Whether something is truly "good" or a "good" use of someone's time is up to the person to decide. Perhaps, for them, it isn't.
But it's not up to them to skip the things they don't want to do and still call themselves an engineer with a Bachelor's degree.
Education is what is left behind after you've forgotten everything you were taught. If you were only taught "useful" things, you didn't get an education, you learned a trade.
Plants vs Zombies - $20 on website, $10 on Mac app store, $7 iPad, $3 iPhone.
Pixelmator - $60 on website, $30 on Mac app store.
Aperture - $200 in box, $80 on Mac app store.
Autodesk Sketchbook - $80 list, sale price $40 at Amazon, sale price $25 on App Store.
But there are lots other publishers trying to maintain the same pricing as their older sales channels, so the marketplace is still churning on this one. Hard to say how it will ultimately work out, but there's little evidence that prices are feeling an upward pressure.
I suppose even a.txt file is unsafe if it includes instructions for sending your credit card info to Russia, which is all that MacDefender really does in the end.
The advantage of Safari's approach is that they don't define "safe". This allows Apple to adjust the safety heuristics from update to update without changing the default security setting.
It's not a zero-sum game. The mobile sector is a growth sector, so Android's growth doesn't have to come out of anyone else's bottom line. And even if it is coming out of someone else's bottom line, it's definitely not Apple's, since the whole point of this article is that Apple is crushing everyone else combined in the profitshare metric, and cannot make their devices fast enough.
But insofar as Android's growth is hurting someone else's bottom line, it's almost certainly Nokia's. They just capitulated and went with WP7, which is a sign of defeat if I ever saw one.
If Android's 33% came at the expense of iOS, you might have a point. But it didn't, so I guess not. The point of the original article is that Apple is making metric fucktons of money from iOS, and their insane growth shows no signs of slowing. Are you disputing this? Or are you proposing a novel definition of "trounced" that involves insane growth rates and billions of dollars in profits? Because I thought that this is what trouncing looks like.
Actually, it's not even close. iOS has almost 40 million users, while Android is just under 25 million.
For phones, it is 33% Android, 25% iOS, which isn't exactly "trouncing". If you use profitshare rather than marketshare as your metric (and surely this is the metric that matters to corporate giants like Apple, Samsung, and HTC), Android is in the basement and probably always will be, because it's a commodity OS. It's whole purpose is to remove the OS as a profit center.
Simple. If making a good tablet isn't enough to sell a good tablet, that means that the demand for tablets is being driven by Apple rather than a need for tablets.
It's not a gadget, people. It's an ecosystem. Imagine building a film camera, but the actual film was rare, required special skills to prepare and load, and there were no processing labs. How well would it do against a camera that autoloaded at the click of a button, and had film labs in every town to process your pictures? It doesn't take a genius to see that the merits of the actual gadget are completely secondary to the value equation for regular consumers.
Apple figured this out 10 years ago with the iPod. The iPad is a nice gadget, better than the Xoom, but not by much. But iPad+iTunes is a monster, years ahead of the competition. Nothing even comes close, and all these other hardware makers who had simply latched on to Microsoft's ecosystem are basically screwed. Only Amazon has an ecosystem that compares to Apple, but it doesn't even occur to anyone to compare Kindle to iPad because they are so distracted by hardware questions that they don't even understand what they are looking at.
Is not as light or as thin, but you still think it is superior hardware? If you glued your 24" LCD monitor to the side of your PC case and hooked that up to 10 car batteries, would that be an even more superior tablet?
A single site link means it's open source friendly?
Who said they were open-source "friendly"? Parent post said they aren't very open source and they don't care, which is ignorant (their kernel and web tools are all open source, FFS). I simply disproved that trollery.
Apple's schtick is that they are extremely open-source friendly in non-strategic segments, and very, very closed in their strategic segments. Basically, they have two personalities, one of which is an open standards Unix nerd, and the other of which is a controlling vertical integrator, and the tension between the two is what makes them a great topic for Slashdot. But on average, it makes them middle of the road OSS-wise, about midway between Debian and Microsoft. Your personal experience will depend on what you spend your time doing. If you think Apple is too closed, you should spend less time in iTunes.
they're not very open source and they fundamentally don't care.
You mean like this, or are you talking about something else?
If they did care they would clutter their designs with backwards compatibility hacks. They don't.
You mean like Classic environment in OS X or Rosetta on Intel macs, or are you talking about something else?
If they did care they would keep, perhaps slavishly, to existing standards, They don't.
Existing standards like, say UNIX, POSIX, CSS3, AAC, h.264, or are you talking about something else?
Why are they even discussed on/.?
I always figured it was because they are the world's biggest vendor of standards-compliant open source UNIX environments, and that stuff is considered pretty important around here. Plus they vertically integrate it with a closed source presentation layer that is the envy of the industry, and a media distribution model that is controlled with an iron fist, which gives us LOTS to talk about.
... or are you talking about something else, cuz it's really hard to tell if you are even on the same planet as the rest of us.
3. As a techwhore, I know enough about Apple's products to realise they're not worth the money being asked for them, unless it was important to me that an electronic gadget needed to match the outfit I was wearing on that particular day.
