DrXym is complaining that iTunes can't do it when it trivially could, not that it isn't possible. To which danaris claims that there is no reason to want to do that anyway.
No, not at all. I certainly see reason to want to do that. Thing is, most non-geek users don't see those reasons. By and large, it never even occurs to them to think of the iPad as something that could carry arbitrary files around on.
This whole concept of "it doesn't matter what you want because you know what you're doing" is complete crap.
I totally agree. Good thing that's not what I said.
It doesn't matter what you want—or what I want, or what CmdrTaco wants—because we are a tiny minority. Sure, everyone knows a geek, but knowing a geek and seeing what he does with his geeky toys doesn't usually make non-geeks rush out to buy said geeky toys. That's why they remain geeky toys, and not mainstream devices.
Your point has a certain amount of logic behind it; however, if it actually held up under real-world conditions, do you really think you'd be seeing quite so many people buying the things they buy, and then doing with them the things they do?
The old, non-touch iPods do, indeed, mount as hard drives when connected (at least, if the "use as disk" checkbox is checked, or whatever the wording is these days). No iOS device does this.
I should hope that people would like a tablet that DOESN'T connect to iTunes. That NOT having to continuously run iTunes software (or helpers) is actually a selling point. It's kind of ironic that people buy svelte wafers to play music / vids and then are forced to sync them with a piece of bloatware. Not only that, but said bloatware deliberately obstructs users and limits what files they're allowed to copy to their own device.
See, what you don't get is, non-geeks don't care.
They don't care that they can't copy arbitrary files to iDevices. What would they do with a zip file or a copy of their Civ 5 saved game on it, anyway? If they want something like a PDF file, there are a number of apps that will display those, and let them copy them over by selecting them in iTunes. I agree the interface is a little clunky, but it doesn't prevent you from copying to an iDevice any file that you can actually use on it.
Furthermore, they don't care that they have to sync it in the first place. Geeks love to bitch about iTunes, but pretty much every non-geek I've talked to that has used it has had no troubles with it.
I certainly don't disagree that iTunes has become more bloated than it perhaps should be, and that Apple should think about breaking the iDevice syncing capabilities out into another application (maybe iSync?;-) ), but that's the kind of thing that generally only bugs geeks. Most people aren't geeks.
Oh, I know that it's the music for me. I used to work in a cube farm, where I could easily hear people chatting on the other side of the room, with or without my music. Now I have my own office, and 99% of the time the only noise is the gentle hum of the HVAC. In both places, my mind operates better (or seems to) when I have music going.
Except, interestingly, in certain situations where I need to think through something that's tying my brain in knots. Not sure what the difference is there.
Really, do these highly paid management guys know anything about how the world works?
Not from what I've seen...
The primary qualification for high management isn't a deep understanding of human nature, after all: it's being buddies with the right rich people, or just being rich enough yourself. Just because someone is a good schmoozer or was able to make a bundle off something doesn't mean they understand how people's minds work. (And that's ignoring the ones who were just born to wealth...).
Between my wife's job and mine (or rather, my former one; my new one is much more pleasant), I've seen far, far too many examples of people in positions of power in companies whose primary skills are nothing more than (to give it a polite name) networking. They know how to make friends and have a good time with other rich people, but their actual business sense, understanding of the people they have charge over, and even understanding of the kind of work those people have to do, is practically nonexistent.
Except that if the driver is reading the paper or watching TV instead of paying attention to the car, they are less likely to notice their level of gas.
You don't think it would be possible to, say, make alerts of this nature more intrusive? Like loud beeps if the level of gas is getting too low?
It's really not hard to get the attention of someone who isn't deliberately ignoring everything that they don't want to deal with. And that kind of person...well, there's not an awful lot you can do about them in any situation.
The developer will suggest a price and then if Amazon chooses to go with it they get only 20% of the proceeds allowing Amazon to keep 80% of the money. Whereas if Amazon chooses a different price then the developer gets to keep 70% and Amazon keeps 30%.
Good grief. That's not what's happening. From the fine summary (emphasis added for the reading-impaired):
Developers will get to take home the standard 70% of the app's retail price (what the app sells for) or 20% of the MSRP (what the developer thinks it should sell for), whichever is greater.
So if you set the MSRP for your app at $100, then unless Amazon rejects it entirely, they will pay you at least $20 for every sale.
If they end up selling it for that $100, then they will pay you $70 for every sale.
