I expect to be able to sit down and enjoy a game from minute one, with no learning curve, no research, and no commitment. And then to walk away again.
I'm a busy person. I'm not wasting my time or my cognitive resources on "learning how to play a game" or "developing enough coordination to manage 150 different controls" so that sometime dozens and dozens of hours down the road I get the satisfaction of being an elitist that can claim to be good at something no-one else is good at.
I still have a Genesis system sitting here and basically every single game offers at least nominal fun, even if it's not the sort of thing that will last for days. I can't say the same for the "big name" games I've played over the last decade. They're all basically the same game: steep learning curve, fiddly 3D play, no fun.
Some will just put it down to price, but I think there's something to the fact that Angry Birds is a runaway hit while console makers (and big game companies in mobile space) suffer. People want to play stuff that's accessible, immediately entertaining, and that is a break from your job. Most people do not care to play games that require the game to become the job itself in order for you to enjoy it and/or have success at it, and there are a good many people that would not enjoy current games even if they made it their job.
There's no gameplay in games anymore. They're just the same kinds of fx-fests that overpriced Hollywood "blockbusters" are. Trite plot, no imagination, no interactivity, no fun.
Games haven't been fun for 15 years or more at this point, and knowledge of how to actually make a fun game seems to have disappeared from the earth. Stop developing new consoles with more shiny parts, you don't need all that hardware and nobody wants to buy it.
Just make more games, and spend less on each one of them, since game cost seems to be positively correlated with game boringness.
Remember the days when every single arcade game in the room was fun, even though they were all platformers with silly-simple graphics? Remember the days of the Atari consoles, the Nintendo NES, or even the early 16-bit era with SNES and Genesis? 80% of all the games were fun, and none of them tried to be overwrought world-shattering hyperrealistic blockbusters.
They were games. Games are meant to be simple and fun. Everything else is bullshit.
You know, sh, csh, sed, awk, perl, etc. etc. etc. The entirety of the Unix System V Bible that I used to have laying around on my shelf in the old days is not about "tinkering," but about *working*.
It is only once Linux comes along that an OS becomes a tinkertoy and a CLI the interface to this form of play.
I use the CLI regularly on my Mac for a lot of heavy lifting. But you're right, when I was running Linux, I used the CLI mostly for tweaking stuff to try to get it to work better ("work 100%" always seemed out of reach). To my eye, in retrospect, this is an endictment of Linux, not an ad for it, and says a lot about the relative "can get work done now" vs. "still working to make it work now" balances in both systems.
I began life on Sun3 workstations running SunOS and when Linux came around in 1993 I was thrilled. I can remember the excitement of running Emacs at home, on a cheap PC with 4MB ram, a 150MB ESDI hard drive, and an EGA card (all of which were an order of magnitude cheaper than the Sun4 workstations that were around at the time).
From then until now—nearly 20 years now—Linux has been in various states of "we're finally almost there!" but it never actually gets there. We were "almost ready to take over the world and displace Windows" all the way back at the KDE 1.0 beta-3 release in 1997.
The pattern goes like this:
1) New project! We will copy and improve upon the shiny proprietary thing in the market now! 2) Code 80% in 2-3 years, leaving 20% buggy or incomplete or listed as "ToDo" or "FixMe" or "ImplementLater" (goes for docs, too). 3) Look over there! There is a NEW shiny proprietary thing! We are behind the curve! 4) Discard all and start again at #1.
Being "satisfied with old but working" (i.e. the Windows XP phenomenon) doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that motivates FOSS developers to get that last 20% done. So if you're an end user of Linux, you're always stuck somewhere between 0% to 80% working, but you never, ever get to 100% working/stable.
It took me until 2008 to realize that I would never, ever get there with Linux. When KDE3 went to KDE4 and I switched to GNOME only to have GNOME3 be announced as a replacement to GNOME2, even as things like Pulse were coming down the pipe that broke audio yet again and driver changes in recent kernels were rendering the laptop hardware I was using at the time unsupported... A light bulb finally went off over my head:
"I've been here before. Over and over again I have been 'almost there' with Linux... and now I'm not again. If I stay, I will spend countless hours and nights over months or even years yet again kludging and coding and submitting and configuring and kludging and, most importantly, waiting on others and on the "community" to implement/fix/document stuff, working hard to continuously preserve and backup and migrate my data in an unstable environment. In 2-3 years I will finally be to 'nearly there' again, and then... No. I will not be fooled/find myself waiting for years for the next major versions to mature yet again."
With fedupness in my soul I partitioned the machine and installed a hackintosh volume, which ironically worked about as well as Linux ever had despite being, well, a hackintosh volume, and which was actually (and again, ironically) somewhat easier to get working right (a bit of futzing around with files and drivers, but no configuration of the runtime, environment, text files, GUI environment, etc., needed).
Within a month I wasn't using Linux at all. Within 6 months I'd bought a MacBook Pro. And that was that.
Now you couldn't pay me to go back to Linux. I need a computer that works 100% and it had been so long by 2008 since I'd had one that I'd forgotten what it was like. Never again.
Social mobility is empirically higher in Europe. There is a good body of peer-reviewed data on this. Your sample of under 300 wealthy Americans is not appropriately sized for a population size of 300 million, plus you are beginning by selecting for upper class members in the first place, ultimately reinforcing, if anything, the parent's post.
Everyone I know has gone Mac in the last 2-3 years, and most have a story like mine. I was committed hardcore to another platform, though I had more than a few complaints. Still, no expectation of ever switching.
But the iPhone was a quantum leap in consumer technology. I was using a Palm, which was "not a bad smartphone" the month before the first iPhone announcement was made. Then iPhone was released and after 10 minutes using it I knew it was a completely different class of device. Within a few months I had realized that I couldn't keep my hands off one and bought it. Rather than let me down and gradually disappoint me, leading to rationalization and acceptance (the usual model for technology buys of all kinds), it continued to impress weeks and months into ownership and I have had no desire to switch—only to upgrade—ever since.
When iPad came out, I was absolutely sure I didn't need one, but ended up using one regularly for reasons unrelated to my own consumerist impulses. But boy did it drive those consumerist impulses... Again, within months I had bought one and it has becomemy most used and relied upon work device.
