You're right. Given that the Iphone is crippled even compared with bog standard cheap phones, it's not like yet another flaw is going to make them change their mind. The RDF is just too strong...
MMS on the Iphone? But wait - whenever people pointed out the lack of MMS before, there was no end of people crawling out the woodwork to tell us that not only was MMS not needed, but that the Iphone was better for it. It made the device simpler to use, or something like that (I never did quite follow the logic).
So does this mean the Iphone is worse, due to including MMS? Or do they concede that their logic was wrong?
you can be annoyed only towards yourself for not upgrading the firmware.
Upgrade the firmware? I prefer a phone where MMS Just Works, Out Of The Box.
I don't like the Iphone's lack of copy/paste/Java/MMS/etc - can jailbreaking fix this?
Of course not. Some phones have flaws or missing features. The Iphone has plenty. Jailbreaking won't fix any of this. Jailbreaking is something that you have to do in addition, to get functionality that on other phones Just Works.
Jesus, what is it with the Apple haters?
Ah yes - anyone who doesn't worship the Iphone, or criticises Apple, must be a "hater". You can't comprehend that people might have some rational reasons for not loving your beloved product, so you hand-wave it away as an irrational hatred.
100% freedom is about 5 mouseclicks away for any iPhone user
I use a phone with 100% freedom Out Of The Box. It "Just Works".
I entirely agree. And nevermind smartphones - even bog standard cheap phones had for years what Apple took ages to get (3G, copy/paste, Java, MMS, video recording). I don't even consider these features anymore - even five years ago they were basic standard items. If I bought a phone that didn't have them, I'd consider it a defect and take it back.
The Iphone may be at a smartphone price level, but it's not deserving of the "smartphone" name in terms of features. And look at sales figures - it's a minority niche player, in a billion dollar market. Why do we hear endless stories about the Iphone, but nothing from major players like Nokia, who are the real market leaders?
The iPhone is so far ahead of anything currently on the market
Yet here we are, with yet another article about something that's already been on other phones for ages (at least for once this is mentioned in TFS).
So I'll bite - give me several features that the Iphone has, that no other phone has?
And please, none of this subjective vague "It does it better it just does". Especially considering that having to jailbreak your phone to get it running the apps that Apple haven't approved hardly constitutes "just working".
So we can look forward to applications which run in the background like Latitude. We can expect to find better copy/paste support
Crumbs, welcome to five years ago.
The competition will, as always, be one step behind.
What? With ancient features like that? One step behind on the hype, maybe.
That doesn't follow. All it shows is that as a monopoly they engaged in illegal actions, but that has nothing to do with how many people are using them through choice.
And even if people dislike MS, that doesn't mean that they like the alternatives any better (otherwise they'd be using them). Once upon a time there were real alternatives such as the Amiga, but now? So the OP should have said "people resent all platforms today".
Lastly, your statement has nothing to do with the initial claim. Even if no one is using it through choice, that doesn't mean people resent it. Consider, I have no choice what OS we run at work, but I'm still glad it's Windows.
What are you, 12? What is it with all the Opera hate on Slashdot?
If market share is what's important (and ignoring that the market share stats are very dubious, and unfairly biased against Opera, which until recently identified as IE, and even now some users have to identify as IE due to poorly written websites, not to mention that browsers that don't cache as often will get more hits), by your logic we should all be using IE.
...not to mention the obvious hypocrisy that wikitruth evidently has no problem putting the hardcore porn pics on its pages (including ones that may have only briefy appeared on Wikipedia). What if a small child was browsing wikitruth - won't somebody think of the children?
What a bizarre site. They cry "censorship" because Wikipedia someones decides to remove articles from their own servers, but on the nudity pages, wikitruth whines "OMG they have pages about SEX that actually have NAUGHTY PICS that a child might see!" (There are child friendly forks of Wikipedia anyway. If you let your child use the Internet unrestricted and unsupervised, it's your own damn fault. For heaven's sake - if they're allowed to look up articles about sexual acts, it's going to be an issue whether there are pictures there or not!)
