Normal what? There are several things that are definitely not normal about me, but I am in fact cisgender. The advantage of "cisgender" over "normal" is that it's specific about what it is.
Many colleges want you to get a college education, which has value in itself. If you want vocational training instead, there are institutions that will provide that.
It's possible to flood the sex worker industry so that very few people can make much money. It's happened before. Prices can get into a race to the bottom when workers are desperate.
The IBM PC was a more powerful computer than the Apple IIe, sure. It was also more expensive. I don't know what you were trying to do, but at that time there really wasn't all that much you could do on an IBM PC and not on an Apple.
Apple was the one who started getting computers into parts of businesses that weren't concerned with them. Accountants bought, out of their own pockets, Apple IIs and copies of Visicalc.
You had a lousy IT guy, apparently. Those 3.5" disks worked just fine for every Mac owner I knew.
Exactly what would you want them to do to reduce vendor lock-in? They make their own OSes. Apps for iOS won't run as-is on Android or Windows. Is this supposed to be some sort of surprise?
I've got a four-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 5S. It runs the latest version of iOS, and runs it well, without noticeable performance problems. If you buy an iPhone that Apple offers, even the cheapest, you will get at least two years of support. You can buy older elsewhere, since they do tend to retain usefulness, but if you deliberately buy old stuff you really can't expect it to be supported much longer.
So, yes, you have a misunderstanding. I understand that many Android phones are effectively out of support when sold or shortly thereafter, and you may be getting confused.
I'm embedded partially in the Apple ecosystem (I own an iPhone), and it works just fine.
iTunes is happy to rip music from CDs. I can buy music from the iTunes store. It's quick and convenient and not expensive. I can also take music from other sources. I don't see why I should care where it's stored on my computer. I haven't found other music players I want to use instead.
In other words, iTunes serves my purposes. I can buy music from it, or supply my own. I can play it. Since I don't want to fiddle with the details instead of concentrating on more interesting things, I'm perfectly OK with that.
Apple was founded by a product guy and a brilliant engineer. They aren't in the feature business. They want their stuff to work easily. To that end, they have pioneered some stuff. MacOS had networking before MS OSes did, for example. They take innovations from everywhere, and then put them together to make them easy to use. The original iPhone didn't have the first phone email and web browser. It had the first that were easy to use with a UI designed for the phone. Apple does its own silicon design, and supports several important F/OS projects.
Lots of people want their technology to be in the background.
Consider my car. It's a technological marvel in many ways. I don't deal with all the tech, I just have fairly simple controls and it does more or less what I tell it to (it will brake to avoid collisions, but trying to keep to its own lane can be overridden). Apple develops tech (they're one of the few companies with ARM's top-end license), but as a support for what the user wants to do instead of showing it off. You're misunderstanding what Apple is about.
Apple products aren't typically status symbols (although there was that iWatch). If lots of teenagers have iPhones and iPads, and they do, the devices just won't work as status symbols. People buy them because they like using them. People keep buying more because they like the previous versions. They typically aren't overpriced for what you get (although many people aren't interested in paying for everything - if you just want a powerful computer, for example, you should buy something else).
1) iOS represents a large part of the market for mobile apps. Therefore I cannot ignore it.
3) Why are you limiting my freedom on what I can and can't do just because I don't like the policy by which it is done?
Kids these days. There's no reason you have to develop for OSX or iOS. If it offends you that much, don't. I've known people who'd turn down jobs involved in developing weapons because it offended them. You don't always get to do whatever job you want on your own terms.
Also, you don't realize how lucky you are with development environments. There's lots of environments where you would have to spend a lot of money and agree to a lot of things. The idea that you can get a development environment of some sort (I favored several xterms, myself, for small projects) for free is fairly recent. I was paying for development environments until the mid-90s at least, things that would let me create my own applications on my own computers.
I think the far worse evil is to sell a device to a person and lock it down.
Apple doesn't do that. Apple sells the user a device that is already locked down to some extent, and they do not lock it down further. The customer buys the device knowing that. There are advantages and disadvantages to having the partial lockdown, and the customer needs to decide whether to buy the device based on that and other factors.
