Fine, I admit it's false. But you had to stretch back 20 years to prove me wrong? This is the best you can do? 20 years is an eternity in tech time. I'll happily agree to reconsider my avoidance of Apple products in 20 years.
To be honest, my own personal purchasing decisions are not a big deal either in the grand scheme of things, so I don't know why you're making such a big issue of it. I have every right to boycott Apple for whatever reasons. Since you asked for my reasons, I gave them. End of story.
The thing is, I'm already doing everything I reasonably can to punish Monsanto as a consumer. Your logic is somehow based on the preposterous assumption that boycotting Apple somehow means that I'm not doing enough to avoid Monsanto. That presumption is plainly, laughably, false.
I disagree with your assessment that Apple's claims have more merit. I admit that such an assessment is subjective, and I am not asking you to agree with me. I would like the same amount of respect from you. I am not asking you to avoid Apple products. But likewise surely you cannot force me to buy Apple products against my will.
If you'll read the rest of this thread, your points have already been discussed at length. All companies abuse patents. The system is broken. We should try to fix the system. However, that said, some companies abuse the system more severely than others. Motorola never managed to obtain a pre-trial sales ban like Apple did.
You are correct that there is literally no way to avoid buying from all abusive companies. But it is possible to avoid buying from the most egregiously abusive one or two companies. That's what I'm doing.
I'd be very happy to be wrong. Please recommend some specific examples of 11"-12" ultrabooks that I should consider. The one model that you mention, the Asus Zenbook, is quite a bit heavier and slower than the Macbook Air. The newly released Asus Zenbook Prime is indeed very nice but it's not available for sale yet as far as I know.
Monsanto is indeed a bad actor and I do try very hard to avoid buying Monsanto products, just like I try to avoid buying Apple products. I don't always succeed, because Monsanto designs their genes to aggressively contaminate nearby farmfields and then sues the neighboring farmers for patent infringement. Nevertheless, I do try. The fact that I do not succeed perfectly is, I think, irrelevant.
Your argument as far as I can tell is something along the lines of "You can't avoid Monsanto haha so why bother even trying to avoid Apple." This argument is so ridiculous that I don't even know how to begin addressing it.
I have not moved the goal posts. I avoid companies that egregiously abuse the legal system. It is indeed impossible to avoid every company that abuses the legal system, but I certainly try to avoid the most egregious abusers. Apple and Monsanto are both in the category of egregious abusers. I notice that not a single one of your counter-arguments involves any factual rebuttal of any of my claims. Do you actually have any legitimate counterpoints or are you just going around accusing me of false bias while ignoring your own obvious bias?
So, you're okay with Apple suing for the profits, but not for a sales ban. Gotcha.
(You STILL don't make sense)
I am not OK with Apple suing for damages either, because I feel the US patent system is broken. However, every other company in the world also uses the patent system to sue for damages, so I can't blame Apple in particular if they were to do that.
Sales bans, however, are uniquely destructive. They destroy free-market competition and free-market choice in a way that monetary damages do not. I do not support such legal actions and I certainly won't pay anyone to act in this way. Are you somehow suggesting that I am not within my rights to boycott Apple?
I'm not asking you to boycott Apple. I'm not biased against Apple. I've said nothing but good things about Apple products. But I certainly am within my rights to make my own purchasing decisions about my own money, for whatever reasons. I have given numerous very legitimate reasons for not purchasing Apple products and not a single one has been factually rebutted.
I can put together an Intel 14" ultrabook for $900 with twice the RAM and nearly identical size, weight, speed, warranty, SSD, as a macbook air that sells for $1200.
14" is too big. I want 11" or 12". Portability is a huge consideration. Can you do the same in the 11" size range? Also, how's the battery life and thermal profile? Bonus points if you can include dedicated page-up and page-down keys (which the Air does not have).
I will not financially support a company that attempts to destroy competing products through the legal system
Your shopping must be pretty limited.
Name a single other company that has obtained a pre-trial sales ban on a phone.
when Apple says Samsung may not sell this phone, I have a huge problem with that.
The courts said that.
But thanks for showing your blatant biases.
The fact that the legal system permits such abuse, does not mean such abuse is legitimate. There are dozens of other companies that do not abuse the legal system in the way that Apple does.
Actually, I understated the case. Every other company except Apple does not abuse the legal system to the extent that Apple does.
So, by your own words, you think Apple has the best computer. But you won't buy one.
I really can't fathom why.
