The issue is that if a sufficient number of people do buy the "closed" cars, "open" cars become commercially unviable.
I think this has actually happened to an extent. Cars come with sealed engines such that only authorised mechanics can work with them. That gives the car manufacturer an effective monopoly on parts and labour -- via franchises.
Anticipated profits from this channel allow these manufacturers to push the retail price of the car down. Now a user-servicable car is more expensive than a non-user-servicable car. Fewer people buy the more expensive car. A positive feedback loop is established.
Now the manufacturers are free to push up the cost of parts and of service franchises, which is bad for the consumer. Due to the closed nature of the cars, you can't get any old grease monkey to fix your car for cheap.
We're not there yet for all components of a car, but I think it's getting pretty close for some core components.
"Can't you fix it so that I don't have to worry about that?"
"Sorry, I can't fix anything. It's locked down to just do what it does."
"Why doesn't the computer just do that for me?"
"It does what the manufacturer made it do, we can't do a damn thing about it"
"Just make it work, I don't care how, and I don't want to know."
"It's a closed system. It just does what it does"
See how those answers could be different for a reasonably open system? (not necessarily Open Source -- even Windows and OSX are open enough to improve those answers).
The danger is that we sleepwalk into a world where cabals of corporations control not only the mainstream devices and the software on them, but also the entire ecosystem of online services around them.
Every time Apple decides to close something off - by insisting on approving apps, by not giving you a [general purpose] USB port, etc., and people go for it anyway, because it's slick and nice to use, we get used to a little bit less openness.
People don't miss openness until it's too late. Then it's suddenly "What do you *mean* I can only use printers that are Apple certified?". "I've bought all these e-books, and now the only place I can read them is on Apple hardware?" etc.
I know, I know: slippery slope fallacy. But it's a slope we *will* slide down, without a critical mass of openness-aware customers insisting on some openness in their tools.
A large userbase of machines like this, for which the only realistic video option is H.264, is going to force video sites to provide H.264. Effectively forcing them to choose a format that involves paying MPEG LA licence fees.
Since Apple gets some of those licence fees, they'll be delighted with this.
For webmasters, the only options will be:
- Pay for encoding/distributing H.264
- Use an open codec, accepting that iPad/iPhone users won't be able to view
- Don't do video
I am not (yet) OCD enough to keep a thorough record. So I'll have to make do with an anecdote.
The other day a friend mentioned that he was thinking of getting a Nexus One phone. His friend chips in "Noooo! iPhones are best!". OK, not exactly unsolicited so far. But that's her entry point. Within 5 minutes we know all about her Mac, what size monitor she has, how great AppleTV is, how much better iWork is than that horrible MS Office... etc. etc.
As long as you're not using some cheapo hardware, if you have XP crashing more than once a year, you're obviously doing something you shouldn't.
Where "doing something you shouldn't" includes having an errant driver, even if that driver is the one supplied to you by the machine's manufacturer.
Background: I was getting a BSOD approximately every day or so. Any Windows zealot I mentioned it to would tell me how it wasn't Windows' fault, I must have installed some dodgy driver, or I had bad hardware. Hardware diagnostics all passed. The drivers were preinstalled.
I installed WhoCrashed in order to analyse my BSOD dumps. Day after day, it would tell me that the crash happened in a core Windows.SYS or.DLL, and that this had probably been caused by another driver which the dump analyser couldn't identify. Once it identified by Ethernet driver. I updated it to no avail. After several months, it identified my Intel graphics driver. I updated that, and now things seem to be stable - touch wood.
I see the argument that says it's the fault of Intel's driver. But surely by now, even drivers should be protected from each other. Admittedly even Linux doesn't do this - but Linux drivers seldom seem to cause kernel panics, in my experience.
Summary: You can't always blame the user for an unstable Windows system. The only reason things are easier on Macs, though, is that the OS and the hardware come from the same place.
Some interfaces are just inherently better, though.
My satnav is a touchscreen TomTom. When on holiday, I borrowed my sister's older Garmin. It felt so *primitive* having to navigate with buttons.
During that time, my girlfriend bought an iPod touch. Returning to the TomTom, it felt like an affront that I couldn't zoom the map with a multitouch pinch.
Lack of multitouch is my one worry about the Nexus One.
Don't forget something incredibly important here - the vast majority of people have no use for software freedoms. They don't write software, they don't understand software, and they don't care about the ethical stance of the people who produced the software they use.
