Actually with the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird, I can check the public key servers to quickly add anyone's key to my keyring with two mouse clicks.
Actually, when a nerd starts using his personal desktop experience as a rebuttal to a large-scale engineering problem, you know the logic car has just driven off into the weeds.
Put another way--how would you like to be the guy who does "two mouse clicks" for, say, the Hotmail email servers? (If you so much as mention using a Perl script to handle it I will reach through the Internet and choke you.)
However, if you can eliminate one potential communication error, doesn't it make sense to do so?
Not if it is hideously expensive, outrageously complicated or both.
I'm not second guessing NASA in this particular decision, but I am saying that it probably would be a good thing if the U.S. would begin transitioning to metric whenever possible.
This is about as fast as we're going to do it. My engine is now measure in liters, as are my soft drinks. I get injections in ccs, just like my motorcycle. Since America can't build a car worth a shit we're getting our wheels from metric countries.
In the meantime we'd appreciate it if you metric faggots would shut the hell up. Your base-10 systems never got you to the Moon, did they?
However converting from cm to m is a UNIT CONVERSION. The design of the UNIT SYSTEM directly impacts on how difficult this is, from trivial to needlessly complex.
Nobody ever does this. Why would you even care about it?
Metric is fine, and it has plenty of benefits. Converting from kilometers to millimeters is, however, NOT one of them.
Of course, imperial units aren't consistent with anything. In metric, you always have powers of 10. In Imperial, the multiplier for any given scale step can be 3, 4, or any combination (which may or may not include either 3 or 4), completely at random.
It's not really random. In general, English measurements are designed to avoid fractions. Splitting a meter into thirds demonstrates this quite well.
How come metric fanatics don't suggest we move to a base-10 system for angular measurements? If 12 is dumb, how stupid is 360?
Bad communication is bad communication. If it weren't inches-to-centimeters it would be something else.
Communication mistakes have doomed thousands of expensive engineering projects. The Mars Orbiter's failure has been latched onto by metric fanatics as some kind of bugaboo that demonstrates the evils of English measurements, but it's just one face of a more prosaic problem--sometimes Doug over in Widget Design and Engineering doesn't read all the TPS reports. Switching to metric does not solve that underlying problem. It might mitigate some egregious errors, and for that reason I'd definitely support a general move to metric. But because the Mars Orbiter gakked it does not mean it's cost-efficient, or even a good idea, to re-tool everything from the ground up, right now, just so faggy Frenchmen don't have to count higher than ten.
Like Google Analytics, or Google Ads. When Google went pear-shaped some time back it made a significant portion of the Web unusable. If your own server is down, no big deal. If other sites depend on your server, then it's a problem.
While I'm slagging off Google, why don't they stop Doing Cool New Stuff and improve their fucking search engine instead?
You talk about people needing to work on their attention span, but what they really need to do is work on their patience , which you didn't remotely cover when playing advocate in this argument here.
One man's patience is another man's wasted time.
For one, why am I standing in line? Lines usually indicate a lack of planning on the part of the line-maker. There's not much in this world that actually requires a line except to provide a terrible job for the otherwise unemployable. So already my time is being poorly utilized. Two, of what benefit is there to staring at the back of the head of the person in front of you? Here "patience" is a word that means "can't think of any better way to spend your time and is therefore satisfied by the mere act of breathing". Three, to ward off the usual rebuttal, I have little to no interest in chatting with the people around me. Most people are stupid, crazy, or some combination of both. For them, having a chance to talk to me, a genius, is an unexpected joy in their mean, puny lives. For me it is an unbearable hardship, as I'm regaled with dubious tales about their last hunting trip or some damn thing.
Now I agree that somebody who requires a video game to divert their attention is probably also witless, but at least they're quiet and don't talk to me. However, using an iPhone (or iPod Touch) to read Proust while I'm in line is one of the few ways I can endure close quarters with the proles, ever since they banned quarterstaff duels at First National. I'll stick the earbuds in as well, even if I'm not listening to music, so I have an excuse to ignore conversation starters like, "You know that Obama isn't actually a US citizen, right?"
That said, I've been using Opera 10 beta for several months now, and it seems more stable than Opera 9 was.
FWIW I downloaded the Mac version of 10, tried to play with the Unity stuff, and Opera crashed within seconds.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it didn't engender a burning desire in me to sink more time into it, that's for sure. I'll try again when 10 isn't so raw.
The iphone is the best device of its kind on the market right now, so its doing well. Nobody denies that. The closed devlopment model still sucks.
As I pointed out earlier, Linux has an open development model. It's pretty well relegated to specialty niches, such as servers. I suggest that "closed development", whatever that means, may have benefits that outweigh the poor-mouthing of indignant nerds.