I have a Galaxy Nexus phone. Apple has sued (successfully) to prevent this phone from being sold in the US. I will not financially support a company that attempts to destroy competing products through the legal system. It's true that the patent system in the US is broken and that lots of other companies abuse patents, but Apple takes abuse of the patent system to a whole new level of evil. No other tech company has gone as far as trying (much less succeeding) to outright ban the sale of competing products. Even Oracle in all their evilness did not order Google to stop making Android; they simply said "pay us 6 billion dollars".
Basically, competition is good. Choice is good. I have no problem with anyone choosing Apple products. But when Apple says Samsung may not sell this phone, I have a huge problem with that. If Apple feels that their patents are being violated, the correct remedy is monetary compensation, not a sales ban.
The results are hardly surprising. Ultrabooks cost more and weigh more than a Macbook Air. They're noisier, hotter, less durable, and don't look as good. If PC makers want to compete with Apple then they need to do so with a product that improves on the Air in some way. All they can offer is faster performance, which is NOT what this market segment is looking for. I want a good ultrabook very badly. I own no Apple computers and have no plans to get one, but neither am I eager to buy a PC which is so markedly inferior to what Apple offers.
The point, which you missed completely, is that the Android SDK works perfectly fine on even quite old versions of Fedora. There is no law of nature that says development kits must require an updated operating system. We have the choice to use iOS alternatives such as Android (at least until Apple sues Android out of existence). If those alternatives are better in some way, then that's a pretty valid reason to use them in my book. It's perfectly reasonable to prefer Android on the basis that the Android SDK runs on multiple versions of three different host environments (Windows, OS X, Linux), unlike iOS.
The phones will still be available from Google Play, for much longer than just a few hours. This lawsuit is between Apple and Samsung. The injuction against selling Galaxy Nexus phones in the US applies to Samsung only. Google is not a party to this lawsuit. The judge in this lawsuit is not capable of ordering Google to do anything, since Apple has not sued Google. Bottom line is, Google (or any other third party, e.g. Verizon) can continue to sell Galaxy Nexus phones for as long as they have the phones to sell. Obviously, once they run out of stock, they will no longer be able to buy new stock from Samsung.
Making the feature optional is enough for me. I don't know how to make that any clearer. Nevertheless, I still have concerns. There's no perfect solution. I'm not going to hide my concerns.
I beg to differ. You've got a lot of balls to come in and accuse me of prejudgment when you're the one who's prejudging me. In fact I've been accused (not by you obviously) of being too trusting of Microsoft on this very issue. See this thread. Anticipating the possibility of future problems absolutely does not involve prejudgment of any kind. There's absolutely nothing wrong with thinking through the possible scenarios. It's a lot worse to be blindsided by the unexpected at the last minute.
Rage? What part of my comment did you interpret as rage? I said very clearly that this was a concern. Concern is a standard English word with a meaning that describes my feelings perfectly. It is far, far short of rage.
So how exactly would that harm your system if it were something anyone could turn off with a simple trip to the bios?
My main concern is that, although the spec does indeed require that the manufacturer must allow the user to turn off secure boot, Microsoft might not enforce this requirement very aggressively. There are tons of examples of buggy BIOSes and ACPI implementations which claim to be compliant with the ACPI spec but fail badly on Linux because of various severe bugs, all while somehow managing to pass Windows certification (because the Windows certification tests don't actually test alternative OSes).
Microsoft has no financial incentive to make sure that manufactuers adhere to the portion of the specification requiring that users be allowed to turn off secure boot. They could easily arrange for their test suites to refrain from rigorously checking whether or not the BIOS switch works.
Sorry, Dropbox and Owncloud do not solve the problem of airplanes. I spend a lot of time on airplanes. With very few exceptions, airplanes have no wifi, and they certainly have no 3G. Even when wifi exists on a flight, it is unacceptably slow. I want to access my files on a mobile device during a flight. This is hideously difficult on an (unjailbroken) iPad. Downloading and saving files onto the device one file at a time does not scale to my needs.
The real story is going to be how something with (apparently) severe weaknesses became anyone's pet new crypto standard.
Oh my god, uninformed summary is uninformed. Please don't make it any worse with your (even more) uninformed comments.