Hope your Droid's contract doesn't run out for another year and a half or so—or you live in one of the few big cities where LTE is being rolled out early—because otherwise, you're not going to find much out there. Or rather, you'll be able to get a bleeding-edge phone that supports LTE, but your service will still be entirely 2g/3g.
But if you are more afraid of the government than of private corporations, you've not been getting the news for the past 20 years, have you?
Yes, but if you think that between 1/4 and 1/3 of Americans don't fall into that category, you've not been getting the news for the past 10 or 11.
More or less the entire platform of the Republican party these days is convincing the American people that companies will do everything for them better than the government (except for protecting them from the dirty gays, of course). And, moreover, that anything the government tries to do is inherently wrong by first principle, because government services are socialism.
Of course, it's just like a Gilded Age America, today!
You realize, of course, that America, today, is in a state of more unbalanced wealth distribution than the Gilded Age robber barons could even have dreamt of?
Well, yeah, they exist. But where I am, it's almost impossible to find a movie available in both versions. Either you get only the 3D version, and there's no option to watch it in 2D, or they've only gotten the 2D version at the theatre (I'd be surprised if my local theatre has more than 2-3 out of its 10 or so screens that support 3D).
That makes it really hard to vote with my dollars, even when I'd much rather watch the 2D version of a movie that wasn't originally shot in 3D.
it is simply logically impossible to have a peace prize WITHOUT making a political statement, action, reason, or opinion
Absolutely, can't argue with that.
However, it is completely possible to have a peace prize given without the primary reason being to make a political statement.
If you give the Nobel Peace Prize to some hypothetical unsung hero who (say) helped organize the tribes of Darfur into a force for peace, rather than conflict, and refused any greater leadership role, that would certainly make a political statement, but it would clearly be given for the reason that he brought peace. Not given for the political statement it makes.
I've been saying for 15+ years that the way to stop spam is to make the fines if caught so high that no matter how much the spamming earns you, the fine will bancrupt you.
No. The way to stop spam (or most other crime) is to make the expected cost of being caught times the risk of being caught much higher than the value of the expected return. A billion dollar fine times one chance in 100 million of being caught doesn't do it.
Once you've made the fine high enough that it bankrupts the spammer, I don't see how making it higher makes any difference.
I am widely considered very intelligent by those I regularly interact with. I have not come across, in my region, anyone more generally competent with computers (including diagnosis and repair of common problems) than I am. I am quite sure that someone with my computer skills would have had little trouble setting up their own business here right out of high school and prospering.
But I would have found it very hard to do so, because my brain just isn't wired that way. I'm generally pretty risk-averse, and would have been stressed out pretty badly if I were depending on irregular customers for my livelihood.
Personality matters in these things. Not only would I have worried about it all the time, but I'm terrible at sales, and I hate talking to people I don't know on the phone. You really need to be an extrovert to be able to start your own business successfully.
doesn't matter if you're the only one who knows the code, its still a zero day vuln until its patched.
No, it's just a known vulnerability with no patch. Zero day means it was exploited on day zero—that is, before anyone else knew the vulnerability existed.
Correct me if I'm totally off base here, but...isn't part of the definition of "zero-day" that the flaw is being exploited? I mean, it's "zero-day" because it's being exploited on "day zero", right?
I know must techies could probably replicate this effect using a combination of animated gifs that change on rollover and javascript but that is so far outside the ability of most graphic designers. Using Flash have them the ability to knock something up using flash as part of the CS suite and control exactly what it looked like with no technical input required. Whether this is a good idea is not the point (As a techie I do not think it is
At least to a certain degree, it ought to be perfectly possible to allow GUI creation of CSS/JS animated menus that also produces valid code. True, it almost certainly couldn't have the level of flexibility that Flash offers for that task, but I'm sure that if Adobe put their collective minds to it, they could make it work pretty well.
Trouble is, they're too worried about Flash as a particular technology to realize that they could probably make just as much money making a tool that would create HTML5/CSS/JS videos, animations, games, etc. (or nearly so). And they'd run on any modern browser, including all the mobile ones.
Do you think you can point to a single piece of creative-anything made in the past 5 years that doesn't have an element of some kind of Adobe product in it? It's universal at this point.
That's hardly an indication that everybody loves them. It just means that since they bought Macromedia, they're the only game in town.
It's like arguing that because everybody uses Microsoft products, Microsoft must have the very best available.