By that logic, an Amiga 4000 which is even more expensive, must be even more of a luxury, and therefore even better value than Macs right?
Honestly, I love how the RDF manages to twist every bad point about Macs to being an advantage! (To point out your logical fallacy: just because X is more expensive than Y, and X is a luxury and Y is not, doesn't mean that if A is more expensive than B, that therefore A is a luxury and B is not. That's a fallacy. There are no grounds to label Macs as luxuries, and PCs as non-luxuries. Indeed, given that Macs are PCs these days, after Apple abandoned the crappy old Mac hardware, the claim is rather ludicrous.)
I do have luxury computers. I also don't have to throw money away that I can put to better uses.
WTH? Even in so-called "rip-off" Britain, mainstream desktop PCs are below £500 (and in many cases far less), many laptops are also now also below £500 with netbooks even cheaper.
But Macs? Nowhere to be seen. I believe the cheapest starts at £500, with a bottom of the range Mac Mini, featuring outdated laptop specs.
Yes, prices may be more expensive here in Europe, but everything is inflated, including Apple.
Honest question - my experience Apple UIs are that they are abysmal (Quicktime, Itunes), so I am curious to know if OS X is different - what objective examples can you give of the UI being better than all other operating systems?
As others have pointed out, a comparable Wintel machine is in the same price range.
How many Macs are in the common sub-£500 price range?
but re-install the OS every six months.
And when I used a Mac, I reinstalled the OS every six months, honest.
But that doesn't mean you have to. I've never had to reinstall Windows - the NT line just works.
Perhaps you should have also not treated your wife like a child?
Using a Mac is not just a neutral experience. It is pleasurable.
Both at work and at home. I don't have to reinstall my OS at least once a year, run defrag on a monthly basis, worry about anti-virus updates every week, or spend hours trying to find and compile drivers for some piece of hardware as I always seem to with Linux even today. It just works. That's what I want, and I'll don't even have to pay extra as PCs are so cheap these days. I got a good 4 years out of my old PC. It needs a new power adaptor (fell on a ceramic tile floor and busted). but should still work and my QuadCore PC is still going strong and it's 4.5 years old. Most I've done to it is add an extra 500GB internal to store video files for video editing. (before external drives came down in price).
I now have a Windows laptop provided by work. Does everything I want and can even boot into XP if I need too for testing (or to play an occasional old game from my PC collection).
[Okay, my history of PCs I've owned is slightly different is different, but the experience on Windows is the same: it's been years since Windows has said my drives need defragging, I've never had a virus, everything just works (the only exception being Apple software like Itunes and Quicktime), I haven't ever had to reinstall Windows, and I've had multiple machines running for years (possibly you are getting confused with Windows 9x, which was an entirely different OS line? I might as well point out flaws in the joke of an OS that was classic MacOS...)]
[I also love how Mac users bitch about Windows - and then brag about being able to run Windows as an advantage! Which is it? That fact is that Mac hardware today is now using PC hardware, so if you're also running Windows, there's no difference.]
For heaven's sake, it's 2009. Most mainstream desktops are now cheaper than that, and even laptops have fallen below that price. Not to mention the obvious example of netbooks.
You're right though that it's an economy option in terms of performance (only 120GB? Crappy NVIDIA 9400M graphics? A pathetic 1GB of memory? Ouch. At £500 these days, I'd expect much better. Hell, I got a laptop at that price with similar specs - two and a half years ago!). It's not economy not in terms of price, I'm afraid.
So get a laptop - still cheap these days, and you get actual portability.
The Mac Mini is the worst of both worlds - laptop prices and performance (due to needing the smaller components), but not as portable as one. Anyhow, there are plenty of small "desktop" PCs around these days too.
Exactly. It's brilliant isn't it? Only the RDF could twist Macs being expensive into being a good point!
I mean seriously - $1000 for a whole PC? It's 2009 for god's sake.
