"it's a purpose-built system" Of course it is a purpose-built system. You know for those people who actually use their PC to run applications.
But more specifically, those that require - or significantly benefit from - a large display with an active digitizer. Otherwise why would you pay a premium price for something you aren't going to use?
And as far as the size of the market goes you were probably one of those who declared 30 years ago that PC's would never create a big market.
Yes of course, I must have been. Clearly the pointing out that the market for an expensive PC with active digitizer is smaller than that for cheaper PCs that lack it means that 3 decades ago I must have been an advocate for saying there wouldn't be a big market for PCs, 'cos that totally follows.
The top-of-the-line 5K Retina Display iMac is only $2299!
Can you buy an iMac with a touchscreen and active digitizer? No, now maybe that doesn't matter for you and you don't care about those things but then you wouldnt be considering a system like this in the first place now would you?
And for all that, it's only got a 3840 X 2160 display, where the iMac has a jaw-dropping 5120 X 2880 display.
No, it has a 4500x3000 screen. Now maybe your definition of "jaw-dropping" falls somewhere in between 13.5million and ~14.7million pixels.
Who woulda thought that Apple would be the less-expensive choice...
Yes let's all marvel at how a thing with less features costs less than a different thing with more features.
But this isn't meant to be a customizable PC/workstation, it's a purpose-built system. Indeed it's probably tremendously overpriced if you were considering it for a general workstation, but if you consider it for it's purpose: as an alternative to things like the Wacom Cintiq, then it's about right.
It's pretty cool but I don't think there's a very big market for this sort of product, the high resolution and stylus features are great but it's too expensive too shell out for unless that's really the focus of what you do on your computer.
Be interesting to see what the Linux folks do with something like this. I tried the Cintiq on Ubuntu using the Linux Wacom project but while it made it work - i.e. you could use the pen in Linux - there was no real use for it. But I suppose it's a niche market so there's not much interest in developing FOSS software for it.
Hint: "portrait mode" is fairly descriptive in a camera application
So in a smartphone camera application if somebody were to say it to you would you interpret it to mean orientation (landscape/portrait) or fake bokeh effect?
No actually, I just tried it out a bit. It's a neat trick but it's pretty hit-and-miss, it really struggles to maintain the hard edges of the foreground subject so you get the background blur bleeding and your foreground edges end up blurry. I know it's explicitly "beta" but it's a fair way off being a convincing fake of the real thing.
They sold it as being a lot better in their presentation, in reality it's not really like that at all.
I thought it was kind of weird that Apple would do the increasingly common "sell/release now, patch later" approach but then to also adopt the "all our users are now also beta testers" MO is even more of a change for Apple.
Contrast that to Linux. Normally, you plug something in and it works great. If it doesn't then you probably should have researched your purchase better.
I don't know about that, I've been trying to find a good distro to run on my 2015 MBP. Ubuntu has a goppingly awful Unity interface, you need hacks to make HiDPI work and the power management/hibernate doesn't work propertly. Mint works with HiDPI but no Wifi, spotty trackpad operation and also has the hibernate issue. Elementary also had the wifi issue which I had to install from Broadcom themselves and took some messing around to make HiDPI work.
So when you say "Linux" what are you referring to? You don't use Linux, you use a Linux-based operating system, a desktop distribution. So which are you talking about?
When Linux doesn't meet your use case, you can fix it or pay someone to have it fixed.
Yes in theory, but in practise regular users do not do either of those things. Yes it's annoying that support for older hardware is stopped but users just buy new hardware with supported software rather than switching to Linux and paying developers to fix problems for them. In fact unless you can find a cheap developer the former is probably more cost effective anyway.
Why do you say that? It's pretty clear from the article here that they took real world sites to understand real world performance issues and addressed those performance issues. What part of they explained do you think is analogous to VW?
Wouldn't it just be easier to have a mechanism to store the encryption key on an external device that you take with you rather than on the machine itself? That way you wouldn't need an elaborate custom-built chassis and you eliminate the threat by just not storing the data and the password in the same place.
Wifi and bluetooth can be turned on while in airplane mode.
The whole point of Airplane mode is to stop wireless connections. Of course you can selectively turn those features back on but whether it's Windows, Android or iOS when you turn on airplane mode it turns off wifi and bluetooth.
Also you can get bluetooth headphones that last for 20+ hours now.
