I meant unlikely to be faster than Apple fixes their OS. Not the carriers. For sure the carriers are very slow in passing versions of Android on to users.
Apple users, on the other hand, had at least 2-3 weeks of complaints before the company even acknowledged there was a fucking bug. They'll be waiting at least another week or two more, if they're lucky.
The bug is fixed in v5.0.1 which went out as a beta to developers 2 days ago. As I said Android is unlikely to be faster with fixes unless they don't test.
Heh! I guess it varies. A friend's 11 year old is still wearing a mix of pink and purple clothes. Come to that I know a couple of women in their 30s that are still infatuated with pink.
The main purpose of extra app stores would be for apps rejected by Apple for business, taste or licensing reasons, which you currently can't get at all.
Maybe some developers would choose to go to another store because they change less commission, or because they want a different business model. As a user how can I guess which apps that has moved onto other stores?
You can't fragment the app store and still pretend it isn't fragmented.
Also, there's no good reason why you can't have a facility to seamlessly search and install from multiple app stores, in the same way that Linux can seamlessly search and install from multiple repos.
Dealing with multiple entities will never be as easy as dealing with one. The Linux repo system UI is a piece of shit compared with the App Store.
My daughter went through 4 phones (Samsung Star, Dell Streak, iPhone 3GS, Samsung i5500) before declaring being happy with a S2.... these kids usually get the toys they want.... I spend over 1Kâ in 14 months on her mobile experiments,...
Why would you choose to spoil your child in that way? That's no life lesson to be giving.
So what's Apple reasoning again to not allow true multitasking on their devices? Even on a pad?
Battery life. Always was. When apps go to the background on iPhone they still consume memory. They just don't consume CPU cycles and therefore power. Apple had a bug in iOS 5.0 that caused poor battery life for some people. The fix will be generally available soon. But generally speaking iPhone battery life, for a given weight of phone, is much better than Android.
The question is if there were no Androids, what mobile phone would those people be using instead. If for example it were iPhone, Google would still be making the exact same money out of search.
Google only gains from those phones that replace what would otherwise be a phone using Bing or some hypothetical other search engine. And I can't see them making money out of that small subset.
But I can't see any reason why a GUI can't be better at managing those lists. iTunes for example can handle 50K+ songs, with manual playlists that you construct with drag and drop, and also smart-playlists that you can construct with any boolean selection you like.
I wouldn't dream of trying to manage songs with text file lists, grep, awk, and piping. It would be a huge step backwards.
A v1 of such a tool for sysadmins could manage lists of servers this way, and have a user defined set of tools that you can apply to lists.
v2+ could come prepackaged with built-in tools that are generally useful to sysadmins. Whilst still having the ability to define your own.
So I can see no reason why the scenario you describe wouldn't be better done with a GUI. It maybe that such a GUI doesn't exist. But I suspect it does - it's a big enough market.
Not THE users. SOME users. Cyanogenmod, Streakdroid, and a number of adhoc images come to mind.
So it's not a fantasy. It's only a fantasy if you misquote it. It's not about "you know how to fix it", it's about "you can fix it, or someone else with a shorter cycle than your carrier can fix it or you can pay someone to fix it".
In what way is waiting for the Cyanogenmod or Steakdroid teams to find, investigate, test and distribute a bug fixed version any better than waiting for Apple to do so? They are unlikely to be faster, unless they don't test. And when they are done, it's a lottery when you'll actually get a build for your particular phone.
The rest of your phone seems to be a rant about choice. Which is odd, because I think everyone is well aware there is a large choice of mobile phones available.
What you describe is possible with a GUI on OSX using the combination of Automator and BB Edit.
But yes the kind of action you describe is a classic example of piping. As is the batch convert example that the other poster gave. Classic, because really there aren't that many categories of problem that are best tackled with piping on a command line.
Even with these kinds of sysadmin type tasks, most of the time you'd have to break out perl or python to do anything clever.