(We see the same thing with the Iphone. Nevermind that the Iphone is a niche player, it's a common tactic to redefine the market to only look at really expensive phones, and then brag that the Iphone has better market share in that minority niche...)
As usual with Facebook controversies, you can very easily opt out of this and never have your photo used by an advertiser.
You can't just assume you have permission - any contract like this must be opt in.
And of course, Facebook is not mandatory, it's something that you choose to be part of.
What if the terms are changed retroactively, to photos you already uploaded?
What if you're not on Facebook and someone uploads a photo of you, that then gets used in an advert?
And of course, why in hell do so many people post illegal or embarrassing items to a fairly public and insecure site?
Off-topic. There are plenty of photos I might not mind being visible to a restricted set of people (Facebook photos don't have to be "public" FYI), but would mind being in an advertising campaign. In fact, even if I was okay with a photo being entirely public, doesn't mean I want it in an advertising campaign.
(This assumes that the story is true - if it isn't, then there's nothing to worry over anyway.)
No, but again I wouldn't call that simply an idea, rather it's knowledge and so on.
Now sure, there is a question of definitions of what do we mean by an "idea", and as I said above, there'll be lots of "ideas" that someone comes up in the process of solving the problems of making a Flux Capacitor. Is that what the OP really meant though? If he has solved problems and obtained knowledge to build new inventions, then sure - there are valid questions to ask such as how to build it without someone using the knowledge for themselves, or how to patent it.
But I'm not convinced. For starters, I doubt anyone would "constantly" be "coming up with 'clever' ideas". This suggests to me he's talking about idea in the sense of one that pops into your head one day (such as "let's build a time machine"), and not the ideas involved in solving the problems on how to build one. It's also unclear why he would need to ask a stranger's advice on whether it's a good idea - if his ideas involve solving a problem, then surely they are inherently "good" (in that they solve the problem he was trying to overcome). Again, it sounds to me this is an idea on its own that he wants to find a use for.
There might be some cases where you have an "idea" to solve a problem, but you're not sure how effective the idea will be, or whether there will be risks (e.g., if I have an idea to fix a bug in code at work, and I ask advice of coworkers if they think it'll cause unforseen problems). But this is something that you would want specialised expertise in the area that you are working in. And even if it's applicable, I'd argue that the point still stands: my "ideas" at work are rarely worth anything in themselves, it's the process of investigating a problem, implementing a solution, testing it, bringing a product to market that all takes time, and is worth something.
Wait - someone saying that everyone should have freedom over the software they use, is comparable to someone saying that everyone shoud only use their non-free software?
Don't get me wrong, I think there's room for more licences that the GPL. But your comparison isn't valid. It's like saying that someone who says healthcare should be illegal is no different to someone who says that everyone should have healthcare. Just because two people believe in something for everyone doesn't mean the two viewpoints are comparable.
Having said that, I still broadly support the Pirate Party's aims, and am glad of their existence. The point is, there's never going to be 5 year copyright terms; too many people oppose it, and it's unlikely that the Party will become Government. But it's good to have someone lobbying for short terms, to counteract the excessive ever-increasing terms lobbyed for by the corporations.
It's the same old political tactic - always lobby for more than what you want, so that there is more chance of getting something you actually want.
(Personally I think that the whole "compromise" argument is very bad, for all sorts of reasons, including that it encourages and rewards people for taking extremist positions, but given that this is how things work, you might as well play the system. Because that's what people on the opposing side are doing.)
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. Given that the Iphone is crippled even compared with bog standard cheap phones, it's not like yet another flaw is going to make them change their mind. The RDF is just too strong...
MMS on the Iphone? But wait - whenever people pointed out the lack of MMS before, there was no end of people crawling out the woodwork to tell us that not only was MMS not needed, but that the Iphone was better for it. It made the device simpler to use, or something like that (I never did quite follow the logic).
So does this mean the Iphone is worse, due to including MMS? Or do they concede that their logic was wrong?
you can be annoyed only towards yourself for not upgrading the firmware.
