I think it's the forced weekly fellatio on Steve's huge demonic black-barbed member that is the problem - the Apple store employees want more of it but there simply isn't enough Jobs' penis to go round...
Look in China at Foxconn's factories where most of Apple's components are made. How much do the employees there get paid?
And what benefits did the families of these people get after the explosion?
Why does any company move manufacturing to Asia unless it is PURELY to cut down production costs by paying lower salaries and giving fewer benefits?
You go to any country in the Western World and there are areas where properties are expensive and the cost of living is high. In pretty much all cases, those areas are so expensive because they are close to commercial parks and big business estates because people like living as close as possible to their places of work.
The net result is that the very presence of those companies and workplaces has forced up the costs of living close to them - so whether or not CEOs of corporations care to admit it, the fact is that companies have a huge effect on social infrastructure. Consequently, if you are working and your cost of living is rising because you live close to your place of work, then you have a right to expect to take home at least the same salary, in real terms, year-after-year.
If you have given people a good enough salary to allow them to live relatively comfortably, then you cannot expect them to suddenly start accepting lower living standards just because you don't want to pay them any more.
The job market works really well without unions and regulation.
Utter rubbish! There may well be less unionisation in the workplace than there was, say, 30 years ago but the good working conditions and benefits that a lot us enjoy now were as a result of unions fighting for those back then.
The idea of a corporation is very simple - you make as much profit as possible by spending as little money as possible, and if you are the CEO or on the board of directors of a company, making money is your prime responsibility to the shareholders.
Statutory days off and free healthcare cost money and any CEO who gaves those out freely would be kicked out by the shareholders unless it had previously been shown that such benefits lead to a happier workforce and better productivity. CEOs did not discover that themselves, it was the unions that fought for those and got them in the first place - now they are standard benefits for many people because they create more profit than they cost to implement due to happier employees.
But those benefits did NOT come out of thin air - they were fought for by unions.
Who the hell do you think YOU are telling someone else how good THEIR employment benefits should be???
Or is this like the "drug dealer & addict" scenario where you're scared his actions my affect you getting your regular Apple fix?
Sorry, but in civilised society, if you work for a company that makes huge profits that you have worked towards creating, then you should have every right to ask for a better share in that profit and/or better conditions as a result.
Yes, we have instances where union power has been allowed to become far too great - but the fact is that most of us in the Western World work 40 hour weeks for reasonable pay and benefits, and in reasonable surroundings not sweatshops precisely BECAUSE unions fought the bosses for those rights.
That's a paradox because as I understand it, you go into an Apple store in the first place to buy yourself a new electronic friend since everyone else in the human race thinks you're an elitist twat.
Judging by these mindless Apple puppet-droids is it not just a case of locating the big plastic button in the middle of their backs, releasing the small plastic panel and just popping out their batteries?
I know women do get bigger when they are pregnant - but even they need to understand that their size would need to increase many millions of times over before they generated enough gravitational pull such that the world did actually revolve around them.
Stop with the "Lactating Mafia" nonsense - YOU decided to have kids, YOU deal with it and be thankful to those of us who don't have them that we're still prepared to subsidise their free schooling etc. through our taxes.
Having not spent most of my earnings on child-rearing, I will be able to afford to employ yours or someone else's kids to change my bags and wipe my backside in my old age.
The reason that there is no Apple in the title is because the five people worldwide who have Mac computers could not generate enough revenue on iTunes if all the Windows people were alienated from using it because they thought it was an Apple-only service.
Below are some useful phrases that I have learnt on Slashdot over the past year or so that will help you translate Fanboi-speak to English, and vice-versa:
English: iCloud sues Apple over iCloud name usage. Fanboi-speak: It's iCloud's fault for not registering the name properly.
English: Apple sues iCloud over iCloud name usage. Fanboi-speak: It's iCloud's fault for not registering the name properly.
English: Steve Jobs kills puppies. Fanboi-speak: Steve Jobs takes positive steps on problems of dog littering and potential spread of rabies.
English: Steve Ballmer kills puppies. Fanboi-speak: Steve Ballmer kills puppies due to anger at number of viruses in Windows.