Yes those particular types of task GUIs are weaker at. But they are the exception. Most of the time, and for most people, GUIs are better. I'm a developer, and I can't think of the last time I had to do any of these repetitive tasks that would best be done with piping commands together. In days of yore I'd be at the command line all the time, fucking about with makefiles and such like. But these days, an IDE does everything. Construct the App interface in a GUI, type the code in, and hit Run. What do I need a command line for?
Fair enough. Wouldn't know anything about the ducts issues. I come from the north of England, and at the hight of summer you're lucky if you can go out without a coat.;-) No need for household air conditioning here.
In fact I've lived in a couple of places where there wasn't even a wall thermostat for the heating!
Apply that context sensitive fill (or at least change the background to be hot pink and use that as a transparency color) to thousands of images like with gimp script or image magick? I suppose a GUI could be specially designed to do specific cases, but why when the command line is so much more flexible?
Actually I got the name wrong. It's not Context Sensitive Fill, it's Content Aware Fill. And it hasn't made it into a shipping version of Photoshop let alone Gimp and Image Magick. But it was damn impressive in the video. But that's by the by. You can't apply it thousands of images, because you need to choose the area you want to fill, because there's something in the picture you want to disappear. That requires looking at each photo, and using a pointing device. It's entirely impossible with a text interface, unless you are happy typing coordinates in for each photo.
Frankly, I was trying to come up with a quick list of GUI programs that I could name off the top of my head so that it wouldn't take me forever to point out that GUI programs suck at piping data to one another, especially so if you need to do the same thing iteratively for hundreds or thousands of cases.
OK I did wonder... It would have been better if you'd given an example of something amazing that you actually do with text piping.
Sure, Word might be able to do specialty stuff like mail merge, but can you drag a directory of word documents onto the adobe acrobat icon and Winzip simultaneously to get a zipped directory of appropriately named PDF docs?
You can do that entire workflow with Automator. Included in OSX. All GUI interface.
Typically when you have MAJOR problems in Beta you weigh that and delay the release if needed.
*IF* it showed up in beta. It's affecting a few users. It's not across the board.
And its not a showstopper. It's not crashing, it's not losing data. It's not preventing any operations. It's just draining some users battery a bit quick. It's a perfect candidate for deferring to the next point release.
Well, the Samsung S2 is that "feature phone" that managed to switch my 11 years daughter from "I want an iPhone" to "What, this phone is way cooler than an iPhone".
Your 11 year old daughter thinks it's cooler. Well I'm convinced. Is it available in pink then?
So, as hard as it might seem, Apple just lost most if not all it's technological superiority
Really? Because they've got a bug that drains some people's battery quicker on a.0 OS release. A bug which is fixed in the beta version developers are testing right now. Yeah, that's really going to change the tech superiority landscape. Clearly Android has never had a bug.
However we've got far better tools for drain-hunting than iOS,
Oh yeah? What's your experience of running Energy Diagnostics in Instruments (One of the tools included with XCode)? Have you used it? Have you even heard of it?
and we don't have to wait for upstream to fix our problems either.
Ah yeah, this fantasy that Android users know how to fix their own OS, and aren't waiting for someone else to fix it for them.
Can you automate the action of importing the data files themselves? I can think of plenty of GUI applications where I can do "File -> Import" or similar, but that's still shitty if I need to run the process with different sets of data, dozens or even hundreds of times.
Just to take a small example, I often want to build a playlist and send all the songs in it to my phone via bluetooth. Of course, I don't want to deal with files; I have a Library for browsing and searching. But it doesn't support sending them through BT.
iCloud syncs the music on all your devices. The whole thing if you want to and have the space. Or selected playlists if that's what you want. It' not bluetooth, but it's better. Bluetooth only means you don't need cable. iCloud means you don't need a cable, and the devices don't even need to be in the same country. And iCloud will sync whenever there's a change. You don't have to run a script to do it.
On Linux, I wrote the script in 10m.
Well done. But most people couldn't. I computer prefer solutions which don't require special skills or study.
I guess it depends on your bar for "amazing feats of computing". I'm impressed by context sensitive fill in Photoshop. I'm impressed by an iPhone app that can "name that tune" after listening with it's microphone for 5 seconds. It's been about 25 years since I've found piping text from app to app to be amazing.