Maybe your use for your phone doesn't require you to jump through the hoops that Apple forces you to jump through a lot, but I find it unbearable.
In which case I suggest you do not buy Apple devices. Simple. I don't see why you feel a need to explain why you find Apple devices unsuitable, or imply that they're unsuitable for everyone, or possibly even immoral.
Getting out more was the whole idea. The Macbook Air was extremely light and easy to carry. I'm happy to carry a few kilos around, but not everybody is.
The iPhone 4 design wasn't too bright, as far as I can tell, but it was overblown in the press. It seemed to affect some iPhones differently. I could reduce my reception a little by licking my finger and deliberately putting it on the junction. It was not a problem at all if you used a phone case. Other phones of the time had their issues.
Seriously, if that's your best shot against Apple, they're doing pretty well.
AI has been pushing into the legal profession. Legal research that used to take lots of lawyers is now done electronically. The medical profession has been resisting more successfully, but there's stuff that would be better done by a computer than a doctor.
So, you have ten deliveries a day. What do you need ten people for? You have one person handling the paperwork, and two more doing loading and unloading. They don't have to be with the truck at all times.
And, then, you want to sell your finished products to a wholesaler in another city. The delivery truck goes to the transfer point outside the city, and your cargo gets loaded onto an automated long-haul truck (or the trailer is given an autonomous cab).
It's not necessary to eliminate truck drivers altogether to cause major problems. Just drastically reducing the number will do the trick.
As far as our historical record of adapting to new technology goes, things are somewhat different now. We've had millennia of civilizations that didn't seriously affect the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A century ago, land transportation was basically what it had been in the Middle Ages plus trains. There were always levels of education that would produce people whose jobs couldn't be automated away.
Serious question: what's in it for the company? If I have to pay for my AIs, and then keep paying the employees displaced, I don't make money. I may as well not get the AIs in. Then, of course, I'm made obsolescent by some Chinese company who did get the AIs and left their former employees to sink or swim on their own. Economic progress requires destroying jobs, because that frees up people for new jobs.
You're assuming that, if you're a skilled tool and die maker, and someone starts making tools and dies in CNC mills, there will be a job for comparable pay that you can do. Either that, or somebody else is now responsible for making up your old income until you retire. Safety nets are not handled by for-profit companies.
My original home computer was roughly a million times less powerful than what I've got now. Of course, since the current one runs Windows, it's somewhat more annoying in its hangs than the TRS-80 was.
The answer to that, as always, has been that you need to increase the level of education accordingly. Those who write and maintain AIs are going to have jobs. But a high school diploma isn't going to cut it, any more than finishing 7th grade was going to cut it once we got automation and computers.
We've seen AI displace lawyers. AIs are, in many situations, better at diagnosing patients than real live doctors are. AIs are, in fact, displacing very educated people, people with post-graduate degrees. Some jobs will not be taken by AIs in the foreseeable future. Some people will make sure their control of money keeps them in control of money. However, for the first time, automation is hitting knowledge jobs, and hitting them hard.
There's lots of reasons for the fall of Rome. The lack of expansion isn't one of them. The Roman Empire could continue indefinitely and be self-sustaining, as long as it didn't face too many barbarian invasions. Greed probably did play a part. The question of succession did: the more troops an Emperor had to hold in reserve to defeat someone else who wanted to be Emperor (it's hard to call someone a usurper when there is no real succession mechanism, not until they fail, anyway) and the fewer were on the border. Not to mention that civil wars are destructive. You can find all sorts of other reasons.
Some of the reasons were showing up in the later Republic, and they were driven by greed. A large number of small farmers is a good basis for a thriving country, and the rich people were buying huge tracts of land for slave-worked farms. A free farmer has something to fight for; a slave farmer doesn't.
The systemic causes are not that some people have incomes of $300K/year, or any other situation where money earned is more or less proportional to work done. A healthier society would still have some people earning a hundred times as much as other people, and so going to college and making lots of money would still work. It would likely require tax increases, but the students in question aren't opposed to paying more taxes.