English: iPhone 4 has antenna problems. Fanboi-speak: iPhone 4 has enhanced "Do Not Call" and privacy features and less viruses than Windows.
English: Android outsells iOS. Fanboi-speak: Did you count the iPod Touch?
English: The iPad is too expensive. Fanboi-speak: The iPad is no more expensive than a reasonable laptop computer.
English: The iPad is too locked down. Fanboi-speak: The iPad is not designed to replace a reasonable laptop computer.
Music is my number one hobby but I have not to this date purchased one downloadable track and have no intention of doing so.
I buy CDs, I rip them to FLAC on purchase, store them on my server and convert FLACs to MP3, OGG or whatever I want when I need to - the CD sits on a shelf as it's own backup and I don't have to get on my knees to Apple, Amazon or anyone else to re-get my music if a hard disk dies or a player breaks.
I do not listen to artists incapable of putting together a good album from start to finish, I listen to albums and don't treat music as "pick n mix" sweeties. I don't need to interract with it, mix it or do all the other stupid stuff people who call themselves "musicians" do to fuck up other peoples' music. I just need to sit, listen and enjoy, whether it's at home in a comfortable armchair or at a live concert.
That means that as an album listener, I laugh hysterically at the prices of downloadable music because in just about every case, I can find the physical CD for less cost than downloading some lossy crap from some online merchant.
Incidentally, BitTorrent and Usenet have made my appreciation of music all the greater because they're a great way of previewing albums before I decide to buy them - I download, listen, then erase the stuff. If it's good, I buy the CD and rip my own copy, if it's crap I forget about it and move on.
What this has meant is that I never buy a bad CD and paying £10 for an album I may end up listening to for 30-odd years or more is great value for money. As well as that, there is a HUGE catalogue of music out there to tap into and I think the record companies do an absolutely perfect job of releasing and re-releasing good music. They pissed me off for a while with DRM-protected CDs but that's now been gone a few years and I am happy again.
RIAA? I'm not in the US so couldn't give a toss, if the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) get the same sort of powers and catch me torrenting one of my previews, they're more than welcome to come over for a cup of tea and see my huge legal music collection for themselves, then decide whether I support music and musicians or not.
The iPad 2 was probably being developed even before the original launched, because after 1 year, it was inevitable that serious competitors would start to appear, and the iPad would need a "bump" to maintain interest.
Okay, that says the iPad was therefore a beta test unit for iPad 2 - therefore an incomplete device.
Making the 2 a bit thinner, a bit lighter (dont diss the apparently small changes in size and weight until you've held both - its very noticable) and adding cameras was the ideal "bump" - enough to drum up new business and keep ahead of the game without pissing off iPad 1 owners (who I guess will mostly wait for iPad 3). Apple also used the time to come up with their own videophone system (which is about the only point of having cameras on a tablet).
Within reason, I could care less about "slimmer" or "weighs 0.0000000001 kgs less" - my muscular structure isn't that sensitive to care about it.
Clearly we have different requirements - you care about the look and weight of the device, I care about functionality and expandability, and have no need to seek the approval of my peers with what is just a computing tool.
This is precisely Apple's target market - people who need fashion accessories.
Rubbish! A camera has been pretty much essential in just about every mobile computing device for several years - phones, laptops...
The likeliest scenario was they omitted it because the technology or design wasn't completed in time for iPad 1 release - i.e. a rushed, incomplete device. And you know as well as I do that the comments in every (non-fanboi written) iPad review on its initial release expressed utter surprise as to the omission of a camera.
Android phones haven't been leading iPhones long enough to have a larger installed base.
But they DO, as above.
Worse for Android is a lot of unit sales aren't really practical to count for the platform since they're single use devices like eBook readers so only phones really expand developers' potential markets.
No, they're convenient not to count for a fanboi who has decided the outcome of this discussion before getting to it.
It serves as a perfect example of a low-power device that is highly user-configurable - it runs an OS and is a computing device, other than that it matters not what type of device it is.
No, they are relevant examples because you implied that in order to tinker with a system and to install on the software that you want, you need more powerful CPUs, more memory, etc. Yet those two devices are relatively low powered and exceptionally configurable. Those examples show your statement to be incorrect.
