You know what? I think I'll take a photo of my cellphone's innards, photoshop conveniently spy-sounding labels into the photo, bring my cellphone to a university professor who will testify that my device has a microphone, a crystal, an antenna and a processor that definitely has the potential to turn it into spying device then write an article about it.
Except everything you are saying here is not nearly as absurd and ridiculous as you hope it would be.
The USA is engaged in warrantless spying to such an extent, that it's not even something targeted, but rather, it's a data mining operation of the highest order. And yes, cell phone data is mined, you can be sure of it. So yes, your cell phone is in all likelihood spying on you as we speak. It's spying on you for the benefit of the government and also for the benefit of the corporations.
Forget about shoulds and look at reality. I'm talking about responsibility and how it works.
For example, I think that the water should be dry, and when I step into it, I am not responsible for getting wet on the account of my "should" thinking. Does it work like that in reality? No, it does not.
Ask yourself: can customer behavior patterns influence the direction of Sony as a corporation? For example, can a boycott influence Sony's attitude at the executive levels? I think the answer is that a real boycott does have such an ability. So to the extent customers have the ability to influence corporate behaviors, the customers become responsible for exercising that ability with due diligence.
At the same time, does Sony need to wait to get boycotted in order to improve their behavior? Of course not. What does this mean? It means Sony holds a primary proximate responsibility for their own behaviors. Sony executives have more influence over what Sony does than do all the Sony customers put together. At the same time, the amount of influence the Sony customers have is not zero.
So this is a correct and balanced way to understand responsibility. Responsibility is always commensurate with the power you have to influence something. The more power, the more responsibility you have. And our or your power can get as low as epsilon, but never absolute 0. So we always have some responsibility for everything, however tiny it may be.
So it's not "all like this" or "all like that." The reality is somewhere between what you're talking about and what your opponent is talking about. I would say Sony has about 70% responsibility to govern its own behaviors in a moral way and all the customers put together have about 30%, roughly. You can even see it as a 50/50 split, but you have to remember that the customer side of the 50 is shared out among all the customers, while the Sony side is concentrated in the hands of the very few powerful executives.
You are having a difficult time realizing your claim that the tablet market will dry up is you applying your own point of view to everyone else
You're doing the same thing.
The thing that should clue you in that you are woefully wrong here is the phenomenal success of the iPad.
If the sales number are the only indicator of the success, then yes, the iPad is a success and so is Wii.
You seem to think people are just being suckered in by the hype and will end up agreeing with your nerd sensibilities, leaving the market to wither.
Nerd? Are you jumping to conclusions? Should I call your sensibilities "jock sensibilities"? Perhaps you're a nerd who thinks by praising iPad you can distance yourself from your nerdly past? And you're projecting this psychological flaw onto everyone you meet?
And yes, I do think people are suckered by the hype. In Wii's case people are also suckered by nostalgia. (How many adults have a warm glowy feelings about Nintendo based on their childhood Mario memories?) I think that hype actually works is a fact. Sad, but true.
Reality is people are highly satisfied with their iPads.
Really? How do you know this?
Reality is they enjoy playing games on them.
People play minefield to pass time at work. That doesn't mean they enjoy playing minefield.
Reality is most people aren't nerds, and it's almost solely nerds who seem to think iPads are no good.
Define "nerd". I have no idea what you're talking about. I am not from USA, btw. I didn't grow up with a nerd concept in my country of origin. Nerd-idea is purely an American thing. I've learned that Nerds and Jocks are supposed to be opposites. That's as far as my knowledge goes. So explain it.
You are applying your own personal views to others. Tablets failed because they were Windows computers with pen-input tacked on. Nobody wants that.
What the fuck is this? Are you blind? Can you read?
Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's not enjoyable for other people, including the well over 100 million iOS users.
I wasn't talking about iOS. I was talking specifically about tablets. I think the phone format is legitimate as a phone + PDA, which is how people use phones these days. Phones are necessary to make phone calls. Making phone calls is a killer app, so phones aren't going anywhere. If you can then tack something more onto a phone and keep it small and comfortable, that's just icing on the cake, and the killer app will carry this type of a mutt forward.
There are roughly 30 mil iPads in circulation. That doesn't mean the whole thing is not a fad. Hell, I am convinced Wii is a fad, even though it has an absurd number of hardware units in circulation. Many Wii owners agree with me (they say it's true that their Wii mostly collects dust). I know what your opinion is, and you're entitled to it. My opinion is that the fad will wear out unless iPads can find something better to do than play games (or get radically better at playing games). iPads suck for games.
