So let's say I roll down to a garage sale and find the band Poison's worst songs of the 1980s on vinyl for two pence (that's two pence more than it's worth).
You seriously overestimate the value of Poison's back catalogue.
So what you are saying, if I understand you correctly, is that the way to make sure that consumers have choices is to make all computing devices work the way you want them to work?
Have you thinked a lifetime of a phone ? it's 2 year max. It's crasy to spend 600$ just for the HW of a phone (+ stupid far&beer toy for iphonists) in every 2 years!
Not so. My Samsung i500 lasted for about 5 years. I only got rid of it because the iPhone came out, and the scratches on the i500's screen after that much use made it annoying. If the iPhone hadn't come out, I'd probably have tried to buy a used i500.
It actually uses the iPhone OS, which is the OS X kernel and a lot of the frameworks and with the touch UI framework replacing Cocoa's UI framework. The OS between the iPhone and the iPad are the same (well, except for minor differences because they're not on the same version right now).
I think part of it is simply product maturity. To extend your car analogy, there are still car people. They are insane people who do things like fiddle with the software for their brakes (just to tie back to an earlier slashdot story) and program their fuel injectors and add new power sources. The average "car guy" of the past has been left behind, either to become today's super-geek car guy, or to become an average user of the cars he owns.
The same thing seems to be happening in computers, where the average computer geek is being left behind. Those who are left will be super geeks on the computers, who actually know how to build their own circuits or use an iPad to transfer software to an Apple// or write code to modify locked down devices; most of the rest will become average computer users.
And HP, which bought WebOS and immediately announced killing off their Win7 tablet to build a WebOS tablet, built along similar lines to the iPhone ecosystem.
At that point, if you're not in the class of "almost everyone", then the record industry, movie industry, and business software industry will assume you to be either A. an employee of an established, licensed, and bonded company, B. a student training to be an employee of such a company, or C. a pirate.
And this differs from today because? Oh, I see, because today they consider option B and option C to be identical.
It's one of the two things he's done that I think is excellent. Basically, he's getting rid of a bloated program that could never have met its goals, and replacing it with a more free-market alternative: having NASA buy its rides from commercial providers. He's keeping the VSE goals, and in fact expanding NASA's wider goals, but removing transport to LEO from NASA's engineering teams, which have consistently failed to deliver for a long time now. As a big supporter of man moving into space on a permanent basis, I'm thrilled.
I can understand why Armstrong is unhappy. Along with the rest of his generation, but even more strongly because of his role in the program, he sees the government-driven space program as the only way to do things. But given that the height of the space program was the early 1970s, and we've done essentially nothing new since the early 1980s, I can't agree with him.
You are right: those of us who aren't mad at Apple for what they are doing likely would be mad if they did the exact same thing on the desktop. But that's because the desktop is a general purpose computer and the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch aren't. I would far more upset losing the use of my special-purpose computing appliance as a phone (guess which I have) due to poorly written third party apps than I am with Apple restricting those apps. (And yes, I'm also an iPhone developer.) I accept that the desktop may crash due to flawed third party software; it's a price I pay for flexibility.
In other words, where I think we differ is that I do not see a need to make every device that is capable of computing into a general purpose device.
I must start with observing that if you are reduced to calling your opponents cocksuckers (which is fundamentally what teabagger means), your arguments have the force of a five year old, which is to say, not much.
In any case, where were these same people during the Bush years? Look up Porkbusters, which was the same people, started during Bush's second term, for much the same reason.
I had a lot of fun demolishing my poli sci instructor's graduate thesis. It was that increasing the speed limits had turned out to vastly increase the number of highway deaths. A little statistics later, I showed him that almost all of the increase he was citing was in areas where the speed limits had not in fact increased (urban areas), and that most urban areas had no change outside the margins of error. PoliSci is not particularly rigorous, I find.
I am curious in what way the tea parties are "a bunch of garbage." It would seem to me that "stop expanding the Federal government, cut the programs that don't work, balance the budget, and leave us alone" is a reasonable position.