After those two experiences, Mac OS didn't seem far off, and already being in love with iPhone/iPad based on my own use of them, the one annoyance I had with them was the way that they seemed not to mesh as well with other platforms (in my case, Linux, but the same goes for Windows) as they do with Mac OS. So I resolved never to spend Mac-level money, but to buy a very old old used Mac and a Mac OS update pack, and get the OS X pack running on a hackintosh machine to "test the waters." I built a hackintosh box for $250 or so with a dual core mainboard, Firewire-800, and a RAID-1, and within a week of using it I knew I would soon migrate my life from Linux (where it had been since 1993) to Mac OS.
Within six months of going "Mac OS only," though, the difference in quality and hardware/software integration between my iPhone/iPad and my other technology devices (a hackintoshed desktop and a hackintoshed Thinkpad) was painfully obvious and I knew that I was done for—I really, really wanted access to true Mac hardware to avoid the niggling little issues and flaws of PC world hardware that seemed increasingly apparent to me.
Got a MacBook Pro 13" machine last January, finally.
It is the best computing device I have ever owned, bar none. Build quality is exceptional, fit and finish are so precise and refined that you feel as though it wasn't made by humans, but by perfect machines. Even the ThinkPads I'd always owned had little things that I'd never noticed. For example, I would never have said that the power switch was slightly crooked or that there was a little key vibration and noise in some keyswitches, or that the hinge had uneven tension throughout its range or that the display was a bit uneven in its brightness UNTIL getting and really using a MacBook Pro. The build quality is measurably better. It has raised my expectations for technology goods.
Aside from that, the ergonomics are also much better. Apple's touchpad and keyboard, though very foreign to me at first, have now enhanced my work speed considerably. For example, the key travel distance and key "give" on the chicklet keyboard has given me another 10-15 wpm in typing speed with no loss (indeed, a gain, thanks to keys not touching each other) in accuracy.
And of course beyond all of these things, there are just fewer fatal flaws. No BIOS to worry about. Exceptional battery life. No need to fuck around with drivers. No "update hell" in which the latest round of absolutely necessary updates kill some functionality in your system that you rely upon, leaving you installing/uninstalling/tweaking in a desperate haze for hours or days (problems seen both in Windows and in Linux). Just massive, massive piles of It Works Without You Having to Think About It, and It's Tough as Nails to Boot.
My parents and siblings' families have gone Mac (something I never thought would happen, an
that have been saying this kind of stuff for years. iPod is lame. iPhone is a useless device. Nobody in their right mind will buy iPad. iPod's price will drive people to competitors. iPhone's price will make in untenable as a phone. iPad is priced more than a laptop, only idiots will pay for it.
Blah, blah, blah. Once a week someone predicts that Apple has finally reached its apex and it's all downhill from here, as the products lack features, are too expensive, the garden is walled, and new competitors X, Y, and Z have finally figured it out and this will be their week|month|year.
So far, this has always been empirically demonstrated to be so much crap by the time the next week|month|year has arrived. Of course, at some point Apple WILL fail, just like all companies and indeed all things in the universe eventually disintegrate, and because at least once a week someone predicts that this will happen this week, at some point someone will be right.
But when that happens, it won't be because of any insight—just because the pundits have made sure to predict the failure of Apple during EVERY week|month|year cycle. And I seriously doubt this is the time, having just been at the local office supply chain store looking at Android tablets yesterday.
It was KDE4 that started my migration away from Linux after fifteen years of hardcore Linux use, advocacy, development, etc. (The pending arrival of GNOME 3 sealed the deal, but it was KDE4 that happened first.)
I still miss Linux, sometimes—the ethic, the openness.
Too bad things didn't work out and Linux didn't ever "arrive" at the same UI quality level as Mac OS or even Windows. But I still have a very soft spot in my heart for Linux and I am continually tempted to install the latest Fedora release in a VM just to have it around. No particular need though—don't actually know what I'd run in it—so I haven't yet.
I've been running OSX Lion with the machine on 24/7 since release day on my 2010 unibody MBP and I've experienced no crashes whatsoever. Lion is a bit slower than Snow Leopard was for some UI tasks, but the new Mission Control task/desktop switcher more than makes up for any other inconvenience.
Biggest issue I had was that my LiveScribe Desktop wasn't working, but as of today that has been fixed, so now: no complaints whatsoever.
and worked, over several years, as an editor in technology publishing, then as an editor in history publishing, then as an editor in academic publishing (journals in the social sciences). In all cases, we worked in Word and sent Word files to the production team/department/contractor. Their processes upon receipt of Word files varied, but the fact is that MS Word is a major standard in many areas of publishing, certainly in mass-market books.
Pay attention; I didn't say I started using KDE in 1994. When i first became a Linux user I was using TWM, then later FVWM, then for a while AfterStep. KDE was, as you say, fall 1997 with the pre3 release, which is where I started using it.
I started using Linux full-time in 1994, wrote a number of Linux books, did a whole bunch of server and desktop installations and was a huge fan of Linux+KDE beginning with KDE pre-1.0 releases. I was religiously all-Linux, all-KDE, all the time until KDE 4 on Fedora 9.
I stuck with KDE4 for several months; at first, I couldn't imagine changing the desktop environment I'd had for so long.
Eventually, however, I realized I spent far too much time trying to configure and reconfigure my KDE4 desktop to behave and appear in ways that were acceptable to me. It seemed like I was always spending time configuring my desktop, yet never getting it quite right. I'd be in the middle of a real task and something would annoy the hell out of me and the next thing you know I'd be knee-deep in configuration and kludging and after a couple hours I'd determinedly force myself to give up and live with it (frown, frown) only to find myself configuring once again before the day was out.
After about three months of that, I switched to GNOME 2 on Fedora. It worked well for me and I decided I actually rather liked GNOME. Once again I settled into an environment, developed a workflow and keyboard and mouse habits and figured out how to do all of the little tweaks I wanted to do each time I did a new distro install to support new hardware, etc.
But when GNOME3 details came out and as the KDE4/GNOME3/Unity trifecta started to overtake the Linux world, I got really frustrated. I switched to Xfce for a while, but like Linus, found it not quite where I wanted to be. I tried to return to Windowmaker, which I'd used back in the day before KDE-1pre releases. But all these years later and no native file manager? No drag-and-drop? Yes, I *can* use the command line, but sometimes I'd like to have a working desktop metaphor as well.
So I tried Enlightenment. Nightmare; a toy project. You spend all of your time just trying to get the install consistent.
Then I realized that I felt really good about the Macs I was encountering at the university where I am faculty. So I committed my first Linux-betrayal since 1994, repartitioned, and installed a Hackintosh partition to "test out" OSX.