Upgrade the firmware? I prefer a phone where MMS Just Works, Out Of The Box.
I don't like the Iphone's lack of copy/paste/Java/MMS/etc - can jailbreaking fix this?
Of course not. Some phones have flaws or missing features. The Iphone has plenty. Jailbreaking won't fix any of this. Jailbreaking is something that you have to do in addition, to get functionality that on other phones Just Works.
Jesus, what is it with the Apple haters?
Ah yes - anyone who doesn't worship the Iphone, or criticises Apple, must be a "hater". You can't comprehend that people might have some rational reasons for not loving your beloved product, so you hand-wave it away as an irrational hatred.
100% freedom is about 5 mouseclicks away for any iPhone user
I use a phone with 100% freedom Out Of The Box. It "Just Works".
I entirely agree. And nevermind smartphones - even bog standard cheap phones had for years what Apple took ages to get (3G, copy/paste, Java, MMS, video recording). I don't even consider these features anymore - even five years ago they were basic standard items. If I bought a phone that didn't have them, I'd consider it a defect and take it back.
The Iphone may be at a smartphone price level, but it's not deserving of the "smartphone" name in terms of features. And look at sales figures - it's a minority niche player, in a billion dollar market. Why do we hear endless stories about the Iphone, but nothing from major players like Nokia, who are the real market leaders?
Someone should rename this place Appledot.
The iPhone is so far ahead of anything currently on the market
Yet here we are, with yet another article about something that's already been on other phones for ages (at least for once this is mentioned in TFS).
So I'll bite - give me several features that the Iphone has, that no other phone has?
And please, none of this subjective vague "It does it better it just does". Especially considering that having to jailbreak your phone to get it running the apps that Apple haven't approved hardly constitutes "just working".
So we can look forward to applications which run in the background like Latitude. We can expect to find better copy/paste support
Crumbs, welcome to five years ago.
The competition will, as always, be one step behind.
What? With ancient features like that? One step behind on the hype, maybe.
In the UK, PIN has replaced signatures for credit/debit cards.
I can barely remember what my own signature is these days. I might as well just put an x or a wiggly line, for all the good it does.
That doesn't follow. All it shows is that as a monopoly they engaged in illegal actions, but that has nothing to do with how many people are using them through choice.
And even if people dislike MS, that doesn't mean that they like the alternatives any better (otherwise they'd be using them). Once upon a time there were real alternatives such as the Amiga, but now? So the OP should have said "people resent all platforms today".
Lastly, your statement has nothing to do with the initial claim. Even if no one is using it through choice, that doesn't mean people resent it. Consider, I have no choice what OS we run at work, but I'm still glad it's Windows.
Fuck you, Opera.
What are you, 12? What is it with all the Opera hate on Slashdot?
If market share is what's important (and ignoring that the market share stats are very dubious, and unfairly biased against Opera, which until recently identified as IE, and even now some users have to identify as IE due to poorly written websites, not to mention that browsers that don't cache as often will get more hits), by your logic we should all be using IE.
...not to mention the obvious hypocrisy that wikitruth evidently has no problem putting the hardcore porn pics on its pages (including ones that may have only briefy appeared on Wikipedia). What if a small child was browsing wikitruth - won't somebody think of the children?
What a bizarre site. They cry "censorship" because Wikipedia someones decides to remove articles from their own servers, but on the nudity pages, wikitruth whines "OMG they have pages about SEX that actually have NAUGHTY PICS that a child might see!" (There are child friendly forks of Wikipedia anyway. If you let your child use the Internet unrestricted and unsupervised, it's your own damn fault. For heaven's sake - if they're allowed to look up articles about sexual acts, it's going to be an issue whether there are pictures there or not!)
Wikipedia cites its sources, rather than plagiarising like the media.
And copyright violations are a big no on Wikipedia anyway, so your point isn't relevant.
By that logic, an Amiga 4000 which is even more expensive, must be even more of a luxury, and therefore even better value than Macs right?
