Sad you got modded down for criticising Apple (such mod-abuse is common), but you make a good point.
With niche[*] platforms, it's easier for users to make claims about all the good things, without other people knowing about the bad points. And the people who use less-mainstream platforms are more likely to be people who really want it, where as the mainstream are less fanatical about what they use. Look at Windows - it's the one that people love to bash, but it's what almost everyone users. And in the 80s/90s when the Amiga was mainstream in the home (at least outside of the US), that was the one that would therefore attract criticism. Amiga users would moan everytime the machine crashed, where as the one token DOS or Mac user could make wild claims about how much better their machine was (hiding all the times it crashed).
So it is with platforms like Symbian today, or all the so-called "feature" phones. People just get on and use them, and they are happy to criticise them and not hide any bad points.
Another point is that many Iphone users have never owned any phone capable of Internet before (even though they've been commonplace even on low end phones since around 2005), so they're amazed "I can post to the Internet on my Iphone!" And so brag about how wonderful it is, where as users of other phones hold their phones to higher standards, because they know Internet access is old hat now.
[*] Apple ~3% market share; Nokia ~40%. Iphone users here seem to be offended by my use of the word, but if you disagree, please argue with facts, not ignorance.
Except it's not the "real world" - other parts of computer/technology industry don't seem to have the problems of long hours and low pay that exist in the games industry. It's the game companies that should "get over it", and start treating people like in the rest of the "real world".
Indeed - I remember the news headlines about "People queue for Iphone 3G" a few years ago (I'm not sure why it was news headlines, but even here in the UK, the media are obsessed with Apple). I thought "I didn't need to queue, I already got 3G three years earlier on my dirt cheap feature phone".
Same with copy/paste, video recording; and now with multitasking and higher resolution on the Iphone 4.
These stats don't tell the whole the story. How many non-Iphone users (about 97% of the phone owning population) plan to get an Iphone? Compared with how many non-Android users planning to get one?
How does the survey factor in people who are undecided?
Of course it's possible that the author was relying on the myth that Iphone and Android are the only two phones(!), hence falsely concluding that 80% of Android users would by an Iphone. But of course, there are many other platforms (must be over 90% of users have neither), for which it would be interesting to read the stats. Did the survey even ask users of other phones?
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
I'm not disagreeing, but it's interesting that now Toys-R-Us sell PCs, and no one cares about it. And a product being seen as "for business use" is, if anything, now a bad point when trying to sell for consumer use (look at Apple trying to falsely brand PCs as boring business machines, and Microsoft's response is to show the exciting things people do with PCs, without pushing the business angle). Similarly, I've seen Iphone users criticising Blackberries for their perceived associations as a business phone...
Indeed - but it's also frustrating (and amusing) to see how things turn around.
PC owners looked down on Amigas as games machines, thinking that they were superior with their DOS based 286s. Yet it's now games that are big business for PCs, and drive much of the PC hardware development.
Mac owners looked down on Amigas as "toys", yet now Apple try to advertise Macs by branding PCs as being boring business machines, and Iphone fans go on about how they can run trivial games on their phones (whilst dismissing Blackberry, on the grounds that it's only "used for business").
Of course I suspect that many of the Amiga users in the 80s/90s went on to use PCs, and thankfully PCs have adopted many of the things the Amiga did well, such as a decent GUI on the OS, decent graphics and sound as standard, doing away with add-on cards for the most part, being more user-friendly. Thus the guys bragging about how good DOS-based PCs are are thankfully as much of a relic of the past as an A500 is, if not more so.
The change is also probably due to the fact that these days (since about the mid-90s), games are seen as acceptable for adults, where as before they were just for kids.
Ironically, when Commodore had gone bust, I'd say what actually accelerated the move from Amigas to PCs was the fact that PCs were becoming games machines (e.g., Doom).
Just go to amiga.org and watch some deluded people, not in jest or in irony, argue that the Amiga is, in 2010, a better computer than a PC. Oh, the humanity!
This isn't a fair comment - and I wondered how long it would be before this straw man appeared.