Three months later I'd built a brand new Hackintosh desktop and bought all Apple software, the first software I'd bought in decades after decades as a free software user. The Linux partition, while still there, was rarely booted any longer. Six months later I'd ditched the Hackintosh desktop and bought a MacBook Pro and reformatted all of my long-term archival media to be Mac-readable.
There are things that frustrate me about Macs (most notably the spinning beach ball moments and the inadequacy of Mac Ports next to the RedHat and Debian repositories, less notably but still there the cost of the hardware and difficulty of cheap repairs with eBay spare parts), but I am in all honesty more productive than I've been in a very, very long time, and once again rarely have to worry about being pissed off by, or spending time I don't have reconfiguring or trying to kludge apart, my desktop—just like back in the KDE3 and GNOME2 days.
Too bad those days are over, but I fear that free software has lost this padawan to the dark side for life. Once you get used to no configuration, no kludges, everything works to your satisfaction 95 percent of the time, it's really hard to imagine going back to tweaks, hacks, editing configuration files, and new releases that routinely require that all of these be rediscovered and that come down the pipe in regular updates and are required for recent hardware support.
I left Verizon Wireless in the late '90s precisely because they were billing me for things that I couldn't identify and that they wouldn't itemize.
Let me tell you how "leaving them" worked out for me. After lots of attempts to get them to itemize, I just paid everything and said cancel (my initial agreement period was over and I was on monthly). Then, I got a bill from them the next month—for the same monthly service, including things they wouldn't itemize, as before. I called them up.
Me: WTF? I quit last month and paid off.
Them: Yes, but you re-opened your account.
Me: WTF? How did I do that? I haven't talked to you since then.
Them: We don't know. But there is this charge that you incurred that means you continued to use the service.
Me: How did I incur the charge? That sounds like the same amount I was asking about before?
Them: Must have been local calls or sth. We can't tell you. But it's there. So your bill / account is back also. You owe for the month.
Me: But I threw away the VZW phones, like, three weeks ago!
Them: Sorry. Pay up.
Me: Get your supervisor.
Song and dance, yadda yadda, I ended up giving in, paying off the month again, and cancelling again.
Next month, WHAT DO YOU KNOW, another VZW bill lands in my mailbox for monthly service AS USUAL.
I called again, same song and dance, only this time I also wrote a letter to corporate describing the sequence of events and suggesting that I was ready to take legal action. Then the retention department or someone behaving like a retention department called me and asked if I didn't really want to stay. I was so livid my head nearly exploded. Then, finally, this last person agreed to cancel me and I stayed cancelled...
Until I got a COLLECTIONS LETTER for another VZW monthly amount. At first I refused to pay in case it was going to go this way every month again, but when two or three months had passed and just that one charge seemed to be left, I paid the collections bill and that was the end of it.
But you'll never get me to go back to VZW unless every other telecom has been carpet-bombed. Even then, I might prefer tin cans and strings to VZW.
when Linux was being downloaded as 100 floppy images from shareware boards, the Linux desktop was light years ahead of anything else available outside of a university engineering lab.
I had a 16-bit color desktop running X and Windows and Mac users would go green with envy at the speed, stability and features. Integrated networking that just worked across the entire OS, not relying on clunky shareware applications or hacks that were limited to one or two contexts or online features. Dozens of windows open with no issues and no crashing. Large SCSI-based filesystems that were lighting fast thanks to the memory management model. The ability to interact with the GUI via the command line and vice-versa. Running applications on the root window, watching them refresh behind windows in the foreground. Even regular applications (forget about scientific computing and large-scale data stuff that used to be the UNIX bread and butter) were impressive to people. Emacs. Andrew. Xfig. Wingz. Mosaic.
To show off a Linux desktop in the early '90s was to show people what computers "were really capable of."
There was still some ground to stand on when advocating for Linux until the mid '00s, but things have really become stale in the world of Linux, apart from the kernel as another poster (rightly) points out. Desktop Linux now looks like the geeks at Star Wars conventions—a bunch of people really enthusiastic about a particular moment in (in this case computing) history that nobody else really cares about any longer.
Apple is working on multiple-device cloud services and bringing the app-supplants-web model to every form factor. Microsoft is working on new mobile platforms and the multitouch desktop.
Meanwhile, Linux continues to be embroiled in the devastatingly interesting GNOME vs. KDE and POP email client wars.
My employer paid for precisely this feature when I was traveling in the UK earlier this year.
It did . not . work . at . all . At least in the London, roaming connections got the lowest priority on the network. 30-40 call attempts, fruitless attempts to use data for two days, and finally I went to a local T-Mobile shop, bought a local pay-as-you-go MicroSIM for £10, got an unlimited data plan attached to it for a £5 annual fee (!!!!!) and popped it into my jailbroken iPhone, upon which I proceeded to tether and use Skype for everything on a £15 T-Mobile setup for the next several weeks, while AT&T were getting paid $100/mo. for data features plus some astronomical amount for voice roaming, neither of which worked or were being used.
I haven't had trouble with AT&T here in the US, but their roaming agreements (at least in the UK) are crap. With Canada YMMV, but based on that experience I would never pony up $100/mo. for data roaming.
This summary is the exactly opposite of the article. It is not just poor journalism, it is borderline commercial defamation.
These days Slashdot a) gets stories more slowly than everyone else, b) very, very often completely misrepresents the article being presented and/or presents it with a strong implicit ideological position that immediately marks everything out as a political or economic discussion rather than a technological one, and c) is full of commenters that clearly have no first-hand experience with anything prior to 32-bit Windows and thus understand the "discussion of technology" in a way completely different from the way that I imagine it (it is, on Slashdot these days, the discussion of consumer electronics, commodity economics, and political regulation).
In short, this is disgusting and I'm tired of it. I think my clicks are going to go somewhere else.
let me just say that the entirety of your post illustrates the complete inability that techies and Slashdotters have to see things from the common user's perspective. Indeed, as unembarrassed elitists, they revel in precisely this inability.
Freedom is not some theoretical construct that you never exercise.
Freedom is the ability to do real things that you might like to do without being constrained.
Only for techies does this set of real things include "hacking on the source."
For the other 99% of humanity, the real things include most of the stuff you'll find in an app store that techies call "cruft."
Only for techies is it irrelevant if an app has "slight" compatibility problems with a handset or comes in several versions or lots of options that need to be set for it to work.