Now, since you brought up the subject of whores, video was used by Jobs as a red herring to get people to focus on video, so he can whore h264, which he owns some patents in.
...but makes no money on.
Seriously, do people still think that Apple pushing HTML5 video over flash has anything to do with patent royalties? Especially after the MPEG-LA has pledged, in writing, to never collect said royalties??
The tone of so much of what I've been seeing about this announcement is remarkably negative, and I don't really see that being justified.
Remember, right now, there's no net neutrality legislation. And until today, so far as I know, none of the major players in the ISP field has shown even the slightest inkling of support for any such legislation.
So now Verizon—bloody Verizon—comes out with a proposal that's actually a strong endorsement of real, enforceable net neutrality legislation that would make a huge difference, and Slashdot, Ars Technica, Public Knowledge, and God knows who else comes down on it like a ton of bricks because it doesn't completely lock out all possibility of the ISPs ever doing anything shady.
Good grief, people, get some perspective. This is a hugely good thing. If legislation like they propose could actually pass, it would be a remarkable step toward full net neutrality. It wouldn't be complete, no, and it would leave wireless pretty much the way it is today—but even there, they want a group (the GAO, I think) to watch the situation carefully and make a yearly report on whether the current laws are protecting consumers enough. That's a hell of a lot more than we get now!
So for Cthulhu's sake, look on the bright side for a change, Slashdot!
No, this is the type of topic that tends to get the hairs up on the backs of the more sarcastic among us. Probably everyone is trying for "Funny" mods by attempting to over-exemplify the behavior and attitudes being talked about in the article, but offending people who a) have mod points and b) happen to actually be on the side the poster is attacking in their attempted joke.
Seems to me that would prove the point just as handily, only against the modders rather than the commenters.
Slashdot Mirror
DrXym is complaining that iTunes can't do it when it trivially could, not that it isn't possible. To which danaris claims that there is no reason to want to do that anyway.
No, not at all. I certainly see reason to want to do that. Thing is, most non-geek users don't see those reasons. By and large, it never even occurs to them to think of the iPad as something that could carry arbitrary files around on.
They don't think of the iPad as a computer.
Dan Aris
This whole concept of "it doesn't matter what you want because you know what you're doing" is complete crap.
I totally agree. Good thing that's not what I said.
It doesn't matter what you want—or what I want, or what CmdrTaco wants—because we are a tiny minority. Sure, everyone knows a geek, but knowing a geek and seeing what he does with his geeky toys doesn't usually make non-geeks rush out to buy said geeky toys. That's why they remain geeky toys, and not mainstream devices.
Your point has a certain amount of logic behind it; however, if it actually held up under real-world conditions, do you really think you'd be seeing quite so many people buying the things they buy, and then doing with them the things they do?
Dan Aris
What kind of iPod do you have?
The old, non-touch iPods do, indeed, mount as hard drives when connected (at least, if the "use as disk" checkbox is checked, or whatever the wording is these days). No iOS device does this.
Dan Aris
I should hope that people would like a tablet that DOESN'T connect to iTunes. That NOT having to continuously run iTunes software (or helpers) is actually a selling point. It's kind of ironic that people buy svelte wafers to play music / vids and then are forced to sync them with a piece of bloatware. Not only that, but said bloatware deliberately obstructs users and limits what files they're allowed to copy to their own device.
See, what you don't get is, non-geeks don't care.
They don't care that they can't copy arbitrary files to iDevices. What would they do with a zip file or a copy of their Civ 5 saved game on it, anyway? If they want something like a PDF file, there are a number of apps that will display those, and let them copy them over by selecting them in iTunes. I agree the interface is a little clunky, but it doesn't prevent you from copying to an iDevice any file that you can actually use on it.
Furthermore, they don't care that they have to sync it in the first place. Geeks love to bitch about iTunes, but pretty much every non-geek I've talked to that has used it has had no troubles with it.
I certainly don't disagree that iTunes has become more bloated than it perhaps should be, and that Apple should think about breaking the iDevice syncing capabilities out into another application (maybe iSync? ;-) ), but that's the kind of thing that generally only bugs geeks. Most people aren't geeks.
Dan Aris
Have you read Pullman's His Dark Materials? (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) I think you'd quite like its subject matter ;-)
Dan Aris
Oh, I know that it's the music for me. I used to work in a cube farm, where I could easily hear people chatting on the other side of the room, with or without my music. Now I have my own office, and 99% of the time the only noise is the gentle hum of the HVAC. In both places, my mind operates better (or seems to) when I have music going.