What is it exactly that you are trying to accomplish with this hypothetical Windows workflow that you say doesn't work? What exactly is it you want Excel to do with your diffs?
I disagree; the first version may be less approachable, but it's much more flexible: one may want to automate the process by feeding a generated list to the program, which is impossible with the graphical version.
The fact that the UI is graphical doesn't preclude the importation of data files. I can think of few graphical document apps that don't.
I'm guessing you're thinking about the classic UNIX way, that munges together the concepts of textual UIs and piping data from one app to another. Well thankfully we've moved a long way past that for most purposes.
"For "shiny shiney people" lets be adult and call them users." No; let's not start arguing against Strawmen. Let's stick with what I said.
I'll lower myself to baby talk when I'm talking to my niece. If that's the best you can do then I'm afraid there are more interesting people here to debate with.
That's kind of my point. The piano's complexity can't be reduced without cutting its functionality.
And my point is that the piano UI doesn't have any complexity. Understanding music, reading sheet music, and developing the muscle memory are the difficult parts and they aren't attributes of the UI.
In the same way, a novice will find it hard to write a decent legal contract on even the simplest of word processors. Their difficulty won't be operating the word processor UI, it'll be learning law.
The problem space and the UI are different things. A complicated or specialist problem space doesn't mean that the tool needs to be complicated.
Slashdot Mirror
Utter bullshit... AT&T, for example
I meant unlikely to be faster than Apple fixes their OS. Not the carriers. For sure the carriers are very slow in passing versions of Android on to users.
Apple users, on the other hand, had at least 2-3 weeks of complaints before the company even acknowledged there was a fucking bug. They'll be waiting at least another week or two more, if they're lucky.
The bug is fixed in v5.0.1 which went out as a beta to developers 2 days ago. As I said Android is unlikely to be faster with fixes unless they don't test.
Heh! I guess it varies. A friend's 11 year old is still wearing a mix of pink and purple clothes. Come to that I know a couple of women in their 30s that are still infatuated with pink.
The main purpose of extra app stores would be for apps rejected by Apple for business, taste or licensing reasons, which you currently can't get at all.
Maybe some developers would choose to go to another store because they change less commission, or because they want a different business model. As a user how can I guess which apps that has moved onto other stores?
You can't fragment the app store and still pretend it isn't fragmented.
Also, there's no good reason why you can't have a facility to seamlessly search and install from multiple app stores, in the same way that Linux can seamlessly search and install from multiple repos.
Dealing with multiple entities will never be as easy as dealing with one. The Linux repo system UI is a piece of shit compared with the App Store.
My daughter went through 4 phones (Samsung Star, Dell Streak, iPhone 3GS, Samsung i5500) before declaring being happy with a S2.... these kids usually get the toys they want.... I spend over 1Kâ in 14 months on her mobile experiments, ...
Why would you choose to spoil your child in that way? That's no life lesson to be giving.
So what's Apple reasoning again to not allow true multitasking on their devices? Even on a pad?
Battery life. Always was. When apps go to the background on iPhone they still consume memory. They just don't consume CPU cycles and therefore power. Apple had a bug in iOS 5.0 that caused poor battery life for some people. The fix will be generally available soon. But generally speaking iPhone battery life, for a given weight of phone, is much better than Android.
The question is if there were no Androids, what mobile phone would those people be using instead. If for example it were iPhone, Google would still be making the exact same money out of search.
Google only gains from those phones that replace what would otherwise be a phone using Bing or some hypothetical other search engine. And I can't see them making money out of that small subset.
50K+ servers. That's a lot. That's unusual.
But I can't see any reason why a GUI can't be better at managing those lists. iTunes for example can handle 50K+ songs, with manual playlists that you construct with drag and drop, and also smart-playlists that you can construct with any boolean selection you like.
I wouldn't dream of trying to manage songs with text file lists, grep, awk, and piping. It would be a huge step backwards.