For the other 99% of humanity, that complexity is in fact a constraint on freedom—on things they might like to do.
For the other 99% of humanity, an intuitive, polished user interface is the very essence of freedom, since it enables agentive action without constraint. A badly designed user interface is in fact a practical constraint on action.
Only for a techie does the "Android community" encompass a thousand different smartphones.
For the other 99% of humanity, "my community of platform users" (those who can help me with questions, with whom I can share experiences and mutually dialogically engage in troubleshooting) includes only the other people with the same handset and the same carrier. A much smaller community. There are just a handful of versions of the iPhone and they are all AT&T.
Your entire post sees the world, and the question of openness and closedness, through the very particular lens of the values that geeks have, the sorts of things that they might like to do, etc.
Someone earlier asked the ridiculous question of whether or not Windows was more free and open than Linux.
I repeat here:
Sit ten users in front of a Windows box, and the same ten users in front of a Linux box for the following hour. Then ask them: during which hour did you feel more free in your user of these computers? They will tell you that they were more free on Windows.
As a typical geek you will, of course, tell them that they are all wrong, and ironically likely try to persuade them (if not to enforce as policy, if you happen to be over an IT department) that they must use Linux—thereby severely curtailing their practical freedom.
Because they don't want to hack on the source. Very, very few people want to. Even fewer actually ever do it. The over all freedom quotient of "open source" in the larger scheme of the world as a system is much lower than most posters here would believe.
This is why Linux, and the Linux desktop, are in the state they're in. (And of course techies will respond that they're in a fine state. Because you can see the source.)
not an intention. A door is not "open" when it is shut simply because you intend for it to be open. Shut is shut.
Android's source is open. Android as a platform is nowhere near it.
Techies care a great deal about the former. Everybody else only cares about the latter.
But techies have done a good job of convincing everyone else that open source code for Android OS == open platform in the marketplace, in practice.
And the debates rage here on Slashdot as if there was some question about whether Android, in reality, in the marketplace, as a series of devices and carriers, is open. It isn't. It simply isn't.
But of course you can have the source.
Here you go, Grandma! What's this? It's the source code to Android! Can you feel the freedom pulsing through your veins? Um, can I just watch a movie? No, sorry, can't do that. Just read the source. SOOOO OPEN!
never complain about the fact that "Gosh, you can't even see the iOS source!"
Rather, they talk about "walled gardens" and "locked down platforms" and the need to jailbreak.
And when these things apply to Android as well?
"Ahhh, but the SOURCE is open."
Well, if that's the important bit, talk about what benefits the source of Android offers that isn't available to iOS users by virtue of its closed source. But it comes off as foolish and fanboytastic to bitch and moan about the walled garden of Apple when Android devices have by and large been much the same: closed until you open it.
Open is not an idea or an intention. Open is a state. Something is open or something is closed.
On windows:
You can install most any version on most any industry standard hardware. You can install most any Windows application on the most common Windows versions. There is no carrier. There is no "walled garden." There are more apps than there are for Linux.
Yes, I'd say that for the average computer user, if you sit them down in front of a Windows box for a day or a week or even a year, they will be MORE FREE using Windows than they will Linux (more able to act according to their own choices, exercise common forms of agency, etc.)
The exception is obviously the case of developers or technology enthusiasts. In fact, they are subject to the same limitations; they can't get a version of Photoshop for Linux or iTunes for Linux either, without purchasing third-party software and dealing with instabilities and bugs that come from emulation. But they don't care about using Linux or Windows for many of the everyday computing tasks that the public cares about, they care about DEVELOPING for Linux or Windows or for using them as a PLATFORM for various kinds of industrial or informatic goals.
In that case, it is the source, not the experience, whose openness matters.
So yes, for an average user, Windows is the most open platform. For a programmer or an activist or a sysadmin, this doesn't matter because Windows is closed source and Linux is open source. The average user does not care to read the source; they do not care that it is "open." They don't ever plan to go through that particular open door.
By saying that "Android is open," Google and its fanboys imply that you can do a great deal with Android that you can't do with iOS. But what they really mean is that you can do a great deal more with the Android OS codebase than you can with the iOS codebase (which mortals can't even access, because it's closed).
These are two very different things; regular users don't care about what they can do with the Android OS. They care about what they can do with Android as an environment for carrying out everyday tasks. For these purposes, in practice, Android—as a platform that necessarily includes not just the OS but also hardware and a carrier—is every bit as closed as is iOS.
That is exactly my point. It's brilliant marketing.
Android is the marketing triumph of the mobile phone age. It demonstrates very clearly that there is tremendous value in the "open" brand. And that's what it is here, make no mistake. Android devices in practice are as open as Ferrari laptops are made by Ferrari.
Let's look at how open they are:
- Carrier locked, walled garden, locked-down out of the box = Little choice, little freedom - Must root to be able to use important features - When you root, you are locked out of other important features - Fewer apps than iOS = Less choice = less freedom - Less polished user interface, more fragmentation = less flexibility, smaller userbase, less choice = less freedom
iPhone jailbreak == Android root After jailbreak == You can use all iTunes, Apple App Store, AND alternate sources Vastly more apps == Vastly more choice, freedom Less fragmentation, more polish == More ease of use, larger community, more choice, more freedom
In all practical terms, the iOS ecosystem is less restrictive. Somehow, however, the only thing that matters is the branding—the ideological and theoretical terms of the equation. Here somehow Google has managed to brand Android as "open" (despite the above) and this makes all the difference.
As a result, activist geeks and savvy tech users FLOCK to Android and push it to their families and friends, assuring all that this is important because Android is OPEN, while iOS is CLOSED.
They then immediately go about rooting the Android phone as the first order of business and then explain (rationalize) about how not all apps are compatible, rooted phones won't have access to things like movies, may create problems with carriers, etc., but all of this is justified by their OPENNESS... Unlike those poor iOS users that must "jailbreak" their phones.
It's 1984 style doublespeak. In one case, rooting = "open" = good. In another case, rooting = "jailbraking" = evil. It's the same damned act, with the same damned consequences, only in the case of the jailbreak, you end up with more functionality and more choice in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect to be able to sit down and enjoy a game from minute one, with no learning curve, no research, and no commitment. And then to walk away again.