The OC was talking about the difficulty in changing the OS on the current line of tablets with the OS installed in firmware insted of rewritable storage (micro SD or an ssd drive) and the lack of storage (16 or 32 gig micro SD), and I was pointing him to the more powerful slates (or tablets, because yes, the terms have become interchangeable) like the HP Slate 500 [amazon.com] or Acer Iconia Tab [amazon.com].
Yes, but your point is precisely what? Since I have demonstrated (as above) that customisability is not a factor of system power (by providing those two example devices as proof of that), then it simply comes down to the fact that the iPad (and, to be fair, some other tablets) are deliberately locked down to not be expandable or tweakable.
In other words, it has nothing to do with the type of device (as you were implying) but more about how it has been designed or not designed to be accessible by the user.
In which case, that makes both Apple and Motorola equally bad. Once again, you incorrectly assume that because I won't buy an iPad automatically means I will by a competing product. Your thinking is blinkered.
And how does any of this go against my point that tablets like the Xoom and the Playbook were buggy and missing features that were advertised they were going to have?
You only mentioned Xoom, you never mentioned Playbook, unless it was in a different thread.
I don't have a tablet either and I see no justification to get one. Up until now, the tablet makers have not helped their case by having bad product launches.
Why's this any different to the launch of iPhone 4 with the antenna problems? Maybe you didn't MEAN to do it but you singled out Motorola exclusively and I am saying that many other manufacturers, including Apple, are guilty of bad product launches - that's my point.
Slashdot Mirror
As an American company, you always have the option of not trading with an overseas company that does not treat its workers fairly... troll.
I think it's the forced weekly fellatio on Steve's huge demonic black-barbed member that is the problem - the Apple store employees want more of it but there simply isn't enough Jobs' penis to go round...
Look in China at Foxconn's factories where most of Apple's components are made. How much do the employees there get paid?
And what benefits did the families of these people get after the explosion?
Why does any company move manufacturing to Asia unless it is PURELY to cut down production costs by paying lower salaries and giving fewer benefits?
You go to any country in the Western World and there are areas where properties are expensive and the cost of living is high. In pretty much all cases, those areas are so expensive because they are close to commercial parks and big business estates because people like living as close as possible to their places of work.
The net result is that the very presence of those companies and workplaces has forced up the costs of living close to them - so whether or not CEOs of corporations care to admit it, the fact is that companies have a huge effect on social infrastructure. Consequently, if you are working and your cost of living is rising because you live close to your place of work, then you have a right to expect to take home at least the same salary, in real terms, year-after-year.
If you have given people a good enough salary to allow them to live relatively comfortably, then you cannot expect them to suddenly start accepting lower living standards just because you don't want to pay them any more.
The job market works really well without unions and regulation.
Utter rubbish! There may well be less unionisation in the workplace than there was, say, 30 years ago but the good working conditions and benefits that a lot us enjoy now were as a result of unions fighting for those back then.
The idea of a corporation is very simple - you make as much profit as possible by spending as little money as possible, and if you are the CEO or on the board of directors of a company, making money is your prime responsibility to the shareholders.
Statutory days off and free healthcare cost money and any CEO who gaves those out freely would be kicked out by the shareholders unless it had previously been shown that such benefits lead to a happier workforce and better productivity. CEOs did not discover that themselves, it was the unions that fought for those and got them in the first place - now they are standard benefits for many people because they create more profit than they cost to implement due to happier employees.
But those benefits did NOT come out of thin air - they were fought for by unions.
Who the hell do you think YOU are telling someone else how good THEIR employment benefits should be???
Or is this like the "drug dealer & addict" scenario where you're scared his actions my affect you getting your regular Apple fix?
Sorry, but in civilised society, if you work for a company that makes huge profits that you have worked towards creating, then you should have every right to ask for a better share in that profit and/or better conditions as a result.
Yes, we have instances where union power has been allowed to become far too great - but the fact is that most of us in the Western World work 40 hour weeks for reasonable pay and benefits, and in reasonable surroundings not sweatshops precisely BECAUSE unions fought the bosses for those rights.
That's a paradox because as I understand it, you go into an Apple store in the first place to buy yourself a new electronic friend since everyone else in the human race thinks you're an elitist twat.