You are failing to note the distinction between truth and Truth. Kind of like when Dan Rather defending faked documents (attempting to bring down Bush) as "fake but accurate." If something expresses the right feelings, those that make one feel better, then it is Truth, no matter how factually inaccurate. And of course, Truth is more important than truth, and supercedes it. If you don't believe me, ask essentially any academic outside of engineering and hard sciences, and they'll set you straight.
Actually, yes, it is good to have a parallel health care system only for soldiers. The physical and psychological needs are vastly different than most civilian situations. We owe it to those who put their lives on the line for us to take care of them. We do not owe it to everyone else (including me) to take care of them.
On the other hand, the real scandals are that (a) the VA system is shockingly bad at providing good health care, and (b) if ObamaCare is not repealed, we will essentially get VA for everyone... except Congress, the president, cabinet officers, the politically connected and other "better than the hoi polloi" types.
I'm just amused at the image of the business meeting where that would be proposed. I had a director once whose reaction would have been: "That's very interesting, out-of-the-box thinking. Now get back in the box!"
It's for exactly this reason that I really like the idea of Flash dying off. The native applications are a big deal in the short run, but in the long run the applications will largely be network-based/server-hosted, and so what you really want is a lot of choices in how to access those applications. Having iPhone-OS and Android and WebOS and ChromeOS tablets, and whatever else chooses to show up, allows the user to get exactly what they want, without compromise, and still have everyone using the exact same applications. This is a huge deal for companies when it matures, because it means that you can eliminate a lot of the overhead currently taken up by IT while improving end users' experience and access to information.
The developer agreement does not make it illegal for someone to work on other projects. It doesn't even make it illegal for you to install Pascal apps on your iPhone. It does mean that Apple won't approve Pascal apps on the iPhone, and you won't get them into the app store. But you are being a bit hysterical to think that joining the developer program in any way affects what else you do.
Certain families in the US are political, and others are artistic, and others are medical and so forth. The thing is, the political ones generally don't get handed the seats (I realize that Kennedy's are sometimes the exception): they have to win them. When they don't even have to stand for election, then we'll have dynastic succession.
But that is essentially always the case, in every human society throughout history. It only becomes a problem when coupled with democracy. Republicanism (small-r) is an attempt to avoid both the bad effects of democracy and the bad effects of monarchy, oligarchy or other dictatorial/elitist ruling structures. Sadly, we have spent a century adapting our system to have the worst aspects of both democracy and monarchy, with the Senate as well as the House now populist and with the president increasingly monarchic. The only place we haven't gone yet is dynastic succession.
Ack, used blockquote instead of quote. Here's the paragraph:
And meanwhile, you're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- (laughter) -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.
is here, and here is the paragraph that people are taking issue with:
And meanwhile, you're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- (laughter) -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.
What I find interesting is not the assertion about the devices, and information becoming entertainment — that's been true since at least the beginnings of edutainment and of news as entertainment almost twenty years ago. For me, the interesting part is the first sentence: "And meanwhile, you're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter." It seems to me that throughout history, the times when truth has been the major component of the information we are given have been few and far between. For example, the news media in the US, despite their pretensions to objectivity, haven't been particularly honest at any time in their history. Even in WWII, the war correspondents left out more than they said, and that was probably the height of objectivity in the news. Heck, the news media was in great part responsible for fomenting the Spanish-American War (google "yellow journalism"), reported the propaganda of Saddam Hussein as news in order to maintain access, and spent years trying to talk us into a recession (note the tone of economic reporting under Bush vs. that under Obama, and compare that to the actual statistics).
In other words, the real requirement we have is not to shut off the flows of information, or even to tilt at the windmill of trying to ensure that all the information we have access to is truthful, but to armor ourselves with scepticism, basic statistical knowledge, and deep historical knowledge so that we, individually, can sort out the truth from the lies, distortions and agenda-driven propaganda we are faced with.
Slashdot Mirror
So let's say I roll down to a garage sale and find the band Poison's worst songs of the 1980s on vinyl for two pence (that's two pence more than it's worth).
You seriously overestimate the value of Poison's back catalogue.
