Apple has an excuse: it doesn't want to include broken shit by a bunch of lazy fuckwits who couldn't build a working toaster let alone maintain a Mac port of a popular web browser plugin. They don't want to include something that causes a ton of crashes, instability, memory leaks and security holes. And so it is not including Flash.
There are plenty of reasons to criticise Apple. The App Store sounds like a pretty Orwellian idea. Not including a bug-ridden pile of shit in their operating system by default is one of the better things Apple have done. If it leads to the demise of Flash quicker, I'll be very happy.
Personally, I don't get all the iTunes hate. There's a lot I don't like about Apple, but iTunes is one of the few not-completely-shite MP3 players out there because it can do handy little things like remember where you are in audiobooks, something the open source players have yet to catch onto despite almost a decade of iTunes/iPod dominance...
How does pushing HTML5/JavaScript-based web apps "necessitate" - as the GP said - the removal of Java and other "old" technology?
The GP said that as with Flash, Apple are "helping to move old tech out". This is true: they helped rid us of floppy disks and serial/LPT ports in favour of USB, were one of the first computer companies to push wireless etc.
But I don't see how for HTML5 or any other new technology to come about, one must throw away our 'old' JVM? Did we have to throw away C when Python came out?
Sometimes you do have to throw away old technology - I'm glad that Intel et al. are finally getting around to replacing BIOS with UEFI. But I don't see how a world of webapps "necessitates getting rid of" the JVM.
The push for getting everyone into HTML 5 using Javascript and all of those technologies necessitates getting rid of the old ways.
By which you mean the JVM? It has nothing to do with "internet standards" ffs.
You do know that 'Java' is to 'JavaScript' as 'car' is to 'carpet'. Beyond a few shared letters for early buzzword compliance, and things like the Rhino interpreter, there is no real relationship between the two.
All those sexy HTML5/JavaScript apps have to be written in programming languages and hosted on servers. And plenty of people are building on top of the JVM. Large chunks of both Twitter and Foursquare are written in Scala, a JVM language. Why? Oh, something about how it is good for long-running processes due to something ridiculous like a million engineer-hours going into JVM development.
If we should get rid of technology simply because it is old, let's get rid of C. No, wait, let's not. Because it is a useful and practical technology, and we should base our technical decisions on technical merit not on buzzword compliance and what appeals to Web 2.0 shiny-seekers.
Not all academics suck at it. The LaTeX crowd (not just maths/physics/comp sci, increasingly social sci., philosophy and so on) these days tend to stick everything in version control. With distributed version control like Git/Mercurial etc., it is pretty easy to have a complete history of your work stuffed onto a few different machines and backed up to some online service too.
Being able to get diffs, branch on chapters and work out the average age of different sections of work is a neat trick that goes with it.
And now normal people are starting to use Google Docs, Dropbox and all sorts of other cloud services, there is no longer any excuse. Yeah, you may lose your iTunes folder, but your Documents/Dissertation folder should be in the damn Dropbox.
Reminds me of the philosophy department at the University of Sydney which, during the heyday of the student movement split into two departments - General Philosophy (which was run as a little Communist collective, trying to live by the various French poststructuralist and postmodern theorists) and Traditional and Modern Philosophy (which taught mainstream Anglo-American philosophy in a normal way). From an article on the topic:
The Department was fully democratic, with all staff and students having the right to speak and vote on matters of course content, assessment and appointments. Meetings of up to 500 were known, though student apathy kept most down to some 20. Formal exams were eliminated, and in some subjects students assessed themselves.
IIRC, they also ended up assessing political philosophy modules by counting attendance at various political protests. The 'Traditional and Modern' department eventually 'won' in the 90s after poaching various other top professors over, and Sydney has gone back to being a pretty good department.
(When I see people trying to take what works on the Internet and apply it back to offline society, I sort of want to shake them and say "yeah, there's a reason we started doing it this way online - because it's online, duh. The mechanics and economics of it might not really work out in the same way if you are doing it in real life.")