I'm a cryptography researcher specializing in pairing-based cryptography. I know this subject well. Here's the real deal. Pairing-based cryptography is just as (in)secure as RSA. Nobody goes around thinking that 923-bit RSA keys are secure. RSA is very widely used. (The current world record for an RSA break is 768 bits, but 1024 bit keys have been disrecommended for a LONG time, and there are teams working on breaking 1024-bit RSA right now that expect to succeed within a few years.) Nobody really expected 923-bit pairing keys to be secure. Those keys are too short. It's nice that these researchers did this, and it's nice that we know exactly how hard it is to break a 923-bit key, but the only take-away lesson here is that short keys are insecure. It does not mean that pairing-based cryptography has "severe weaknesses" or that the whole concept of pairing-based cryptography is somehow insecure.
I repeat: the key broken in this study was short. The study's conclusions are not very surprising or indicative of any weakness in the underlying protocol.
Another gross misrepresentation in your comment is the insinuation that pairing-based cryptography is somehow anyone's "pet new crypto standard." The number of international standards documents dealing with pairings is exactly zero.
Your snarky reply, while cute, is not particularly accurate, and does not really contribute to the discussion.
Since you didn't bother to provide any details, I have to guess what you mean by your three words. Anyone who's taken a compilers class knows that the word "compile" is a very general term; it would be no exaggeration to say that almost anything a computer does consists of compiling something in some form. Assuming you mean the iPad can't compile, say, C code (and that this is presumably a showstopper or at least a significant drawback), it's certainly true that if compiling code is one of your main requirements while traveling then an iPad will serve you poorly. But given the incredibly limited capabilities of any sort of rig along the lines of what the asker is proposing, I have a hard time believing that the ability to compile code is a major requirement for the person who was asking this question. It's not like a Raspberry Pi (or even an Eee PC) will be a beast at compiling.
If you have to, an iPad can be used for compiling C code, either indirectly (by sshing to a remote server), or directly by jailbreaking. So your use of the word "can't" is wrong. It would be much more accurate to say that compiling code on an iPad is difficult and that if this is one of your main requirements then you need to say so up front in order to receive useful advice in return. Certainly the vast majority of travelers don't have any sort of requirement to compile code on the go.
I have one of those Eee PC 1001PX's, and it's not bad, but let's be real. It doesn't get 9 hours of battery life. I get 3 hours on a bad day and 4 on a good day. This is on Windows 7; it's actually a bit better on Linux, but not by much. If you want battery life (and you should, when traveling), get an iPad with external keyboard. I don't like what Apple does as a company, but I have to admit that from a technical standpoint their product wins.
Yes, you hit the nail on the head. Facebook's privacy controls are so crude that they force users to overshare. Google+ gets fine-grained sharing exactly right. Any analyst using quantity-based metrics (all of them) are going to overestimate Facebook and underestimate Google+.
Also, Google Maps is curiously missing from your list. Maps was developed almost entirely in-house and dominates its market.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine, I admit it's false. But you had to stretch back 20 years to prove me wrong? This is the best you can do? 20 years is an eternity in tech time. I'll happily agree to reconsider my avoidance of Apple products in 20 years.
The UX21A is a strong contender. But is it available for sale yet? I can't find it actually for sale anywhere.
To be honest, my own personal purchasing decisions are not a big deal either in the grand scheme of things, so I don't know why you're making such a big issue of it. I have every right to boycott Apple for whatever reasons. Since you asked for my reasons, I gave them. End of story.
The thing is, I'm already doing everything I reasonably can to punish Monsanto as a consumer. Your logic is somehow based on the preposterous assumption that boycotting Apple somehow means that I'm not doing enough to avoid Monsanto. That presumption is plainly, laughably, false.
I disagree with your assessment that Apple's claims have more merit. I admit that such an assessment is subjective, and I am not asking you to agree with me. I would like the same amount of respect from you. I am not asking you to avoid Apple products. But likewise surely you cannot force me to buy Apple products against my will.
You are correct that there is literally no way to avoid buying from all abusive companies. But it is possible to avoid buying from the most egregiously abusive one or two companies. That's what I'm doing.
I'd be very happy to be wrong. Please recommend some specific examples of 11"-12" ultrabooks that I should consider. The one model that you mention, the Asus Zenbook, is quite a bit heavier and slower than the Macbook Air. The newly released Asus Zenbook Prime is indeed very nice but it's not available for sale yet as far as I know.
Your argument as far as I can tell is something along the lines of "You can't avoid Monsanto haha so why bother even trying to avoid Apple." This argument is so ridiculous that I don't even know how to begin addressing it.
I have not moved the goal posts. I avoid companies that egregiously abuse the legal system. It is indeed impossible to avoid every company that abuses the legal system, but I certainly try to avoid the most egregious abusers. Apple and Monsanto are both in the category of egregious abusers. I notice that not a single one of your counter-arguments involves any factual rebuttal of any of my claims. Do you actually have any legitimate counterpoints or are you just going around accusing me of false bias while ignoring your own obvious bias?