Or, they don't know they have a use for software freedom. How many times have you heard someone complain about some element of their software? What if you were to tell them, "You know, if that were open source software, you could probably find someone who'd make it work the way you want, for $50."
RMS is simply crazy. He's outraged that he can't have the source code to someone's closed source program; his response is that all software should be open source, closed source is evil.
He's outraged that he can't have the source code to a program he (or his employer) has paid for, because that reduces its utility to him. Not providing the source, to him, is crippling the product. He believes people are being ripped off by crippled products. He thinks that by buying into a system where crippled products are the norm, you're not only being ripped off, but perpetuating a system where other people are ripped off.
- iPhoto isn't a mess, it's very easy to use actually, I can't even give any arguments for that because your argument doesn't give any either.
This applies to iPhoto 5. I took notes at the time because I intended to blog about it. I've not tried it since.
I couldn't work it out. I couldn't see when to apply the "roll" concept, the "album" concept, the "keyword" concept. I found adding keywords to be ridiculously inconvenient. I've imported rolls and not been able to find them subsequently.
I found it frustrating that you couldn't move the cursor when labelling, since the cursor keys move between pictures.
I hated the way it locked up the UI while it imported, pointlessly showing you a thumbnail of each image as it copies it. I found search to be complicated. Plus it didn't make sense to me that search didn't include album names.
Overall though, I bought a Mac after being impressed by Picasa. A friend said "If you like that, you'll LOVE the Mac", but it turned out Picasa is so much more slick and fluent than iPhoto 5 was.
- I use Logic myself and have used Ableton and ProTools, and Garageband beats them all by far at intuitiveness. Which is kind of logical considering it's a beginner's app.
I found myself beating my head against the keyboard trying to work out how to make simple changes to a software instrument loop. I forget the details. Shorten a note, move a note, insert a new note. I just couldn't work out how to do it. The help text just said "You can move notes" without saying how.
- iTunes isn't perfect, no, but it's still ten times better than WMP...
I never said WMP was any good.
- You don't make slideshows in iMovie, that's where Keynote is for... [...] If you can't figure that out than you definitely can't figure out Linux stuff.
I think we mean different things by slideshow. I put together a movie out of stills, Ken Burns effect, transitions, some music in the background. The principles seem simple, but I felt like I was fighting the app every step of the way. In common with GarageBand, I think, a lot of it is to do with arcane keyboard modifiers. Shift-drag does one thing, command-drag does another, with no rhyme or reason I can detect.
Of course, if you do this every day, you learn all the modifiers. That's not intuitive though. That's learning.
SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE: APPLE FANBOYS ARE ANNOYING, BUT SLASHDOT LINUX FANBOYS BASHING A COMPANY THAT'S NOT CATERING TO THEM IS ANNOYING^100... Apple products are great products for the average user, I'd even say the best available.
When I'm using iLife, I'd like to think I represent the average user. Yes, if I want to take notes, I open a Terminal and type "vi". But when I'm in GarageBand, I just want things to work in an intuitive and obvious way. I want to be able to right-click on a loop, get a pull-down menu and select 'split'. (I just Googled for how to do this - edit-split. I'm sure when I tried this it was a more obscure alt/shift/control/command/whatever click)
Slashdot Mirror
Just a pity MS's only workable computer HW consists of a line of mice and keyboards.
And last time I checked they don't update too well.
Then there's the Xbox - which is a closed system just like the iPad.
You can compile your own Android from source, having audited it for bugging code.
You can choose which web sites you visit from the Android browser.
(admittedly if you refuse to use Google's closed-source Android apps, you lose some functionality. That's the trade-off.)
You wont to know why EVERY major business uses PCs?
Because they went with the conventional choice decades ago, and now migrating would be a huge expense.
Because whoever made the choice knows Windows and nothing else.
(Note: This is not an argument for using Macs or iPads instead)
The issue is that if a sufficient number of people do buy the "closed" cars, "open" cars become commercially unviable.
I think this has actually happened to an extent. Cars come with sealed engines such that only authorised mechanics can work with them. That gives the car manufacturer an effective monopoly on parts and labour -- via franchises.
Anticipated profits from this channel allow these manufacturers to push the retail price of the car down. Now a user-servicable car is more expensive than a non-user-servicable car. Fewer people buy the more expensive car. A positive feedback loop is established.
Now the manufacturers are free to push up the cost of parts and of service franchises, which is bad for the consumer. Due to the closed nature of the cars, you can't get any old grease monkey to fix your car for cheap.