I'm also not sure what Roblimo's problem with Atlassian or proprietary software is; from my experience Atlassian produces fairly good software and charges far less than competitors.
Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha! You are joking, right?
Confluence is classic enterprise software. Purchased by people who never have to use it. I've used it and it is unintuitive shit. They've taken what should be a fundamentally simple piece of software - a wiki - and made it into the bastard lovechild of Lotus Notes and Outlook so they can add a bunch of bullet point features. The result is a horrific monstrosity that nobody would ever use if it weren't for Enterprise Architects needing Important Enterprise Features.
Yes, there are people who aren't total social media douchebags who use Twitter.
HootSuite uses ow.ly which for quite a long time wrapped links in a stupid 'social toolbar', a sort of crap Twitter version of the DiggBar. Horrible. If I go to someone's Twitter profile and see that they have mostly been posting from HootSuite, I conclude the same thing as when I see they use Outlook for their e-mail.
He doesn't even have to do that: sell all the print copies to the CIA (or whoever) and then make it available as a (paid-for) e-book. Good luck trying to buy up all the copies of an infinitely reproducible ePub or PDF or Kindle file!
It is also a highly ineffective censorship technique: it only takes a few copies to get out into the hands of newspaper reviewers, bloggers or other people who might be able to lead public opinion for the public to demand a reprint. And since you can't copyright facts, if anyone gets a copy they can simply rewrite the facts (sort of like Wikipedia does) and republish those in a newspaper or online etc.
Buying up all the copies can work in some limited domains: if you are a local politician who wants to keep a story under wraps, going out and buying all the copies of a local paper might be effective. But at the level of international politics and military affairs? Can't see it being effective except as a marketing technique ("OMG look the government are trying to censor it! Go buy it!") that has been used most effectively by the video game and movie industries.
Say I believed there was an incredibly sexy pornographic performer beckoning to me at the end of my bed and requesting that we engage in certain activities that might be considered lewd everywhere but the darkest reaches of the Internet. I wake up to find it is just a sibling telling me to get out of bed because it is time for breakfast. But, you know, in my mind, it was a porn star. Therefore, my subconscious inner mind created a porn star and placed it at the end of my bed.
The figment of your subconscious mind if not a real thing. It cannot beckon you on and offer to perform sexual acts, nor can it can conspire with another. Another person may exploit your suggestibility or paranoia, but we have perfectly good phrases for that: "exploiting your paranoia" or "exploiting your suggestibility".
Most people probably don't give a shit about iTunes. It works reasonably well. There's a bunch of people who moan about it a lot on the Internet though.
People can't type nearly as fast as with a keyboard
You can shorten that to simply "People can't type". They really can't. Find a secretarial position being offered in central London and I bet you I could type with enough speed and accuracy on my iPad or netbook or even my goddamn phone to meet the requirements for the job. And that is because as most people - even those people who are paid good money to use computers all day long - have never been taught to type properly. The idea that people are going to be making major buying decisions based on keyboard quality is absolutely laughable. The Slashdot crowd might - but nobody else is.
Really: half of the teenage population of Europe has been content for the last fifteen years to type voluminous amounts using nothing more than the buttons on their mobile phones.
Example - I was in a mobile phone shop in the UK a few years ago buying a cheapy pay-as-you-go phone for an elderly relative. There was a 20-something girl in there who was renegotiating her phone contract after she had a bill through for >130 GBP (that's 200 USD) all in SMS messages sent from her phone (unlike in the USA, most countries it is sender pays for SMS rather than recipient). This wasn't an iPhone or a BlackBerry or something with an on-screen or QWERTY physical keyboard. No, 130 GBP's work of SMS messages sent using the numeric keypad. She left the shop very satisfied as they found a contract package for ~80 GBP a month that would give her the same amount of texts she was currently paying >130 GBP a month for. That has gotta be 2000 messages a month, all sent from one of the most horrible text input methods ever devised.
