I really don't understand it. I caved and got one recently. I know I'm late to the party, but the company-negotiated data plan was just too good. I don't own a single piece of Apple equipment except for that phone, and I'm very happy with it. The only thing I find a bit annoying is the crappy video codec support.
Slightly offtopic, but I use the Urban Spoon app a lot. In general I don't trust any individual food bloggers. It's impossible to know which twits ordered something they probably wouldn't like but wanted to try, and then blogged about how they didn't like it. Or the waitress didn't respond to their "Are you from Tennessee?" pickup line and they feel slighted. Or they just like to bitch. Or they just don't like the race of the proprietor.
So I've begun to trust the raw number. 87% of people liked it out of 150 reviews? I'm in.
Found an awesome vietnamese place the other day that way, minutes from my home. I've been ordering Bun Bo Hue for a couple of decades, and this lady was the first person to good-naturedly) correct me. It's pronounced "huay", not "hew". They were all laughing at me, I just know it.
"I didn't grow up around DOS and still prefer a command line to a GUI for getting real work done."
Okay, that's twice in this thread that I've squinted at my monitor and said, "What the fuck?"
Is the bar really so very low on slashdot that saying you prefer a command line gets you +5 insightful? Actually, it clearly is.
We need to be able to moderate something "completely devoid of insight but somehow I connect with this". Or maybe we need "so obvious even a caveman can see it".
Java Sucks. There... I said it. It's a bizarre, overweight, crushingly painful piece of crap that just needs to die already. Nobody gives a crap about "write once, run anywhere", even if it existed, and relying on any of the common frameworks sets you up to create a poorly performing piece of crap.
You'd think that EJB 2.0 would have killed Java for good, but for some reason it's still kicking.
I'm not saying you can't build good stuff in Java. I'm just saying you can do it faster and cheaper in other technologies, with better performance. The good Java stuff is hand-coded to the bottom, at great expense.
"Yeah IE6 failed - And we don't ever want to go back there again."
Are you joking? IE6 was such a phenomenal success that industry still can't shake it. You can't possibly justify calling it a failure. By every metric it's a piece of software that succeeded. I'm replying to your message using IE6 - 9 years after it was introduced.
Had it failed, it wouldn't still be holding back the web.
Personally I think this desperate need to shove everything in a browser is a retarded sickness that needs to die. It's like trying to shove a potato through a straw. The solution isn't to adapt the straw to be potato-friendly.
I live and work in a busy downtown area. If there were no meters all spots would be taken by 8:00 a.m. and anybody coming downtown during the day to do business would be out of luck.
Parking meters don't just take in money, they help moderate the usage of the space.
In my day we managed to carry around weed and not get caught. The fact that she got caught with a Jolly Rancher proves what I suspect - kids today are a little slower, mentally speaking.
Learning to get away with stuff is vital to the developmental process. I see a sad future where the adults of tomorrow are too stupid to run a decent ponzi scheme, and all the good ones are owned by foreigners.
"If you're dumb enough to repeatedly get caught speeding and not learn from it then yeah, they're not going to improve things."
In 1999 I paid nearly a thousand dollars in photo radar tickets. I had a 1998 Miata at the time, so, well... It wasn't about being dumb. I accepted the tickets as the price I had to pay to drive how I wanted to drive. I had an accident in 1986 when I was 16 (no injuries, low impact). Since then I've been accident-free, and back in the late '90's I actually did amateur racing.
I never sped through residential areas, school zones, or construction sites. The places I got ticketed at were in wide-open areas with lots of visibility and low traffic - exactly the kinds of places where you would put radar if you just wanted cash and didn't give a flying fuck about preventing accidents. It's not about safety, at least not in my city.
For some people it's a tax, not a lesson to be learned.
"And they accomplish this by starting with one of the purest open-source distros around -- Debian -- and then pissing all over it."
And why, exactly, does that bother you? It shouldn't, but apparently it does. Did they send someone over to specifically piss on your copy of Debain?
Or are you just assuming you've been wronged somehow in the process? Because I'll bet your life is not one iota different than it would have been had they not started with Debian. Except, of course, for the fact that you can now complain about them.
"What went wrong was believing the the oil companies when they said they had a plan in the first place... the industry has a 100% track record with major oils spills."
Let me tell you why your claim is busted thinking.