Honestly, I love how the RDF manages to twist every bad point about Macs to being an advantage! (To point out your logical fallacy: just because X is more expensive than Y, and X is a luxury and Y is not, doesn't mean that if A is more expensive than B, that therefore A is a luxury and B is not. That's a fallacy. There are no grounds to label Macs as luxuries, and PCs as non-luxuries. Indeed, given that Macs are PCs these days, after Apple abandoned the crappy old Mac hardware, the claim is rather ludicrous.)
I do have luxury computers. I also don't have to throw money away that I can put to better uses.
WTH? Even in so-called "rip-off" Britain, mainstream desktop PCs are below £500 (and in many cases far less), many laptops are also now also below £500 with netbooks even cheaper.
But Macs? Nowhere to be seen. I believe the cheapest starts at £500, with a bottom of the range Mac Mini, featuring outdated laptop specs.
Yes, prices may be more expensive here in Europe, but everything is inflated, including Apple.
Honest question - my experience Apple UIs are that they are abysmal (Quicktime, Itunes), so I am curious to know if OS X is different - what objective examples can you give of the UI being better than all other operating systems?
As others have pointed out, a comparable Wintel machine is in the same price range.
How many Macs are in the common sub-£500 price range?
but re-install the OS every six months.
And when I used a Mac, I reinstalled the OS every six months, honest.
But that doesn't mean you have to. I've never had to reinstall Windows - the NT line just works.
Perhaps you should have also not treated your wife like a child?
Using a Mac is not just a neutral experience. It is pleasurable.
Dude, it's a computer.
Both at work and at home. I don't have to reinstall my OS at least once a year, run defrag on a monthly basis, worry about anti-virus updates every week, or spend hours trying to find and compile drivers for some piece of hardware as I always seem to with Linux even today. It just works. That's what I want, and I'll don't even have to pay extra as PCs are so cheap these days. I got a good 4 years out of my old PC. It needs a new power adaptor (fell on a ceramic tile floor and busted). but should still work and my QuadCore PC is still going strong and it's 4.5 years old. Most I've done to it is add an extra 500GB internal to store video files for video editing. (before external drives came down in price).
I now have a Windows laptop provided by work. Does everything I want and can even boot into XP if I need too for testing (or to play an occasional old game from my PC collection).
[Okay, my history of PCs I've owned is slightly different is different, but the experience on Windows is the same: it's been years since Windows has said my drives need defragging, I've never had a virus, everything just works (the only exception being Apple software like Itunes and Quicktime), I haven't ever had to reinstall Windows, and I've had multiple machines running for years (possibly you are getting confused with Windows 9x, which was an entirely different OS line? I might as well point out flaws in the joke of an OS that was classic MacOS...)]
[I also love how Mac users bitch about Windows - and then brag about being able to run Windows as an advantage! Which is it? That fact is that Mac hardware today is now using PC hardware, so if you're also running Windows, there's no difference.]
Remember, the average age of Macs still in use is quite a bit greater than the average age of PCs still in use.
Citation need. Yes, I'm glad you still use a 1999 Mac, but you can't generalise from a single anecdote!
Some people still use their 15 year old Amigas. Beat that.
I think what's really going on here is that you don't know what you are talking about.
You'd better have that citation, before you mouth off like that.
Yes, he's sure. In the UK prices start at £499.
For heaven's sake, it's 2009. Most mainstream desktops are now cheaper than that, and even laptops have fallen below that price. Not to mention the obvious example of netbooks.
You're right though that it's an economy option in terms of performance (only 120GB? Crappy NVIDIA 9400M graphics? A pathetic 1GB of memory? Ouch. At £500 these days, I'd expect much better. Hell, I got a laptop at that price with similar specs - two and a half years ago!). It's not economy not in terms of price, I'm afraid.
So get a laptop - still cheap these days, and you get actual portability.
The Mac Mini is the worst of both worlds - laptop prices and performance (due to needing the smaller components), but not as portable as one. Anyhow, there are plenty of small "desktop" PCs around these days too.
