...it seems a little premature to be issuing the big FU to the one guy on the planet who's trying to fix the cell phone industry. Recall, this is the same guy and the same company who tried to save the music industry from it's own stupidity. (Reference EMI's evolving position on DRM). You might want to give this a little time. Apple cannot fix the entire cell phone industry overnight, but they can fix some things up front, gain influence in the market, and use that influence to fix other problems later.
No, Jobs is no great villain, but I don't think there's any evidence for your claims for his heroism. Jobs isn't trying to "fix" either of these industries: he's trying to make a buck, which makes him no better or worse than any other corporate baron.
In the case of music, a hard look at the facts blows your case out of the water. Jobs for years profited from DRM. He defied open standards with proprietary formats. He conspired with the music biz to keep music prices higher than most consumers were willing to pay (as readily measured by the volume of P2P trading vs. the volume of iTMS sales). Now, he is even increasing costs for downloading music under the cover of eliminating DRM. That's not fixing anything so much as prices. (Sure, they wanted to charge more; call him only a partial appeaser, then.) Through these services, Jobs has proven himself less a benign reformer than a useful ally to the malignant music cartels.
The court is still out on his entry into the cell phone biz. Early signs, as TFA today suggests, aren't cause for celebration. Yes, don't give him the big FU yet, but also wait and see and judge realistically before claiming he is "fixing" anything.
I know fanboys will be fanboys. But can the rest of us resist sentimentalizing Jobs just because we like his OS and industrial design?
It's true that CSS allows ad blocking and I have used it with relatively good results, though also with some effort, in the past on Safari.
We should be hesitant to compare the virtue of its open standards to the user-friendly nature of extensions. Style sheets are not for amateurs or the general public; extensions are precisely for them. And as you seem to acknowledge, they open a universe of possibilities no stylesheet can.
It's clear to me, at least, which represents the superior method for liberating users to browse as they wish.
"Safari is another Trojan horse that introduces an innovation of Apple to the Windows community and entices them to the Mac platform," said Tim Bajarin, an industry analyst at Creative Strategies, a technology consultancy.
Er, um, you might call it that.
"Safari is another enticement for the Windows community to look at the Mac platform," says Van Baker, an analyst at market researcher Gartner. "If it can bring some new people into the fold, perhaps a few percentage points, that's goodness."
That's "goodness"? Ladies and gentlemen, my market analyst: the Sundance Festival groupie.
Because your experience on a site will be a lot better the closer your browser set-up is to how the company tests functionality/usability.
Not my point. Let me spell it out.
I'm talking about post-debugging, every day usage. That's where Safari locks its users into rigid pre-defined interaction with the web: you see what the web author/company/Apple want you to see.
And that authoritarian one-way relationship inherited from print media is over. The web isn't theirs. It's ours, the users, to see what/when/how/why we want.
Firefox's modular design lets you shape and determine how you browse by customizing as you wish. This will be more and more the future, as web browsing becomes inherently a highly selective cherrypicking of information. Safari, at present, is just old hat.
OK, for a lark I'm trying out the Safari beta on an older 2.4 ghz XP box with 512mb ram. With two tabs open, it's consistently working the CPU at between 80 and 90%. Whatever the hell for? Who slapped together this wunderpile?
On the plus side, it's easy on the eyes. The Safari bookmarks implementation has always been smooth. And the adjustable Google search bar is better than most stabs at this on Firefox. It renders quickly, as claimed, though I can't say it renders perceptibly more quickly than Firefox.
Even on OS X, though, I don't run Safari. It's barely customizable in an age when Firefox extensions have completely rewritten the rules of browsing. Why would I want to see ads? Why browse the way some web site or computer corporation thinks I should?
It's frankly no one's business to judge how big is "too big"; it could be argued that a Prius or Honda Civic Hybrid are "too big" or "more than someone needs". You could even argue that carpooling or small 1- or 2-person vehicles would serve many just fine. Then we start going down the road of taking away personal freedoms and mandating sizes and shapes of vehicles. I suppose in some nations, that would fly.
Oh, thank you, James Madison. For a moment there, we were in danger of falling under the control of totalitarians who want to take away our monster trucks.
All you're saying, Dave, is that individual freedom is of paramount importance. If you believe that, then why even concern yourself with the science of global warming? Freedom will always place another claim that trumps social responsibility. Freedom isn't remotely about responsibility, but this debate, and our survival, are.
Even if only a small fraction Mac zealots get an iPhone, it will still be hugely successful for Apple.
Even Apple doesn't believe that. For years, zealots haven't been able to produce big profits for the computer line. In recent history, only the iPod was able to do that by appealing to a far wider group. And it has been Apple's hope ever since that iPod sales would have spillover effect, something that seems to be coming true at least in the laptop line.