You're obviously trolling, but seriously, where does this idiotic meme come from? Macbooks are white or unpainted. Meanwhile, over at Sony, the Vaio Fall Collection (this is no joke) are available in black, gold, glossy carbon, bordeaux red, sangria red, striped, wavy black, wavy white, arabesque black, arabesque gold, crocodile black, and crocodile pink. FUCKING. CROCODILE. PINK. So you're clearly an asshat who doesn't know the first thing about accessorizing your computer to your wardrobe, since you should obviously be running Win7 if you have to match your PC to your boots. And by the way, you'll pay as much or more for a Vaio as you will for a Macbook.
- for consumers who will eventually have to pay ~30% more,
That's a fee for marketing and distribution. I'm skeptical that we consumers would pay 30% less if developers all had to manage their own sales, marketing, and distribution channels. The evidence so far indicates that we can expect to pay 60% less on apps delivered through the app store, despite this 30% fee.
So, while DRM is generally obnoxious, it is not nearly so bad when it is not used to artificially restrict the devices that I can watch it on (e.g. as with Kindle or anything Apple).
How does forcing video to HTML5/H.265 artificially restrict the devices you can watch it on?
Parent is right - an empty executive chair would be funny on so many levels. Balmer's MIA business strategy, defecting MS executives, the CIO purchasing logic that keeps the company profitable, and of course it's the weapon of choice in the MS executive suite.
after all, it's not like you're going to type a novel on a tablet...
Actually, I know a guy who had his laptop stolen, so he has switched to writing his book on his iPad. He says it's actually a better device for the job--once you add a Bluetooth keyboard, of course.
Yeah, saying that the #1 manufacturer of smartphones "ceased to matter" is pretty epic.
They "matter" if they are charting the course of the industry, which they clearly are not. Not in the USA, not in Japan, not even in Finland. The fact that they continue to sell lots of phones and make money does not "matter" to anyone except to their shareholders. And I'm pretty sure that Nokia shareholders are not too happy right now--their stock is trading around $10 from a high of $40 a couple years ago. Their executives publicly admit that they have been clobbered by the iPhone revolution, and they still have no real plan for dealing with it.
Also the starting point is about 1983, before the introduction of the Mac. By the time you added the printer adapter, monitor and other required gear, the//e cost more than a PC compatible when the Mac was introduced.
You are really distorting the value equation here. You've moved the "starting point" to the XT, which made better use of the 16 bit technology and was a superior technical platform. You're ignoring IBM entirely, and basing your prices on clones, but you're still comparing to name brand Apple, not to Apple clones.
My computer history sounds identical to yours, except that my Apple in 1982 was a clone, and way cheaper than any PC, compatible or otherwise.
The IBM PC was for all intents and purposes an 8-bit computer for the first few years of its life, because it only had an 8-bit address space of actual RAM and it could only run the standard 8-bit apps ported from CP/M. So actually the comparison is completely fair. It wasn't until the XT that the 16 bit technology started to make a real difference between the platforms and the PC eclipsed the Apple II (and III). But by then Apple was focussed on the 32-bit Mac. Clones didn't take leadership of the PC industry until the mid-80s.
Some of you should check the statistics on global smart phone dominance.
Do you mean the stats that show Nokia's profitability collapsing, and coming in below analysts' estimates? The stats that show their sales are flat, despite a drop in prices? The stats that show Apple, RIM, and Android phones eating their lunch? The statements from their executives that their profitability problems are due to their inability to deliver a smartphone that could take on the iPhone?
Dude, please. You're getting your anti-Apple memes all mixed up.
Facts: In 1979 the Apple II+ cost $1195 with 48K of RAM. In 1981, the IBM PC cost $1565 with 16K of RAM. Apple had cheaper hardware and software for years. And furthermore Microsoft was a key supplier to both companies, so why on earth would anyone have wanted to crush them?
The cheap PC clones vs. expensive Apple meme had real legs for about 10 years (early 1990s to early 2000's). It has been false for quite a bit longer than it was true.
There is a difference between complicated and expressive.
C++ is complicated. C is expressive. It's no coincidence that C used to have the same reputation as Perl for having too many ways to skin the same cat, hard core geek appeal, and obtuse, punctuation-heavy syntax (witness the IOCCC).
Slashdot Mirror
They're still the world's largest vendor of open source, standards-compliant Unix systems. The things we used to like about them haven't changed.
Whether something is truly "good" or a "good" use of someone's time is up to the person to decide. Perhaps, for them, it isn't.
But it's not up to them to skip the things they don't want to do and still call themselves an engineer with a Bachelor's degree.
Education is what is left behind after you've forgotten everything you were taught. If you were only taught "useful" things, you didn't get an education, you learned a trade.
How about some actual prices?
Plants vs Zombies - $20 on website, $10 on Mac app store, $7 iPad, $3 iPhone.
Pixelmator - $60 on website, $30 on Mac app store.
Aperture - $200 in box, $80 on Mac app store.
Autodesk Sketchbook - $80 list, sale price $40 at Amazon, sale price $25 on App Store.