Yet no one in their right mind would dream of calling those "Not a Standard". So, since Apple will allow ANYONE who meets their criteria and pays their License Fee to design and sell Lightning-compatible products, claim MFi-Compliance, and be "guaranteed to work" with other Lightning-equipped products, how is that NOT a Standard?
Because nobody else can use it in their devices, you can only use it to make accessories for Apple products.
So why doesn't Apple just Open Source Lightning?
Because they can extract license fees from it and this would allow for companies to make accessories that easily work for both iDevices and non-iDevices. It's in their interest as a for-profit company to do exactly this.
But the same thing could be said of the abovementioned examples of "Standards" that are still "Licensed"; some after decades of widespread use.
No, it couldn't. Because anybody can make a DVD and a DVD drive and all they need to do is pay the license fees, you cannot do the same with lightning. HTC can't just come along and make a phone with a lightning port.
But this is all beside the point, the point is what they did is made their newer device more of a pain in the ass to use than their previous one without adding any replacement technology, this is a step backward for Apple in general and I'm not sure what makes you so desperately defend that.
And their contention is that they are replacing the 3.5 mm analog Jack with a superior standard. Reread my post, and think about your response.
I read what you wrote, lightning is not a standard, in fact not only that it isn't even available across Apple's own product lines. Also it wasn't replaced with anything, I had a single lighting connector and bluetooth headphone capability on my iPhone 6 too, if they replaced the headphone jack with another lightning connector then fine - still not a standard but at least it solves one of the annoyances.
But I was actually surprised to already see almost 2 dozen Lightning headphones and earbuds on Amazon, with quality and prices from $799 (!!!) all the way down to $30 or maybe less, and about a half-dozen dual-port charging/listening cables, too. So the "annoyance" won't be lasting long.
Yeah except they don't work with anything else, they don't even work with any of my Macs (or any iDevices) and I still need an adapter for the plane when I want to have it on charge and listen to music. With the serial ports and floppy drive it was: "hey we're replacing this with a superior standard", that is not the case here.
We all know there's workarounds, but they're clunky. It's annoying that my iPhone 7 is more cumbersome to do the things just worked out of the box with my iPhone 6, yes I know I can get bluetooth headphones, which I did but on a long haul flight they don't last and don't work in airplane mode anyway. So now I need another set of headphones and a headphone+charge adapter.
That's not the sort of regression in user experience I'm used to with Apple's products. The other issue with it is the inconsistency, the lightning port isn't available on any Mac so the lightning-only headphones they ship with the iPhone (without any lightning to 3.5mm adapter) don't even work with my other Apple products.
Now I'm sure you'll leap to their defence with all the possible workarounds but the fact is the user experience is now worse, this is a downgrade, not an upgrade and usually Apple handles these things so well so this is disappointing but it's ok it's an annoyance and you can admit that.
Curious about one thing - what is rms and FSF's official position on systemd?
It's free software, it meets their definition and offers users what they define as the essential freedoms so they're just fine with it. Is there something about systemd that would make you think they would have a different position?
personally i dont like the top tires phones now its all a sealed throw me away a year from now setup.
Dont be so melodramatic. There is no reason the top tier phones can't last many years. Indeed even the iPhone 5 from over 4 years ago is perfectly usable with the latest OS update, as is the Nexus 4, Galaxy S4 with Cyanogen, etc... If you need to throw them away after 1 year then the problem is with you, not the phone.
A few points:
1. My new TV box puts itself to sleep when I'm not using it (It detects via the HDMI channel when the TV turns off and sleeps).
What sort of box is it? The problem I have with TV boxes is that I can't find one that can play every format, hence the need for a media server to transcode it. If a media box could do it it would be cheaper to have one for each TV than to set up a server and I wouldn't need something like Plex at all.
Slashdot Mirror
"it's a purpose-built system" Of course it is a purpose-built system. You know for those people who actually use their PC to run applications.
But more specifically, those that require - or significantly benefit from - a large display with an active digitizer. Otherwise why would you pay a premium price for something you aren't going to use?
And as far as the size of the market goes you were probably one of those who declared 30 years ago that PC's would never create a big market.
Yes of course, I must have been. Clearly the pointing out that the market for an expensive PC with active digitizer is smaller than that for cheaper PCs that lack it means that 3 decades ago I must have been an advocate for saying there wouldn't be a big market for PCs, 'cos that totally follows.
