That's not what I wrote. I wrote: "the iPad created the concept of desirable device called a tablet, that was different from a big phone."
And that's true. Microsoft and others had tinkered about with devices, variously called slates, tablets and books for the last 20 years. But none of them were desirable. As evidenced by the fact that none of them ever sold enough to be successful even as a niche.
I'm pointing out that Apple created the market. There was no market for tablets before the iPad.
"Only a fool would expect him to endorse something he didn't have available to sell." FTTY
Compare and contrast with Sergy Brin of Google, who despite having phones to sell, calls phones 'Emasculating' because he'll have some novelty glasses to sell sometime later this year.
Right, the Apple product is perfect in every way and everything else is either just a copy or shite. Nice try.
Thats's not what he said. If you're having trouble understanding, read my response to him.
the screen resolution was both low and an odd multiple of what came before so that it took a while for apps to be ported to it (since Apple encouraged everyone to code for fixed resolutions).
Again, read my post. Apple didn't want simple ports of what was already available on phones. They wanted new categories of apps with longer engagement times. Porting by changing resolutions is easy, especially when it's to a bigger device, and that wouldn't hold apps up for a while. Changing to a different style of UI was required and that took longer. But more importantly bringing out completely new apps that wouldn't make sense on a phone - that's what takes time.
Android largely missed this subtlety. Because they don't do anything to encourage anything other than stretching out the same old phone apps.
People said that the Galaxy Note would never sell. An oversized phone with an old fashioned stylus.
Imagine how much stronger the resistance would be had the iPad not already set up the paradigm of a tablet. His argument is exactly WHY "an oversized phone" could sell.
Heh heh! Just a bit of Saturday night ranting for fun. Winding up sysadmins. I don't even believe half of what I put sometimes.... Pyramid building... I haven't even heard that since the 1970s.:-)
This is exactly right. The 7" tablets are only accepted as valid devices because the iPad created the concept of desirable device called a tablet, that was different from a big phone.
Had it not been for the iPad, every 7" device review would have featured the comment "But you're going to look really silly holding this to the side of your head for a phone call."
And it wasn't just the size, it introduced the idea of a different level of application engagement. Phone apps are typically designed for tiny tasks, measured in seconds: Looking something up, communicating, a quick casual game whilst waiting for something. Desktop apps are typically designed for interactions lasting hours: All day spent word processing, an evening spent playing an immersive game. Tablets were designed to occupy something in between. Measured in minutes: Casual browsing on the sofa. Reading a chapter from a bedtime book. It required something that very obviously wasn't a phone, in order to get developers to look at what apps might fit this model of casual engagement measured in minutes, and for consumers to accept it as something they might want in addition to and separate from a phone.
So, no. It wouldn't have been better if Apple had started with the 7.9" in the first place.
There's also a subtlety that hasn't been mentioned yet. There's a big gender divide. The 7.9" iPads are popular with women. The 9.7" is still more popular with men. So it's not that one size is better than the other. Both sizes are needed to suit different markets. And Apple did have to start with one.
No, that doesn't do it either. Take Azureus (Vuze). They had so many options they did a tree view of pages. And then it was still too complicated, so they created an entirely new interface, but still allowed access to the old "classic" interface.
Now it used to be that my Aseureus installation used to download 4 files at once. But now it only downloads one at a time. I'm pretty sure, at one time when I was trying to get a download working faster, I changed something in the advanced options to make it do that. And now I can't find it.
Yes, there are 48 pages of options, several of which will affect how many downloads you have, and I can't find the one that I changed before.
It's not good enough to have options hidden in "Advanced" sections, because they get changed, maybe by the main user, perhaps by someone borrowing the machine. Possibly by someone supporting the machine who thought he was helping. And then someone has to find what option was changed and change it back.
This is not a matter of preference as in: dev likes yellow cars, I like green cars, we get green cars. It's a matter of preference as in: dev likes wankel engine, I like diesel engine, dev can't repair the engine if it malfunctions, the kind of job is suited for diesel engines and in the future dev will likely have to drive diesel anyway. Ignoring the dev is the right thing to do.
And another sysadmin demonstrates that he only knows and cares for the problems he has. He takes no allowance of the pros and cons of the different platforms for the developer.