I have hung out on amiga.org in recent years - yes, you occasionally get one random deluded guy claiming that an A1000 is better than a 2010 computer, but the point is, not only is he hardly representative of the users there, he's also shouted down and mocked by the other Amiga users there. You get fanatics everywhere (just look at Apple - people who think that Iphones sell the most, or it was the first phone with Internet).
Yeah, of course I thought the A1200 was the shit at the time, but that's cause I was a blinded Amiga fanboy.
I don't think that was deluded at the time. Obviously an A1200 is crap compared with a 2010 PC (what an unfair comparison to make); and yes, it certainly wasn't as revolutionary as the A1000, and it's a shame that Commodore fouled up and didn't get things like the AAA chipset ready time. But, compared to PCs at the time, what could you get for £400? Yes, the Amiga had nothing to compete with a £1500 PC, but the problem there was at the high end with the A4000, not with the A1200.
The A1200 wasn't as great as it could have been, but it wasn't delusional to still prefer it over the alternatives at the time; it was a perfectly reasonable decision.
The Playstation came out another two years later, and wasn't a computer anyway.
I agree - it does seem to be odd to have a rather specific development question for one particular platform as an Ask Slashdot. I have plenty of questions I ask, for things like Symbian/Qt and Windows/DirectX development that I do in my spare time, and I'm sure plenty of other Slashdot readers do on various areas, but I post to an appropriate development forum (e.g., Nokia forums, GameDev). If every development question about a random platform they were development got asked, the front page would quickly get bogged down with endless questions...
I agree. The far more interesting - and relevant - battle I think is Nokia versus everyone else, since Nokia are the number one company in the phone market. Long term, we might well see Android the number one platform, though it could be that Nokia are still the number one company (since Android sales would be split across several manufacturers). Although then again, so far Android is only able to run on high end devices, so Nokia will still get a lot of Symbian sales from the mid-range, where you simply can't buy an Android phone (annoyingly - even older phones like the HTC Dream seem to be discontinued, where as Nokia have phones like the 5800, the X6, and even the dirt cheap 5230).
Unfortunately the media just focus on Apple Apple Apple, as if a company with about 3% market share, that is only interested in selling expensive phones at the high end of the market, is the most relevant company.
Publishing under the GPL doesn't bind you to anything whatsoever. It's your code, you do what you like with it. It's other people it binds.
Sure, if you make an API call to someone else's library, you have to follow the licence of that library. Have a go at shipping an application with a commercial closed-source library, without adhereing to the licence, and let me know how you get on, okay?
And they don't touched commercial software either, because that's also licenced? Yes, clearly the only thing companies touch is that abudance of licence-free public domain software out there.
Yes, this is no one ever criticises Windows, ever. (Or for a more specific example to this story, no one ever criticised Opera for having ads in the free version, even though that was years ago.)
Wait.
Of course, it's fair game to criticise a product, even if you've also decided not to buy it. How are people to know not to buy it, if we don't publicise the bad with the good? People do it here all the time. Why are Apple any different? And we get three stories a day on advertising everything Apple do (or are rumoured too), so they can't complain when there's negative publicity too.
You are also forgetting a basic principle of extradition law - that someone is given up when it's a crime in both countries.
Why should the UK give into another country's request, because someone did something that is perfectly legal under UK law? Also note that there is nothing special about the server it took place on - many countries have laws about posting certain material on the Internet to any server, no matter where that server is located.
it's basic law whether you like it or not.
This is not the law - you won't get extradited to another country for drawing a picture on anyone's server.
And the law being criticised is not "basic", it was only added in 2003. And if it's so obvious things should work this way, why is it one-sided?
But what are people to do? Thousands of people wrote to their MPs over the Digital Economy Bill, only to be ignored. When they protest, the Government can still ignore them. Or pass laws banning protest outside Parliament without permission - and then get the police to remove such protestors (as recently happened).
People do protest - such as the G20 protests (where peaceful protesters can be "kettled" for hours, and a complete bystander died after being hit by the police, the news today saying they won't face charges).