I'm a busy person. I'm not wasting my time or my cognitive resources on "learning how to play a game" or "developing enough coordination to manage 150 different controls" so that sometime dozens and dozens of hours down the road I get the satisfaction of being an elitist that can claim to be good at something no-one else is good at.
I still have a Genesis system sitting here and basically every single game offers at least nominal fun, even if it's not the sort of thing that will last for days. I can't say the same for the "big name" games I've played over the last decade. They're all basically the same game: steep learning curve, fiddly 3D play, no fun.
Some will just put it down to price, but I think there's something to the fact that Angry Birds is a runaway hit while console makers (and big game companies in mobile space) suffer. People want to play stuff that's accessible, immediately entertaining, and that is a break from your job. Most people do not care to play games that require the game to become the job itself in order for you to enjoy it and/or have success at it, and there are a good many people that would not enjoy current games even if they made it their job.
There's no gameplay in games anymore. They're just the same kinds of fx-fests that overpriced Hollywood "blockbusters" are. Trite plot, no imagination, no interactivity, no fun.
Games haven't been fun for 15 years or more at this point, and knowledge of how to actually make a fun game seems to have disappeared from the earth. Stop developing new consoles with more shiny parts, you don't need all that hardware and nobody wants to buy it.
Just make more games, and spend less on each one of them, since game cost seems to be positively correlated with game boringness.
Remember the days when every single arcade game in the room was fun, even though they were all platformers with silly-simple graphics? Remember the days of the Atari consoles, the Nintendo NES, or even the early 16-bit era with SNES and Genesis? 80% of all the games were fun, and none of them tried to be overwrought world-shattering hyperrealistic blockbusters.
They were games. Games are meant to be simple and fun. Everything else is bullshit.
You know, sh, csh, sed, awk, perl, etc. etc. etc. The entirety of the Unix System V Bible that I used to have laying around on my shelf in the old days is not about "tinkering," but about *working*.
It is only once Linux comes along that an OS becomes a tinkertoy and a CLI the interface to this form of play.
I use the CLI regularly on my Mac for a lot of heavy lifting. But you're right, when I was running Linux, I used the CLI mostly for tweaking stuff to try to get it to work better ("work 100%" always seemed out of reach). To my eye, in retrospect, this is an endictment of Linux, not an ad for it, and says a lot about the relative "can get work done now" vs. "still working to make it work now" balances in both systems.
I began life on Sun3 workstations running SunOS and when Linux came around in 1993 I was thrilled. I can remember the excitement of running Emacs at home, on a cheap PC with 4MB ram, a 150MB ESDI hard drive, and an EGA card (all of which were an order of magnitude cheaper than the Sun4 workstations that were around at the time).
From then until now—nearly 20 years now—Linux has been in various states of "we're finally almost there!" but it never actually gets there. We were "almost ready to take over the world and displace Windows" all the way back at the KDE 1.0 beta-3 release in 1997.
The pattern goes like this:
1) New project! We will copy and improve upon the shiny proprietary thing in the market now!
2) Code 80% in 2-3 years, leaving 20% buggy or incomplete or listed as "ToDo" or "FixMe" or "ImplementLater" (goes for docs, too).
3) Look over there! There is a NEW shiny proprietary thing! We are behind the curve!
4) Discard all and start again at #1.
Being "satisfied with old but working" (i.e. the Windows XP phenomenon) doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that motivates FOSS developers to get that last 20% done. So if you're an end user of Linux, you're always stuck somewhere between 0% to 80% working, but you never, ever get to 100% working/stable.
It took me until 2008 to realize that I would never, ever get there with Linux. When KDE3 went to KDE4 and I switched to GNOME only to have GNOME3 be announced as a replacement to GNOME2, even as things like Pulse were coming down the pipe that broke audio yet again and driver changes in recent kernels were rendering the laptop hardware I was using at the time unsupported... A light bulb finally went off over my head:
"I've been here before. Over and over again I have been 'almost there' with Linux... and now I'm not again. If I stay, I will spend countless hours and nights over months or even years yet again kludging and coding and submitting and configuring and kludging and, most importantly, waiting on others and on the "community" to implement/fix/document stuff, working hard to continuously preserve and backup and migrate my data in an unstable environment. In 2-3 years I will finally be to 'nearly there' again, and then... No. I will not be fooled/find myself waiting for years for the next major versions to mature yet again."
With fedupness in my soul I partitioned the machine and installed a hackintosh volume, which ironically worked about as well as Linux ever had despite being, well, a hackintosh volume, and which was actually (and again, ironically) somewhat easier to get working right (a bit of futzing around with files and drivers, but no configuration of the runtime, environment, text files, GUI environment, etc., needed).
Within a month I wasn't using Linux at all. Within 6 months I'd bought a MacBook Pro. And that was that.
Now you couldn't pay me to go back to Linux. I need a computer that works 100% and it had been so long by 2008 since I'd had one that I'd forgotten what it was like. Never again.
Social mobility is empirically higher in Europe. There is a good body of peer-reviewed data on this. Your sample of under 300 wealthy Americans is not appropriately sized for a population size of 300 million, plus you are beginning by selecting for upper class members in the first place, ultimately reinforcing, if anything, the parent's post.
Everyone I know has gone Mac in the last 2-3 years, and most have a story like mine. I was committed hardcore to another platform, though I had more than a few complaints. Still, no expectation of ever switching.
But the iPhone was a quantum leap in consumer technology. I was using a Palm, which was "not a bad smartphone" the month before the first iPhone announcement was made. Then iPhone was released and after 10 minutes using it I knew it was a completely different class of device. Within a few months I had realized that I couldn't keep my hands off one and bought it. Rather than let me down and gradually disappoint me, leading to rationalization and acceptance (the usual model for technology buys of all kinds), it continued to impress weeks and months into ownership and I have had no desire to switch—only to upgrade—ever since.
When iPad came out, I was absolutely sure I didn't need one, but ended up using one regularly for reasons unrelated to my own consumerist impulses. But boy did it drive those consumerist impulses... Again, within months I had bought one and it has becomemy most used and relied upon work device.
After those two experiences, Mac OS didn't seem far off, and already being in love with iPhone/iPad based on my own use of them, the one annoyance I had with them was the way that they seemed not to mesh as well with other platforms (in my case, Linux, but the same goes for Windows) as they do with Mac OS. So I resolved never to spend Mac-level money, but to buy a very old old used Mac and a Mac OS update pack, and get the OS X pack running on a hackintosh machine to "test the waters." I built a hackintosh box for $250 or so with a dual core mainboard, Firewire-800, and a RAID-1, and within a week of using it I knew I would soon migrate my life from Linux (where it had been since 1993) to Mac OS.