So what you are saying, if I understand you correctly, is that the way to make sure that consumers have choices is to make all computing devices work the way you want them to work?
Have you thinked a lifetime of a phone ? it's 2 year max. It's crasy to spend 600$ just for the HW of a phone (+ stupid far&beer toy for iphonists) in every 2 years!
Not so. My Samsung i500 lasted for about 5 years. I only got rid of it because the iPhone came out, and the scratches on the i500's screen after that much use made it annoying. If the iPhone hadn't come out, I'd probably have tried to buy a used i500.
It actually uses the iPhone OS, which is the OS X kernel and a lot of the frameworks and with the touch UI framework replacing Cocoa's UI framework. The OS between the iPhone and the iPad are the same (well, except for minor differences because they're not on the same version right now).
Guess what Objective-C was designed for?
We don't have to guess. It was a proper superset of C for NeXT workstations, which were oddly enough quite a bit less powerful than today's iPhones.
I think part of it is simply product maturity. To extend your car analogy, there are still car people. They are insane people who do things like fiddle with the software for their brakes (just to tie back to an earlier slashdot story) and program their fuel injectors and add new power sources. The average "car guy" of the past has been left behind, either to become today's super-geek car guy, or to become an average user of the cars he owns.
The same thing seems to be happening in computers, where the average computer geek is being left behind. Those who are left will be super geeks on the computers, who actually know how to build their own circuits or use an iPad to transfer software to an Apple // or write code to modify locked down devices; most of the rest will become average computer users.
I don't see this as a bad thing.
I know that this is offtopic, but you do realize that you can vote submissions up and down for inclusion, right?
And HP, which bought WebOS and immediately announced killing off their Win7 tablet to build a WebOS tablet, built along similar lines to the iPhone ecosystem.
At that point, if you're not in the class of "almost everyone", then the record industry, movie industry, and business software industry will assume you to be either A. an employee of an established, licensed, and bonded company, B. a student training to be an employee of such a company, or C. a pirate.
And this differs from today because? Oh, I see, because today they consider option B and option C to be identical.
It's one of the two things he's done that I think is excellent. Basically, he's getting rid of a bloated program that could never have met its goals, and replacing it with a more free-market alternative: having NASA buy its rides from commercial providers. He's keeping the VSE goals, and in fact expanding NASA's wider goals, but removing transport to LEO from NASA's engineering teams, which have consistently failed to deliver for a long time now. As a big supporter of man moving into space on a permanent basis, I'm thrilled.
I can understand why Armstrong is unhappy. Along with the rest of his generation, but even more strongly because of his role in the program, he sees the government-driven space program as the only way to do things. But given that the height of the space program was the early 1970s, and we've done essentially nothing new since the early 1980s, I can't agree with him.
You are right: those of us who aren't mad at Apple for what they are doing likely would be mad if they did the exact same thing on the desktop. But that's because the desktop is a general purpose computer and the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch aren't. I would far more upset losing the use of my special-purpose computing appliance as a phone (guess which I have) due to poorly written third party apps than I am with Apple restricting those apps. (And yes, I'm also an iPhone developer.) I accept that the desktop may crash due to flawed third party software; it's a price I pay for flexibility.
In other words, where I think we differ is that I do not see a need to make every device that is capable of computing into a general purpose device.
Nice job with red meat for both sides, there.
I must start with observing that if you are reduced to calling your opponents cocksuckers (which is fundamentally what teabagger means), your arguments have the force of a five year old, which is to say, not much.
In any case, where were these same people during the Bush years? Look up Porkbusters, which was the same people, started during Bush's second term, for much the same reason.
No. I expect the cross-platform runtime to be web applications, hosted in most cases on a server somewhere with a web frontend.
I had a lot of fun demolishing my poli sci instructor's graduate thesis. It was that increasing the speed limits had turned out to vastly increase the number of highway deaths. A little statistics later, I showed him that almost all of the increase he was citing was in areas where the speed limits had not in fact increased (urban areas), and that most urban areas had no change outside the margins of error. PoliSci is not particularly rigorous, I find.