Do you see how hugely and annoying the guy's finger is blocking the view while he's controlling the game? Guess what? I've been playing Nintendo DSi games for a while. Nintendo DSi is made for games. It comes with a stylus. I found that even though stylus is thin compared to a finger (and more accurate), it's still damn annoying in how it blocks the screen and keeps moving around right over the game area, constantly blocking different parts of the screen. Now, in Nintendo's case, they have two screens. So sometimes it doesn't matter, depending on the game. If the main content is on the top screen, then it's not so bad. If the main content is on the bottom screen, then it's bad. Not to mention using stylus is just annoying in and of itself, and using a greasy finger is even more annoying. Using your finger is an option with Nintendo DSi. I've used it that way plenty to know that I think it sucks, that it's an inferior mode of control.
Other people don't have my experience. Many of them are buying a touch-screen device for the first time. They've heard the hype but have never used touch-screens seriously. They'll get a chance to use them now and they'll soon make up their minds if they like it or not, and just how serious of games can be played on the device.
And yes, it's my opinion. I'm sorry you don't like it. Oh wait. No, I am not. I don't like your opinion either. Not to mention your blinding hypocrisy and bullshit.
Who's asking you to ditch your PC, PS3, Xbox 360, PSP or DSi? No one here is even asking you to get an iPad. But even if they were, it would just be an additional device to play games on. You didn't get rid of any of the other devices each time you bought a different one.
That's because each new device is great for playing games (with a great game library). The iPad sucks for playing games. I am a gamer. I know. I don't even like using stylus on Nintendo DSi. Just think how much I would "enjoy" using my smudgy greasy fingers on a screen, blocking the view of the game while controlling it? No thanks.
Most people don't have a cornucopia of gaming systems.
That's right. Most people are not game connoisseurs like yours truly.:) So when I talk about gaming, I actually somewhat know what I am talking about. I have years of experience on many devises with many input methods.
Why shouldn't they play games on it if they are having fun?
Gosh... this is idiotic. I am not here to tell others how to live their lives. I am just saying that in my opinion the tablets will generally fail in the market like they did the first time (remember all the tablet hype years ago?). I think the tablets might succeed if they abandon the "walled garden" philosophy and become extensible and configurable general purpose devices, but I don't see that happening yet. In this hypothetical scenario what will carry the tablets is not their form factor (which is OK) or input method (which sucks very badly), but the open nature.
Games are everywhere. What would be significantly more troubling for iPads would be if people *weren't* playing games on them.
I'm a huge gamer. Now tell me why I should play on an iPad. What will make me ditch my PC, PS3, xbox360, PSP and Nintendo DSi, and pick up iPad when I want to play some games?
If gaming is their primary use, then tablet is doomed because the general purpose computers, game consoles and portable game consoles are all much, much better for playing games. It's not a good sign if the device's primary use involves a function it sucks at.
The tablets failed to take off in the past and I think they'll fail again. They just don't fill a credible niche. They're largely useless. Maybe doctors and nurses will use them in hospitals to keep the patient notes, or maybe tablets can fill some other super-specialized industrial niche like that. But tablets suck as general purpose devices, and they suck as gaming devices as well.
Fuck innovation. I would settle for just any good non-dummified game that doesn't try to target the lowest common denominator. There just aren't any quality games around, period. Every game company is working hard to increase the poly count, to make everything voiced over and motion captures, and fuck the gameplay. Everything is made simpler and simpler. Ridiculous. I wish we could go back to the days of text bubbles when superior gameplay was the only way to stand out from the crowd.
Of course bad, boring, unoriginal and soulless music can't possibly be the problem. Trying to charge too much money can't be the problem either. Treating your customers as if they are thieves can't be the problem, nope... Suing innocent moms and pops for infringement and demanding 10 million dollars for each downloaded song can't possibly be the problem either.
Microsoft is a company made up of hundreds of development groups working on hundreds of products in a dozen divisions.
Most of the people who are on those teams care about the work they're doing, care about the products they release and want to release the best products possible.
So, relative to IE9, what it Microsoft up to? If I had to guess, a hard-working team of engineers, program managers and test engineers are busting their asses to make the best browser they can. They care more about standards than I'd hazard a guess most people on Slashdot do, and they want to make something that gives the best experience there is on the web.
You're saying that the wishes and desires of the Microsoft executive management are irrelevant and that what Microsoft does is all about its "in-the-treches" teams? I don't buy it.
It is absolutely a double edged sword since 2-faced people we like can be exposed lying just like people we don't like.
