Douglas Rushoff says it much better than I ever could. His book on this topic is very interesting, and highly recommended if you are interested in the subject.
Re:Most people don't want to learn how computers w
on
Osborne 1 vs. IPad 2
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· Score: 1
There was a time when the vast majority of people didn't want to read. Only priests needed to be literate. The vast majority of people just wanted to do what they were told to do, according to the holy texts, which they could not read themselves.
So because you learned a new language (something you could have done on a regular computer anyway, I might add) it's OK to dumb down and restrict our user interfaces to the lowest common denominator and thus encourage people not to learn more powerful computing skills? In some ways this new wave of "it's OK to know nothing about computers, you don't have to be a 'geek'" is like going back to times when reading and writing was restricted to priests and it was accepted that the common man just doesn't have the time or need to be literate.
As others have pointed out, you seem to be ignorant of a very, very common type of hardware found in any datacenter: Remote management boards. These inexpensive boards are available from any serious server vendor (dell, hp, ibm, etc), in fact many servers come with them built in.
I've got several servers in hosting centers that I have never laid eyes on. Shipped directly from my vendor to the hosting site, they plug it in, and I do everything from powering it on to installing the OS to the entire lifecycle of maintenance right from my house.
The Osborne was designed with the assumption that it's purchasers would be intelligent enough to read a couple manuals and learn some basic skills. It offered even greater power to those who went beyond the basics.
The iPad assumes you are an idiot who can't be expected to learn a damn thing. Heck, you probably can't even be bothered to touch things with your finger unless they are shiny and smooth. Master the complexity of touching things? Great, but unlike learning the basics of the Orborne, it won't help you actually understand anything about how the system works. The interface is so far abstracted from the machine that you won't ever learn anything by using it.
Products that cater to the ignorant may find marketing success, but ultimately they do our society a massive disservice.
I'm not sure yet. In a perfect world, manufacturers would make good choices that added value to the Android platform, without any need for rules or supervision. It seems that Google has some reason to believe they will not be perfect. I don't know whether this is an appropriate way to make Android better, or if it even will make Android better, but Google seems to think it will and I've got to assume they know more about what is going on than I do. That doesn't mean I blindly support their actions here, but I can't condemn they either.
I supposed we tend to see what we're looking for. Seems to me it isn't a world of such "all or nothing" extremes. IMHO the diversity found in the Android world hasn't caused any significant problems and has lead to a great deal of variety in innovative devices from many companies. Now Google is trying to put some additional standards in place so that we don't run into problems down the road, probably in response to lessons learned over the past couple years. This isn't a massive change. They aren't locking down the platform or reducing the marketplace to a single model from a single manufacturer, so I still see Android as a superior platform to some of the competition. Are they "less superior" for making these changes? Time will tell.
I never saw anyone say there was no fragmentation in the Android world. I heard lots of people say that fragmentation wasn't a problem, and I'd tend to agree with them. Before the anti-Android crowd made up this "fragmentation" thing, we used to use terms like "variety", "diversity" and so on.
If you bought OS9 shortly after it was released for the CoCo, you'd have been multitasking for five years before the Amiga came out. Could have been six or seven if you'd had a GIMIX or another of the first systems that ran OS9.
A couple points.. first, OS9 did have a GUI on the Tandy Color Computer, not sure if there was a GUI on the other 6809/OS9 platforms. It used the joystick to move the cursor, and I think they even sold a mouse at one point. However, this GUI was fairly crap, wasted precious RAM (many OS9 systems had 64k or even less) and few people wanted much to do with it. More often, people used the "windowing" system which let you define several areas on the text screen as independent I/O devices, or have multiple virtual screens and toggle between them. Another popular way to take advantage of multitasking was by connecting one or more serial terminals, and this was common on OS9 machines.. which is my second point.. I don't agree that multitasking is pointless without a GUI.. you just need multiple displays/terminals/areas on the screen. Lots of home users of OS9 systems added a second terminal for the kids/other folks in the house and so share the PC with multiple people simultaneously, something that even modern PCs really don't do (and probably there isn't a reason to do that anymore, but back then it was much cheaper and simpler to add a terminal than another computer system).