There are hundreds of spills that you don't hear about that could have been major spills. However, the oil companies have detailed plans and procedures for how to deal with them. As a result, these spills don't become major ones, and they don't count in your grand analysis. Of course the companies have a 100% track record with major oil spills - but what percentage of "potentially" major spills do they make up? You might instead say 99% of potentially major spills are successfully contained.
When a major spill happens people like to point and say, "Oh - they have no plan!", like there's some freaking awesome magic plan wand the oil companies could wave over the situation. Thing is, once it's a "major spill", there's no good plan. There's no easy way to deal with loose crude in large volumes on land, let alone 5000 feet under the surface of the ocean. The plan is exactly what they're doing - booms, dispersants, and now this tool they're going to try. Failing that they dig another well.
"The contingency plan that was supposed to keep this from happening didn't get implemented or just wasn't sufficient."
That remains to be determined. It wasn't just one plan - there were redundant precautions. Multiple equipment failures might have overcame the perfectly sound plan that works on thousands of rigs today. Maybe they got a pressure kick that nobody has ever encountered before. No matter how many redundancies you put in something, there is ALWAYS a scenario to failure.
There are something like 5600 rigs drilling at present. They've got their shit together, or you'd be knee-deep in crude.
"We're all warm and fluffy with open source, we're a safe alternative to java, honest, look."
I was getting your point until you hit Java. After watching the litany of trainwrecks that is the expensive java experiment in our company, Microsoft IS a safe alternative. In fact, I'd rather replace all our "successful because they delivered" java projects with a group of elderly asians with abacuses... aba... abacii? That'd be a warm and fluffy alternative to Java.
In other areas of the company they've been delivering.Net projects successfully, so I'm hardpressed to defend Java. We hired expensive, proven guns, too. We didn't half-ass it.
Let's say I find myself a man to play the guitar at dinnertime each night. It's now the end of the week, and he has the "expectation" of income. He was deprived of the use of his time, and I enjoyed the fruits of his labour. If I choose to not pay him, have I not stolen from him?
Instead, let's say he recorded the dinnertime performances for me in advance. I have not agreed in advance to buy them, but he expects that if I do wish to listen to them during dinner I will pay him. Let's say I copy them, listen to them, and I do not pay. He has the "expectation" of income, he was deprived of the use of his time, and I enjoyed the fruits of his labour.
If I'm not stealing in the second case, I'm not stealing in the first.
"For the love of $deity why would _anybody_ still be using the DNS server that their ISP provides? Ignoring the multiple FREE DNS providers out there, it is trivally easy to setup your own caching DNS server regardless of the OS platform you use."
Because the internet stoppped being just for techies 10 years ago? Step out of your little bubble, you dweeb, and look around. First you have to give a crap about the concept of a DNS, which is exactly one step too far for the vast majority of folks.
Rightly so, too. If my family had to worry about things like that they would never have gotten any further than the occasional email.
In my past I've frequently been in your position - wondering why the whole world doesn't give a crap about some ridiculous thing I think is incorrect. However, this year I'm turning 40, and for some reason I'm starting to get the other perspective. The "ridiculous" is on the other side.
"The bill calls for a 6 percent tax on all deposits to be paid to state and tribal governments made by residents of their jurisdiction. For example, if someone living in Missouri puts $1,000 into an online gambling account anywhere in the country, $60 would go to Missouri's state government."
Imagine if you had to hand over six percent of the money in your pocket as taxes just to be allowed in the door of a casino. Incredible horseshit, no? To even suggest it is ludicrous. And yet there it is.
I'm glad I live in Canada where they don't tax your gambling winnings at all unless you're a professional gambler.
Sadly, as the U.S. continues to collapse into the black hole that is it's debt, more of this kind of thing will happen.
"Moderators, just because you don't understand a post doesn't mean it's offtopic. He's in effect saying "don't buy DRMed games, the GPL is the way to go". Overrated perhaps (although I don't agree that it is overrated), but it IS on topic."
That is so redundant in this thread that it spills over the sides and actually becomes redundant in hundreds of other slashdot stories. It's grade-a redundancy.
"People who buy Apple products are generally okay with being limited on capabilities."