He forgets that he's there to serve the company, not the other way around.
These IT departments are in charge of maintaining this crap and making sure it runs. They already have an environment and systems to maintain that environment in place.
They have salaries to justify and pyramids to build.
It is perfectly reasonable for them to not want to have to maintain a completely different set of systems for some one-off site that some newbies are proposing because it's the current hotness and/or all they know.
Which has precisely nothing to do with the colocation company topic. It's not your job to deal with these machines. You've been sidelined.
At no point did I ever say that there shouldn't be options. Of course there should. But they should be minimal. Again you show you haven't a clue when you say it's not a conscious "design" choice. EVERY option in OSX has been fought over. A lot of them many times in the 30 years history of the Mac UI. Options are only there if they really HAVE to be. They don't just appear or not at random.
The lack of a option in System Preferences to have the computer switched on whilst the lid is closed isn't because no one ever thought of it, any more than it can't be done. It's a choice. Not only of UI, which we are now talking about, but also my earlier technical point about the stupidity of some people putting switched on laptops in backpacks. And undoubtably other considerations.
Now to your point. 28 preferences tabs in an entire modern OS. Each one contained in a window significantly smaller than the screen, with no scrolling. My earlier example - Azeureus (Vuze) - a single app. 54 tabs. Many of which require scrolling, even when the window is maximized.
Your example, VLC, whilst not as bad has 6 just for a video player. That's one fifth the tabs of an entire OS.
For completeness - Windows 8 appears to have 48 vs OSXs 28. Again the Windows ones scroll, the OSX ones don't.
And yet, still I agree with you. 28 is too many. OSX is not perfect.
A good UI designer thinks of every option that has to stay in the software as a little point of failure. The ideal software doesn't need options. It just does the right thing.
The companies have web sites, with FAQs. Why don't you do some research. After all, if you feel like it's your job to advise people not to do it, you should know what you're talking about, right?
The point was not enterprise, but professionalism.
Professionalism. That's that thing where you behave in a certain way because it's what you believe other people in the corporate entity in which you serve expect you to behave? I seem to remember it from my days of corporate drudge. At least it saves having to think for yourself.
Just kidding. No, what you are really talking about is enterprise. You said it in your original post, and it's clear that's still exactly the box in which your thoughts are contained.
Second, as I mentioned, development (as opposed to staging or production) is fine to do on OSX but this should not have anything to do with colocation.
Staging? Production? Don't be silly. For these projects you develop on a Mac Mini, and put that self same Mac Mini or a clone of it in the colocation. The box works. It does what you want. You knew the task wasn't that demanding before you started. All you need the colocation for is the access to the fat pipe.
The big bad sysadmin could just choose to use OSX instead, and that's just as good, and you are just as qualified as he is to make that choice.
No. On cases like these I'm BETTER qualified to make the choice. Because I developed it, and it's my money paying for it. He proves he's not got the right experience by demanding that it has to go on a Linux or Windows server, because that's all he knows. If he was so clever, he'd be a developer, rather than a sysadmin.
Your problem is you have a hammer, and you think everything is a nail. These solutions aren't for the kind of projects you're used to.
In the market where Linux lives, simply not having been put out of business by Microsoft is remarkable.
Linux isn't a business. It's a hobby. People work on it for no money, and it's given away for no money. If it was a business, it would indeed be dead. That Linux has failed to gain more than 1-2% of the desktop market despite the fact that it's been given away, is testament to how bad it is.
Google made Android successful, basing it on Linux, by making a real business out of it.
I find it hard to believe a company that has tested this device wouldn't have had this problem reported to them?
How many years did it take to create 3D movie glasses that didn't give a sizable proportion of people headaches.
Well, lets see. They started doing mass market 3D movies in the 1950s. And despite stepwise improvements since then, 60 years later, 3D glasses still give a sizable proportion of people headaches.
Of course Google Glass is going to give people headaches. For similar reasons: If the focus and parallax of your two eyes don't match, you'll get headaches. Or at least a lot of people will.
None of that matters because you don't have to deal with these things. That's for the colocation company to deal with. And as they specialise in Mac Minis it's no problem for them.