We're not there yet for all components of a car, but I think it's getting pretty close for some core components.
The analogy to computers is pretty easy to make.
"Can't you fix it so that I don't have to worry about that?"
"Sorry, I can't fix anything. It's locked down to just do what it does."
"Why doesn't the computer just do that for me?"
"It does what the manufacturer made it do, we can't do a damn thing about it"
"Just make it work, I don't care how, and I don't want to know."
"It's a closed system. It just does what it does"
See how those answers could be different for a reasonably open system? (not necessarily Open Source -- even Windows and OSX are open enough to improve those answers).
What? Among other things, RMS wrote GCC, which is part of Apple's XCode, and used to compile all that Apple software.
Many consumers don't care, and even LIKE, the idea of being locked in to the App Store, because it introduces a significant amount of safety.
Consider the difference between telling people "skateboarding may result in injury or death", versus completely banning skateboards.
People understand this. When it's applied to computers, though, they seem not to.
Here's a similar opinion from a source that's less Free Software oriented.
The danger is that we sleepwalk into a world where cabals of corporations control not only the mainstream devices and the software on them, but also the entire ecosystem of online services around them.
Every time Apple decides to close something off - by insisting on approving apps, by not giving you a [general purpose] USB port, etc., and people go for it anyway, because it's slick and nice to use, we get used to a little bit less openness.
People don't miss openness until it's too late. Then it's suddenly "What do you *mean* I can only use printers that are Apple certified?". "I've bought all these e-books, and now the only place I can read them is on Apple hardware?" etc.
I know, I know: slippery slope fallacy. But it's a slope we *will* slide down, without a critical mass of openness-aware customers insisting on some openness in their tools.
My mistake - there will be a dongle kit for USB and SD.
My wife gets one if I do - she'll use it in the car to doublecheck the photos she takes
No USB, no card reader... how's she going to transfer her photos to the iPad?
Feel free to make up your own definitions of HD.
However, a 720p TV is allowed to display the HD logo.
From the looks of it, the keyboard dock is can *only* be used at a desk.
I use it because it seems to put less of a load on my machine.
However, in Chrome, the video looks a lot more pixelated than when viewed in Flash. Perhaps Flash is doing some smoothing?
3. The iPhone Web, where every page is HTML+JavaScript and scales nicely to small screen sizes.
And if you want to serve video, you have to pay a consortium that Apple is a member of. Just saying.
+1
A large userbase of machines like this, for which the only realistic video option is H.264, is going to force video sites to provide H.264. Effectively forcing them to choose a format that involves paying MPEG LA licence fees.
Since Apple gets some of those licence fees, they'll be delighted with this.
For webmasters, the only options will be:
- Pay for encoding/distributing H.264
- Use an open codec, accepting that iPad/iPhone users won't be able to view
- Don't do video
It's pretty underhand.
Ahem. http://slashdot.org/~slim/achievements
I am not (yet) OCD enough to keep a thorough record. So I'll have to make do with an anecdote.
The other day a friend mentioned that he was thinking of getting a Nexus One phone. His friend chips in "Noooo! iPhones are best!". OK, not exactly unsolicited so far. But that's her entry point. Within 5 minutes we know all about her Mac, what size monitor she has, how great AppleTV is, how much better iWork is than that horrible MS Office... etc. etc.
As long as you're not using some cheapo hardware, if you have XP crashing more than once a year, you're obviously doing something you shouldn't.
Where "doing something you shouldn't" includes having an errant driver, even if that driver is the one supplied to you by the machine's manufacturer.
Background: I was getting a BSOD approximately every day or so. Any Windows zealot I mentioned it to would tell me how it wasn't Windows' fault, I must have installed some dodgy driver, or I had bad hardware. Hardware diagnostics all passed. The drivers were preinstalled.
I installed WhoCrashed in order to analyse my BSOD dumps. Day after day, it would tell me that the crash happened in a core Windows .SYS or .DLL, and that this had probably been caused by another driver which the dump analyser couldn't identify. Once it identified by Ethernet driver. I updated it to no avail. After several months, it identified my Intel graphics driver. I updated that, and now things seem to be stable - touch wood.
I see the argument that says it's the fault of Intel's driver. But surely by now, even drivers should be protected from each other. Admittedly even Linux doesn't do this - but Linux drivers seldom seem to cause kernel panics, in my experience.