So, you're okay with Apple suing for the profits, but not for a sales ban. Gotcha.
(You STILL don't make sense)
I am not OK with Apple suing for damages either, because I feel the US patent system is broken. However, every other company in the world also uses the patent system to sue for damages, so I can't blame Apple in particular if they were to do that.
Sales bans, however, are uniquely destructive. They destroy free-market competition and free-market choice in a way that monetary damages do not. I do not support such legal actions and I certainly won't pay anyone to act in this way. Are you somehow suggesting that I am not within my rights to boycott Apple?
I'm not asking you to boycott Apple. I'm not biased against Apple. I've said nothing but good things about Apple products. But I certainly am within my rights to make my own purchasing decisions about my own money, for whatever reasons. I have given numerous very legitimate reasons for not purchasing Apple products and not a single one has been factually rebutted.
I can put together an Intel 14" ultrabook for $900 with twice the RAM and nearly identical size, weight, speed, warranty, SSD, as a macbook air that sells for $1200.
14" is too big. I want 11" or 12". Portability is a huge consideration. Can you do the same in the 11" size range? Also, how's the battery life and thermal profile? Bonus points if you can include dedicated page-up and page-down keys (which the Air does not have).
I will not financially support a company that attempts to destroy competing products through the legal system
Your shopping must be pretty limited.
Name a single other company that has obtained a pre-trial sales ban on a phone.
when Apple says Samsung may not sell this phone, I have a huge problem with that.
The courts said that.
But thanks for showing your blatant biases.
The fact that the legal system permits such abuse, does not mean such abuse is legitimate. There are dozens of other companies that do not abuse the legal system in the way that Apple does.
Actually, I understated the case. Every other company except Apple does not abuse the legal system to the extent that Apple does.
Oh, I definitely want one, but there are non-technical reasons why I will not purchase Apple products (see my reply elsewhere in this thread).
So, by your own words, you think Apple has the best computer. But you won't buy one. I really can't fathom why.
I have a Galaxy Nexus phone. Apple has sued (successfully) to prevent this phone from being sold in the US. I will not financially support a company that attempts to destroy competing products through the legal system. It's true that the patent system in the US is broken and that lots of other companies abuse patents, but Apple takes abuse of the patent system to a whole new level of evil. No other tech company has gone as far as trying (much less succeeding) to outright ban the sale of competing products. Even Oracle in all their evilness did not order Google to stop making Android; they simply said "pay us 6 billion dollars".
Basically, competition is good. Choice is good. I have no problem with anyone choosing Apple products. But when Apple says Samsung may not sell this phone, I have a huge problem with that. If Apple feels that their patents are being violated, the correct remedy is monetary compensation, not a sales ban.
The results are hardly surprising. Ultrabooks cost more and weigh more than a Macbook Air. They're noisier, hotter, less durable, and don't look as good. If PC makers want to compete with Apple then they need to do so with a product that improves on the Air in some way. All they can offer is faster performance, which is NOT what this market segment is looking for. I want a good ultrabook very badly. I own no Apple computers and have no plans to get one, but neither am I eager to buy a PC which is so markedly inferior to what Apple offers.
The point, which you missed completely, is that the Android SDK works perfectly fine on even quite old versions of Fedora. There is no law of nature that says development kits must require an updated operating system. We have the choice to use iOS alternatives such as Android (at least until Apple sues Android out of existence). If those alternatives are better in some way, then that's a pretty valid reason to use them in my book. It's perfectly reasonable to prefer Android on the basis that the Android SDK runs on multiple versions of three different host environments (Windows, OS X, Linux), unlike iOS.
The phones will still be available from Google Play, for much longer than just a few hours. This lawsuit is between Apple and Samsung. The injuction against selling Galaxy Nexus phones in the US applies to Samsung only. Google is not a party to this lawsuit. The judge in this lawsuit is not capable of ordering Google to do anything, since Apple has not sued Google. Bottom line is, Google (or any other third party, e.g. Verizon) can continue to sell Galaxy Nexus phones for as long as they have the phones to sell. Obviously, once they run out of stock, they will no longer be able to buy new stock from Samsung.
Making the feature optional is enough for me. I don't know how to make that any clearer. Nevertheless, I still have concerns. There's no perfect solution. I'm not going to hide my concerns.