They were trying to insist we use their preferred tool, rather than the one we know how to use.
Right. And you were trying (perhaps succeeded) to insist they use your preferred tool, rather than the one they know how to use.
You are pretty typical for a web developer who has no experience in a managed environment. You think that you are a special snowflake and that you should have what you want. Doesn't work that way.
You seem to think you're quite a special snowflake yourself. And you think someone made you in charge. Well, in your own little world you might be. But there's a whole bigger world out there that doesn't have to do what you say. And these companies serve those people.
So let's ask what's more reasonable: That an IT group either trains or hires someone on Mac administration, purchases Mac hardware, and associated software to make it integrate with other systems, and so on for one website, or that the web developers write their code for the web platform that all the other stuff runs on?
Your limited knowledge is showing. You think all the problems are on the IT dept side of that. It doesn't occur to you that the developers would echo those problems. You think that Mohammed must always come to the mountain. Well that was once true. And in enterprise situations t's usually true. But there are some situations where Mohammed doesn't have to come to you. Mohammed can do his own thing. And that's where these companies come in.
P.S. I'm not typical of any kind of Web Developer. Nor of someone who currently has any Mac Mini Colocation needs. I'm a mobile developer. But I am able to see why these services are useful, and it seems you can't. It's certainly possible that I'll use one in the future, if I need some server based services for a mobile app.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/12/hearst-president-david-carey-apple-ipad-magazine-interview/
Huh? How is it meaningless? If you're going to contradict, say why.
Apple created the "tablet?"
That's not what I wrote. I wrote: "the iPad created the concept of desirable device called a tablet, that was different from a big phone."
And that's true. Microsoft and others had tinkered about with devices, variously called slates, tablets and books for the last 20 years. But none of them were desirable. As evidenced by the fact that none of them ever sold enough to be successful even as a niche.
I'm pointing out that Apple created the market. There was no market for tablets before the iPad.
"Only a fool would expect him to endorse something he didn't have available to sell."
FTTY
Compare and contrast with Sergy Brin of Google, who despite having phones to sell, calls phones 'Emasculating' because he'll have some novelty glasses to sell sometime later this year.
That should put it in context for you.
The investors figured it out, and that's why they're trying to get to the money fast, Tim Cook isn't up to it, and they know it.
And yet Apple's share price is still higher than when Jobs died. And higher still than when he retired. The facts don't fit with your rhetoric.
That's right to an extent. There's always a market for entry level. And at the moment, that's the entry level device to get into the iPad.
But there's also a big gender divide. It's mostly women buying the 7.9" iPad, whilst men still prefer the 9.7" version.
Right, the Apple product is perfect in every way and everything else is either just a copy or shite. Nice try.
Thats's not what he said. If you're having trouble understanding, read my response to him.
the screen resolution was both low and an odd multiple of what came before so that it took a while for apps to be ported to it (since Apple encouraged everyone to code for fixed resolutions).
Again, read my post. Apple didn't want simple ports of what was already available on phones. They wanted new categories of apps with longer engagement times. Porting by changing resolutions is easy, especially when it's to a bigger device, and that wouldn't hold apps up for a while. Changing to a different style of UI was required and that took longer. But more importantly bringing out completely new apps that wouldn't make sense on a phone - that's what takes time.
Android largely missed this subtlety. Because they don't do anything to encourage anything other than stretching out the same old phone apps.
People said that the Galaxy Note would never sell. An oversized phone with an old fashioned stylus.
Imagine how much stronger the resistance would be had the iPad not already set up the paradigm of a tablet. His argument is exactly WHY "an oversized phone" could sell.
You sound just like my GF.
Heh heh! Just a bit of Saturday night ranting for fun. Winding up sysadmins. I don't even believe half of what I put sometimes. ... Pyramid building... I haven't even heard that since the 1970s. :-)
Cheers. :o)
This is exactly right. The 7" tablets are only accepted as valid devices because the iPad created the concept of desirable device called a tablet, that was different from a big phone.
Had it not been for the iPad, every 7" device review would have featured the comment "But you're going to look really silly holding this to the side of your head for a phone call."