The top-of-the-line 5K Retina Display iMac is only $2299!
Can you buy an iMac with a touchscreen and active digitizer? No, now maybe that doesn't matter for you and you don't care about those things but then you wouldnt be considering a system like this in the first place now would you?
And for all that, it's only got a 3840 X 2160 display, where the iMac has a jaw-dropping 5120 X 2880 display.
No, it has a 4500x3000 screen. Now maybe your definition of "jaw-dropping" falls somewhere in between 13.5million and ~14.7million pixels.
Who woulda thought that Apple would be the less-expensive choice...
Yes let's all marvel at how a thing with less features costs less than a different thing with more features.
That's basically the same machine, except with an Apple logo and OS X instead of Microsoft logos and Windows 10, and no touchscreen.
It's not just a touchscreen though, it's a digitizer that supports an active stylus as well.
Is the touchscreen and Windows 10 really worth $800?
Well that depends, if you need a touchscreen with an active stylus for the work you're doing then yes, if not then probably not.
They can put it all in one article. It's still free advertising.
Yes if there's one thing I thought of about the audience of Slashdot it's that they are the perfect target market for Microsoft to advertise to.
But this isn't meant to be a customizable PC/workstation, it's a purpose-built system. Indeed it's probably tremendously overpriced if you were considering it for a general workstation, but if you consider it for it's purpose: as an alternative to things like the Wacom Cintiq, then it's about right.
It's pretty cool but I don't think there's a very big market for this sort of product, the high resolution and stylus features are great but it's too expensive too shell out for unless that's really the focus of what you do on your computer.
Be interesting to see what the Linux folks do with something like this. I tried the Cintiq on Ubuntu using the Linux Wacom project but while it made it work - i.e. you could use the pen in Linux - there was no real use for it. But I suppose it's a niche market so there's not much interest in developing FOSS software for it.
Hint: "portrait mode" is fairly descriptive in a camera application
So in a smartphone camera application if somebody were to say it to you would you interpret it to mean orientation (landscape/portrait) or fake bokeh effect?
No actually, I just tried it out a bit. It's a neat trick but it's pretty hit-and-miss, it really struggles to maintain the hard edges of the foreground subject so you get the background blur bleeding and your foreground edges end up blurry. I know it's explicitly "beta" but it's a fair way off being a convincing fake of the real thing.
They sold it as being a lot better in their presentation, in reality it's not really like that at all.
Portrait Camera for iPhone 7 Plus (beta)
I thought it was kind of weird that Apple would do the increasingly common "sell/release now, patch later" approach but then to also adopt the "all our users are now also beta testers" MO is even more of a change for Apple.
Contrast that to Linux. Normally, you plug something in and it works great. If it doesn't then you probably should have researched your purchase better.
I don't know about that, I've been trying to find a good distro to run on my 2015 MBP. Ubuntu has a goppingly awful Unity interface, you need hacks to make HiDPI work and the power management/hibernate doesn't work propertly. Mint works with HiDPI but no Wifi, spotty trackpad operation and also has the hibernate issue. Elementary also had the wifi issue which I had to install from Broadcom themselves and took some messing around to make HiDPI work.
So when you say "Linux" what are you referring to? You don't use Linux, you use a Linux-based operating system, a desktop distribution. So which are you talking about?
Regardless of theory versus practice, it's ILLEGAL to fix bugs in proprietary software.
I'm not talking about proprietary software or the legality of fixing bugs in it.
When Linux doesn't meet your use case, you can fix it or pay someone to have it fixed.
Yes in theory, but in practise regular users do not do either of those things. Yes it's annoying that support for older hardware is stopped but users just buy new hardware with supported software rather than switching to Linux and paying developers to fix problems for them. In fact unless you can find a cheap developer the former is probably more cost effective anyway.
Why do you say that? It's pretty clear from the article here that they took real world sites to understand real world performance issues and addressed those performance issues. What part of they explained do you think is analogous to VW?
A bootloader with network access isn't that complicated and you have to secure your network access regardless of what you're doing anyway.
That would mean it couldn't reboot unless you were physically right there -- making it useless for any form of remote application.
You could send it the encrypted encryption key remotely too, doesn't need to be a physical external device.
Wouldn't it just be easier to have a mechanism to store the encryption key on an external device that you take with you rather than on the machine itself? That way you wouldn't need an elaborate custom-built chassis and you eliminate the threat by just not storing the data and the password in the same place.