I love the Amiga, I switched from OS9 to the Amigas and they were my primary computer for many years.. went from an A500 to a 2000 to a 1200 w/ 68040 accelerator (still have that one). However, AmigaDOS wasn't ever nearly as nice to use or powerful as OS9 was. It wasn't until I started messing with Linux that I found an even better CLI to play with:)
OS-9 provided true multitasking for microcomputers in 1979. It was a standard option for the Tandy Color Computer starting in '80 or '81. These Radio Shack computers were available and affordable for "Joe Sixpack".. though most instances of Joe didn't seem very interested at the time. Amiga's ability to provide multitasking 5 years later may have more to do with marketing and the public's receptiveness to computers in general than any technical feat.
Yes, Apple is well known for ignoring the calendar experience. They've really innovated a new standard for just letting time pass as needed and eschewed any sort of predictable timetable.. Why, just look at the completely erratic releases in the iPhone series.. nobody could possibly guess when the next version will come out, Apple just waits till everything is perfect and then surprise, out of the blue they change everything again. This "ignore the clock" mentality (some might call it "thinking different") is directly expressed in their products, for example the unique and creative way they implement the alarm function during time changes.
That sort of makes sense, if you ignore that fact that notebook sales are up just about as much as netbook sales are down, and the average low end notebook price has dropped to less than that of a high end netbook.
Maybe people who wanted a small, cheap portable computer have decided instead to buy a small device that can't run any real application software, or really do much of what a computer does at all. Or maybe, just maybe, they decided to get a slightly less small, more powerful but similarly priced portable computer.
I suppose in the end we'll all just believe what we want to believe.
Maybe it's just semantics. I'd consider most website vulnerabilities to be "unlocked pins" in your example. The reality is that unlike a bridge that has just fallen over, a website which has just been compromised is not easy to spot. I don't trust any tool to detect a compromised website instantly, therefore the potential for compromise seems the most reliable indicator of danger. As for whether McAfee does an acceptable job of any of this, I doubt it.
"There is a difference between whether a website is vulnerable to attacks and whether it's unsafe to view. If I'm going to open a page in my browser, I care whether or not the page is fact dangerous to view at that point in time, not whether it could potentially be made dangerous."
Sort of like saying you're perfectly happy to drive over bridges that have a decent chance of collapsing, so long as they haven't collapsed at that time? Isn't the issue that a site which is perfectly safe to browse but vulnerable to attack can become unsafe to browse in an instant, just as the unsafe bridge works fine.. until it doesn't?
Hey, someone who gets what I was trying to say:) Judging from the long line of comments, my views are unpopular, but I'm not alone. Not sure if that is merely a reflection of the quality of relationship advice you can expect from/. or what. Anyway thanks for explaining what I saw in the post (manipulation) much better than I did.
I've been married for 10 years to a wonderful woman that I'd never call "illogical", in fact her reasoning is often clearer than most anyone else I know. If I tried to get my wife to pick *anything* merely by looking at a handful of pictures that of items I had selected, she'd have a good laugh (because she knows me). If anyone else tried it, she'd be offended, and rightly so.
If you've found someone who either matches your sad depiction of a woman or (more likely) allows you to believe you understand them, good for you. Keep making assumptions about her, as you have about me.. it's working for you.
"I can tell that everyone suggesting you just put Windows on the Mac has never been married, or probably had a LT girlfriend but..."
Don't know what kind of women you are dating, but your impression of women as irrational things that should be manipulated so as not to blame you in the future sounds awful.
How to buy a perfectly fine laptop in 2 easy steps:
1. Decide how much you want to spend
2. Go to any laptop manufacturers website. Spend slightly more than that.
Congratulations! You have now mastered the most common way us normal folks buy computers. It may feel strange to a Mac guy, but most of the world has figured out long ago that there is no use in worrying about the details when you're looking for a bog standard PC. Get on with your life.
cool that you are open minded about it, I am trying to be too. I spent a decent amount of time on Google, and all I turn up are A) people stating the privilege thing (millions of them, clearly it's just an accepted standard thing to say), but never any source or references, B) a much smaller group asking the same question I am, with mixed answers, the people claiming its a "right" generally with some pointer to a more or less relevant court decisions, the "privilege" camp just repeating the privilege theory a lot, or C) complete nut jobs insisting they can just drive around without a license or insurance and any cop who stops them is a state funded drone out to harass the innocent.