Mine were much funnier.
You have kids. You therefore cannot have an iPad as iPads are for lonely virgins only.
Judging by these mindless Apple puppet-droids is it not just a case of locating the big plastic button in the middle of their backs, releasing the small plastic panel and just popping out their batteries?
I know women do get bigger when they are pregnant - but even they need to understand that their size would need to increase many millions of times over before they generated enough gravitational pull such that the world did actually revolve around them.
Stop with the "Lactating Mafia" nonsense - YOU decided to have kids, YOU deal with it and be thankful to those of us who don't have them that we're still prepared to subsidise their free schooling etc. through our taxes.
Having not spent most of my earnings on child-rearing, I will be able to afford to employ yours or someone else's kids to change my bags and wipe my backside in my old age.
It works both ways I'm afraid.
The reason that there is no Apple in the title is because the five people worldwide who have Mac computers could not generate enough revenue on iTunes if all the Windows people were alienated from using it because they thought it was an Apple-only service.
Below are some useful phrases that I have learnt on Slashdot over the past year or so that will help you translate Fanboi-speak to English, and vice-versa:
English: iCloud sues Apple over iCloud name usage.
Fanboi-speak: It's iCloud's fault for not registering the name properly.
English: Apple sues iCloud over iCloud name usage.
Fanboi-speak: It's iCloud's fault for not registering the name properly.
English: Steve Jobs kills puppies.
Fanboi-speak: Steve Jobs takes positive steps on problems of dog littering and potential spread of rabies.
English: Steve Ballmer kills puppies.
Fanboi-speak: Steve Ballmer kills puppies due to anger at number of viruses in Windows.
English: iPhone 4 has antenna problems.
Fanboi-speak: iPhone 4 has enhanced "Do Not Call" and privacy features and less viruses than Windows.
English: Android outsells iOS.
Fanboi-speak: Did you count the iPod Touch?
English: The iPad is too expensive.
Fanboi-speak: The iPad is no more expensive than a reasonable laptop computer.
English: The iPad is too locked down.
Fanboi-speak: The iPad is not designed to replace a reasonable laptop computer.
PayPal chief hits Australia, wants POS payments
"Point Of Sale" was not the first thing that came into my head for the "POS" acronym when thinking of Paypal.
You're preaching to the wrong person.
Music is my number one hobby but I have not to this date purchased one downloadable track and have no intention of doing so.
I buy CDs, I rip them to FLAC on purchase, store them on my server and convert FLACs to MP3, OGG or whatever I want when I need to - the CD sits on a shelf as it's own backup and I don't have to get on my knees to Apple, Amazon or anyone else to re-get my music if a hard disk dies or a player breaks.
I do not listen to artists incapable of putting together a good album from start to finish, I listen to albums and don't treat music as "pick n mix" sweeties. I don't need to interract with it, mix it or do all the other stupid stuff people who call themselves "musicians" do to fuck up other peoples' music. I just need to sit, listen and enjoy, whether it's at home in a comfortable armchair or at a live concert.
That means that as an album listener, I laugh hysterically at the prices of downloadable music because in just about every case, I can find the physical CD for less cost than downloading some lossy crap from some online merchant.
Incidentally, BitTorrent and Usenet have made my appreciation of music all the greater because they're a great way of previewing albums before I decide to buy them - I download, listen, then erase the stuff. If it's good, I buy the CD and rip my own copy, if it's crap I forget about it and move on.
What this has meant is that I never buy a bad CD and paying £10 for an album I may end up listening to for 30-odd years or more is great value for money. As well as that, there is a HUGE catalogue of music out there to tap into and I think the record companies do an absolutely perfect job of releasing and re-releasing good music. They pissed me off for a while with DRM-protected CDs but that's now been gone a few years and I am happy again.
RIAA? I'm not in the US so couldn't give a toss, if the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) get the same sort of powers and catch me torrenting one of my previews, they're more than welcome to come over for a cup of tea and see my huge legal music collection for themselves, then decide whether I support music and musicians or not.
I am owned by Murdoch and help to put hundreds of things on the iPad for one of his fringe outfits.