While I'm in favour of jailbreaking and such, I think what you really mean is something other than limited on capabilities. Now if you mean "limited on capabilities" in the sense that the obtaining of apps is restricted to Apple's app store, well... restriction of source is only a restriction on capability if you can't find what you need at that source. If there's something you need to do on an iPhone, there's probably an application that'll do it.
I just got my iPhone, and I've been looking for an excuse to jailbreak it, but... it does everything I want it to do. I thought the inability to multitask (corrected, apparently, in iPhone OS/4) would bug me, but it turns out it's a non-issue.
The only thing I can think of offhand that Apple has restricted the capabilities of is flash, but in all honesty I haven't missed it at all.
When I saw "Up" I saw 3D used perfectly for the first time. No gimmicky shots, no pointless stuff coming out of the screen... the 3D was an enhancement, nothing more. If 3D is used like that, I'm in. But I suspect more films will be like "Journey to the Center of the Earth" which was just abysmal. And the oscar for "Most Gratuitous Use of a Bolo Paddle in 3D" goes to...
I've considered throwing a brick through the front glass on city hall to indicate how I feel about my local government's obscene spending policies. Time spent playing online games is time during which they aren't spending ridiculous amounts of money on stupid, wasteful things.
I want them to do at least 80% less than they do, so if they waste a bunch of time on online games, that's okay with me.
"Though superstring theory requires 10 or 11 dimensions of space (from what little I understand), so serious physicists really believe those dimensions might exist."
I suspect string theory is wrong because it's too complex. I think at the core of all physics must be simplicity. If you get as complicated as string theory I think you're heading down the wrong path.
Physics, when distilled, should be elegant. When Einstein proposed mass-energy equivalence with a formula it changed the world - not because it was a complex relationship that only physicists could understand, but because it was so incredibly simple that it HAD to be right.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody could have a big income, but spend like a person with an avereage income. How will you disproportionally punish him for doing well?
It's not meant to be stage-worthy. It's just handy for home, or for limiting what you have to carry around when you and your friends are jamming.
I can sit on the couch with headphones and play, rather than having to sit by my rack gear.
I really don't understand it. I caved and got one recently. I know I'm late to the party, but the company-negotiated data plan was just too good. I don't own a single piece of Apple equipment except for that phone, and I'm very happy with it. The only thing I find a bit annoying is the crappy video codec support.
I went from happy to thrilled at this announcement: http://www.ikmultimedia.com/teaser_20100506.php
Slightly offtopic, but I use the Urban Spoon app a lot. In general I don't trust any individual food bloggers. It's impossible to know which twits ordered something they probably wouldn't like but wanted to try, and then blogged about how they didn't like it. Or the waitress didn't respond to their "Are you from Tennessee?" pickup line and they feel slighted. Or they just like to bitch. Or they just don't like the race of the proprietor.
So I've begun to trust the raw number. 87% of people liked it out of 150 reviews? I'm in.
Found an awesome vietnamese place the other day that way, minutes from my home. I've been ordering Bun Bo Hue for a couple of decades, and this lady was the first person to good-naturedly) correct me. It's pronounced "huay", not "hew". They were all laughing at me, I just know it.
"I didn't grow up around DOS and still prefer a command line to a GUI for getting real work done."
Okay, that's twice in this thread that I've squinted at my monitor and said, "What the fuck?"
Is the bar really so very low on slashdot that saying you prefer a command line gets you +5 insightful? Actually, it clearly is.
We need to be able to moderate something "completely devoid of insight but somehow I connect with this". Or maybe we need "so obvious even a caveman can see it".
"That's because Microsoft has a crippled CLI, and yes, that included Powershell."
So far +4 "insightful". How fucking retarded do you have to be to moderate a post bashing the Windows CLI as "insightful"?
Actually, I'll tell you. You have to be 16 inches of forehead retarded.
"That guy just said the sun will rise tomorrow - how insightful!"
"there's a curious lack of Java projects."
Java Sucks. There... I said it. It's a bizarre, overweight, crushingly painful piece of crap that just needs to die already. Nobody gives a crap about "write once, run anywhere", even if it existed, and relying on any of the common frameworks sets you up to create a poorly performing piece of crap.
You'd think that EJB 2.0 would have killed Java for good, but for some reason it's still kicking.
I'm not saying you can't build good stuff in Java. I'm just saying you can do it faster and cheaper in other technologies, with better performance. The good Java stuff is hand-coded to the bottom, at great expense.