Except, interestingly, in certain situations where I need to think through something that's tying my brain in knots. Not sure what the difference is there.
Dan Aris
Really, do these highly paid management guys know anything about how the world works?
Not from what I've seen...
The primary qualification for high management isn't a deep understanding of human nature, after all: it's being buddies with the right rich people, or just being rich enough yourself. Just because someone is a good schmoozer or was able to make a bundle off something doesn't mean they understand how people's minds work. (And that's ignoring the ones who were just born to wealth...).
Between my wife's job and mine (or rather, my former one; my new one is much more pleasant), I've seen far, far too many examples of people in positions of power in companies whose primary skills are nothing more than (to give it a polite name) networking. They know how to make friends and have a good time with other rich people, but their actual business sense, understanding of the people they have charge over, and even understanding of the kind of work those people have to do, is practically nonexistent.
Dan Aris
You don't make teachers teach about abortion, so why make them teach other difficult subjects?
How about, "because abortion isn't a fundamental part of any reasonable biology curriculum."
Seriously, you can't see the difference here?
Dan Aris
Except that if the driver is reading the paper or watching TV instead of paying attention to the car, they are less likely to notice their level of gas.
You don't think it would be possible to, say, make alerts of this nature more intrusive? Like loud beeps if the level of gas is getting too low?
It's really not hard to get the attention of someone who isn't deliberately ignoring everything that they don't want to deal with. And that kind of person...well, there's not an awful lot you can do about them in any situation.
Dan Aris
The developer will suggest a price and then if Amazon chooses to go with it they get only 20% of the proceeds allowing Amazon to keep 80% of the money. Whereas if Amazon chooses a different price then the developer gets to keep 70% and Amazon keeps 30%.
Good grief. That's not what's happening. From the fine summary (emphasis added for the reading-impaired):
Developers will get to take home the standard 70% of the app's retail price (what the app sells for) or 20% of the MSRP (what the developer thinks it should sell for), whichever is greater .
So if you set the MSRP for your app at $100, then unless Amazon rejects it entirely, they will pay you at least $20 for every sale.
If they end up selling it for that $100, then they will pay you $70 for every sale.
Dan Aris
Hope your Droid's contract doesn't run out for another year and a half or so—or you live in one of the few big cities where LTE is being rolled out early—because otherwise, you're not going to find much out there. Or rather, you'll be able to get a bleeding-edge phone that supports LTE, but your service will still be entirely 2g/3g.
Dan Aris
But if you are more afraid of the government than of private corporations, you've not been getting the news for the past 20 years, have you?
Yes, but if you think that between 1/4 and 1/3 of Americans don't fall into that category, you've not been getting the news for the past 10 or 11.
More or less the entire platform of the Republican party these days is convincing the American people that companies will do everything for them better than the government (except for protecting them from the dirty gays, of course). And, moreover, that anything the government tries to do is inherently wrong by first principle, because government services are socialism.
Dan Aris
Of course, it's just like a Gilded Age America, today!
You realize, of course, that America, today, is in a state of more unbalanced wealth distribution than the Gilded Age robber barons could even have dreamt of?
Dan Aris
You'll notice there are 2D versions of 3D movies
Well, yeah, they exist. But where I am, it's almost impossible to find a movie available in both versions. Either you get only the 3D version, and there's no option to watch it in 2D, or they've only gotten the 2D version at the theatre (I'd be surprised if my local theatre has more than 2-3 out of its 10 or so screens that support 3D).
That makes it really hard to vote with my dollars, even when I'd much rather watch the 2D version of a movie that wasn't originally shot in 3D.
Dan Aris
it is simply logically impossible to have a peace prize WITHOUT making a political statement, action, reason, or opinion
Absolutely, can't argue with that.
However, it is completely possible to have a peace prize given without the primary reason being to make a political statement.
If you give the Nobel Peace Prize to some hypothetical unsung hero who (say) helped organize the tribes of Darfur into a force for peace, rather than conflict, and refused any greater leadership role, that would certainly make a political statement, but it would clearly be given for the reason that he brought peace. Not given for the political statement it makes.
Dan Aris
No. The way to stop spam (or most other crime) is to make the expected cost of being caught times the risk of being caught much higher than the value of the expected return. A billion dollar fine times one chance in 100 million of being caught doesn't do it.