I know it's depressing that a lot of people don't care, but it is silly to say that no one is protesting.
What about all the things happening in the US? Is that because people are "zombies" too?
It was an elected house that passed this law in the first place, with little debate. Whislt there are flaws with the Lords, the last thing we want is a duplicate of the Commons.
Is this why things like honor killing are on the rise in European Nations? We certainly can't try people by our laws just because they live here now can we...
Honor killings are illegal. And they stand for trial - in the EU countries they commit the crime. According to you, anyone suspected should be whisked away to the US, yet US citizens suspected of crimes should be extradited to the UK, for some reason.
Indeed - I seem to be in the opposite situation to most people in that I don't want an expensive contract (I hardly use my phone for texting or phone calls), but I don't mind paying a lump sum to get a decent phone for Internet etc. It also doesn't help that Internet only seems to get included in the contracts at the higher monthly fees (I'd rather an Internet-only contract, if such a thing existed).
Thankfully Nokia now have much cheaper Symbian phones, and on PAYG, so I got a 5800.
As for the article calling the Nexus One a failure - Google's intention was never to be a phone manufacturer, but to provide Android to others, which is going well for them. The Nexus One seemed more about having a high end "flagship"; one could argue the numbers of sales aren't really important, as long as something was available at the high end (although now there's the HTC Desire, anyway). No one criticises the Iphone for only have a few per cent market share, if they're happy with its features. And, whilst I like Nokia and they sell far more than anyone else, I do think it's a shame they currently don't have a high end "flagship" phone.
Absolutely mind-boggling you say? How about absolutely doomed?
Indeed. Whilst people may have criticised the Apple Iphones for lacking these features (rightly so - just as we criticise any product lacking features, especially that other far cheaper bog standard products have had for years), there has also been plenty of defence of "But no one cares about these features" (or even, spinning it as a "good thing because it saves battery life" - event though the Iphones seem to guzzle battery life faster than other phones like Nokias), and in particular, the media seem to hype the Iphones at every opportunity, despite these lacking features.
Whether it matters from a consumer point of view, who knows - lacking these features may work for Apple, but then that's only if MS are also happy with a few per cent market share. But I find it interesting if the media are now going to criticise Microsoft because their phone lacks these features, when the Iphones got praised for it.
It's called releasing a phone that's already behind the curve.
It certainly works fine for Apple. As long as a company makes profit, why should it matter - that's what people say for Apple. If Apple can spend years adding features like 3G, copy/paste, multitasking etc, why the hurry for Microsoft?
Long story short this product is doomed with a 97% confidence of certain doomage.
Well, if they get 100-97=3% of the market, they're as "doomed" as Apple:)
From simple things like requiring real names instead of handles to display to people ('cuz x0x0LaTiNaLoVeRx0x
Said "Voyager529".
I agree that Facebook is much improved over MySpace, but I don't think that this point is one of them. Requiring real names, as opposed to the long established Internet practice of using handles, is a risk for people's privacy, and also means that some people may restrict what they can talk about on Facebook, out of fear of family/potential-employers etc reading.
No, the Apple II (not the Macintosh) was limited to 15 colors in low-res and 8 in hi-res
We were talking about the Spectrum though...
The Macintosh II, released in 1987, was capable of 24-bit color, which is something like millions of colors more than 15.
Indeed, and the original Macintosh, which we were talking about, IIRC only had 1 bit colour? Yes, it's true that the Mac eventually surpassed the ZX Spectrum a few years later.
Slashdot Mirror
Sad you got modded down for criticising Apple (such mod-abuse is common), but you make a good point.
With niche[*] platforms, it's easier for users to make claims about all the good things, without other people knowing about the bad points. And the people who use less-mainstream platforms are more likely to be people who really want it, where as the mainstream are less fanatical about what they use. Look at Windows - it's the one that people love to bash, but it's what almost everyone users. And in the 80s/90s when the Amiga was mainstream in the home (at least outside of the US), that was the one that would therefore attract criticism. Amiga users would moan everytime the machine crashed, where as the one token DOS or Mac user could make wild claims about how much better their machine was (hiding all the times it crashed).