Uh. I didn't describe anything
You described apps starting from scratch. That is not a fully accurate picture.
why can't it run 3rd party apps with a cpu quota at a lower priority level to ensure the core platform is "always on top and responsive"? for example?
Ask that question from the standpoint of Apple, who needs to sell a lot of iPhones. Here's a hint--my old Palm didn't multi-task either, and it still crashed a lot.
Open development appeals directly to me as a programmer. That's a real feature.
A lot of programmers don't give a shit. Some of them are making a living not giving a shit about it. Who's right? Better question: who's more right?
Multitasking is a real feature too that enables an entire class of apps that 3rd parties simply can't do on the iphone.
I accept that. But I'll frame the underlying question in another way--do these new classes of apps add to the experience of the iPhone, or do they merely tick checkboxes on some geek's wishlist? Here's another hint: most people are willing to wait a few seconds for their stocks to update, because they're not depending on their iPhone to daytrade.
I get where you're coming from. But I suggest that your deeply held concerns may be orthogonal to Apple's.
Further, the LACK of an open development model on the iphone is one of the developer communities BIGGEST gripes with it. Apps that people WANT to own, want to write, and in some cases even have already written, are not readily available because apple said "No".
That explains why there's nobody developing for the iPhone, I guess. Oh, wait.
Uh no. Its better in the sense that when I'm using the iphone and switch from one app to another, and back again, the original app has to to start from scratch. Multitasking is not a theoretical benefit.
Yeah, I hate that when I jump out of Bookworm on my iPod Touch it destroys my game. Oh, wait, it doesn't.
What you're describing isn't multi-tasking.
I hear a lot of "Everybody hates the iPhone," but nothing to back that up. Customers like it. Developers like it. Even if your complaints are 100% valid (they're not), it doesn't seem to affect the iPhones popularity. I suspect it has something to do with the iPhone's overall delivery of features and service and ease of use. Those are very hard problems that Apple is quite good at solving. "Open development" and "multi-tasking" will not solely serve as silver bullets to compete with the iPhone.
Seriously, you think multitasking is only some vague, hand waving, fairy dust 'possible' benefit? Seriously?
I only use my phone for one thing at a time, so yeah. Your main complaint seems to be with using IM clients, which I care not a whit about. I don't know if this is possible on the iPhone, but can you talk on the phone and look up addresses or phone numbers? Or peruse Google Maps? If you can't because of a lack of multi-tasking, then yeah, I agree it's a compelling and important feature. If you can, I'm not so sure it's a valid complaint.
The keyboard, to me, is a wash. Some like it, some like the iPhone's virtual keyboard. It's a matter of preferences.
As for the others, they're potential benefits. Open development model? Linux has that, but it didn't help it take the world by storm. Multi-tasking? Sure, I suppose it would be better in some theoretical sense, but you're making a judgement based on brochure bullet-points. That's why I asked for specific examples. Is it a better email platform? I don't know. Better casual gaming platform? I don't know. Better music player? I don't know. Better development platform? I don't know.
We don't know because it's brand new and we don't know much about it, and certainly don't know anything long-term. The iPhone is a known entity, with a decently long track record, and therefore we know the pros and cons. With the Pre you can assume a bunch of benefits from the bullet-points, but they're just guesses.
I say this as a satisfied Blackberry user, so I'm not fanboying the iPhone.
T-Mobile doesn't give you the "new customer" rate, though. Just a discount. It used to be that you could yell at the store managers and they would swing a deal, but now all the brick & mortar stores are solely staffed by powerless plebes. They have to call a 1-800 number (just like you!) to talk to somebody who can actually make a decision more important than sweeping up. I'd have thought that number mobility would mean that carriers would work harder to keep their customers, but instead they just focused on poaching newbies from the other companies.
I'm convinced that cell phone carriers in the US have a union contract with Satan himself to keep them in power. That's the only explanation I've got for why such completely retarded business practices have not been stamped out by market forces.
Or, in shorter form, when buying and selling is controlled by politics, the first thing to be bought and sold are politicians.
A lot of problems can be solved here by rule of law and sensible governmental procedures. In the case of the former, you don't allow legislators to abrogate their responsibilities by giving regulatory control to unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies like the Dept. of Education or the EPA. In the latter case, you don't allow legislators to bundle disparate laws into omnibus bills. A bill that cannot be read is guaranteed to be a bad bill.
The primary argument against these ideas is that it prevents government from acting quickly. Which it doesn't, necessarily, but even if it does, what of it? Government should be deliberative, since government action tends more towards the permanent than the temporary.
Newsflash we all can't live in the cities. End of line.
Of course, not everybody can, but certainly many, if not most can. We don't want to, but that is a separate issue.