it's really the lack of any references from the huge number of people on the "privilege" side of things that stands out. it doesn't seem to me this is something obvious that requires no explanation or proof, yet for many it is. I've generally learned to assume that I've missed something somewhere instead of assuming that a huge number of people are wrong, but I'm really not sure in this case.
anyway I wasn't asking you to research this.. based on your well written op I figured you'd just say "because of...", possibly with some slight insult related to my ignorance, and that would be that. If you do decide to try and figure this out, I'd love to hear what you find. If nothing else maybe this thread will remind people to be critical of everything, just in case. good luck.
I guess that might explain it, but of course you need a license to marry, hunt, fish, own a gun, operate a business, and god knows what else. I'm fairly sure that gun ownership is a constitutional right, and it would seem marriage would be although I'm not certain. I am no legal scholar... I am not convinced that just because something is licensed it automatically becomes a privilege rather than a right.. but maybe so.
That's a really big "if". Historically operating systems that attempt to run other platform's applications tend to do a more or less crap job of it.
I'd be more interested to see an Android device from RIM where they have ported/adapted the good things about the blackberry platform (which does not include running it's apps:), rather than a blackberry where they've tacked on part of Android.
yep.. sounds like RIM's approach with Android apps is a lot like the way OS/2 ran Windows programs, but only certain programs, and not quite as easily as Windows did. expect the same issues with compatibility and lack of full functionality to come up here. for instance, will the playbook support android widgets on its home screen? that's a huge advantage of the android platform imho. also, will you be able to share data between android apps using the share button and/or the filesystem like you can on a real android device? they talk an awful lot about sandboxing. it seems difficult to create something that runs android apps as well as an android device without being an android device, and even if you did, you still have to come up with some compelling advantage or you've wasted a lot of time and effort compared to just running android in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imV3pPIUy1k
Douglas Rushoff says it much better than I ever could. His book on this topic is very interesting, and highly recommended if you are interested in the subject.
There was a time when the vast majority of people didn't want to read. Only priests needed to be literate. The vast majority of people just wanted to do what they were told to do, according to the holy texts, which they could not read themselves.
So because you learned a new language (something you could have done on a regular computer anyway, I might add) it's OK to dumb down and restrict our user interfaces to the lowest common denominator and thus encourage people not to learn more powerful computing skills? In some ways this new wave of "it's OK to know nothing about computers, you don't have to be a 'geek'" is like going back to times when reading and writing was restricted to priests and it was accepted that the common man just doesn't have the time or need to be literate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imV3pPIUy1k
As others have pointed out, you seem to be ignorant of a very, very common type of hardware found in any datacenter: Remote management boards. These inexpensive boards are available from any serious server vendor (dell, hp, ibm, etc), in fact many servers come with them built in.
I've got several servers in hosting centers that I have never laid eyes on. Shipped directly from my vendor to the hosting site, they plug it in, and I do everything from powering it on to installing the OS to the entire lifecycle of maintenance right from my house.
The Osborne was designed with the assumption that it's purchasers would be intelligent enough to read a couple manuals and learn some basic skills. It offered even greater power to those who went beyond the basics.
The iPad assumes you are an idiot who can't be expected to learn a damn thing. Heck, you probably can't even be bothered to touch things with your finger unless they are shiny and smooth. Master the complexity of touching things? Great, but unlike learning the basics of the Orborne, it won't help you actually understand anything about how the system works. The interface is so far abstracted from the machine that you won't ever learn anything by using it.
Products that cater to the ignorant may find marketing success, but ultimately they do our society a massive disservice.
I'm not sure yet. In a perfect world, manufacturers would make good choices that added value to the Android platform, without any need for rules or supervision. It seems that Google has some reason to believe they will not be perfect. I don't know whether this is an appropriate way to make Android better, or if it even will make Android better, but Google seems to think it will and I've got to assume they know more about what is going on than I do. That doesn't mean I blindly support their actions here, but I can't condemn they either.