Simple solution to that: SSH into your computer from your iPad. I do it all the time, and use Vim and IRb (Interactive Ruby REPL) and control rtorrent (I do download a lot of *cough*Linux ISOs*cough*) in a screen session. iSSH for the iPad works great.
You can also jailbreak, and hiding underneath is a FreeBSD system which you can get a terminal emulator for from the Cydia store, and then install all sorts of programming language runtimes.
Or you can pay Apple $99 to be part of their developer programme and sign and install whatever you want on your own device. No limitations there - just build it in Xcode and send it up the wire to the device. The "no REPLs" rule only applies to stuff in the store.
Farmville isn't a Windows application. And, didn't you hear? Farmville is being ported to iOS.
VLC, WMP, MCE? Hint: tap the little button that says "Video" or "YouTube" for video, or for audio tap the button that says "iPod". And if you want to play XviD, CineXPlayer is free. Not to mention the app store has all the Spotify, Hulu, Last.fm and so on action that you could ever desire.
Browser? Safari on the iPad does act the same as the desktop browser for "simple HTML elements". Except Flash, which isn't a simple HTML element, it is a badly-programmed piece of shit plugin that gives you as many spammy ads and crashes as it does valuable experiences. And there are plenty of alternative browsers for the iPad - many of them free - which add a wide range of functionality. They all use the same rendering engine though - Safari's WebKit.
While this may not help a company like Apple, Google's Android platform allows new companies to enter the market without having to write the entire software stack. This in turn should drive prices down.
Oh yes, Android will save us! It'll let Samsung and $YOUR_LOCAL_MOBILE_CARRIER fuck you over instead of Steve Jobs. The fact that people were having to crack their own phones to install Google's updated code while waiting for the mobile carriers to get their shit in order just shows you how fucked up the Android platform already is.
Don't get me wrong: I'd love it if Android were to work. But all it seems to be doing is letting you switch from having Apple as your master to having a complex and confusing interplay of masters. Apple has one clear motivation: to sell shiny things. But Android? Google want my personal data. Vodafone want to sell me long phone contracts and lock me down for two years at a go. And HTC want to sell my shiny things and then never update the software because, well, I'm not their client - Vodafone is and, well, software is up to the carrier. Apple may rape the customers wallet, but at least you don't become part of a real political clusterfuck.
What are you talking about? iTunes works fine. The primary reason I bought an iPod is because it syncs with iTunes whereas most of the other MP3 players required me to manage files manually. And 'syncs with iTunes' includes convenient things like if I'm listening to an audiobook or podcast, it remembers where I am and syncs that back to the computer so that I can keep listening from where I left off. I've looked and looked for this kind of feature in any other desktop media management software for Linux (I like to keep my Linux escape plans ready so if Apple stops doing the sort of things I need, I can pack up and leave easily) - and none of them seem to implement it. And precisely zero of them have any way of doing that kind of sync with media players. Archos and SanDisk and all these guys have had years to get this shit working - and, like with Linux generally, to fund development of a good media player app - and the best I can get is "write your own rsync script". Fuck that. iTunes lets me plug my device in, have it sync in a few minutes and have all the new shit I want to listen ready to listen to without me having to drag and drop anything in my damn file manager.
Similarly, I don't get the wireless hype. If I want to move a large movie file from my desktop computer to my media player, it'll take much, much less time over USB than over wifi. Yes, yes, I can stream it. But I can't stream it when I'm in the railway tunnel.
I've got a top-end Sony Walkman phone that I won in a hacking competition a year or so back. It has an MP3 player functionality, but no way of syncing iTunes+iPod style. I've used it about once when my computer was broken and I couldn't sync my iPod for a few days. Truly awful.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has an excuse: it doesn't want to include broken shit by a bunch of lazy fuckwits who couldn't build a working toaster let alone maintain a Mac port of a popular web browser plugin. They don't want to include something that causes a ton of crashes, instability, memory leaks and security holes. And so it is not including Flash.