So it is with platforms like Symbian today, or all the so-called "feature" phones. People just get on and use them, and they are happy to criticise them and not hide any bad points.
Another point is that many Iphone users have never owned any phone capable of Internet before (even though they've been commonplace even on low end phones since around 2005), so they're amazed "I can post to the Internet on my Iphone!" And so brag about how wonderful it is, where as users of other phones hold their phones to higher standards, because they know Internet access is old hat now.
[*] Apple ~3% market share; Nokia ~40%. Iphone users here seem to be offended by my use of the word, but if you disagree, please argue with facts, not ignorance.
Except it's not the "real world" - other parts of computer/technology industry don't seem to have the problems of long hours and low pay that exist in the games industry. It's the game companies that should "get over it", and start treating people like in the rest of the "real world".
Indeed - I remember the news headlines about "People queue for Iphone 3G" a few years ago (I'm not sure why it was news headlines, but even here in the UK, the media are obsessed with Apple). I thought "I didn't need to queue, I already got 3G three years earlier on my dirt cheap feature phone".
Same with copy/paste, video recording; and now with multitasking and higher resolution on the Iphone 4.
These stats don't tell the whole the story. How many non-Iphone users (about 97% of the phone owning population) plan to get an Iphone? Compared with how many non-Android users planning to get one?
How does the survey factor in people who are undecided?
Of course it's possible that the author was relying on the myth that Iphone and Android are the only two phones(!), hence falsely concluding that 80% of Android users would by an Iphone. But of course, there are many other platforms (must be over 90% of users have neither), for which it would be interesting to read the stats. Did the survey even ask users of other phones?
I'm not disagreeing, but it's interesting that now Toys-R-Us sell PCs, and no one cares about it. And a product being seen as "for business use" is, if anything, now a bad point when trying to sell for consumer use (look at Apple trying to falsely brand PCs as boring business machines, and Microsoft's response is to show the exciting things people do with PCs, without pushing the business angle). Similarly, I've seen Iphone users criticising Blackberries for their perceived associations as a business phone...
Indeed - but it's also frustrating (and amusing) to see how things turn around.
PC owners looked down on Amigas as games machines, thinking that they were superior with their DOS based 286s. Yet it's now games that are big business for PCs, and drive much of the PC hardware development.
Mac owners looked down on Amigas as "toys", yet now Apple try to advertise Macs by branding PCs as being boring business machines, and Iphone fans go on about how they can run trivial games on their phones (whilst dismissing Blackberry, on the grounds that it's only "used for business").
Of course I suspect that many of the Amiga users in the 80s/90s went on to use PCs, and thankfully PCs have adopted many of the things the Amiga did well, such as a decent GUI on the OS, decent graphics and sound as standard, doing away with add-on cards for the most part, being more user-friendly. Thus the guys bragging about how good DOS-based PCs are are thankfully as much of a relic of the past as an A500 is, if not more so.
The change is also probably due to the fact that these days (since about the mid-90s), games are seen as acceptable for adults, where as before they were just for kids.
Ironically, when Commodore had gone bust, I'd say what actually accelerated the move from Amigas to PCs was the fact that PCs were becoming games machines (e.g., Doom).
And the original Mac is rubbish when compared to modern PCs. Is that what people said when we got the anniversary article for the Mac?
If that's the worst criticism you can make of a platform, it must have been revolutionary to only be outdone by PCs 25 years later...
Just go to amiga.org and watch some deluded people, not in jest or in irony, argue that the Amiga is, in 2010, a better computer than a PC. Oh, the humanity!
This isn't a fair comment - and I wondered how long it would be before this straw man appeared.
I have hung out on amiga.org in recent years - yes, you occasionally get one random deluded guy claiming that an A1000 is better than a 2010 computer, but the point is, not only is he hardly representative of the users there, he's also shouted down and mocked by the other Amiga users there. You get fanatics everywhere (just look at Apple - people who think that Iphones sell the most, or it was the first phone with Internet).