To be successful, the iPhone has to be popular with Wal-Mart America. That's Apple's market now. Apple wants to sell to Joe Sixpack, not merely to fussy refined aesthetes (that tiny segment's delivered already and not going anywhere). The hipsters and smugsters shown in the Switcher ads? Highly colorful pilot fish meant to bring along the carp. When the lady in the lime green stretch pants shifts her Big Mac to the other paw and whips out her iPhone, wiping clean the screen on her thigh, hearts will light up in Cupertino.
I suppose we should be clambering over each other trying to secure one. We can queue up for the chance to spend our money! These jerks have us by the gonads if we constantly fear we might not get one.
For most of us, this is an expensive toy. Can it really be $500 worth of fun?
Dunno, fun is relative. But you're right about the gonads. Edward Bernays understood this a long time ago.
In the power relationship you describe, there's a marvelously easy way to manipulate consumer herds. Shortages offer both added value to early adopters and wield a whip over those who are denied.
Shortages = bragging rights = "fun" for haves = viral multiplication of desire by have-nots.
Why this should work especially well in America, short-term instant-grat consumer heaven, is the subject of the documentary I linked above.
AFAIK, a Geo Metro and a Lexus IS350 can both go from point A to point B and reach the maximum allowed speed limits on (almost) any road you'll be travelling on. The difference is the experience you get out of driving those cars.
The difference is it still takes someone else to key your Lexus IS350 for you.
You can key your own iPhone the first time you put it in the wrong pocket.;-)
Well, I like the Grado SR 60s. Comfortable as sin and fairly accurate for the price, they're a fine budget-conscious step into audiophile phones. One can always do better, spend more, etc.
No, thanks. Following the parenthetical link I landed at TFA, which was little more than Computerworld whining about how people using the Adblock and AdblockPlus extensions would deprive it of ad revenue.
Computerworld actually had the gall to suggest switching to blocking software that's more selective, allowing you to cherrypick ads to block "while continuing to support the sites we love by allowing most ads to appear." Oh, what a cynical dearth of principles: block our competitors' ads, but NIMBY!
Nope, I'm an equal opportunity Scrooge, and for my free-as-beer money these are two of the most useful Firefox extensions around.
You know, I was ready to cheer on an act of rebellion by a smart wise acre. We all know the type: fed up with conformity, pressed by fraudulent adult authority, eager to remake the world from less toxic materials. These sorts grow up to be our best directors, artists, writers, observers. They are our Vonneguts, our Bill Hickses.
Then I saw the video.
Sorry, this isn't the Holden Caulfield of Kentridge High. The filmmaker is a Beavis. He's one of Mike Judge's droolers in Idiocracy. Ah, the price of making video cameras cheap and easy to operate!
As far as can be told, the chief offenses of the good lady Mong are:
-- She smells bad to the noses of teen boys who wear sleeveless athletic gear;
-- She has a fat ass;
-- She hasn't spent her days ordering the books on her classroom shelves as anal retentively as their mothers have tidied the Reader's Digest tomes and workout DVDs in their homes.
Wotta J'accuse!
This is a very nasty video that merely intends to hurt. It brutalizes what appears to be a tired, unappreciated woman, a disheveled and disrespected human being whose thankless job it is to babysit these spoiled shits.
Suspend the kid and push him in the direction of the nearest Wal-Mart: his bright future awaits.
do some research and find out how much, exactly, artists are compensated for cd sales by the riaa.. i think you'll find several conflicting points of data, all well below a "reasonable" amount. (think fractions of a percent)
True, but inadequate compensation for others is no barrier to libertarian idealism!
Why, just today I was praising the wisdom of the market and-- Huh?
If there is a market for games of this type then they will take off.
Bullshit.
What will "take off" is what is backed by the biggest capital, which in turn buys ads and "reviews." Without this, nothing takes off.
Do you even know what games are on the market today? Just take a look: three or four genres, each clogged with half a dozen clones vying for the same shelf space. And these clones are likely to be sequels, which means they are even less original than their last iteration.
Recycling the same old shit month after month, year after year is hardly "the market" deciding. It's the suits deciding.
Gaming is now a market with a high barrier to entry. That's a complete reversal of the situation we had even fifteen years ago, when publishing opportunities were great and the variety in games even greater. As a result your fictitious sentient "market" is simply a puppet on a string, dancing the way corporate money tells it.