There are plenty of reasons to criticise Apple. The App Store sounds like a pretty Orwellian idea. Not including a bug-ridden pile of shit in their operating system by default is one of the better things Apple have done. If it leads to the demise of Flash quicker, I'll be very happy.
rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app/
There. Fixed that for you. Enjoy your Zune.
Personally, I don't get all the iTunes hate. There's a lot I don't like about Apple, but iTunes is one of the few not-completely-shite MP3 players out there because it can do handy little things like remember where you are in audiobooks, something the open source players have yet to catch onto despite almost a decade of iTunes/iPod dominance...
How does pushing HTML5/JavaScript-based web apps "necessitate" - as the GP said - the removal of Java and other "old" technology?
The GP said that as with Flash, Apple are "helping to move old tech out". This is true: they helped rid us of floppy disks and serial/LPT ports in favour of USB, were one of the first computer companies to push wireless etc.
But I don't see how for HTML5 or any other new technology to come about, one must throw away our 'old' JVM? Did we have to throw away C when Python came out?
Sometimes you do have to throw away old technology - I'm glad that Intel et al. are finally getting around to replacing BIOS with UEFI. But I don't see how a world of webapps "necessitates getting rid of" the JVM.
By which you mean the JVM? It has nothing to do with "internet standards" ffs.
You do know that 'Java' is to 'JavaScript' as 'car' is to 'carpet'. Beyond a few shared letters for early buzzword compliance, and things like the Rhino interpreter, there is no real relationship between the two.
All those sexy HTML5/JavaScript apps have to be written in programming languages and hosted on servers. And plenty of people are building on top of the JVM. Large chunks of both Twitter and Foursquare are written in Scala, a JVM language. Why? Oh, something about how it is good for long-running processes due to something ridiculous like a million engineer-hours going into JVM development.
If we should get rid of technology simply because it is old, let's get rid of C. No, wait, let's not. Because it is a useful and practical technology, and we should base our technical decisions on technical merit not on buzzword compliance and what appeals to Web 2.0 shiny-seekers.
Not all academics suck at it. The LaTeX crowd (not just maths/physics/comp sci, increasingly social sci., philosophy and so on) these days tend to stick everything in version control. With distributed version control like Git/Mercurial etc., it is pretty easy to have a complete history of your work stuffed onto a few different machines and backed up to some online service too.
Being able to get diffs, branch on chapters and work out the average age of different sections of work is a neat trick that goes with it.
And now normal people are starting to use Google Docs, Dropbox and all sorts of other cloud services, there is no longer any excuse. Yeah, you may lose your iTunes folder, but your Documents/Dissertation folder should be in the damn Dropbox.
Reminds me of the philosophy department at the University of Sydney which, during the heyday of the student movement split into two departments - General Philosophy (which was run as a little Communist collective, trying to live by the various French poststructuralist and postmodern theorists) and Traditional and Modern Philosophy (which taught mainstream Anglo-American philosophy in a normal way). From an article on the topic:
IIRC, they also ended up assessing political philosophy modules by counting attendance at various political protests. The 'Traditional and Modern' department eventually 'won' in the 90s after poaching various other top professors over, and Sydney has gone back to being a pretty good department.
(When I see people trying to take what works on the Internet and apply it back to offline society, I sort of want to shake them and say "yeah, there's a reason we started doing it this way online - because it's online, duh. The mechanics and economics of it might not really work out in the same way if you are doing it in real life.")
Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha! You are joking, right?
Confluence is classic enterprise software. Purchased by people who never have to use it. I've used it and it is unintuitive shit. They've taken what should be a fundamentally simple piece of software - a wiki - and made it into the bastard lovechild of Lotus Notes and Outlook so they can add a bunch of bullet point features. The result is a horrific monstrosity that nobody would ever use if it weren't for Enterprise Architects needing Important Enterprise Features.
FTFY
If only.
