, larger, faster, and more mature than the kids they were teamed with each year. This leads to them getting more time handling the ball as they grow up.
Seriously. If you can't read well written cursive then you shouldn't just "feel" illiterate, you should acknowledge that you are, in fact, not literate. At least in my opinion.
illiterate - 2.a. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with language and literature. (Source: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/illiterate)
This leads to the discussion of whether or not reading and writing in cursive is an "expected standard of familiarity." I believe that it is. It might be argued, however, that our society either no longer expects -- or expects but no longer requires -- the capability to read and write script. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that true English language literacy (both using cursive and spelling as examples) is no longer required for adequate social acceptance and job performance due to the capability of our machines to be literate for us.
Except that according to the wiki page on the ship (already linked above) the draft of the Vandenberg is 24' and it's 71.5' wide. Add to that a significant amount of freeboard and superstructure (judging by the picture). Not sure how close that would put the top of the ship to standard recreational diving limits (~60') but PADI Advanced Open Water (AOW) cert allows for diving up to ~100' and the "deep diver" certifications (130') putting most of the ship within reach.
Perhaps I just read it differently, but I think you're projecting "racism" where none was intended.
Internet usage penetration by population is still tends to be larger in countries with Euro-Centric histories. Isn't UNESCO headquarters also in Europe?
My take on the GP's statement was that it is unsurprising that European texts are more largely represented at first in terms of quantity that have been digitized. Would it be "racist" to point out the fact that the WDL was based on work already started by the [US] Library of Congress (which is probably a bit Euro-heavy).
When looked at in terms of potential for being added to the collection, I would think that the current amount of current Middle Eastern texts is indeed "paltry", and it was correctly pointed out that the percentages should change as the project grows. With the heavy financial contributions coming from the Middle East, the vast potential for ancient material from both there and from East Asia yet to be digitized, and the internet usage number (especially in E. Asia), I'd think those numbers should be very different before long.
But again, it's about more than whether it's easy or difficult to hack the device. It's about being treated with respect by the vendor. A vendor that gives you specs and drivers is better than one that gives you no support and makes you fend for yourself, even if it's a fun challenge to reverse engineer their hardware. A vendor that lets you install your own software right out of the box is better than one that makes you violate their recommendations and terms (and, potentially, the law) in order to do the same thing.
That is a point I will concede. While there is some consolation to be found in Apple's rather passive attitude towards their devoted hacker community (compared to other companies who more aggressively try to put the kibosh on things), it would be hard to argue that things would be much sunnier if Apple were more permissive. Even if they didn't actively support independent developers, dropping the veiled legal threat would be progress.
Only a masochist would prefer the difficult way just for the sake of adding difficulty to his life.
I will posit that there are numerous tangible and intangible benefits gained from the "difficult way" that have nothing to do with masochism (at least I hope not).
The bulk of the folks bitching in this thread seem to follow the same line of logic: Android does stuff that you can do without hacking your iPhone.
So? The parent makes the key point... when you jailbreak it, the iPhone is really magnificent. It's pretty slick to begin with, but when you open it up to non-restricted apps, it's starts to really shine. Great UI. Lots of flexibility. Everything Apple gives you combined with everything the dev-team groupies have to offer.
And yet you wine about having to "hack" it?
First off, the process of jailbreaking an iPhone is so trivial that "hack" hardly does the process justice. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to describe it as a non-Apple approved upgrade.
Second, are you hainging out on the right website? It used to be the Slashdot mantra that the easy way was less desirable. Isn't this the website where countless threads proselytizing the good of Linux over the evils of Windows glossed over the x windows settings you used to have to tweak in your console based text editor after having freshly compiled yourself a new kernel, all to get to a point where the mouse cursor would move across the desktop. And you complain now of the difficulty involved with a gui-based nearly brick-proof software hack?
Seriously?
If I had a mod up point, I'd give it to you. It takes me longer to relearn how to do things in Office 2007 that I was proficient at in Office 2003, than it does to learn something else (OO or iWork) from scratch.
It did indeed take me five minutes to figure out how to print.
And in Excel, why did they screw up the 'formula bar'? MS had in Excel, the one piece of the office bundle that none of the other packages had ever managed to get quite right, and then they had to muck it up.
I'm betting that Chrome would easily surpass Safari here on Slashdot if Google ever gets around to coming out with the Mac and Linux versions.
I think the parent makes two good points. Apple gains from this and people will indeed pay more to avoid Vista.
My anecdote:
I bought 3 new computers for the house last year. The desktop for myself was my chance to escape from dual-booting and run a purely Linux system. I'd been happy enough with Ubuntu finally to do it, and plus I could afford system two... the windows computer to appease my wife who had always complained bitterly (and still holds it against me) when I'd tried to get her to use Linux. Since I just got her a cheap system, it didn't have an XP option. I figured she'd be happy with the shiny Vista interface. Only I had to upgrade the store bought - pre installed with Vista system with more RAM in order to get it to function.
System 3 was a laptop that we would both use. After much debate, I managed to talk the Mrs into letting me get an Apple. She was very apprehensive, not being the sort that takes well to technology changes, so is what I consider to be an "average consumer". She didn't like the Mac at first, and to be honest, it took me a bit to figure out how to get the default settings fixed so that I could right-click.
Long story short, she's been exposed to all 4 OS's now. When her company got her a work laptop, she requested a Mac. Her IT shop refused to support Apples so she made them downgrade a Dell to XP from Vista. I'm betting the time it took their IT shop to reload OS and get it working (taking into account their 'competence') cost her company a good bit more than $150.
Even though she occasionally uses the Vista machine at home, she doesn't like it and she uses my MacBook Pro more. I anticipate that there will never be another Windows box in our house. Thank you, MS for giving us Vista.