No more being a slave to whatever is playing in my hotel room. With a fast connection, I can watch and control my own DirecTV from wherever I happen to be. Either on my laptop, or my Treo, I can watch what I want, when I want. Slingbox ought to hire me, because I help sell a few units everytime I connect up waiting at an airport gate. People cant believe I am watching my own DirecTV on my phone.
Get one, bitches.
You're still a TV slave. You're just placeshifting your shackles.
This isn't surprising to me at all. Speaking simply from personal experience:
-- a failed iBook G3 logic board, rendering the laptop useless soon after passing out of (extended) warranty
-- a relative's mooing Macbook; quoth the Apple store Genius, "I don't hear any problem"
-- a friend's overheating G5 iMac, repaired repeatedly with lots of annoyance to him
Now, balanced against that, we've all had considerably good experience with Apple since the OS 9 days. And we're all still customers (and I've sent them loads of business). But our days of unqualified praise for the company are over, buried in its declining competence and rising disregard for quality.
I need a new laptop, but a glance at www.appledefects.com or the Mac Rumors forums reminds me it's now a crapshoot when buying Apple. Will the device be bliss or bust? Who can tell any more?
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No, Jobs is no great villain, but I don't think there's any evidence for your claims for his heroism. Jobs isn't trying to "fix" either of these industries: he's trying to make a buck, which makes him no better or worse than any other corporate baron.
In the case of music, a hard look at the facts blows your case out of the water. Jobs for years profited from DRM. He defied open standards with proprietary formats. He conspired with the music biz to keep music prices higher than most consumers were willing to pay (as readily measured by the volume of P2P trading vs. the volume of iTMS sales). Now, he is even increasing costs for downloading music under the cover of eliminating DRM. That's not fixing anything so much as prices. (Sure, they wanted to charge more; call him only a partial appeaser, then.) Through these services, Jobs has proven himself less a benign reformer than a useful ally to the malignant music cartels.
The court is still out on his entry into the cell phone biz. Early signs, as TFA today suggests, aren't cause for celebration. Yes, don't give him the big FU yet, but also wait and see and judge realistically before claiming he is "fixing" anything.
I know fanboys will be fanboys. But can the rest of us resist sentimentalizing Jobs just because we like his OS and industrial design?
It's true that CSS allows ad blocking and I have used it with relatively good results, though also with some effort, in the past on Safari.
We should be hesitant to compare the virtue of its open standards to the user-friendly nature of extensions. Style sheets are not for amateurs or the general public; extensions are precisely for them. And as you seem to acknowledge, they open a universe of possibilities no stylesheet can.
It's clear to me, at least, which represents the superior method for liberating users to browse as they wish.
Er, um, you might call it that.
"Safari is another enticement for the Windows community to look at the Mac platform," says Van Baker, an analyst at market researcher Gartner. "If it can bring some new people into the fold, perhaps a few percentage points, that's goodness."
That's "goodness"? Ladies and gentlemen, my market analyst: the Sundance Festival groupie.
Thanks for the tips.
Because your experience on a site will be a lot better the closer your browser set-up is to how the company tests functionality/usability.
Not my point. Let me spell it out.
I'm talking about post-debugging, every day usage. That's where Safari locks its users into rigid pre-defined interaction with the web: you see what the web author/company/Apple want you to see.
And that authoritarian one-way relationship inherited from print media is over. The web isn't theirs. It's ours, the users, to see what/when/how/why we want.
Firefox's modular design lets you shape and determine how you browse by customizing as you wish. This will be more and more the future, as web browsing becomes inherently a highly selective cherrypicking of information. Safari, at present, is just old hat.
On the plus side, it's easy on the eyes. The Safari bookmarks implementation has always been smooth. And the adjustable Google search bar is better than most stabs at this on Firefox. It renders quickly, as claimed, though I can't say it renders perceptibly more quickly than Firefox.
Even on OS X, though, I don't run Safari. It's barely customizable in an age when Firefox extensions have completely rewritten the rules of browsing. Why would I want to see ads? Why browse the way some web site or computer corporation thinks I should?
This is like 1999, today.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=3106
Oh, thank you, James Madison. For a moment there, we were in danger of falling under the control of totalitarians who want to take away our monster trucks.
All you're saying, Dave, is that individual freedom is of paramount importance. If you believe that, then why even concern yourself with the science of global warming? Freedom will always place another claim that trumps social responsibility. Freedom isn't remotely about responsibility, but this debate, and our survival, are.
Hitler was also a mass murderer, but the Germans didn't have many problems with science, did they?
Even Apple doesn't believe that. For years, zealots haven't been able to produce big profits for the computer line. In recent history, only the iPod was able to do that by appealing to a far wider group. And it has been Apple's hope ever since that iPod sales would have spillover effect, something that seems to be coming true at least in the laptop line.