And it wasn't just the size, it introduced the idea of a different level of application engagement. Phone apps are typically designed for tiny tasks, measured in seconds: Looking something up, communicating, a quick casual game whilst waiting for something. Desktop apps are typically designed for interactions lasting hours: All day spent word processing, an evening spent playing an immersive game. Tablets were designed to occupy something in between. Measured in minutes: Casual browsing on the sofa. Reading a chapter from a bedtime book. It required something that very obviously wasn't a phone, in order to get developers to look at what apps might fit this model of casual engagement measured in minutes, and for consumers to accept it as something they might want in addition to and separate from a phone.
So, no. It wouldn't have been better if Apple had started with the 7.9" in the first place.
There's also a subtlety that hasn't been mentioned yet. There's a big gender divide. The 7.9" iPads are popular with women. The 9.7" is still more popular with men. So it's not that one size is better than the other. Both sizes are needed to suit different markets. And Apple did have to start with one.
For sure, they started with the right one.
So how did I fail?
In exactly the way I predicted. By failing to show Nexus tablets outselling the iPad.
"...in Japan, in one month of last year" isn't the same thing. And I knew all you had was "In Japan".
Do you want me to go dig up the story about Nexus tablets outselling the iPad? I will if you want.
You can try. But you'll fail.
No, that doesn't do it either. Take Azureus (Vuze). They had so many options they did a tree view of pages. And then it was still too complicated, so they created an entirely new interface, but still allowed access to the old "classic" interface.
Now it used to be that my Aseureus installation used to download 4 files at once. But now it only downloads one at a time. I'm pretty sure, at one time when I was trying to get a download working faster, I changed something in the advanced options to make it do that. And now I can't find it.
Yes, there are 48 pages of options, several of which will affect how many downloads you have, and I can't find the one that I changed before.
It's not good enough to have options hidden in "Advanced" sections, because they get changed, maybe by the main user, perhaps by someone borrowing the machine. Possibly by someone supporting the machine who thought he was helping. And then someone has to find what option was changed and change it back.
Here, read this.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000059.html
This is not a matter of preference as in: dev likes yellow cars, I like green cars, we get green cars.
It's a matter of preference as in: dev likes wankel engine, I like diesel engine, dev can't repair the engine if it malfunctions, the kind of job is suited for diesel engines and in the future dev will likely have to drive diesel anyway.
Ignoring the dev is the right thing to do.
And another sysadmin demonstrates that he only knows and cares for the problems he has. He takes no allowance of the pros and cons of the different platforms for the developer.
He forgets that he's there to serve the company, not the other way around.
I think he's just too much of a sociopath to care about anything beyond his own priorities, it must suck to have to work with him.
But that's exactly the attitude you showed to these Mac developers. It's the sysadmin mindset. The Register was satirising it years ago with BOFH.
These IT departments are in charge of maintaining this crap and making sure it runs. They already have an environment and systems to maintain that environment in place.
They have salaries to justify and pyramids to build.
It is perfectly reasonable for them to not want to have to maintain a completely different set of systems for some one-off site that some newbies are proposing because it's the current hotness and/or all they know.
Which has precisely nothing to do with the colocation company topic. It's not your job to deal with these machines. You've been sidelined.
Well 28. Growl isn't OSX.
At no point did I ever say that there shouldn't be options. Of course there should. But they should be minimal. Again you show you haven't a clue when you say it's not a conscious "design" choice. EVERY option in OSX has been fought over. A lot of them many times in the 30 years history of the Mac UI. Options are only there if they really HAVE to be. They don't just appear or not at random.
The lack of a option in System Preferences to have the computer switched on whilst the lid is closed isn't because no one ever thought of it, any more than it can't be done. It's a choice. Not only of UI, which we are now talking about, but also my earlier technical point about the stupidity of some people putting switched on laptops in backpacks. And undoubtably other considerations.
Now to your point. 28 preferences tabs in an entire modern OS. Each one contained in a window significantly smaller than the screen, with no scrolling. My earlier example - Azeureus (Vuze) - a single app. 54 tabs. Many of which require scrolling, even when the window is maximized.
Your example, VLC, whilst not as bad has 6 just for a video player. That's one fifth the tabs of an entire OS.