Yep, I'm using two hulking Dell Trinitron CRT 21" monitors (1600x1200) that I got for free off some dude on LiveJournal many years ago. They rock.
Although the 24" Samsung monitor my I'm testing on a machine I just built for my parents is really tempting me to switch over to LCDs.
1. Write Slashdot comments while working and make mistake.
2. Notice afterwards.
3. Get annoyed.
"Get mouse from TFA" of course.
1. Get article from TFA.
2. Breed it with the OpenOffice Mouse.
3. ???
4. Profit, I guess. Or just stare at the combined ugliness.
The conditional word "if" was included for your convenience.
It is now FIXED.
http://twitter.com/delbius/status/25120366027
Yes, there are people who aren't total social media douchebags who use Twitter.
HootSuite uses ow.ly which for quite a long time wrapped links in a stupid 'social toolbar', a sort of crap Twitter version of the DiggBar. Horrible. If I go to someone's Twitter profile and see that they have mostly been posting from HootSuite, I conclude the same thing as when I see they use Outlook for their e-mail.
That's not a great solution: because Twitter shortens lots of links through t.co - meaning you'll click on links on Twitter and go to 0.0.0.0
The actual solution: use a native client or the mobile web version ( http://m.twitter.com/ ) until Twitter fixes the exploit.
If you want to use the web interface, the mobile version isn't affected: http://m.twitter.com/
He doesn't even have to do that: sell all the print copies to the CIA (or whoever) and then make it available as a (paid-for) e-book. Good luck trying to buy up all the copies of an infinitely reproducible ePub or PDF or Kindle file!
It is also a highly ineffective censorship technique: it only takes a few copies to get out into the hands of newspaper reviewers, bloggers or other people who might be able to lead public opinion for the public to demand a reprint. And since you can't copyright facts, if anyone gets a copy they can simply rewrite the facts (sort of like Wikipedia does) and republish those in a newspaper or online etc.
Buying up all the copies can work in some limited domains: if you are a local politician who wants to keep a story under wraps, going out and buying all the copies of a local paper might be effective. But at the level of international politics and military affairs? Can't see it being effective except as a marketing technique ("OMG look the government are trying to censor it! Go buy it!") that has been used most effectively by the video game and movie industries.
Say I believed there was an incredibly sexy pornographic performer beckoning to me at the end of my bed and requesting that we engage in certain activities that might be considered lewd everywhere but the darkest reaches of the Internet. I wake up to find it is just a sibling telling me to get out of bed because it is time for breakfast. But, you know, in my mind, it was a porn star. Therefore, my subconscious inner mind created a porn star and placed it at the end of my bed.
The figment of your subconscious mind if not a real thing. It cannot beckon you on and offer to perform sexual acts, nor can it can conspire with another. Another person may exploit your suggestibility or paranoia, but we have perfectly good phrases for that: "exploiting your paranoia" or "exploiting your suggestibility".
Stats or GTFO thanks.
Most people probably don't give a shit about iTunes. It works reasonably well. There's a bunch of people who moan about it a lot on the Internet though.
You can shorten that to simply "People can't type". They really can't. Find a secretarial position being offered in central London and I bet you I could type with enough speed and accuracy on my iPad or netbook or even my goddamn phone to meet the requirements for the job. And that is because as most people - even those people who are paid good money to use computers all day long - have never been taught to type properly. The idea that people are going to be making major buying decisions based on keyboard quality is absolutely laughable. The Slashdot crowd might - but nobody else is.
Really: half of the teenage population of Europe has been content for the last fifteen years to type voluminous amounts using nothing more than the buttons on their mobile phones.