To be successful, the iPhone has to be popular with Wal-Mart America. That's Apple's market now. Apple wants to sell to Joe Sixpack, not merely to fussy refined aesthetes (that tiny segment's delivered already and not going anywhere). The hipsters and smugsters shown in the Switcher ads? Highly colorful pilot fish meant to bring along the carp. When the lady in the lime green stretch pants shifts her Big Mac to the other paw and whips out her iPhone, wiping clean the screen on her thigh, hearts will light up in Cupertino.
For most of us, this is an expensive toy. Can it really be $500 worth of fun?
Dunno, fun is relative. But you're right about the gonads. Edward Bernays understood this a long time ago.
In the power relationship you describe, there's a marvelously easy way to manipulate consumer herds. Shortages offer both added value to early adopters and wield a whip over those who are denied.
Shortages = bragging rights = "fun" for haves = viral multiplication of desire by have-nots.
Why this should work especially well in America, short-term instant-grat consumer heaven, is the subject of the documentary I linked above.
The difference is it still takes someone else to key your Lexus IS350 for you.
You can key your own iPhone the first time you put it in the wrong pocket. ;-)
I mean, it's a phone for God's sake, not a cure for cancer.
Happily for the credit card companies, it won't cure ennui, either.
Agreed, I'll be blocking more than just Computerworld's ads from now on. ;-)
Well, I like the Grado SR 60s. Comfortable as sin and fairly accurate for the price, they're a fine budget-conscious step into audiophile phones. One can always do better, spend more, etc.
Yep, Leopard and the iPhone. ;-)
Computerworld actually had the gall to suggest switching to blocking software that's more selective, allowing you to cherrypick ads to block "while continuing to support the sites we love by allowing most ads to appear." Oh, what a cynical dearth of principles: block our competitors' ads, but NIMBY!
Nope, I'm an equal opportunity Scrooge, and for my free-as-beer money these are two of the most useful Firefox extensions around.
Then I saw the video.
Sorry, this isn't the Holden Caulfield of Kentridge High. The filmmaker is a Beavis. He's one of Mike Judge's droolers in Idiocracy. Ah, the price of making video cameras cheap and easy to operate!
As far as can be told, the chief offenses of the good lady Mong are:
-- She smells bad to the noses of teen boys who wear sleeveless athletic gear;
-- She has a fat ass;
-- She hasn't spent her days ordering the books on her classroom shelves as anal retentively as their mothers have tidied the Reader's Digest tomes and workout DVDs in their homes.
Wotta J'accuse!
This is a very nasty video that merely intends to hurt. It brutalizes what appears to be a tired, unappreciated woman, a disheveled and disrespected human being whose thankless job it is to babysit these spoiled shits.
Suspend the kid and push him in the direction of the nearest Wal-Mart: his bright future awaits.
True, but inadequate compensation for others is no barrier to libertarian idealism!
Why, just today I was praising the wisdom of the market and-- Huh?
What's that? I'm being outsourced?
Hey waitaminnit! It's not fair!
If you can dream up new ways to harm your fellow man, then your future is assured, young scientist!
Bullshit.
What will "take off" is what is backed by the biggest capital, which in turn buys ads and "reviews." Without this, nothing takes off.
Do you even know what games are on the market today? Just take a look: three or four genres, each clogged with half a dozen clones vying for the same shelf space. And these clones are likely to be sequels, which means they are even less original than their last iteration.
Recycling the same old shit month after month, year after year is hardly "the market" deciding. It's the suits deciding.
Gaming is now a market with a high barrier to entry. That's a complete reversal of the situation we had even fifteen years ago, when publishing opportunities were great and the variety in games even greater. As a result your fictitious sentient "market" is simply a puppet on a string, dancing the way corporate money tells it.
Get one, bitches.
You're still a TV slave. You're just placeshifting your shackles.
-- a failed iBook G3 logic board, rendering the laptop useless soon after passing out of (extended) warranty
-- a relative's mooing Macbook; quoth the Apple store Genius, "I don't hear any problem"
-- a friend's overheating G5 iMac, repaired repeatedly with lots of annoyance to him
Now, balanced against that, we've all had considerably good experience with Apple since the OS 9 days. And we're all still customers (and I've sent them loads of business). But our days of unqualified praise for the company are over, buried in its declining competence and rising disregard for quality.
I need a new laptop, but a glance at www.appledefects.com or the Mac Rumors forums reminds me it's now a crapshoot when buying Apple. Will the device be bliss or bust? Who can tell any more?
Oh, ROFL until it hurts! You're going to "hell" for that one! :-)
Excellent reading of the situation.