There. Corrected that for you.
Q1 2011 - iPhone user base = 17 million-odd, Android user base = 36 milion-odd.
Go invest in a dictionary app from the store and look up the word "minority" again.
The iPad 2 was probably being developed even before the original launched, because after 1 year, it was inevitable that serious competitors would start to appear, and the iPad would need a "bump" to maintain interest.
Okay, that says the iPad was therefore a beta test unit for iPad 2 - therefore an incomplete device.
Making the 2 a bit thinner, a bit lighter (dont diss the apparently small changes in size and weight until you've held both - its very noticable) and adding cameras was the ideal "bump" - enough to drum up new business and keep ahead of the game without pissing off iPad 1 owners (who I guess will mostly wait for iPad 3). Apple also used the time to come up with their own videophone system (which is about the only point of having cameras on a tablet).
Within reason, I could care less about "slimmer" or "weighs 0.0000000001 kgs less" - my muscular structure isn't that sensitive to care about it.
Clearly we have different requirements - you care about the look and weight of the device, I care about functionality and expandability, and have no need to seek the approval of my peers with what is just a computing tool.
This is precisely Apple's target market - people who need fashion accessories.
Rubbish! A camera has been pretty much essential in just about every mobile computing device for several years - phones, laptops...
The likeliest scenario was they omitted it because the technology or design wasn't completed in time for iPad 1 release - i.e. a rushed, incomplete device. And you know as well as I do that the comments in every (non-fanboi written) iPad review on its initial release expressed utter surprise as to the omission of a camera.
There's been no sales figures showing actual installed base of Android devices.
Well I found them easily enough - 36% Android compared to 17% iPhone, as of Q1 2011.
Remember that iOS runs on iPod touches as well as iPhones.
Here's a list of Android devices - not just phones and tablets either.
Android phones haven't been leading iPhones long enough to have a larger installed base.
But they DO, as above.
Worse for Android is a lot of unit sales aren't really practical to count for the platform since they're single use devices like eBook readers so only phones really expand developers' potential markets.
No, they're convenient not to count for a fanboi who has decided the outcome of this discussion before getting to it.
It serves as a perfect example of a low-power device that is highly user-configurable - it runs an OS and is a computing device, other than that it matters not what type of device it is.
No, they are relevant examples because you implied that in order to tinker with a system and to install on the software that you want, you need more powerful CPUs, more memory, etc. Yet those two devices are relatively low powered and exceptionally configurable. Those examples show your statement to be incorrect.
The OC was talking about the difficulty in changing the OS on the current line of tablets with the OS installed in firmware insted of rewritable storage (micro SD or an ssd drive) and the lack of storage (16 or 32 gig micro SD), and I was pointing him to the more powerful slates (or tablets, because yes, the terms have become interchangeable) like the HP Slate 500 [amazon.com] or Acer Iconia Tab [amazon.com].
Yes, but your point is precisely what? Since I have demonstrated (as above) that customisability is not a factor of system power (by providing those two example devices as proof of that), then it simply comes down to the fact that the iPad (and, to be fair, some other tablets) are deliberately locked down to not be expandable or tweakable.
In other words, it has nothing to do with the type of device (as you were implying) but more about how it has been designed or not designed to be accessible by the user.
Clearly the financial report is open to interpretation - I DO consider it a bailout.
No. He supplied a ridiculous scenario - I retorted with an even more ridiculous one in order to emphasise how ridiculous his scenario was.
Motorola Xoom advertised said features.
In which case, that makes both Apple and Motorola equally bad. Once again, you incorrectly assume that because I won't buy an iPad automatically means I will by a competing product. Your thinking is blinkered.
And how does any of this go against my point that tablets like the Xoom and the Playbook were buggy and missing features that were advertised they were going to have?
You only mentioned Xoom, you never mentioned Playbook, unless it was in a different thread.
I don't have a tablet either and I see no justification to get one. Up until now, the tablet makers have not helped their case by having bad product launches.
Why's this any different to the launch of iPhone 4 with the antenna problems? Maybe you didn't MEAN to do it but you singled out Motorola exclusively and I am saying that many other manufacturers, including Apple, are guilty of bad product launches - that's my point.