Wifi and bluetooth can be turned on while in airplane mode.
The whole point of Airplane mode is to stop wireless connections. Of course you can selectively turn those features back on but whether it's Windows, Android or iOS when you turn on airplane mode it turns off wifi and bluetooth.
Also you can get bluetooth headphones that last for 20+ hours now.
Which ones?
Yet no one in their right mind would dream of calling those "Not a Standard". So, since Apple will allow ANYONE who meets their criteria and pays their License Fee to design and sell Lightning-compatible products, claim MFi-Compliance, and be "guaranteed to work" with other Lightning-equipped products, how is that NOT a Standard?
Because nobody else can use it in their devices, you can only use it to make accessories for Apple products.
So why doesn't Apple just Open Source Lightning?
Because they can extract license fees from it and this would allow for companies to make accessories that easily work for both iDevices and non-iDevices. It's in their interest as a for-profit company to do exactly this.
But the same thing could be said of the abovementioned examples of "Standards" that are still "Licensed"; some after decades of widespread use.
No, it couldn't. Because anybody can make a DVD and a DVD drive and all they need to do is pay the license fees, you cannot do the same with lightning. HTC can't just come along and make a phone with a lightning port.
But this is all beside the point, the point is what they did is made their newer device more of a pain in the ass to use than their previous one without adding any replacement technology, this is a step backward for Apple in general and I'm not sure what makes you so desperately defend that.
And their contention is that they are replacing the 3.5 mm analog Jack with a superior standard. Reread my post, and think about your response.
I read what you wrote, lightning is not a standard, in fact not only that it isn't even available across Apple's own product lines. Also it wasn't replaced with anything, I had a single lighting connector and bluetooth headphone capability on my iPhone 6 too, if they replaced the headphone jack with another lightning connector then fine - still not a standard but at least it solves one of the annoyances.
But I was actually surprised to already see almost 2 dozen Lightning headphones and earbuds on Amazon, with quality and prices from $799 (!!!) all the way down to $30 or maybe less, and about a half-dozen dual-port charging/listening cables, too. So the "annoyance" won't be lasting long.
Yeah except they don't work with anything else, they don't even work with any of my Macs (or any iDevices) and I still need an adapter for the plane when I want to have it on charge and listen to music. With the serial ports and floppy drive it was: "hey we're replacing this with a superior standard", that is not the case here.
We all know there's workarounds, but they're clunky. It's annoying that my iPhone 7 is more cumbersome to do the things just worked out of the box with my iPhone 6, yes I know I can get bluetooth headphones, which I did but on a long haul flight they don't last and don't work in airplane mode anyway. So now I need another set of headphones and a headphone+charge adapter.
That's not the sort of regression in user experience I'm used to with Apple's products. The other issue with it is the inconsistency, the lightning port isn't available on any Mac so the lightning-only headphones they ship with the iPhone (without any lightning to 3.5mm adapter) don't even work with my other Apple products.
Now I'm sure you'll leap to their defence with all the possible workarounds but the fact is the user experience is now worse, this is a downgrade, not an upgrade and usually Apple handles these things so well so this is disappointing but it's ok it's an annoyance and you can admit that.
Stresses the battery, which reacts differently due to the reduced cabin pressure at higher elevation.
Nothing to do with that, the plane hadn't even taken off.
Curious about one thing - what is rms and FSF's official position on systemd?
It's free software, it meets their definition and offers users what they define as the essential freedoms so they're just fine with it. Is there something about systemd that would make you think they would have a different position?
personally i dont like the top tires phones now its all a sealed throw me away a year from now setup.
Dont be so melodramatic. There is no reason the top tier phones can't last many years. Indeed even the iPhone 5 from over 4 years ago is perfectly usable with the latest OS update, as is the Nexus 4, Galaxy S4 with Cyanogen, etc... If you need to throw them away after 1 year then the problem is with you, not the phone.
Cool, I'll check it out. Thanks :)
A few points: 1. My new TV box puts itself to sleep when I'm not using it (It detects via the HDMI channel when the TV turns off and sleeps).
What sort of box is it? The problem I have with TV boxes is that I can't find one that can play every format, hence the need for a media server to transcode it. If a media box could do it it would be cheaper to have one for each TV than to set up a server and I wouldn't need something like Plex at all.