I am curious in what way the tea parties are "a bunch of garbage." It would seem to me that "stop expanding the Federal government, cut the programs that don't work, balance the budget, and leave us alone" is a reasonable position.
You are failing to note the distinction between truth and Truth. Kind of like when Dan Rather defending faked documents (attempting to bring down Bush) as "fake but accurate." If something expresses the right feelings, those that make one feel better, then it is Truth, no matter how factually inaccurate. And of course, Truth is more important than truth, and supercedes it. If you don't believe me, ask essentially any academic outside of engineering and hard sciences, and they'll set you straight.
Actually, yes, it is good to have a parallel health care system only for soldiers. The physical and psychological needs are vastly different than most civilian situations. We owe it to those who put their lives on the line for us to take care of them. We do not owe it to everyone else (including me) to take care of them.
On the other hand, the real scandals are that (a) the VA system is shockingly bad at providing good health care, and (b) if ObamaCare is not repealed, we will essentially get VA for everyone... except Congress, the president, cabinet officers, the politically connected and other "better than the hoi polloi" types.
I'm just amused at the image of the business meeting where that would be proposed. I had a director once whose reaction would have been: "That's very interesting, out-of-the-box thinking. Now get back in the box!"
It's for exactly this reason that I really like the idea of Flash dying off. The native applications are a big deal in the short run, but in the long run the applications will largely be network-based/server-hosted, and so what you really want is a lot of choices in how to access those applications. Having iPhone-OS and Android and WebOS and ChromeOS tablets, and whatever else chooses to show up, allows the user to get exactly what they want, without compromise, and still have everyone using the exact same applications. This is a huge deal for companies when it matures, because it means that you can eliminate a lot of the overhead currently taken up by IT while improving end users' experience and access to information.
The developer agreement does not make it illegal for someone to work on other projects. It doesn't even make it illegal for you to install Pascal apps on your iPhone. It does mean that Apple won't approve Pascal apps on the iPhone, and you won't get them into the app store. But you are being a bit hysterical to think that joining the developer program in any way affects what else you do.
Um, how was the comment you're referring to not flamebait and trolling?
Certain families in the US are political, and others are artistic, and others are medical and so forth. The thing is, the political ones generally don't get handed the seats (I realize that Kennedy's are sometimes the exception): they have to win them. When they don't even have to stand for election, then we'll have dynastic succession.
But that is essentially always the case, in every human society throughout history. It only becomes a problem when coupled with democracy. Republicanism (small-r) is an attempt to avoid both the bad effects of democracy and the bad effects of monarchy, oligarchy or other dictatorial/elitist ruling structures. Sadly, we have spent a century adapting our system to have the worst aspects of both democracy and monarchy, with the Senate as well as the House now populist and with the president increasingly monarchic. The only place we haven't gone yet is dynastic succession.
Ack, used blockquote instead of quote. Here's the paragraph:
And meanwhile, you're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- (laughter) -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.
is here, and here is the paragraph that people are taking issue with:
What I find interesting is not the assertion about the devices, and information becoming entertainment — that's been true since at least the beginnings of edutainment and of news as entertainment almost twenty years ago. For me, the interesting part is the first sentence: "And meanwhile, you're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter." It seems to me that throughout history, the times when truth has been the major component of the information we are given have been few and far between. For example, the news media in the US, despite their pretensions to objectivity, haven't been particularly honest at any time in their history. Even in WWII, the war correspondents left out more than they said, and that was probably the height of objectivity in the news. Heck, the news media was in great part responsible for fomenting the Spanish-American War (google "yellow journalism"), reported the propaganda of Saddam Hussein as news in order to maintain access, and spent years trying to talk us into a recession (note the tone of economic reporting under Bush vs. that under Obama, and compare that to the actual statistics).
In other words, the real requirement we have is not to shut off the flows of information, or even to tilt at the windmill of trying to ensure that all the information we have access to is truthful, but to armor ourselves with scepticism, basic statistical knowledge, and deep historical knowledge so that we, individually, can sort out the truth from the lies, distortions and agenda-driven propaganda we are faced with.