Exactly. It's brilliant isn't it? Only the RDF could twist Macs being expensive into being a good point!
I mean seriously - $1000 for a whole PC? It's 2009 for god's sake.
(We see the same thing with the Iphone. Nevermind that the Iphone is a niche player, it's a common tactic to redefine the market to only look at really expensive phones, and then brag that the Iphone has better market share in that minority niche...)
As usual with Facebook controversies, you can very easily opt out of this and never have your photo used by an advertiser.
You can't just assume you have permission - any contract like this must be opt in.
And of course, Facebook is not mandatory, it's something that you choose to be part of.
What if the terms are changed retroactively, to photos you already uploaded?
What if you're not on Facebook and someone uploads a photo of you, that then gets used in an advert?
And of course, why in hell do so many people post illegal or embarrassing items to a fairly public and insecure site?
Off-topic. There are plenty of photos I might not mind being visible to a restricted set of people (Facebook photos don't have to be "public" FYI), but would mind being in an advertising campaign. In fact, even if I was okay with a photo being entirely public, doesn't mean I want it in an advertising campaign.
(This assumes that the story is true - if it isn't, then there's nothing to worry over anyway.)
No, but again I wouldn't call that simply an idea, rather it's knowledge and so on.
Now sure, there is a question of definitions of what do we mean by an "idea", and as I said above, there'll be lots of "ideas" that someone comes up in the process of solving the problems of making a Flux Capacitor. Is that what the OP really meant though? If he has solved problems and obtained knowledge to build new inventions, then sure - there are valid questions to ask such as how to build it without someone using the knowledge for themselves, or how to patent it.
But I'm not convinced. For starters, I doubt anyone would "constantly" be "coming up with 'clever' ideas". This suggests to me he's talking about idea in the sense of one that pops into your head one day (such as "let's build a time machine"), and not the ideas involved in solving the problems on how to build one. It's also unclear why he would need to ask a stranger's advice on whether it's a good idea - if his ideas involve solving a problem, then surely they are inherently "good" (in that they solve the problem he was trying to overcome). Again, it sounds to me this is an idea on its own that he wants to find a use for.
There might be some cases where you have an "idea" to solve a problem, but you're not sure how effective the idea will be, or whether there will be risks (e.g., if I have an idea to fix a bug in code at work, and I ask advice of coworkers if they think it'll cause unforseen problems). But this is something that you would want specialised expertise in the area that you are working in. And even if it's applicable, I'd argue that the point still stands: my "ideas" at work are rarely worth anything in themselves, it's the process of investigating a problem, implementing a solution, testing it, bringing a product to market that all takes time, and is worth something.
For a moment, I thought you were the author of the Windows File Copy Dialog...
Wait - someone saying that everyone should have freedom over the software they use, is comparable to someone saying that everyone shoud only use their non-free software?
Don't get me wrong, I think there's room for more licences that the GPL. But your comparison isn't valid. It's like saying that someone who says healthcare should be illegal is no different to someone who says that everyone should have healthcare. Just because two people believe in something for everyone doesn't mean the two viewpoints are comparable.
This is my view too.
Having said that, I still broadly support the Pirate Party's aims, and am glad of their existence. The point is, there's never going to be 5 year copyright terms; too many people oppose it, and it's unlikely that the Party will become Government. But it's good to have someone lobbying for short terms, to counteract the excessive ever-increasing terms lobbyed for by the corporations.
It's the same old political tactic - always lobby for more than what you want, so that there is more chance of getting something you actually want.
(Personally I think that the whole "compromise" argument is very bad, for all sorts of reasons, including that it encourages and rewards people for taking extremist positions, but given that this is how things work, you might as well play the system. Because that's what people on the opposing side are doing.)
Indeed, it doesn't matter that other phones have been cracked - Apple were the first ones to make it work Out Of The Box.
It's all about the implementation. With the iPhone 3gS, your credit card details are integrated perfectly with crackers, thieves, and Steve Jobs.