Yeah, of course I thought the A1200 was the shit at the time, but that's cause I was a blinded Amiga fanboy.
I don't think that was deluded at the time. Obviously an A1200 is crap compared with a 2010 PC (what an unfair comparison to make); and yes, it certainly wasn't as revolutionary as the A1000, and it's a shame that Commodore fouled up and didn't get things like the AAA chipset ready time. But, compared to PCs at the time, what could you get for £400? Yes, the Amiga had nothing to compete with a £1500 PC, but the problem there was at the high end with the A4000, not with the A1200.
The A1200 wasn't as great as it could have been, but it wasn't delusional to still prefer it over the alternatives at the time; it was a perfectly reasonable decision.
The Playstation came out another two years later, and wasn't a computer anyway.
I agree - it does seem to be odd to have a rather specific development question for one particular platform as an Ask Slashdot. I have plenty of questions I ask, for things like Symbian/Qt and Windows/DirectX development that I do in my spare time, and I'm sure plenty of other Slashdot readers do on various areas, but I post to an appropriate development forum (e.g., Nokia forums, GameDev). If every development question about a random platform they were development got asked, the front page would quickly get bogged down with endless questions...
I agree. The far more interesting - and relevant - battle I think is Nokia versus everyone else, since Nokia are the number one company in the phone market. Long term, we might well see Android the number one platform, though it could be that Nokia are still the number one company (since Android sales would be split across several manufacturers). Although then again, so far Android is only able to run on high end devices, so Nokia will still get a lot of Symbian sales from the mid-range, where you simply can't buy an Android phone (annoyingly - even older phones like the HTC Dream seem to be discontinued, where as Nokia have phones like the 5800, the X6, and even the dirt cheap 5230).
Unfortunately the media just focus on Apple Apple Apple, as if a company with about 3% market share, that is only interested in selling expensive phones at the high end of the market, is the most relevant company.
Oh look, a 1980s Mac vs PC debate. I had a platform that could both pre-emptively multitask, and didn't have faff with drivers etc.
Publishing under the GPL doesn't bind you to anything whatsoever. It's your code, you do what you like with it. It's other people it binds.
Sure, if you make an API call to someone else's library, you have to follow the licence of that library. Have a go at shipping an application with a commercial closed-source library, without adhereing to the licence, and let me know how you get on, okay?
And they don't touched commercial software either, because that's also licenced? Yes, clearly the only thing companies touch is that abudance of licence-free public domain software out there.
Yes, this is no one ever criticises Windows, ever. (Or for a more specific example to this story, no one ever criticised Opera for having ads in the free version, even though that was years ago.)
Wait.
Of course, it's fair game to criticise a product, even if you've also decided not to buy it. How are people to know not to buy it, if we don't publicise the bad with the good? People do it here all the time. Why are Apple any different? And we get three stories a day on advertising everything Apple do (or are rumoured too), so they can't complain when there's negative publicity too.
You are also forgetting a basic principle of extradition law - that someone is given up when it's a crime in both countries.
Why should the UK give into another country's request, because someone did something that is perfectly legal under UK law? Also note that there is nothing special about the server it took place on - many countries have laws about posting certain material on the Internet to any server, no matter where that server is located.
it's basic law whether you like it or not.
This is not the law - you won't get extradited to another country for drawing a picture on anyone's server.
And the law being criticised is not "basic", it was only added in 2003. And if it's so obvious things should work this way, why is it one-sided?
But what are people to do? Thousands of people wrote to their MPs over the Digital Economy Bill, only to be ignored. When they protest, the Government can still ignore them. Or pass laws banning protest outside Parliament without permission - and then get the police to remove such protestors (as recently happened).
People do protest - such as the G20 protests (where peaceful protesters can be "kettled" for hours, and a complete bystander died after being hit by the police, the news today saying they won't face charges).