Once you've made the fine high enough that it bankrupts the spammer, I don't see how making it higher makes any difference.
Dan Aris
I am widely considered very intelligent by those I regularly interact with. I have not come across, in my region, anyone more generally competent with computers (including diagnosis and repair of common problems) than I am. I am quite sure that someone with my computer skills would have had little trouble setting up their own business here right out of high school and prospering.
But I would have found it very hard to do so, because my brain just isn't wired that way. I'm generally pretty risk-averse, and would have been stressed out pretty badly if I were depending on irregular customers for my livelihood.
Personality matters in these things. Not only would I have worried about it all the time, but I'm terrible at sales, and I hate talking to people I don't know on the phone. You really need to be an extrovert to be able to start your own business successfully.
Dan Aris
Which is why I remain mystified at how most of the /. community refuses to even think of supporting any political candidates promoted by the Tea Party.
Here's a hint:
They're not a separate political party!
They're just a radical and generally pretty unrealistic wing of the Republican party.
Dan Aris
means the code is known and no patch exists..
doesn't matter if you're the only one who knows the code, its still a zero day vuln until its patched.
No, it's just a known vulnerability with no patch. Zero day means it was exploited on day zero—that is, before anyone else knew the vulnerability existed.
Dan Aris
Correct me if I'm totally off base here, but...isn't part of the definition of "zero-day" that the flaw is being exploited? I mean, it's "zero-day" because it's being exploited on "day zero", right?
Dan Aris
I know must techies could probably replicate this effect using a combination of animated gifs that change on rollover and javascript but that is so far outside the ability of most graphic designers. Using Flash have them the ability to knock something up using flash as part of the CS suite and control exactly what it looked like with no technical input required. Whether this is a good idea is not the point (As a techie I do not think it is
At least to a certain degree, it ought to be perfectly possible to allow GUI creation of CSS/JS animated menus that also produces valid code. True, it almost certainly couldn't have the level of flexibility that Flash offers for that task, but I'm sure that if Adobe put their collective minds to it, they could make it work pretty well.
Trouble is, they're too worried about Flash as a particular technology to realize that they could probably make just as much money making a tool that would create HTML5/CSS/JS videos, animations, games, etc. (or nearly so). And they'd run on any modern browser, including all the mobile ones.
Dan Aris
Do you think you can point to a single piece of creative-anything made in the past 5 years that doesn't have an element of some kind of Adobe product in it? It's universal at this point.
That's hardly an indication that everybody loves them. It just means that since they bought Macromedia, they're the only game in town.
It's like arguing that because everybody uses Microsoft products, Microsoft must have the very best available.
Dan Aris
Now, since you brought up the subject of whores, video was used by Jobs as a red herring to get people to focus on video, so he can whore h264, which he owns some patents in.
...but makes no money on.
Seriously, do people still think that Apple pushing HTML5 video over flash has anything to do with patent royalties? Especially after the MPEG-LA has pledged, in writing, to never collect said royalties??
Dan Aris
The tone of so much of what I've been seeing about this announcement is remarkably negative, and I don't really see that being justified.
Remember, right now, there's no net neutrality legislation. And until today, so far as I know, none of the major players in the ISP field has shown even the slightest inkling of support for any such legislation.
So now Verizon—bloody Verizon—comes out with a proposal that's actually a strong endorsement of real, enforceable net neutrality legislation that would make a huge difference, and Slashdot, Ars Technica, Public Knowledge, and God knows who else comes down on it like a ton of bricks because it doesn't completely lock out all possibility of the ISPs ever doing anything shady.
Good grief, people, get some perspective. This is a hugely good thing. If legislation like they propose could actually pass, it would be a remarkable step toward full net neutrality. It wouldn't be complete, no, and it would leave wireless pretty much the way it is today—but even there, they want a group (the GAO, I think) to watch the situation carefully and make a yearly report on whether the current laws are protecting consumers enough. That's a hell of a lot more than we get now!
So for Cthulhu's sake, look on the bright side for a change, Slashdot!
Dan Aris
No, this is the type of topic that tends to get the hairs up on the backs of the more sarcastic among us. Probably everyone is trying for "Funny" mods by attempting to over-exemplify the behavior and attitudes being talked about in the article, but offending people who a) have mod points and b) happen to actually be on the side the poster is attacking in their attempted joke.
Seems to me that would prove the point just as handily, only against the modders rather than the commenters.
Dan Aris