And, indeed, we have leftist college students calling for all sorts of equalities and more opportunity for the poor and minority groups.
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Normal what? There are several things that are definitely not normal about me, but I am in fact cisgender. The advantage of "cisgender" over "normal" is that it's specific about what it is.
Many colleges want you to get a college education, which has value in itself. If you want vocational training instead, there are institutions that will provide that.
It's possible to flood the sex worker industry so that very few people can make much money. It's happened before. Prices can get into a race to the bottom when workers are desperate.
I've tried installing Linux on laptops that came with Windows, with mixed success. The advantage of a Mac is that you're already running Unix.
Another question to ask would be how other large multinational companies are at paying taxes. Is Apple doing anything out of the ordinary?
The IBM PC was a more powerful computer than the Apple IIe, sure. It was also more expensive. I don't know what you were trying to do, but at that time there really wasn't all that much you could do on an IBM PC and not on an Apple.
Apple was the one who started getting computers into parts of businesses that weren't concerned with them. Accountants bought, out of their own pockets, Apple IIs and copies of Visicalc.
You had a lousy IT guy, apparently. Those 3.5" disks worked just fine for every Mac owner I knew.
Ah, I see there is almost everything to misunderstand.
Exactly what would you want them to do to reduce vendor lock-in? They make their own OSes. Apps for iOS won't run as-is on Android or Windows. Is this supposed to be some sort of surprise?
I've got a four-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 5S. It runs the latest version of iOS, and runs it well, without noticeable performance problems. If you buy an iPhone that Apple offers, even the cheapest, you will get at least two years of support. You can buy older elsewhere, since they do tend to retain usefulness, but if you deliberately buy old stuff you really can't expect it to be supported much longer.
So, yes, you have a misunderstanding. I understand that many Android phones are effectively out of support when sold or shortly thereafter, and you may be getting confused.
I'm embedded partially in the Apple ecosystem (I own an iPhone), and it works just fine.
iTunes is happy to rip music from CDs. I can buy music from the iTunes store. It's quick and convenient and not expensive. I can also take music from other sources. I don't see why I should care where it's stored on my computer. I haven't found other music players I want to use instead.
In other words, iTunes serves my purposes. I can buy music from it, or supply my own. I can play it. Since I don't want to fiddle with the details instead of concentrating on more interesting things, I'm perfectly OK with that.
Apple was founded by a product guy and a brilliant engineer. They aren't in the feature business. They want their stuff to work easily. To that end, they have pioneered some stuff. MacOS had networking before MS OSes did, for example. They take innovations from everywhere, and then put them together to make them easy to use. The original iPhone didn't have the first phone email and web browser. It had the first that were easy to use with a UI designed for the phone. Apple does its own silicon design, and supports several important F/OS projects.
Lots of people want their technology to be in the background.
Consider my car. It's a technological marvel in many ways. I don't deal with all the tech, I just have fairly simple controls and it does more or less what I tell it to (it will brake to avoid collisions, but trying to keep to its own lane can be overridden). Apple develops tech (they're one of the few companies with ARM's top-end license), but as a support for what the user wants to do instead of showing it off. You're misunderstanding what Apple is about.
Apple products aren't typically status symbols (although there was that iWatch). If lots of teenagers have iPhones and iPads, and they do, the devices just won't work as status symbols. People buy them because they like using them. People keep buying more because they like the previous versions. They typically aren't overpriced for what you get (although many people aren't interested in paying for everything - if you just want a powerful computer, for example, you should buy something else).
Kids these days. There's no reason you have to develop for OSX or iOS. If it offends you that much, don't. I've known people who'd turn down jobs involved in developing weapons because it offended them. You don't always get to do whatever job you want on your own terms.
Also, you don't realize how lucky you are with development environments. There's lots of environments where you would have to spend a lot of money and agree to a lot of things. The idea that you can get a development environment of some sort (I favored several xterms, myself, for small projects) for free is fairly recent. I was paying for development environments until the mid-90s at least, things that would let me create my own applications on my own computers.