Within six months of going "Mac OS only," though, the difference in quality and hardware/software integration between my iPhone/iPad and my other technology devices (a hackintoshed desktop and a hackintoshed Thinkpad) was painfully obvious and I knew that I was done for—I really, really wanted access to true Mac hardware to avoid the niggling little issues and flaws of PC world hardware that seemed increasingly apparent to me.
Got a MacBook Pro 13" machine last January, finally.
It is the best computing device I have ever owned, bar none. Build quality is exceptional, fit and finish are so precise and refined that you feel as though it wasn't made by humans, but by perfect machines. Even the ThinkPads I'd always owned had little things that I'd never noticed. For example, I would never have said that the power switch was slightly crooked or that there was a little key vibration and noise in some keyswitches, or that the hinge had uneven tension throughout its range or that the display was a bit uneven in its brightness UNTIL getting and really using a MacBook Pro. The build quality is measurably better. It has raised my expectations for technology goods.
Aside from that, the ergonomics are also much better. Apple's touchpad and keyboard, though very foreign to me at first, have now enhanced my work speed considerably. For example, the key travel distance and key "give" on the chicklet keyboard has given me another 10-15 wpm in typing speed with no loss (indeed, a gain, thanks to keys not touching each other) in accuracy.
And of course beyond all of these things, there are just fewer fatal flaws. No BIOS to worry about. Exceptional battery life. No need to fuck around with drivers. No "update hell" in which the latest round of absolutely necessary updates kill some functionality in your system that you rely upon, leaving you installing/uninstalling/tweaking in a desperate haze for hours or days (problems seen both in Windows and in Linux). Just massive, massive piles of It Works Without You Having to Think About It, and It's Tough as Nails to Boot.
My parents and siblings' families have gone Mac (something I never thought would happen, an
that have been saying this kind of stuff for years. iPod is lame. iPhone is a useless device. Nobody in their right mind will buy iPad. iPod's price will drive people to competitors. iPhone's price will make in untenable as a phone. iPad is priced more than a laptop, only idiots will pay for it.
Blah, blah, blah. Once a week someone predicts that Apple has finally reached its apex and it's all downhill from here, as the products lack features, are too expensive, the garden is walled, and new competitors X, Y, and Z have finally figured it out and this will be their week|month|year.
So far, this has always been empirically demonstrated to be so much crap by the time the next week|month|year has arrived. Of course, at some point Apple WILL fail, just like all companies and indeed all things in the universe eventually disintegrate, and because at least once a week someone predicts that this will happen this week, at some point someone will be right.
But when that happens, it won't be because of any insight—just because the pundits have made sure to predict the failure of Apple during EVERY week|month|year cycle. And I seriously doubt this is the time, having just been at the local office supply chain store looking at Android tablets yesterday.
It was KDE4 that started my migration away from Linux after fifteen years of hardcore Linux use, advocacy, development, etc. (The pending arrival of GNOME 3 sealed the deal, but it was KDE4 that happened first.)
I still miss Linux, sometimes—the ethic, the openness.
Too bad things didn't work out and Linux didn't ever "arrive" at the same UI quality level as Mac OS or even Windows. But I still have a very soft spot in my heart for Linux and I am continually tempted to install the latest Fedora release in a VM just to have it around. No particular need though—don't actually know what I'd run in it—so I haven't yet.
above is "2010 MBP here, with Lion, no problems" over and over again, including the same thing from myself.
Looks like the results of this straw poll are in, and they are that the story is BS and /. has been had once again.
I've been running OSX Lion with the machine on 24/7 since release day on my 2010 unibody MBP and I've experienced no crashes whatsoever. Lion is a bit slower than Snow Leopard was for some UI tasks, but the new Mission Control task/desktop switcher more than makes up for any other inconvenience.
Biggest issue I had was that my LiveScribe Desktop wasn't working, but as of today that has been fixed, so now: no complaints whatsoever.
and worked, over several years, as an editor in technology publishing, then as an editor in history publishing, then as an editor in academic publishing (journals in the social sciences). In all cases, we worked in Word and sent Word files to the production team/department/contractor. Their processes upon receipt of Word files varied, but the fact is that MS Word is a major standard in many areas of publishing, certainly in mass-market books.
Pay attention; I didn't say I started using KDE in 1994. When i first became a Linux user I was using TWM, then later FVWM, then for a while AfterStep. KDE was, as you say, fall 1997 with the pre3 release, which is where I started using it.
I started using Linux full-time in 1994, wrote a number of Linux books, did a whole bunch of server and desktop installations and was a huge fan of Linux+KDE beginning with KDE pre-1.0 releases. I was religiously all-Linux, all-KDE, all the time until KDE 4 on Fedora 9.
I stuck with KDE4 for several months; at first, I couldn't imagine changing the desktop environment I'd had for so long.
Eventually, however, I realized I spent far too much time trying to configure and reconfigure my KDE4 desktop to behave and appear in ways that were acceptable to me. It seemed like I was always spending time configuring my desktop, yet never getting it quite right. I'd be in the middle of a real task and something would annoy the hell out of me and the next thing you know I'd be knee-deep in configuration and kludging and after a couple hours I'd determinedly force myself to give up and live with it (frown, frown) only to find myself configuring once again before the day was out.
After about three months of that, I switched to GNOME 2 on Fedora. It worked well for me and I decided I actually rather liked GNOME. Once again I settled into an environment, developed a workflow and keyboard and mouse habits and figured out how to do all of the little tweaks I wanted to do each time I did a new distro install to support new hardware, etc.
But when GNOME3 details came out and as the KDE4/GNOME3/Unity trifecta started to overtake the Linux world, I got really frustrated. I switched to Xfce for a while, but like Linus, found it not quite where I wanted to be. I tried to return to Windowmaker, which I'd used back in the day before KDE-1pre releases. But all these years later and no native file manager? No drag-and-drop? Yes, I *can* use the command line, but sometimes I'd like to have a working desktop metaphor as well.
So I tried Enlightenment. Nightmare; a toy project. You spend all of your time just trying to get the install consistent.
Then I realized that I felt really good about the Macs I was encountering at the university where I am faculty. So I committed my first Linux-betrayal since 1994, repartitioned, and installed a Hackintosh partition to "test out" OSX.