I supposed we tend to see what we're looking for. Seems to me it isn't a world of such "all or nothing" extremes. IMHO the diversity found in the Android world hasn't caused any significant problems and has lead to a great deal of variety in innovative devices from many companies. Now Google is trying to put some additional standards in place so that we don't run into problems down the road, probably in response to lessons learned over the past couple years. This isn't a massive change. They aren't locking down the platform or reducing the marketplace to a single model from a single manufacturer, so I still see Android as a superior platform to some of the competition. Are they "less superior" for making these changes? Time will tell.
I never saw anyone say there was no fragmentation in the Android world. I heard lots of people say that fragmentation wasn't a problem, and I'd tend to agree with them. Before the anti-Android crowd made up this "fragmentation" thing, we used to use terms like "variety", "diversity" and so on.
Believe it or not, some of us are still using and extending OS9. It's a fun hobby. There's even a web server for OS9 on TRS-80 now.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nitros9/
https://sites.google.com/site/drivewire4/
If you bought OS9 shortly after it was released for the CoCo, you'd have been multitasking for five years before the Amiga came out.
Could have been six or seven if you'd had a GIMIX or another of the first systems that ran OS9.
A couple points.. first, OS9 did have a GUI on the Tandy Color Computer, not sure if there was a GUI on the other 6809/OS9 platforms. It used the joystick to move the cursor, and I think they even sold a mouse at one point. However, this GUI was fairly crap, wasted precious RAM (many OS9 systems had 64k or even less) and few people wanted much to do with it. More often, people used the "windowing" system which let you define several areas on the text screen as independent I/O devices, or have multiple virtual screens and toggle between them. Another popular way to take advantage of multitasking was by connecting one or more serial terminals, and this was common on OS9 machines.. which is my second point.. I don't agree that multitasking is pointless without a GUI.. you just need multiple displays/terminals/areas on the screen. Lots of home users of OS9 systems added a second terminal for the kids/other folks in the house and so share the PC with multiple people simultaneously, something that even modern PCs really don't do (and probably there isn't a reason to do that anymore, but back then it was much cheaper and simpler to add a terminal than another computer system).
I love the Amiga, I switched from OS9 to the Amigas and they were my primary computer for many years.. went from an A500 to a 2000 to a 1200 w/ 68040 accelerator (still have that one). However, AmigaDOS wasn't ever nearly as nice to use or powerful as OS9 was. It wasn't until I started messing with Linux that I found an even better CLI to play with :)
OS-9 provided true multitasking for microcomputers in 1979. It was a standard option for the Tandy Color Computer starting in '80 or '81.
These Radio Shack computers were available and affordable for "Joe Sixpack".. though most instances of Joe didn't seem very interested at the time.
Amiga's ability to provide multitasking 5 years later may have more to do with marketing and the public's receptiveness to computers in general than
any technical feat.
Yes, Apple is well known for ignoring the calendar experience. They've really innovated a new standard for just letting time pass as needed and eschewed any sort of predictable timetable.. Why, just look at the completely erratic releases in the iPhone series.. nobody could possibly guess when the next version will come out, Apple just waits till everything is perfect and then surprise, out of the blue they change everything again. This "ignore the clock" mentality (some might call it "thinking different") is directly expressed in their products, for example the unique and creative way they implement the alarm function during time changes.
That sort of makes sense, if you ignore that fact that notebook sales are up just about as much as netbook sales are down, and the average low end notebook price has dropped to less than that of a high end netbook.
Maybe people who wanted a small, cheap portable computer have decided instead to buy a small device that can't run any real application software, or really do much of what a computer does at all. Or maybe, just maybe, they decided to get a slightly less small, more powerful but similarly priced portable computer.
I suppose in the end we'll all just believe what we want to believe.
Maybe it's just semantics. I'd consider most website vulnerabilities to be "unlocked pins" in your example. The reality is that unlike a bridge that has just fallen over, a website which has just been compromised is not easy to spot. I don't trust any tool to detect a compromised website instantly, therefore the potential for compromise seems the most reliable indicator of danger. As for whether McAfee does an acceptable job of any of this, I doubt it.