A v1 of such a tool for sysadmins could manage lists of servers this way, and have a user defined set of tools that you can apply to lists.
v2+ could come prepackaged with built-in tools that are generally useful to sysadmins. Whilst still having the ability to define your own.
So I can see no reason why the scenario you describe wouldn't be better done with a GUI. It maybe that such a GUI doesn't exist. But I suspect it does - it's a big enough market.
Not THE users. SOME users. Cyanogenmod, Streakdroid, and a number of adhoc images come to mind.
So it's not a fantasy. It's only a fantasy if you misquote it. It's not about "you know how to fix it", it's about "you can fix it, or someone else with a shorter cycle than your carrier can fix it or you can pay someone to fix it".
In what way is waiting for the Cyanogenmod or Steakdroid teams to find, investigate, test and distribute a bug fixed version any better than waiting for Apple to do so? They are unlikely to be faster, unless they don't test. And when they are done, it's a lottery when you'll actually get a build for your particular phone.
The rest of your phone seems to be a rant about choice. Which is odd, because I think everyone is well aware there is a large choice of mobile phones available.
What you describe is possible with a GUI on OSX using the combination of Automator and BB Edit.
But yes the kind of action you describe is a classic example of piping. As is the batch convert example that the other poster gave. Classic, because really there aren't that many categories of problem that are best tackled with piping on a command line.
Even with these kinds of sysadmin type tasks, most of the time you'd have to break out perl or python to do anything clever.
Yes those particular types of task GUIs are weaker at. But they are the exception. Most of the time, and for most people, GUIs are better. I'm a developer, and I can't think of the last time I had to do any of these repetitive tasks that would best be done with piping commands together. In days of yore I'd be at the command line all the time, fucking about with makefiles and such like. But these days, an IDE does everything. Construct the App interface in a GUI, type the code in, and hit Run. What do I need a command line for?
Fair enough. Wouldn't know anything about the ducts issues. I come from the north of England, and at the hight of summer you're lucky if you can go out without a coat. ;-) No need for household air conditioning here.
In fact I've lived in a couple of places where there wasn't even a wall thermostat for the heating!
I suspect HVAC is not such a great paid job here!
Apply that context sensitive fill (or at least change the background to be hot pink and use that as a transparency color) to thousands of images like with gimp script or image magick? I suppose a GUI could be specially designed to do specific cases, but why when the command line is so much more flexible?
Actually I got the name wrong. It's not Context Sensitive Fill, it's Content Aware Fill. And it hasn't made it into a shipping version of Photoshop let alone Gimp and Image Magick. But it was damn impressive in the video. But that's by the by. You can't apply it thousands of images, because you need to choose the area you want to fill, because there's something in the picture you want to disappear. That requires looking at each photo, and using a pointing device. It's entirely impossible with a text interface, unless you are happy typing coordinates in for each photo.
Frankly, I was trying to come up with a quick list of GUI programs that I could name off the top of my head so that it wouldn't take me forever to point out that GUI programs suck at piping data to one another, especially so if you need to do the same thing iteratively for hundreds or thousands of cases.
OK I did wonder... It would have been better if you'd given an example of something amazing that you actually do with text piping.
Sure, Word might be able to do specialty stuff like mail merge, but can you drag a directory of word documents onto the adobe acrobat icon and Winzip simultaneously to get a zipped directory of appropriately named PDF docs?
You can do that entire workflow with Automator. Included in OSX. All GUI interface.
Yes. I'm also OK when people call a locomotive a train, call a lamp a bulb, and a torch a flashlight.
Life's too short.
Motorola Droid 4. Non-replaceable battery.
Palm Pre. Non-replaceable battery.
Typically when you have MAJOR problems in Beta you weigh that and delay the release if needed.
*IF* it showed up in beta. It's affecting a few users. It's not across the board.
And its not a showstopper. It's not crashing, it's not losing data. It's not preventing any operations. It's just draining some users battery a bit quick. It's a perfect candidate for deferring to the next point release.
Especially as Google's email app consists of a UIWebView. The only reason they bundled it in a native app was to support notifications.