Example - I was in a mobile phone shop in the UK a few years ago buying a cheapy pay-as-you-go phone for an elderly relative. There was a 20-something girl in there who was renegotiating her phone contract after she had a bill through for >130 GBP (that's 200 USD) all in SMS messages sent from her phone (unlike in the USA, most countries it is sender pays for SMS rather than recipient). This wasn't an iPhone or a BlackBerry or something with an on-screen or QWERTY physical keyboard. No, 130 GBP's work of SMS messages sent using the numeric keypad. She left the shop very satisfied as they found a contract package for ~80 GBP a month that would give her the same amount of texts she was currently paying >130 GBP a month for. That has gotta be 2000 messages a month, all sent from one of the most horrible text input methods ever devised.
Simple solution to that: SSH into your computer from your iPad. I do it all the time, and use Vim and IRb (Interactive Ruby REPL) and control rtorrent (I do download a lot of *cough*Linux ISOs*cough*) in a screen session. iSSH for the iPad works great.
You can also jailbreak, and hiding underneath is a FreeBSD system which you can get a terminal emulator for from the Cydia store, and then install all sorts of programming language runtimes.
Or you can pay Apple $99 to be part of their developer programme and sign and install whatever you want on your own device. No limitations there - just build it in Xcode and send it up the wire to the device. The "no REPLs" rule only applies to stuff in the store.
Farmville isn't a Windows application. And, didn't you hear? Farmville is being ported to iOS.
VLC, WMP, MCE? Hint: tap the little button that says "Video" or "YouTube" for video, or for audio tap the button that says "iPod". And if you want to play XviD, CineXPlayer is free. Not to mention the app store has all the Spotify, Hulu, Last.fm and so on action that you could ever desire.
Browser? Safari on the iPad does act the same as the desktop browser for "simple HTML elements". Except Flash, which isn't a simple HTML element, it is a badly-programmed piece of shit plugin that gives you as many spammy ads and crashes as it does valuable experiences. And there are plenty of alternative browsers for the iPad - many of them free - which add a wide range of functionality. They all use the same rendering engine though - Safari's WebKit.
Oh yes, Android will save us! It'll let Samsung and $YOUR_LOCAL_MOBILE_CARRIER fuck you over instead of Steve Jobs. The fact that people were having to crack their own phones to install Google's updated code while waiting for the mobile carriers to get their shit in order just shows you how fucked up the Android platform already is.
Don't get me wrong: I'd love it if Android were to work. But all it seems to be doing is letting you switch from having Apple as your master to having a complex and confusing interplay of masters. Apple has one clear motivation: to sell shiny things. But Android? Google want my personal data. Vodafone want to sell me long phone contracts and lock me down for two years at a go. And HTC want to sell my shiny things and then never update the software because, well, I'm not their client - Vodafone is and, well, software is up to the carrier. Apple may rape the customers wallet, but at least you don't become part of a real political clusterfuck.
What are you talking about? iTunes works fine. The primary reason I bought an iPod is because it syncs with iTunes whereas most of the other MP3 players required me to manage files manually. And 'syncs with iTunes' includes convenient things like if I'm listening to an audiobook or podcast, it remembers where I am and syncs that back to the computer so that I can keep listening from where I left off. I've looked and looked for this kind of feature in any other desktop media management software for Linux (I like to keep my Linux escape plans ready so if Apple stops doing the sort of things I need, I can pack up and leave easily) - and none of them seem to implement it. And precisely zero of them have any way of doing that kind of sync with media players. Archos and SanDisk and all these guys have had years to get this shit working - and, like with Linux generally, to fund development of a good media player app - and the best I can get is "write your own rsync script". Fuck that. iTunes lets me plug my device in, have it sync in a few minutes and have all the new shit I want to listen ready to listen to without me having to drag and drop anything in my damn file manager.
Similarly, I don't get the wireless hype. If I want to move a large movie file from my desktop computer to my media player, it'll take much, much less time over USB than over wifi. Yes, yes, I can stream it. But I can't stream it when I'm in the railway tunnel.
I've got a top-end Sony Walkman phone that I won in a hacking competition a year or so back. It has an MP3 player functionality, but no way of syncing iTunes+iPod style. I've used it about once when my computer was broken and I couldn't sync my iPod for a few days. Truly awful.