I know it's depressing that a lot of people don't care, but it is silly to say that no one is protesting.
What about all the things happening in the US? Is that because people are "zombies" too?
It was an elected house that passed this law in the first place, with little debate. Whislt there are flaws with the Lords, the last thing we want is a duplicate of the Commons.
So in your opinion I can go to England and Slander people as much as I want since I'm a US citizen?
If the situations were reversed, and a US hacker was wanted in the UK - no, he wouldn't be extradited.
That's the point. This all follows from a one-sided extradition treaty passed by the last Government - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_Act_2003 .
Is this why things like honor killing are on the rise in European Nations? We certainly can't try people by our laws just because they live here now can we...
Honor killings are illegal. And they stand for trial - in the EU countries they commit the crime. According to you, anyone suspected should be whisked away to the US, yet US citizens suspected of crimes should be extradited to the UK, for some reason.
Indeed - I seem to be in the opposite situation to most people in that I don't want an expensive contract (I hardly use my phone for texting or phone calls), but I don't mind paying a lump sum to get a decent phone for Internet etc. It also doesn't help that Internet only seems to get included in the contracts at the higher monthly fees (I'd rather an Internet-only contract, if such a thing existed).
Thankfully Nokia now have much cheaper Symbian phones, and on PAYG, so I got a 5800.
As for the article calling the Nexus One a failure - Google's intention was never to be a phone manufacturer, but to provide Android to others, which is going well for them. The Nexus One seemed more about having a high end "flagship"; one could argue the numbers of sales aren't really important, as long as something was available at the high end (although now there's the HTC Desire, anyway). No one criticises the Iphone for only have a few per cent market share, if they're happy with its features. And, whilst I like Nokia and they sell far more than anyone else, I do think it's a shame they currently don't have a high end "flagship" phone.
Absolutely mind-boggling you say? How about absolutely doomed?
Indeed. Whilst people may have criticised the Apple Iphones for lacking these features (rightly so - just as we criticise any product lacking features, especially that other far cheaper bog standard products have had for years), there has also been plenty of defence of "But no one cares about these features" (or even, spinning it as a "good thing because it saves battery life" - event though the Iphones seem to guzzle battery life faster than other phones like Nokias), and in particular, the media seem to hype the Iphones at every opportunity, despite these lacking features.
Whether it matters from a consumer point of view, who knows - lacking these features may work for Apple, but then that's only if MS are also happy with a few per cent market share. But I find it interesting if the media are now going to criticise Microsoft because their phone lacks these features, when the Iphones got praised for it.
It's called releasing a phone that's already behind the curve.
It certainly works fine for Apple. As long as a company makes profit, why should it matter - that's what people say for Apple. If Apple can spend years adding features like 3G, copy/paste, multitasking etc, why the hurry for Microsoft?
Long story short this product is doomed with a 97% confidence of certain doomage.
Well, if they get 100-97=3% of the market, they're as "doomed" as Apple :)
From simple things like requiring real names instead of handles to display to people ('cuz x0x0LaTiNaLoVeRx0x
Said "Voyager529".
I agree that Facebook is much improved over MySpace, but I don't think that this point is one of them. Requiring real names, as opposed to the long established Internet practice of using handles, is a risk for people's privacy, and also means that some people may restrict what they can talk about on Facebook, out of fear of family/potential-employers etc reading.
He still got an account before you did.
Yes - it's how she receives the email from Facebook, telling her that there's a message from MichaelSmith's wife.
put a little spin on corporate and government press releases
Although it's also bad when the Government press releases already come with spin, and the newspaper publishes this as factual news, unchallenged.
I didn't start the argument!
No, the Apple II (not the Macintosh) was limited to 15 colors in low-res and 8 in hi-res
We were talking about the Spectrum though...
The Macintosh II, released in 1987, was capable of 24-bit color, which is something like millions of colors more than 15.
Indeed, and the original Macintosh, which we were talking about, IIRC only had 1 bit colour? Yes, it's true that the Mac eventually surpassed the ZX Spectrum a few years later.