Well, the Samsung S2 is that "feature phone" that managed to switch my 11 years daughter from "I want an iPhone" to "What, this phone is way cooler than an iPhone".
Your 11 year old daughter thinks it's cooler. Well I'm convinced. Is it available in pink then?
So, as hard as it might seem, Apple just lost most if not all it's technological superiority
Really? Because they've got a bug that drains some people's battery quicker on a .0 OS release. A bug which is fixed in the beta version developers are testing right now. Yeah, that's really going to change the tech superiority landscape. Clearly Android has never had a bug.
However we've got far better tools for drain-hunting than iOS,
Oh yeah? What's your experience of running Energy Diagnostics in Instruments (One of the tools included with XCode)? Have you used it? Have you even heard of it?
and we don't have to wait for upstream to fix our problems either.
Ah yeah, this fantasy that Android users know how to fix their own OS, and aren't waiting for someone else to fix it for them.
Apple says "A small number of customers" and they're completely unbiased here so I should take their word.
No, it's Apple so you should assume the worse. It's obviously quite different from when it's RIM, whose announcements you should take at face value.
Can you automate the action of importing the data files themselves? I can think of plenty of GUI applications where I can do "File -> Import" or similar, but that's still shitty if I need to run the process with different sets of data, dozens or even hundreds of times.
OSX has Automator for that kind of thing. It has a GUI. No programming required.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator
Just to take a small example, I often want to build a playlist and send all the songs in it to my phone via bluetooth. Of course, I don't want to deal with files; I have a Library for browsing and searching. But it doesn't support sending them through BT.
iCloud syncs the music on all your devices. The whole thing if you want to and have the space. Or selected playlists if that's what you want. It' not bluetooth, but it's better. Bluetooth only means you don't need cable. iCloud means you don't need a cable, and the devices don't even need to be in the same country. And iCloud will sync whenever there's a change. You don't have to run a script to do it.
On Linux, I wrote the script in 10m.
Well done. But most people couldn't. I computer prefer solutions which don't require special skills or study.
That's an explanation, not an excuse.
Mind you it wasn't the only offender back in the dark ages of computing. The name of the CP/M copy command was PIP if I recall correctly.
At least CP/M had the good grace to go obsolete.
I guess it depends on your bar for "amazing feats of computing". I'm impressed by context sensitive fill in Photoshop. I'm impressed by an iPhone app that can "name that tune" after listening with it's microphone for 5 seconds. It's been about 25 years since I've found piping text from app to app to be amazing.
What is it exactly that you are trying to accomplish with this hypothetical Windows workflow that you say doesn't work? What exactly is it you want Excel to do with your diffs?
Looks like you've managed to learn cut, but paste is still too complicated for you. Maybe you need a better UI.
I disagree; the first version may be less approachable, but it's much more flexible: one may want to automate the process by feeding a generated list to the program, which is impossible with the graphical version.
The fact that the UI is graphical doesn't preclude the importation of data files. I can think of few graphical document apps that don't.
I'm guessing you're thinking about the classic UNIX way, that munges together the concepts of textual UIs and piping data from one app to another. Well thankfully we've moved a long way past that for most purposes.
Ah, I see your software mental model is still stuck in 1970s text interfaces.
grep? Is there any excuse for even the name of that command?
"For "shiny shiney people" lets be adult and call them users."
No; let's not start arguing against Strawmen. Let's stick with what I said.
I'll lower myself to baby talk when I'm talking to my niece. If that's the best you can do then I'm afraid there are more interesting people here to debate with.
That's kind of my point. The piano's complexity can't be reduced without cutting its functionality.
And my point is that the piano UI doesn't have any complexity. Understanding music, reading sheet music, and developing the muscle memory are the difficult parts and they aren't attributes of the UI.
In the same way, a novice will find it hard to write a decent legal contract on even the simplest of word processors. Their difficulty won't be operating the word processor UI, it'll be learning law.
The problem space and the UI are different things. A complicated or specialist problem space doesn't mean that the tool needs to be complicated.