Apple doesn't do that. Apple sells the user a device that is already locked down to some extent, and they do not lock it down further. The customer buys the device knowing that. There are advantages and disadvantages to having the partial lockdown, and the customer needs to decide whether to buy the device based on that and other factors.
In which case I suggest you do not buy Apple devices. Simple. I don't see why you feel a need to explain why you find Apple devices unsuitable, or imply that they're unsuitable for everyone, or possibly even immoral.
Getting out more was the whole idea. The Macbook Air was extremely light and easy to carry. I'm happy to carry a few kilos around, but not everybody is.
The iPhone 4 design wasn't too bright, as far as I can tell, but it was overblown in the press. It seemed to affect some iPhones differently. I could reduce my reception a little by licking my finger and deliberately putting it on the junction. It was not a problem at all if you used a phone case. Other phones of the time had their issues.
Seriously, if that's your best shot against Apple, they're doing pretty well.
It's Unix, guy, with a lot of proprietary shell stuff on top. It can do anything.
My 5S is upgraded to the latest iOS, and it works just fine.
AI has been pushing into the legal profession. Legal research that used to take lots of lawyers is now done electronically. The medical profession has been resisting more successfully, but there's stuff that would be better done by a computer than a doctor.
So, you have ten deliveries a day. What do you need ten people for? You have one person handling the paperwork, and two more doing loading and unloading. They don't have to be with the truck at all times.
And, then, you want to sell your finished products to a wholesaler in another city. The delivery truck goes to the transfer point outside the city, and your cargo gets loaded onto an automated long-haul truck (or the trailer is given an autonomous cab).
It's not necessary to eliminate truck drivers altogether to cause major problems. Just drastically reducing the number will do the trick.
As far as our historical record of adapting to new technology goes, things are somewhat different now. We've had millennia of civilizations that didn't seriously affect the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A century ago, land transportation was basically what it had been in the Middle Ages plus trains. There were always levels of education that would produce people whose jobs couldn't be automated away.
Serious question: what's in it for the company? If I have to pay for my AIs, and then keep paying the employees displaced, I don't make money. I may as well not get the AIs in. Then, of course, I'm made obsolescent by some Chinese company who did get the AIs and left their former employees to sink or swim on their own. Economic progress requires destroying jobs, because that frees up people for new jobs.
You're assuming that, if you're a skilled tool and die maker, and someone starts making tools and dies in CNC mills, there will be a job for comparable pay that you can do. Either that, or somebody else is now responsible for making up your old income until you retire. Safety nets are not handled by for-profit companies.
My original home computer was roughly a million times less powerful than what I've got now. Of course, since the current one runs Windows, it's somewhat more annoying in its hangs than the TRS-80 was.
We've seen AI displace lawyers. AIs are, in many situations, better at diagnosing patients than real live doctors are. AIs are, in fact, displacing very educated people, people with post-graduate degrees. Some jobs will not be taken by AIs in the foreseeable future. Some people will make sure their control of money keeps them in control of money. However, for the first time, automation is hitting knowledge jobs, and hitting them hard.
There's lots of reasons for the fall of Rome. The lack of expansion isn't one of them. The Roman Empire could continue indefinitely and be self-sustaining, as long as it didn't face too many barbarian invasions. Greed probably did play a part. The question of succession did: the more troops an Emperor had to hold in reserve to defeat someone else who wanted to be Emperor (it's hard to call someone a usurper when there is no real succession mechanism, not until they fail, anyway) and the fewer were on the border. Not to mention that civil wars are destructive. You can find all sorts of other reasons.
Some of the reasons were showing up in the later Republic, and they were driven by greed. A large number of small farmers is a good basis for a thriving country, and the rich people were buying huge tracts of land for slave-worked farms. A free farmer has something to fight for; a slave farmer doesn't.
The systemic causes are not that some people have incomes of $300K/year, or any other situation where money earned is more or less proportional to work done. A healthier society would still have some people earning a hundred times as much as other people, and so going to college and making lots of money would still work. It would likely require tax increases, but the students in question aren't opposed to paying more taxes.
And, indeed, we have leftist college students calling for all sorts of equalities and more opportunity for the poor and minority groups.