Three months later I'd built a brand new Hackintosh desktop and bought all Apple software, the first software I'd bought in decades after decades as a free software user. The Linux partition, while still there, was rarely booted any longer. Six months later I'd ditched the Hackintosh desktop and bought a MacBook Pro and reformatted all of my long-term archival media to be Mac-readable.
There are things that frustrate me about Macs (most notably the spinning beach ball moments and the inadequacy of Mac Ports next to the RedHat and Debian repositories, less notably but still there the cost of the hardware and difficulty of cheap repairs with eBay spare parts), but I am in all honesty more productive than I've been in a very, very long time, and once again rarely have to worry about being pissed off by, or spending time I don't have reconfiguring or trying to kludge apart, my desktop—just like back in the KDE3 and GNOME2 days.
Too bad those days are over, but I fear that free software has lost this padawan to the dark side for life. Once you get used to no configuration, no kludges, everything works to your satisfaction 95 percent of the time, it's really hard to imagine going back to tweaks, hacks, editing configuration files, and new releases that routinely require that all of these be rediscovered and that come down the pipe in regular updates and are required for recent hardware support.
I left Verizon Wireless in the late '90s precisely because they were billing me for things that I couldn't identify and that they wouldn't itemize.
Let me tell you how "leaving them" worked out for me. After lots of attempts to get them to itemize, I just paid everything and said cancel (my initial agreement period was over and I was on monthly). Then, I got a bill from them the next month—for the same monthly service, including things they wouldn't itemize, as before. I called them up.
Me: WTF? I quit last month and paid off.
Them: Yes, but you re-opened your account.
Me: WTF? How did I do that? I haven't talked to you since then.
Them: We don't know. But there is this charge that you incurred that means you continued to use the service.
Me: How did I incur the charge? That sounds like the same amount I was asking about before?
Them: Must have been local calls or sth. We can't tell you. But it's there. So your bill / account is back also. You owe for the month.
Me: But I threw away the VZW phones, like, three weeks ago!
Them: Sorry. Pay up.
Me: Get your supervisor.
Song and dance, yadda yadda, I ended up giving in, paying off the month again, and cancelling again.
Next month, WHAT DO YOU KNOW, another VZW bill lands in my mailbox for monthly service AS USUAL.
I called again, same song and dance, only this time I also wrote a letter to corporate describing the sequence of events and suggesting that I was ready to take legal action. Then the retention department or someone behaving like a retention department called me and asked if I didn't really want to stay. I was so livid my head nearly exploded. Then, finally, this last person agreed to cancel me and I stayed cancelled...
Until I got a COLLECTIONS LETTER for another VZW monthly amount. At first I refused to pay in case it was going to go this way every month again, but when two or three months had passed and just that one charge seemed to be left, I paid the collections bill and that was the end of it.
But you'll never get me to go back to VZW unless every other telecom has been carpet-bombed. Even then, I might prefer tin cans and strings to VZW.
As I recall, it was already late when I was a CS major in 1991 using GNU Emacs on SunOS.
when Linux was being downloaded as 100 floppy images from shareware boards, the Linux desktop was light years ahead of anything else available outside of a university engineering lab.
I had a 16-bit color desktop running X and Windows and Mac users would go green with envy at the speed, stability and features. Integrated networking that just worked across the entire OS, not relying on clunky shareware applications or hacks that were limited to one or two contexts or online features. Dozens of windows open with no issues and no crashing. Large SCSI-based filesystems that were lighting fast thanks to the memory management model. The ability to interact with the GUI via the command line and vice-versa. Running applications on the root window, watching them refresh behind windows in the foreground. Even regular applications (forget about scientific computing and large-scale data stuff that used to be the UNIX bread and butter) were impressive to people. Emacs. Andrew. Xfig. Wingz. Mosaic.
To show off a Linux desktop in the early '90s was to show people what computers "were really capable of."
There was still some ground to stand on when advocating for Linux until the mid '00s, but things have really become stale in the world of Linux, apart from the kernel as another poster (rightly) points out. Desktop Linux now looks like the geeks at Star Wars conventions—a bunch of people really enthusiastic about a particular moment in (in this case computing) history that nobody else really cares about any longer.
Apple is working on multiple-device cloud services and bringing the app-supplants-web model to every form factor. Microsoft is working on new mobile platforms and the multitouch desktop.
Meanwhile, Linux continues to be embroiled in the devastatingly interesting GNOME vs. KDE and POP email client wars.
1999 called. They want their story back.
My employer paid for precisely this feature when I was traveling in the UK earlier this year.
It did . not . work . at . all . At least in the London, roaming connections got the lowest priority on the network. 30-40 call attempts, fruitless attempts to use data for two days, and finally I went to a local T-Mobile shop, bought a local pay-as-you-go MicroSIM for £10, got an unlimited data plan attached to it for a £5 annual fee (!!!!!) and popped it into my jailbroken iPhone, upon which I proceeded to tether and use Skype for everything on a £15 T-Mobile setup for the next several weeks, while AT&T were getting paid $100/mo. for data features plus some astronomical amount for voice roaming, neither of which worked or were being used.
I haven't had trouble with AT&T here in the US, but their roaming agreements (at least in the UK) are crap. With Canada YMMV, but based on that experience I would never pony up $100/mo. for data roaming.
This summary is the exactly opposite of the article. It is not just poor journalism, it is borderline commercial defamation.
These days Slashdot a) gets stories more slowly than everyone else, b) very, very often completely misrepresents the article being presented and/or presents it with a strong implicit ideological position that immediately marks everything out as a political or economic discussion rather than a technological one, and c) is full of commenters that clearly have no first-hand experience with anything prior to 32-bit Windows and thus understand the "discussion of technology" in a way completely different from the way that I imagine it (it is, on Slashdot these days, the discussion of consumer electronics, commodity economics, and political regulation).
In short, this is disgusting and I'm tired of it. I think my clicks are going to go somewhere else.
being posted from Tennesse, then. Or if we do, I presume I can collect somehow?
let me just say that the entirety of your post illustrates the complete inability that techies and Slashdotters have to see things from the common user's perspective. Indeed, as unembarrassed elitists, they revel in precisely this inability.
Freedom is not some theoretical construct that you never exercise.
Freedom is the ability to do real things that you might like to do without being constrained.
Only for techies does this set of real things include "hacking on the source."