"Yeah IE6 failed - And we don't ever want to go back there again."
Are you joking? IE6 was such a phenomenal success that industry still can't shake it. You can't possibly justify calling it a failure. By every metric it's a piece of software that succeeded. I'm replying to your message using IE6 - 9 years after it was introduced.
Had it failed, it wouldn't still be holding back the web.
Personally I think this desperate need to shove everything in a browser is a retarded sickness that needs to die. It's like trying to shove a potato through a straw. The solution isn't to adapt the straw to be potato-friendly.
I live and work in a busy downtown area. If there were no meters all spots would be taken by 8:00 a.m. and anybody coming downtown during the day to do business would be out of luck.
Parking meters don't just take in money, they help moderate the usage of the space.
In my day we managed to carry around weed and not get caught. The fact that she got caught with a Jolly Rancher proves what I suspect - kids today are a little slower, mentally speaking.
Learning to get away with stuff is vital to the developmental process. I see a sad future where the adults of tomorrow are too stupid to run a decent ponzi scheme, and all the good ones are owned by foreigners.
"If you're dumb enough to repeatedly get caught speeding and not learn from it then yeah, they're not going to improve things."
In 1999 I paid nearly a thousand dollars in photo radar tickets. I had a 1998 Miata at the time, so, well... It wasn't about being dumb. I accepted the tickets as the price I had to pay to drive how I wanted to drive. I had an accident in 1986 when I was 16 (no injuries, low impact). Since then I've been accident-free, and back in the late '90's I actually did amateur racing.
I never sped through residential areas, school zones, or construction sites. The places I got ticketed at were in wide-open areas with lots of visibility and low traffic - exactly the kinds of places where you would put radar if you just wanted cash and didn't give a flying fuck about preventing accidents. It's not about safety, at least not in my city.
For some people it's a tax, not a lesson to be learned.
"And they accomplish this by starting with one of the purest open-source distros around -- Debian -- and then pissing all over it."
And why, exactly, does that bother you? It shouldn't, but apparently it does. Did they send someone over to specifically piss on your copy of Debain?
Or are you just assuming you've been wronged somehow in the process? Because I'll bet your life is not one iota different than it would have been had they not started with Debian. Except, of course, for the fact that you can now complain about them.
"What went wrong was believing the the oil companies when they said they had a plan in the first place... the industry has a 100% track record with major oils spills."
Let me tell you why your claim is busted thinking.
There are hundreds of spills that you don't hear about that could have been major spills. However, the oil companies have detailed plans and procedures for how to deal with them. As a result, these spills don't become major ones, and they don't count in your grand analysis. Of course the companies have a 100% track record with major oil spills - but what percentage of "potentially" major spills do they make up? You might instead say 99% of potentially major spills are successfully contained.
When a major spill happens people like to point and say, "Oh - they have no plan!", like there's some freaking awesome magic plan wand the oil companies could wave over the situation. Thing is, once it's a "major spill", there's no good plan. There's no easy way to deal with loose crude in large volumes on land, let alone 5000 feet under the surface of the ocean. The plan is exactly what they're doing - booms, dispersants, and now this tool they're going to try. Failing that they dig another well.
"The contingency plan that was supposed to keep this from happening didn't get implemented or just wasn't sufficient."
That remains to be determined. It wasn't just one plan - there were redundant precautions. Multiple equipment failures might have overcame the perfectly sound plan that works on thousands of rigs today. Maybe they got a pressure kick that nobody has ever encountered before. No matter how many redundancies you put in something, there is ALWAYS a scenario to failure. There are something like 5600 rigs drilling at present. They've got their shit together, or you'd be knee-deep in crude.
"We're all warm and fluffy with open source, we're a safe alternative to java, honest, look."
.Net projects successfully, so I'm hardpressed to defend Java. We hired expensive, proven guns, too. We didn't half-ass it.
I was getting your point until you hit Java. After watching the litany of trainwrecks that is the expensive java experiment in our company, Microsoft IS a safe alternative. In fact, I'd rather replace all our "successful because they delivered" java projects with a group of elderly asians with abacuses... aba... abacii? That'd be a warm and fluffy alternative to Java.
In other areas of the company they've been delivering
"You can't "steal" the expectation of income."