I don't get it. How is this a double-edged sword again? Seems like a win-win. I want to know that I like those people who truly deserve it. If someone exposes objectionable yet factual information to me about the people I like, I welcome it. Not to mention that I also have some capacity for forgiveness too, as I am sure do the others as well.
Why do you care that much about decorum? Stop with the superficial bullshit please. It's not like these people insert phrases like "epic fail" every 2 seconds of their speech. They used it appropriately and judiciously.
Today, open source is mainstream, with original believers such as Red Hat worth billions and superpowers such as Oracle buying in.
Can we please chill with the rhetoric? Oracle is not a superpower, for fuck's sake. Secondly, Oracle's relationship with open source is not entirely clear. Oracle currently seems to be at odds with at least some open source initiatives. So I wouldn't be saying that Oracle is "buying in" if I were in your place.
It's neither here nor there for the actual Free Software movement itself because the Free Software movement transcends governments, nations, and other such trifles. So any new user of the Free Software is a welcome addition, but to say that it's a breakthrough people are waiting for is a bit much.
FF, and especially FF4 are very fast for me on Macbook. As fast as Chrome for all intents and purposes. Of course that's not scientific, but then there do exist some benchmarks and you can look them up yourself.
These are the same type of guys that gave us statistically accurate risk modeling for the complex derivative securities and we know how well that turned out. One must be careful with mathematical models, especially when you're modeling sentiment.
Ignoring pleas of the people isn't exactly the kind of things he advocated.
Are you kidding me? Harmony of the state and living under a strict hierarchy are the linchpins of Confucious thought. The very idea that the "people" should be able to have a voice, let alone use it, would have been anathema to him and his contemporaries.
Contemporaries? Really now? There was a big diversity of opinion on this matter inside China even during the time of Confucious. Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) was a notorious critic of Confucian thinking, and Daoism, of which Chuang Tzu is the second highest ranking patriarch after Lao Tzu, is arguably as popular and as essentially Chinese as is Confucianism.
Slashdot Mirror
It's become somewhat out of control, and something people are treating as the most important thing going.
What an understatement.
Well said.
You know what? I think I'll take a photo of my cellphone's innards, photoshop conveniently spy-sounding labels into the photo, bring my cellphone to a university professor who will testify that my device has a microphone, a crystal, an antenna and a processor that definitely has the potential to turn it into spying device then write an article about it.
Except everything you are saying here is not nearly as absurd and ridiculous as you hope it would be.
The USA is engaged in warrantless spying to such an extent, that it's not even something targeted, but rather, it's a data mining operation of the highest order. And yes, cell phone data is mined, you can be sure of it. So yes, your cell phone is in all likelihood spying on you as we speak. It's spying on you for the benefit of the government and also for the benefit of the corporations.
Read this and think again about your cell phone:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer
Forget about shoulds and look at reality. I'm talking about responsibility and how it works.
For example, I think that the water should be dry, and when I step into it, I am not responsible for getting wet on the account of my "should" thinking. Does it work like that in reality? No, it does not.
Ask yourself: can customer behavior patterns influence the direction of Sony as a corporation? For example, can a boycott influence Sony's attitude at the executive levels? I think the answer is that a real boycott does have such an ability. So to the extent customers have the ability to influence corporate behaviors, the customers become responsible for exercising that ability with due diligence.
At the same time, does Sony need to wait to get boycotted in order to improve their behavior? Of course not. What does this mean? It means Sony holds a primary proximate responsibility for their own behaviors. Sony executives have more influence over what Sony does than do all the Sony customers put together. At the same time, the amount of influence the Sony customers have is not zero.
So this is a correct and balanced way to understand responsibility. Responsibility is always commensurate with the power you have to influence something. The more power, the more responsibility you have. And our or your power can get as low as epsilon, but never absolute 0. So we always have some responsibility for everything, however tiny it may be.
So it's not "all like this" or "all like that." The reality is somewhere between what you're talking about and what your opponent is talking about. I would say Sony has about 70% responsibility to govern its own behaviors in a moral way and all the customers put together have about 30%, roughly. You can even see it as a 50/50 split, but you have to remember that the customer side of the 50 is shared out among all the customers, while the Sony side is concentrated in the hands of the very few powerful executives.
You don't mess with the SEC.
LOL
You are having a difficult time realizing your claim that the tablet market will dry up is you applying your own point of view to everyone else
You're doing the same thing.
The thing that should clue you in that you are woefully wrong here is the phenomenal success of the iPad.
If the sales number are the only indicator of the success, then yes, the iPad is a success and so is Wii.
You seem to think people are just being suckered in by the hype and will end up agreeing with your nerd sensibilities, leaving the market to wither.