Summary: You can't always blame the user for an unstable Windows system. The only reason things are easier on Macs, though, is that the OS and the hardware come from the same place.
Some interfaces are just inherently better, though.
My satnav is a touchscreen TomTom. When on holiday, I borrowed my sister's older Garmin. It felt so *primitive* having to navigate with buttons.
During that time, my girlfriend bought an iPod touch. Returning to the TomTom, it felt like an affront that I couldn't zoom the map with a multitouch pinch.
Lack of multitouch is my one worry about the Nexus One.
This all sounds tremendously complicated. Three fingers for this, two fingers for that. How do you learn it all?
I'd be eager to try it if it wasn't for the cost of entry (or the stigma of hovering around an Apple Store waiting to have a go).
And this from the company that for years wouldn't give you a second mouse button...
esc, 0
Same as in any other bash/ksh
Assuming you put 'set -o vi' in your bash profile. But of course you did.
OSX. It's just like any other UNIX :)
Don't forget something incredibly important here - the vast majority of people have no use for software freedoms. They don't write software, they don't understand software, and they don't care about the ethical stance of the people who produced the software they use.
Or, they don't know they have a use for software freedom. How many times have you heard someone complain about some element of their software? What if you were to tell them, "You know, if that were open source software, you could probably find someone who'd make it work the way you want, for $50."
If memory serves (I should check, but I can't be arsed) we were well into the Pentium era when Windows 95 came out.
RMS is simply crazy. He's outraged that he can't have the source code to someone's closed source program; his response is that all software should be open source, closed source is evil.
He's outraged that he can't have the source code to a program he (or his employer) has paid for, because that reduces its utility to him. Not providing the source, to him, is crippling the product. He believes people are being ripped off by crippled products. He thinks that by buying into a system where crippled products are the norm, you're not only being ripped off, but perpetuating a system where other people are ripped off.
Dude, WTF are you talking about.
- iPhoto isn't a mess, it's very easy to use actually, I can't even give any arguments for that because your argument doesn't give any either.
This applies to iPhoto 5. I took notes at the time because I intended to blog about it. I've not tried it since.
I couldn't work it out. I couldn't see when to apply the "roll" concept, the "album" concept, the "keyword" concept. I found adding keywords to be ridiculously inconvenient. I've imported rolls and not been able to find them subsequently.
I found it frustrating that you couldn't move the cursor when labelling, since the cursor keys move between pictures.
I hated the way it locked up the UI while it imported, pointlessly showing you a thumbnail of each image as it copies it. I found search to be complicated. Plus it didn't make sense to me that search didn't include album names.
Overall though, I bought a Mac after being impressed by Picasa. A friend said "If you like that, you'll LOVE the Mac", but it turned out Picasa is so much more slick and fluent than iPhoto 5 was.
- I use Logic myself and have used Ableton and ProTools, and Garageband beats them all by far at intuitiveness. Which is kind of logical considering it's a beginner's app.
I found myself beating my head against the keyboard trying to work out how to make simple changes to a software instrument loop. I forget the details. Shorten a note, move a note, insert a new note. I just couldn't work out how to do it. The help text just said "You can move notes" without saying how.
- iTunes isn't perfect, no, but it's still ten times better than WMP...
I never said WMP was any good.
- You don't make slideshows in iMovie, that's where Keynote is for... [...] If you can't figure that out than you definitely can't figure out Linux stuff.
I think we mean different things by slideshow. I put together a movie out of stills, Ken Burns effect, transitions, some music in the background. The principles seem simple, but I felt like I was fighting the app every step of the way. In common with GarageBand, I think, a lot of it is to do with arcane keyboard modifiers. Shift-drag does one thing, command-drag does another, with no rhyme or reason I can detect.
Of course, if you do this every day, you learn all the modifiers. That's not intuitive though. That's learning.
SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE: APPLE FANBOYS ARE ANNOYING, BUT SLASHDOT LINUX FANBOYS BASHING A COMPANY THAT'S NOT CATERING TO THEM IS ANNOYING^100... Apple products are great products for the average user, I'd even say the best available.
When I'm using iLife, I'd like to think I represent the average user. Yes, if I want to take notes, I open a Terminal and type "vi". But when I'm in GarageBand, I just want things to work in an intuitive and obvious way. I want to be able to right-click on a loop, get a pull-down menu and select 'split'. (I just Googled for how to do this - edit-split. I'm sure when I tried this it was a more obscure alt/shift/control/command/whatever click)