Let's say I find myself a man to play the guitar at dinnertime each night. It's now the end of the week, and he has the "expectation" of income. He was deprived of the use of his time, and I enjoyed the fruits of his labour. If I choose to not pay him, have I not stolen from him?
Instead, let's say he recorded the dinnertime performances for me in advance. I have not agreed in advance to buy them, but he expects that if I do wish to listen to them during dinner I will pay him. Let's say I copy them, listen to them, and I do not pay. He has the "expectation" of income, he was deprived of the use of his time, and I enjoyed the fruits of his labour.
If I'm not stealing in the second case, I'm not stealing in the first.
"For the love of $deity why would _anybody_ still be using the DNS server that their ISP provides? Ignoring the multiple FREE DNS providers out there, it is trivally easy to setup your own caching DNS server regardless of the OS platform you use."
Because the internet stoppped being just for techies 10 years ago? Step out of your little bubble, you dweeb, and look around. First you have to give a crap about the concept of a DNS, which is exactly one step too far for the vast majority of folks.
Rightly so, too. If my family had to worry about things like that they would never have gotten any further than the occasional email.
In my past I've frequently been in your position - wondering why the whole world doesn't give a crap about some ridiculous thing I think is incorrect. However, this year I'm turning 40, and for some reason I'm starting to get the other perspective. The "ridiculous" is on the other side.
"The bill calls for a 6 percent tax on all deposits to be paid to state and tribal governments made by residents of their jurisdiction. For example, if someone living in Missouri puts $1,000 into an online gambling account anywhere in the country, $60 would go to Missouri's state government."
Imagine if you had to hand over six percent of the money in your pocket as taxes just to be allowed in the door of a casino. Incredible horseshit, no? To even suggest it is ludicrous. And yet there it is.
I'm glad I live in Canada where they don't tax your gambling winnings at all unless you're a professional gambler.
Sadly, as the U.S. continues to collapse into the black hole that is it's debt, more of this kind of thing will happen.
Epic Fail - "I have sigs turned off."
Well played.
Nothing to say but... my sig.
"Moderators, just because you don't understand a post doesn't mean it's offtopic. He's in effect saying "don't buy DRMed games, the GPL is the way to go". Overrated perhaps (although I don't agree that it is overrated), but it IS on topic."
That is so redundant in this thread that it spills over the sides and actually becomes redundant in hundreds of other slashdot stories. It's grade-a redundancy.
"People who buy Apple products are generally okay with being limited on capabilities."
While I'm in favour of jailbreaking and such, I think what you really mean is something other than limited on capabilities. Now if you mean "limited on capabilities" in the sense that the obtaining of apps is restricted to Apple's app store, well... restriction of source is only a restriction on capability if you can't find what you need at that source. If there's something you need to do on an iPhone, there's probably an application that'll do it.
I just got my iPhone, and I've been looking for an excuse to jailbreak it, but... it does everything I want it to do. I thought the inability to multitask (corrected, apparently, in iPhone OS/4) would bug me, but it turns out it's a non-issue.
The only thing I can think of offhand that Apple has restricted the capabilities of is flash, but in all honesty I haven't missed it at all.
If anybody thinks their IT job is dirty, they are sorely in need of a reality check.
I have relatives that run pig farms.
When I saw "Up" I saw 3D used perfectly for the first time. No gimmicky shots, no pointless stuff coming out of the screen... the 3D was an enhancement, nothing more. If 3D is used like that, I'm in. But I suspect more films will be like "Journey to the Center of the Earth" which was just abysmal. And the oscar for "Most Gratuitous Use of a Bolo Paddle in 3D" goes to...
I've considered throwing a brick through the front glass on city hall to indicate how I feel about my local government's obscene spending policies. Time spent playing online games is time during which they aren't spending ridiculous amounts of money on stupid, wasteful things.
I want them to do at least 80% less than they do, so if they waste a bunch of time on online games, that's okay with me.
"Though superstring theory requires 10 or 11 dimensions of space (from what little I understand), so serious physicists really believe those dimensions might exist."
I suspect string theory is wrong because it's too complex. I think at the core of all physics must be simplicity. If you get as complicated as string theory I think you're heading down the wrong path.
Physics, when distilled, should be elegant. When Einstein proposed mass-energy equivalence with a formula it changed the world - not because it was a complex relationship that only physicists could understand, but because it was so incredibly simple that it HAD to be right.