People chose to live in suburbs. They were able to live in suburbs because of cheap gas, cheap housing and subsidized highways and freeways to assist in making commutes possible. Those were decisions made with economical thinking; economical thinking can be used to reverse the trend. For example assigning true costs to items. Were highways toll roads people would more directly bear the cost and therefore would make decisions that were rational for them.
Now whether anybody will stand for that is again a separate issue.
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Actually, when a nerd starts using his personal desktop experience as a rebuttal to a large-scale engineering problem, you know the logic car has just driven off into the weeds.
Put another way--how would you like to be the guy who does "two mouse clicks" for, say, the Hotmail email servers? (If you so much as mention using a Perl script to handle it I will reach through the Internet and choke you.)
How do you tell when somebody is taking an Internet argument far too seriously?
Not if it is hideously expensive, outrageously complicated or both.
This is about as fast as we're going to do it. My engine is now measure in liters, as are my soft drinks. I get injections in ccs, just like my motorcycle. Since America can't build a car worth a shit we're getting our wheels from metric countries.
In the meantime we'd appreciate it if you metric faggots would shut the hell up. Your base-10 systems never got you to the Moon, did they?
Nobody ever does this. Why would you even care about it?
Metric is fine, and it has plenty of benefits. Converting from kilometers to millimeters is, however, NOT one of them.
It's not really random. In general, English measurements are designed to avoid fractions. Splitting a meter into thirds demonstrates this quite well.
How come metric fanatics don't suggest we move to a base-10 system for angular measurements? If 12 is dumb, how stupid is 360?
Bad communication is bad communication. If it weren't inches-to-centimeters it would be something else.
Communication mistakes have doomed thousands of expensive engineering projects. The Mars Orbiter's failure has been latched onto by metric fanatics as some kind of bugaboo that demonstrates the evils of English measurements, but it's just one face of a more prosaic problem--sometimes Doug over in Widget Design and Engineering doesn't read all the TPS reports. Switching to metric does not solve that underlying problem. It might mitigate some egregious errors, and for that reason I'd definitely support a general move to metric. But because the Mars Orbiter gakked it does not mean it's cost-efficient, or even a good idea, to re-tool everything from the ground up, right now, just so faggy Frenchmen don't have to count higher than ten.
Like Google Analytics, or Google Ads. When Google went pear-shaped some time back it made a significant portion of the Web unusable. If your own server is down, no big deal. If other sites depend on your server, then it's a problem.
While I'm slagging off Google, why don't they stop Doing Cool New Stuff and improve their fucking search engine instead?
Disney World managed to eliminate lines. I suggest that the banks start employing mice.
One man's patience is another man's wasted time.
For one, why am I standing in line? Lines usually indicate a lack of planning on the part of the line-maker. There's not much in this world that actually requires a line except to provide a terrible job for the otherwise unemployable. So already my time is being poorly utilized. Two, of what benefit is there to staring at the back of the head of the person in front of you? Here "patience" is a word that means "can't think of any better way to spend your time and is therefore satisfied by the mere act of breathing". Three, to ward off the usual rebuttal, I have little to no interest in chatting with the people around me. Most people are stupid, crazy, or some combination of both. For them, having a chance to talk to me, a genius, is an unexpected joy in their mean, puny lives. For me it is an unbearable hardship, as I'm regaled with dubious tales about their last hunting trip or some damn thing.
Now I agree that somebody who requires a video game to divert their attention is probably also witless, but at least they're quiet and don't talk to me. However, using an iPhone (or iPod Touch) to read Proust while I'm in line is one of the few ways I can endure close quarters with the proles, ever since they banned quarterstaff duels at First National. I'll stick the earbuds in as well, even if I'm not listening to music, so I have an excuse to ignore conversation starters like, "You know that Obama isn't actually a US citizen, right?"
FWIW I downloaded the Mac version of 10, tried to play with the Unity stuff, and Opera crashed within seconds.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it didn't engender a burning desire in me to sink more time into it, that's for sure. I'll try again when 10 isn't so raw.
I suspect you are utterly wrong about that. If you're so sure you should short AAPL.
As I pointed out earlier, Linux has an open development model. It's pretty well relegated to specialty niches, such as servers. I suggest that "closed development", whatever that means, may have benefits that outweigh the poor-mouthing of indignant nerds.
You described apps starting from scratch. That is not a fully accurate picture.
Ask that question from the standpoint of Apple, who needs to sell a lot of iPhones. Here's a hint--my old Palm didn't multi-task either, and it still crashed a lot.
A lot of programmers don't give a shit. Some of them are making a living not giving a shit about it. Who's right? Better question: who's more right?