Nerd? Are you jumping to conclusions? Should I call your sensibilities "jock sensibilities"? Perhaps you're a nerd who thinks by praising iPad you can distance yourself from your nerdly past? And you're projecting this psychological flaw onto everyone you meet?
And yes, I do think people are suckered by the hype. In Wii's case people are also suckered by nostalgia. (How many adults have a warm glowy feelings about Nintendo based on their childhood Mario memories?) I think that hype actually works is a fact. Sad, but true.
Reality is people are highly satisfied with their iPads.
Really? How do you know this?
Reality is they enjoy playing games on them.
People play minefield to pass time at work. That doesn't mean they enjoy playing minefield.
Reality is most people aren't nerds, and it's almost solely nerds who seem to think iPads are no good.
Define "nerd". I have no idea what you're talking about. I am not from USA, btw. I didn't grow up with a nerd concept in my country of origin. Nerd-idea is purely an American thing. I've learned that Nerds and Jocks are supposed to be opposites. That's as far as my knowledge goes. So explain it.
Simulated 3D is different from the real 3D though.
You are applying your own personal views to others. Tablets failed because they were Windows computers with pen-input tacked on. Nobody wants that.
What the fuck is this? Are you blind? Can you read?
Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's not enjoyable for other people, including the well over 100 million iOS users.
I wasn't talking about iOS. I was talking specifically about tablets. I think the phone format is legitimate as a phone + PDA, which is how people use phones these days. Phones are necessary to make phone calls. Making phone calls is a killer app, so phones aren't going anywhere. If you can then tack something more onto a phone and keep it small and comfortable, that's just icing on the cake, and the killer app will carry this type of a mutt forward.
There are roughly 30 mil iPads in circulation. That doesn't mean the whole thing is not a fad. Hell, I am convinced Wii is a fad, even though it has an absurd number of hardware units in circulation. Many Wii owners agree with me (they say it's true that their Wii mostly collects dust). I know what your opinion is, and you're entitled to it. My opinion is that the fad will wear out unless iPads can find something better to do than play games (or get radically better at playing games). iPads suck for games.
Take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olXj_FwJoog
Do you see how hugely and annoying the guy's finger is blocking the view while he's controlling the game? Guess what? I've been playing Nintendo DSi games for a while. Nintendo DSi is made for games. It comes with a stylus. I found that even though stylus is thin compared to a finger (and more accurate), it's still damn annoying in how it blocks the screen and keeps moving around right over the game area, constantly blocking different parts of the screen. Now, in Nintendo's case, they have two screens. So sometimes it doesn't matter, depending on the game. If the main content is on the top screen, then it's not so bad. If the main content is on the bottom screen, then it's bad. Not to mention using stylus is just annoying in and of itself, and using a greasy finger is even more annoying. Using your finger is an option with Nintendo DSi. I've used it that way plenty to know that I think it sucks, that it's an inferior mode of control.
Other people don't have my experience. Many of them are buying a touch-screen device for the first time. They've heard the hype but have never used touch-screens seriously. They'll get a chance to use them now and they'll soon make up their minds if they like it or not, and just how serious of games can be played on the device.
And yes, it's my opinion. I'm sorry you don't like it. Oh wait. No, I am not. I don't like your opinion either. Not to mention your blinding hypocrisy and bullshit.
Who's asking you to ditch your PC, PS3, Xbox 360, PSP or DSi? No one here is even asking you to get an iPad. But even if they were, it would just be an additional device to play games on. You didn't get rid of any of the other devices each time you bought a different one.
That's because each new device is great for playing games (with a great game library). The iPad sucks for playing games. I am a gamer. I know. I don't even like using stylus on Nintendo DSi. Just think how much I would "enjoy" using my smudgy greasy fingers on a screen, blocking the view of the game while controlling it? No thanks.
Most people don't have a cornucopia of gaming systems.
That's right. Most people are not game connoisseurs like yours truly. :) So when I talk about gaming, I actually somewhat know what I am talking about. I have years of experience on many devises with many input methods.
Why shouldn't they play games on it if they are having fun?
Gosh... this is idiotic. I am not here to tell others how to live their lives. I am just saying that in my opinion the tablets will generally fail in the market like they did the first time (remember all the tablet hype years ago?). I think the tablets might succeed if they abandon the "walled garden" philosophy and become extensible and configurable general purpose devices, but I don't see that happening yet. In this hypothetical scenario what will carry the tablets is not their form factor (which is OK) or input method (which sucks very badly), but the open nature.
Games are everywhere. What would be significantly more troubling for iPads would be if people *weren't* playing games on them.