For the other 99% of humanity, the real things include most of the stuff you'll find in an app store that techies call "cruft."
Only for techies is it irrelevant if an app has "slight" compatibility problems with a handset or comes in several versions or lots of options that need to be set for it to work.
For the other 99% of humanity, that complexity is in fact a constraint on freedom—on things they might like to do.
For the other 99% of humanity, an intuitive, polished user interface is the very essence of freedom, since it enables agentive action without constraint. A badly designed user interface is in fact a practical constraint on action.
Only for a techie does the "Android community" encompass a thousand different smartphones.
For the other 99% of humanity, "my community of platform users" (those who can help me with questions, with whom I can share experiences and mutually dialogically engage in troubleshooting) includes only the other people with the same handset and the same carrier. A much smaller community. There are just a handful of versions of the iPhone and they are all AT&T.
Your entire post sees the world, and the question of openness and closedness, through the very particular lens of the values that geeks have, the sorts of things that they might like to do, etc.
Someone earlier asked the ridiculous question of whether or not Windows was more free and open than Linux.
I repeat here:
Sit ten users in front of a Windows box, and the same ten users in front of a Linux box for the following hour.
Then ask them: during which hour did you feel more free in your user of these computers?
They will tell you that they were more free on Windows.
As a typical geek you will, of course, tell them that they are all wrong, and ironically likely try to persuade them (if not to enforce as policy, if you happen to be over an IT department) that they must use Linux—thereby severely curtailing their practical freedom.
Because they don't want to hack on the source. Very, very few people want to. Even fewer actually ever do it.
The over all freedom quotient of "open source" in the larger scheme of the world as a system is much lower than most posters here would believe.
This is why Linux, and the Linux desktop, are in the state they're in.
(And of course techies will respond that they're in a fine state. Because you can see the source.)
not an intention. A door is not "open" when it is shut simply because you intend for it to be open. Shut is shut.
Android's source is open.
Android as a platform is nowhere near it.
Techies care a great deal about the former.
Everybody else only cares about the latter.
But techies have done a good job of convincing everyone else that open source code for Android OS == open platform in the marketplace, in practice.
And the debates rage here on Slashdot as if there was some question about whether Android, in reality, in the marketplace, as a series of devices and carriers, is open. It isn't. It simply isn't.
But of course you can have the source.
Here you go, Grandma!
What's this?
It's the source code to Android! Can you feel the freedom pulsing through your veins?
Um, can I just watch a movie?
No, sorry, can't do that. Just read the source. SOOOO OPEN!
never complain about the fact that "Gosh, you can't even see the iOS source!"
Rather, they talk about "walled gardens" and "locked down platforms" and the need to jailbreak.
And when these things apply to Android as well?
"Ahhh, but the SOURCE is open."
Well, if that's the important bit, talk about what benefits the source of Android offers that isn't available to iOS users by virtue of its closed source. But it comes off as foolish and fanboytastic to bitch and moan about the walled garden of Apple when Android devices have by and large been much the same: closed until you open it.
by posters.
Open is not an idea or an intention. Open is a state. Something is open or something is closed.
On windows:
You can install most any version on most any industry standard hardware.
You can install most any Windows application on the most common Windows versions.
There is no carrier.
There is no "walled garden."
There are more apps than there are for Linux.
Yes, I'd say that for the average computer user, if you sit them down in front of a Windows box for a day or a week or even a year, they will be MORE FREE using Windows than they will Linux (more able to act according to their own choices, exercise common forms of agency, etc.)
The exception is obviously the case of developers or technology enthusiasts. In fact, they are subject to the same limitations; they can't get a version of Photoshop for Linux or iTunes for Linux either, without purchasing third-party software and dealing with instabilities and bugs that come from emulation. But they don't care about using Linux or Windows for many of the everyday computing tasks that the public cares about, they care about DEVELOPING for Linux or Windows or for using them as a PLATFORM for various kinds of industrial or informatic goals.
In that case, it is the source, not the experience, whose openness matters.
So yes, for an average user, Windows is the most open platform.
For a programmer or an activist or a sysadmin, this doesn't matter because Windows is closed source and Linux is open source.
The average user does not care to read the source; they do not care that it is "open." They don't ever plan to go through that particular open door.
By saying that "Android is open," Google and its fanboys imply that you can do a great deal with Android that you can't do with iOS. But what they really mean is that you can do a great deal more with the Android OS codebase than you can with the iOS codebase (which mortals can't even access, because it's closed).
These are two very different things; regular users don't care about what they can do with the Android OS. They care about what they can do with Android as an environment for carrying out everyday tasks. For these purposes, in practice, Android—as a platform that necessarily includes not just the OS but also hardware and a carrier—is every bit as closed as is iOS.
That is exactly my point. It's brilliant marketing.
Android is the marketing triumph of the mobile phone age. It demonstrates very clearly that there is tremendous value in the "open" brand. And that's what it is here, make no mistake. Android devices in practice are as open as Ferrari laptops are made by Ferrari.
Let's look at how open they are:
- Carrier locked, walled garden, locked-down out of the box = Little choice, little freedom
- Must root to be able to use important features
- When you root, you are locked out of other important features
- Fewer apps than iOS = Less choice = less freedom
- Less polished user interface, more fragmentation = less flexibility, smaller userbase, less choice = less freedom
iPhone jailbreak == Android root
After jailbreak == You can use all iTunes, Apple App Store, AND alternate sources
Vastly more apps == Vastly more choice, freedom
Less fragmentation, more polish == More ease of use, larger community, more choice, more freedom
In all practical terms, the iOS ecosystem is less restrictive. Somehow, however, the only thing that matters is the branding—the ideological and theoretical terms of the equation. Here somehow Google has managed to brand Android as "open" (despite the above) and this makes all the difference.
As a result, activist geeks and savvy tech users FLOCK to Android and push it to their families and friends, assuring all that this is important because Android is OPEN, while iOS is CLOSED.
They then immediately go about rooting the Android phone as the first order of business and then explain (rationalize) about how not all apps are compatible, rooted phones won't have access to things like movies, may create problems with carriers, etc., but all of this is justified by their OPENNESS... Unlike those poor iOS users that must "jailbreak" their phones.
It's 1984 style doublespeak. In one case, rooting = "open" = good. In another case, rooting = "jailbraking" = evil. It's the same damned act, with the same damned consequences, only in the case of the jailbreak, you end up with more functionality and more choice in the end.