I beg to differ. You've got a lot of balls to come in and accuse me of prejudgment when you're the one who's prejudging me. In fact I've been accused (not by you obviously) of being too trusting of Microsoft on this very issue. See this thread. Anticipating the possibility of future problems absolutely does not involve prejudgment of any kind. There's absolutely nothing wrong with thinking through the possible scenarios. It's a lot worse to be blindsided by the unexpected at the last minute.
Rage? What part of my comment did you interpret as rage? I said very clearly that this was a concern. Concern is a standard English word with a meaning that describes my feelings perfectly. It is far, far short of rage.
So how exactly would that harm your system if it were something anyone could turn off with a simple trip to the bios?
My main concern is that, although the spec does indeed require that the manufacturer must allow the user to turn off secure boot, Microsoft might not enforce this requirement very aggressively. There are tons of examples of buggy BIOSes and ACPI implementations which claim to be compliant with the ACPI spec but fail badly on Linux because of various severe bugs, all while somehow managing to pass Windows certification (because the Windows certification tests don't actually test alternative OSes).
Microsoft has no financial incentive to make sure that manufactuers adhere to the portion of the specification requiring that users be allowed to turn off secure boot. They could easily arrange for their test suites to refrain from rigorously checking whether or not the BIOS switch works.
Sorry, Dropbox and Owncloud do not solve the problem of airplanes. I spend a lot of time on airplanes. With very few exceptions, airplanes have no wifi, and they certainly have no 3G. Even when wifi exists on a flight, it is unacceptably slow. I want to access my files on a mobile device during a flight. This is hideously difficult on an (unjailbroken) iPad. Downloading and saving files onto the device one file at a time does not scale to my needs.
The real story is going to be how something with (apparently) severe weaknesses became anyone's pet new crypto standard.
Oh my god, uninformed summary is uninformed. Please don't make it any worse with your (even more) uninformed comments.
I'm a cryptography researcher specializing in pairing-based cryptography. I know this subject well. Here's the real deal. Pairing-based cryptography is just as (in)secure as RSA. Nobody goes around thinking that 923-bit RSA keys are secure. RSA is very widely used. (The current world record for an RSA break is 768 bits, but 1024 bit keys have been disrecommended for a LONG time, and there are teams working on breaking 1024-bit RSA right now that expect to succeed within a few years.) Nobody really expected 923-bit pairing keys to be secure. Those keys are too short. It's nice that these researchers did this, and it's nice that we know exactly how hard it is to break a 923-bit key, but the only take-away lesson here is that short keys are insecure. It does not mean that pairing-based cryptography has "severe weaknesses" or that the whole concept of pairing-based cryptography is somehow insecure.
I repeat: the key broken in this study was short. The study's conclusions are not very surprising or indicative of any weakness in the underlying protocol.
Another gross misrepresentation in your comment is the insinuation that pairing-based cryptography is somehow anyone's "pet new crypto standard." The number of international standards documents dealing with pairings is exactly zero.
Since you didn't bother to provide any details, I have to guess what you mean by your three words. Anyone who's taken a compilers class knows that the word "compile" is a very general term; it would be no exaggeration to say that almost anything a computer does consists of compiling something in some form. Assuming you mean the iPad can't compile, say, C code (and that this is presumably a showstopper or at least a significant drawback), it's certainly true that if compiling code is one of your main requirements while traveling then an iPad will serve you poorly. But given the incredibly limited capabilities of any sort of rig along the lines of what the asker is proposing, I have a hard time believing that the ability to compile code is a major requirement for the person who was asking this question. It's not like a Raspberry Pi (or even an Eee PC) will be a beast at compiling.
If you have to, an iPad can be used for compiling C code, either indirectly (by sshing to a remote server), or directly by jailbreaking. So your use of the word "can't" is wrong. It would be much more accurate to say that compiling code on an iPad is difficult and that if this is one of your main requirements then you need to say so up front in order to receive useful advice in return. Certainly the vast majority of travelers don't have any sort of requirement to compile code on the go.
I have one of those Eee PC 1001PX's, and it's not bad, but let's be real. It doesn't get 9 hours of battery life. I get 3 hours on a bad day and 4 on a good day. This is on Windows 7; it's actually a bit better on Linux, but not by much. If you want battery life (and you should, when traveling), get an iPad with external keyboard. I don't like what Apple does as a company, but I have to admit that from a technical standpoint their product wins.
Also, Google Maps is curiously missing from your list. Maps was developed almost entirely in-house and dominates its market.