I'm a huge gamer. Now tell me why I should play on an iPad. What will make me ditch my PC, PS3, xbox360, PSP and Nintendo DSi, and pick up iPad when I want to play some games?
And please don't forget that gaming also was the main reason PCs took of back in the day.
PC were great for gaming. They were both open and very flexible devices in terms of both input and output.
If gaming is their primary use, then tablet is doomed because the general purpose computers, game consoles and portable game consoles are all much, much better for playing games. It's not a good sign if the device's primary use involves a function it sucks at.
The tablets failed to take off in the past and I think they'll fail again. They just don't fill a credible niche. They're largely useless. Maybe doctors and nurses will use them in hospitals to keep the patient notes, or maybe tablets can fill some other super-specialized industrial niche like that. But tablets suck as general purpose devices, and they suck as gaming devices as well.
Fuck innovation. I would settle for just any good non-dummified game that doesn't try to target the lowest common denominator. There just aren't any quality games around, period. Every game company is working hard to increase the poly count, to make everything voiced over and motion captures, and fuck the gameplay. Everything is made simpler and simpler. Ridiculous. I wish we could go back to the days of text bubbles when superior gameplay was the only way to stand out from the crowd.
Of course bad, boring, unoriginal and soulless music can't possibly be the problem. Trying to charge too much money can't be the problem either. Treating your customers as if they are thieves can't be the problem, nope... Suing innocent moms and pops for infringement and demanding 10 million dollars for each downloaded song can't possibly be the problem either.
Oh right, it's Pandora's fault!
Programmers already rule the world.
"The Code Is the Law" --Lessig
Some programmers know that they rule the world. Some don't. That's the only difference.
Microsoft is a company made up of hundreds of development groups working on hundreds of products in a dozen divisions.
Most of the people who are on those teams care about the work they're doing, care about the products they release and want to release the best products possible.
So, relative to IE9, what it Microsoft up to? If I had to guess, a hard-working team of engineers, program managers and test engineers are busting their asses to make the best browser they can. They care more about standards than I'd hazard a guess most people on Slashdot do, and they want to make something that gives the best experience there is on the web.
You're saying that the wishes and desires of the Microsoft executive management are irrelevant and that what Microsoft does is all about its "in-the-treches" teams? I don't buy it.
How much did that low id cost ya?
It is absolutely a double edged sword since 2-faced people we like can be exposed lying just like people we don't like.
I don't get it. How is this a double-edged sword again? Seems like a win-win. I want to know that I like those people who truly deserve it. If someone exposes objectionable yet factual information to me about the people I like, I welcome it. Not to mention that I also have some capacity for forgiveness too, as I am sure do the others as well.
So what? If you don't like closed content, just don't use it!
And if you don't like the CPUs that support the creation of the closed content, just don't buy them!
Why do you care that much about decorum? Stop with the superficial bullshit please. It's not like these people insert phrases like "epic fail" every 2 seconds of their speech. They used it appropriately and judiciously.
Today, open source is mainstream, with original believers such as Red Hat worth billions and superpowers such as Oracle buying in.
Can we please chill with the rhetoric? Oracle is not a superpower, for fuck's sake. Secondly, Oracle's relationship with open source is not entirely clear. Oracle currently seems to be at odds with at least some open source initiatives. So I wouldn't be saying that Oracle is "buying in" if I were in your place.
It's neither here nor there for the actual Free Software movement itself because the Free Software movement transcends governments, nations, and other such trifles. So any new user of the Free Software is a welcome addition, but to say that it's a breakthrough people are waiting for is a bit much.
I seriously hope Firefox doesn't change how the awesome bar works. That's one of the many things I prefer in Firefox to Chrome and all other browsers.
FF, and especially FF4 are very fast for me on Macbook. As fast as Chrome for all intents and purposes. Of course that's not scientific, but then there do exist some benchmarks and you can look them up yourself.
These are the same type of guys that gave us statistically accurate risk modeling for the complex derivative securities and we know how well that turned out. One must be careful with mathematical models, especially when you're modeling sentiment.
Ignoring pleas of the people isn't exactly the kind of things he advocated.
Are you kidding me? Harmony of the state and living under a strict hierarchy are the linchpins of Confucious thought. The very idea that the "people" should be able to have a voice, let alone use it, would have been anathema to him and his contemporaries.
Contemporaries? Really now? There was a big diversity of opinion on this matter inside China even during the time of Confucious. Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) was a notorious critic of Confucian thinking, and Daoism, of which Chuang Tzu is the second highest ranking patriarch after Lao Tzu, is arguably as popular and as essentially Chinese as is Confucianism.