I accept that. But I'll frame the underlying question in another way--do these new classes of apps add to the experience of the iPhone, or do they merely tick checkboxes on some geek's wishlist? Here's another hint: most people are willing to wait a few seconds for their stocks to update, because they're not depending on their iPhone to daytrade.
I get where you're coming from. But I suggest that your deeply held concerns may be orthogonal to Apple's.
That explains why there's nobody developing for the iPhone, I guess. Oh, wait.
Yeah, I hate that when I jump out of Bookworm on my iPod Touch it destroys my game. Oh, wait, it doesn't.
What you're describing isn't multi-tasking.
I hear a lot of "Everybody hates the iPhone," but nothing to back that up. Customers like it. Developers like it. Even if your complaints are 100% valid (they're not), it doesn't seem to affect the iPhones popularity. I suspect it has something to do with the iPhone's overall delivery of features and service and ease of use. Those are very hard problems that Apple is quite good at solving. "Open development" and "multi-tasking" will not solely serve as silver bullets to compete with the iPhone.
But you believe what you want.
I only use my phone for one thing at a time, so yeah. Your main complaint seems to be with using IM clients, which I care not a whit about. I don't know if this is possible on the iPhone, but can you talk on the phone and look up addresses or phone numbers? Or peruse Google Maps? If you can't because of a lack of multi-tasking, then yeah, I agree it's a compelling and important feature. If you can, I'm not so sure it's a valid complaint.
The keyboard, to me, is a wash. Some like it, some like the iPhone's virtual keyboard. It's a matter of preferences.
As for the others, they're potential benefits. Open development model? Linux has that, but it didn't help it take the world by storm. Multi-tasking? Sure, I suppose it would be better in some theoretical sense, but you're making a judgement based on brochure bullet-points. That's why I asked for specific examples. Is it a better email platform? I don't know. Better casual gaming platform? I don't know. Better music player? I don't know. Better development platform? I don't know.
We don't know because it's brand new and we don't know much about it, and certainly don't know anything long-term. The iPhone is a known entity, with a decently long track record, and therefore we know the pros and cons. With the Pre you can assume a bunch of benefits from the bullet-points, but they're just guesses.
I say this as a satisfied Blackberry user, so I'm not fanboying the iPhone.
Why is the Pre better? Can you give specific examples?
More importantly, what about a UPS?
California: land of the electronic textbook AND rolling blackouts.
You're right. As I recall it, "Web log" briefly morphed into "weblog" then quickly became "blog".
Either way, "blog" and "blogger" are words that should have been quietly smothered in the dead of night.
I thought "Web site" was perfectly adequate. It actually would have been prescient, since most "blog" software turned into some flavor of CMS anyway.
But I'm also losing the battle between "Web site" and "website". Fucking barbarians.
"Blog" is short for "weblog", which is not a word. Or it shouldn't be.
The damage done to the language is now irreparable. Enjoy your future Chinese classes, America!
T-Mobile doesn't give you the "new customer" rate, though. Just a discount. It used to be that you could yell at the store managers and they would swing a deal, but now all the brick & mortar stores are solely staffed by powerless plebes. They have to call a 1-800 number (just like you!) to talk to somebody who can actually make a decision more important than sweeping up. I'd have thought that number mobility would mean that carriers would work harder to keep their customers, but instead they just focused on poaching newbies from the other companies.
I'm convinced that cell phone carriers in the US have a union contract with Satan himself to keep them in power. That's the only explanation I've got for why such completely retarded business practices have not been stamped out by market forces.
I reckon you new 'round these parts...
Nonsense, they can just go to the poor-people doctors. Over there, behind the tanners and slaughterhouses.
Or, in shorter form, when buying and selling is controlled by politics, the first thing to be bought and sold are politicians.
A lot of problems can be solved here by rule of law and sensible governmental procedures. In the case of the former, you don't allow legislators to abrogate their responsibilities by giving regulatory control to unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies like the Dept. of Education or the EPA. In the latter case, you don't allow legislators to bundle disparate laws into omnibus bills. A bill that cannot be read is guaranteed to be a bad bill.
The primary argument against these ideas is that it prevents government from acting quickly. Which it doesn't, necessarily, but even if it does, what of it? Government should be deliberative, since government action tends more towards the permanent than the temporary.
Of course, not everybody can, but certainly many, if not most can. We don't want to, but that is a separate issue.
People chose to live in suburbs. They were able to live in suburbs because of cheap gas, cheap housing and subsidized highways and freeways to assist in making commutes possible. Those were decisions made with economical thinking; economical thinking can be used to reverse the trend. For example assigning true costs to items. Were highways toll roads people would more directly bear the cost and therefore would make decisions that were rational for them.
Now whether anybody will stand for that is again a separate issue.