For completeness - Windows 8 appears to have 48 vs OSXs 28. Again the Windows ones scroll, the OSX ones don't.
And yet, still I agree with you. 28 is too many. OSX is not perfect.
A good UI designer thinks of every option that has to stay in the software as a little point of failure. The ideal software doesn't need options. It just does the right thing.
The companies have web sites, with FAQs. Why don't you do some research. After all, if you feel like it's your job to advise people not to do it, you should know what you're talking about, right?
The point was not enterprise, but professionalism.
Professionalism. That's that thing where you behave in a certain way because it's what you believe other people in the corporate entity in which you serve expect you to behave? I seem to remember it from my days of corporate drudge. At least it saves having to think for yourself.
Just kidding. No, what you are really talking about is enterprise. You said it in your original post, and it's clear that's still exactly the box in which your thoughts are contained.
Second, as I mentioned, development (as opposed to staging or production) is fine to do on OSX but this should not have anything to do with colocation.
Staging? Production? Don't be silly. For these projects you develop on a Mac Mini, and put that self same Mac Mini or a clone of it in the colocation. The box works. It does what you want. You knew the task wasn't that demanding before you started. All you need the colocation for is the access to the fat pipe.
The big bad sysadmin could just choose to use OSX instead, and that's just as good, and you are just as qualified as he is to make that choice.
No. On cases like these I'm BETTER qualified to make the choice. Because I developed it, and it's my money paying for it. He proves he's not got the right experience by demanding that it has to go on a Linux or Windows server, because that's all he knows. If he was so clever, he'd be a developer, rather than a sysadmin.
Your problem is you have a hammer, and you think everything is a nail. These solutions aren't for the kind of projects you're used to.
In the market where Linux lives, simply not having been put out of business by Microsoft is remarkable.
Linux isn't a business. It's a hobby. People work on it for no money, and it's given away for no money. If it was a business, it would indeed be dead. That Linux has failed to gain more than 1-2% of the desktop market despite the fact that it's been given away, is testament to how bad it is.
Google made Android successful, basing it on Linux, by making a real business out of it.
Sadly, yes. It was never the market leader. At that time, Symbian was the market leader.
I find it hard to believe a company that has tested this device wouldn't have had this problem reported to them?
How many years did it take to create 3D movie glasses that didn't give a sizable proportion of people headaches.
Well, lets see. They started doing mass market 3D movies in the 1950s. And despite stepwise improvements since then, 60 years later, 3D glasses still give a sizable proportion of people headaches.
Of course Google Glass is going to give people headaches. For similar reasons: If the focus and parallax of your two eyes don't match, you'll get headaches. Or at least a lot of people will.
None of that matters because you don't have to deal with these things. That's for the colocation company to deal with. And as they specialise in Mac Minis it's no problem for them.
Microsoft has never been market leader in either phones or search.
They were trying to insist we use their preferred tool, rather than the one we know how to use.
Right. And you were trying (perhaps succeeded) to insist they use your preferred tool, rather than the one they know how to use.
You are pretty typical for a web developer who has no experience in a managed environment. You think that you are a special snowflake and that you should have what you want. Doesn't work that way.
You seem to think you're quite a special snowflake yourself. And you think someone made you in charge. Well, in your own little world you might be. But there's a whole bigger world out there that doesn't have to do what you say. And these companies serve those people.
So let's ask what's more reasonable: That an IT group either trains or hires someone on Mac administration, purchases Mac hardware, and associated software to make it integrate with other systems, and so on for one website, or that the web developers write their code for the web platform that all the other stuff runs on?
Your limited knowledge is showing. You think all the problems are on the IT dept side of that. It doesn't occur to you that the developers would echo those problems. You think that Mohammed must always come to the mountain. Well that was once true. And in enterprise situations t's usually true. But there are some situations where Mohammed doesn't have to come to you. Mohammed can do his own thing. And that's where these companies come in.
P.S. I'm not typical of any kind of Web Developer. Nor of someone who currently has any Mac Mini Colocation needs. I'm a mobile developer. But I am able to see why these services are useful, and it seems you can't. It's certainly possible that I'll use one in the future, if I need some server based services for a mobile app.