"There is a difference between whether a website is vulnerable to attacks and whether it's unsafe to view. If I'm going to open a page in my browser, I care whether or not the page is fact dangerous to view at that point in time, not whether it could potentially be made dangerous."
Sort of like saying you're perfectly happy to drive over bridges that have a decent chance of collapsing, so long as they haven't collapsed at that time? Isn't the issue that a site which is perfectly safe to browse but vulnerable to attack can become unsafe to browse in an instant, just as the unsafe bridge works fine.. until it doesn't?
Hey, someone who gets what I was trying to say :) Judging from the long line of comments, my views are unpopular, but I'm not alone. Not sure if that is merely a reflection of the quality of relationship advice you can expect from /. or what. Anyway thanks for explaining what I saw in the post (manipulation) much better than I did.
I've been married for 10 years to a wonderful woman that I'd never call "illogical", in fact her reasoning is often clearer than most anyone else I know. If I tried to get my wife to pick *anything* merely by looking at a handful of pictures that of items I had selected, she'd have a good laugh (because she knows me). If anyone else tried it, she'd be offended, and rightly so.
If you've found someone who either matches your sad depiction of a woman or (more likely) allows you to believe you understand them, good for you. Keep making assumptions about her, as you have about me.. it's working for you.
"I can tell that everyone suggesting you just put Windows on the Mac has never been married, or probably had a LT girlfriend but..."
Don't know what kind of women you are dating, but your impression of women as irrational things that should be manipulated so as not to blame you in the future sounds awful.
How to buy a perfectly fine laptop in 2 easy steps:
1. Decide how much you want to spend
2. Go to any laptop manufacturers website. Spend slightly more than that.
Congratulations! You have now mastered the most common way us normal folks buy computers. It may feel strange to a Mac guy, but most of the world has figured out long ago that there is no use in worrying about the details when you're looking for a bog standard PC. Get on with your life.
cool that you are open minded about it, I am trying to be too. I spent a decent amount of time on Google, and all I turn up are A) people stating the privilege thing (millions of them, clearly it's just an accepted standard thing to say), but never any source or references, B) a much smaller group asking the same question I am, with mixed answers, the people claiming its a "right" generally with some pointer to a more or less relevant court decisions, the "privilege" camp just repeating the privilege theory a lot, or C) complete nut jobs insisting they can just drive around without a license or insurance and any cop who stops them is a state funded drone out to harass the innocent.
it's really the lack of any references from the huge number of people on the "privilege" side of things that stands out. it doesn't seem to me this is something obvious that requires no explanation or proof, yet for many it is. I've generally learned to assume that I've missed something somewhere instead of assuming that a huge number of people are wrong, but I'm really not sure in this case.
anyway I wasn't asking you to research this.. based on your well written op I figured you'd just say "because of ...", possibly with some slight insult related to my ignorance, and that would be that. If you do decide to try and figure this out, I'd love to hear what you find. If nothing else maybe this thread will remind people to be critical of everything, just in case. good luck.
I guess that might explain it, but of course you need a license to marry, hunt, fish, own a gun, operate a business, and god knows what else.
I'm fairly sure that gun ownership is a constitutional right, and it would seem marriage would be although I'm not certain.
I am no legal scholar... I am not convinced that just because something is licensed it automatically becomes a privilege rather than a right.. but maybe so.
That's a really big "if". Historically operating systems that attempt to run other platform's applications tend to do a more or less crap job of it.
I'd be more interested to see an Android device from RIM where they have ported/adapted the good things about the blackberry platform (which does not include running it's apps :), rather than a blackberry where they've tacked on part of Android.
yep.. sounds like RIM's approach with Android apps is a lot like the way OS/2 ran Windows programs, but only certain programs, and not quite as easily as Windows did. expect the same issues with compatibility and lack of full functionality to come up here.
for instance, will the playbook support android widgets on its home screen? that's a huge advantage of the android platform imho. also, will you be able to share data between android apps using the share button and/or the filesystem like you can on a real android device? they talk an awful lot about sandboxing.
it seems difficult to create something that runs android apps as well as an android device without being an android device, and even if you did, you still have to come up with some compelling advantage or you've wasted a lot of time and effort compared to just running android in the first place.