But there are lots other publishers trying to maintain the same pricing as their older sales channels, so the marketplace is still churning on this one. Hard to say how it will ultimately work out, but there's little evidence that prices are feeling an upward pressure.
No need to speculate, the App Store has existed for some time, and there are many 3rd-party applications being sold there.
And the evidence shows that prices tend to drop by 60-70% when they go onto the App Store.
I suppose even a .txt file is unsafe if it includes instructions for sending your credit card info to Russia, which is all that MacDefender really does in the end.
The advantage of Safari's approach is that they don't define "safe". This allows Apple to adjust the safety heuristics from update to update without changing the default security setting.
It's not a zero-sum game. The mobile sector is a growth sector, so Android's growth doesn't have to come out of anyone else's bottom line. And even if it is coming out of someone else's bottom line, it's definitely not Apple's, since the whole point of this article is that Apple is crushing everyone else combined in the profitshare metric, and cannot make their devices fast enough.
But insofar as Android's growth is hurting someone else's bottom line, it's almost certainly Nokia's. They just capitulated and went with WP7, which is a sign of defeat if I ever saw one.
If Android's 33% came at the expense of iOS, you might have a point. But it didn't, so I guess not. The point of the original article is that Apple is making metric fucktons of money from iOS, and their insane growth shows no signs of slowing. Are you disputing this? Or are you proposing a novel definition of "trounced" that involves insane growth rates and billions of dollars in profits? Because I thought that this is what trouncing looks like.
Actually, it's not even close. iOS has almost 40 million users, while Android is just under 25 million.
For phones, it is 33% Android, 25% iOS, which isn't exactly "trouncing". If you use profitshare rather than marketshare as your metric (and surely this is the metric that matters to corporate giants like Apple, Samsung, and HTC), Android is in the basement and probably always will be, because it's a commodity OS. It's whole purpose is to remove the OS as a profit center.
But I'd sound like a douche if I used "vertical".
Simple. If making a good tablet isn't enough to sell a good tablet, that means that the demand for tablets is being driven by Apple rather than a need for tablets.
It's not a gadget, people. It's an ecosystem. Imagine building a film camera, but the actual film was rare, required special skills to prepare and load, and there were no processing labs. How well would it do against a camera that autoloaded at the click of a button, and had film labs in every town to process your pictures? It doesn't take a genius to see that the merits of the actual gadget are completely secondary to the value equation for regular consumers.
Apple figured this out 10 years ago with the iPod. The iPad is a nice gadget, better than the Xoom, but not by much. But iPad+iTunes is a monster, years ahead of the competition. Nothing even comes close, and all these other hardware makers who had simply latched on to Microsoft's ecosystem are basically screwed. Only Amazon has an ecosystem that compares to Apple, but it doesn't even occur to anyone to compare Kindle to iPad because they are so distracted by hardware questions that they don't even understand what they are looking at.
Is not as light or as thin, but you still think it is superior hardware? If you glued your 24" LCD monitor to the side of your PC case and hooked that up to 10 car batteries, would that be an even more superior tablet?
A single site link means it's open source friendly?
Who said they were open-source "friendly"? Parent post said they aren't very open source and they don't care, which is ignorant (their kernel and web tools are all open source, FFS). I simply disproved that trollery.
Apple's schtick is that they are extremely open-source friendly in non-strategic segments, and very, very closed in their strategic segments. Basically, they have two personalities, one of which is an open standards Unix nerd, and the other of which is a controlling vertical integrator, and the tension between the two is what makes them a great topic for Slashdot. But on average, it makes them middle of the road OSS-wise, about midway between Debian and Microsoft. Your personal experience will depend on what you spend your time doing. If you think Apple is too closed, you should spend less time in iTunes.
they're not very open source and they fundamentally don't care.
You mean like this, or are you talking about something else?
If they did care they would clutter their designs with backwards compatibility hacks. They don't.
You mean like Classic environment in OS X or Rosetta on Intel macs, or are you talking about something else?
If they did care they would keep, perhaps slavishly, to existing standards, They don't.
Existing standards like, say UNIX, POSIX, CSS3, AAC, h.264, or are you talking about something else?
Why are they even discussed on /.?
I always figured it was because they are the world's biggest vendor of standards-compliant open source UNIX environments, and that stuff is considered pretty important around here. Plus they vertically integrate it with a closed source presentation layer that is the envy of the industry, and a media distribution model that is controlled with an iron fist, which gives us LOTS to talk about.
... or are you talking about something else, cuz it's really hard to tell if you are even on the same planet as the rest of us.
Actually, Apple did invent the idea of Pad computing, back in 1987. The iPad is their 2nd Generation tablet computer.
3. As a techwhore, I know enough about Apple's products to realise they're not worth the money being asked for them, unless it was important to me that an electronic gadget needed to match the outfit I was wearing on that particular day.
You're obviously trolling, but seriously, where does this idiotic meme come from? Macbooks are white or unpainted. Meanwhile, over at Sony, the Vaio Fall Collection (this is no joke) are available in black, gold, glossy carbon, bordeaux red, sangria red, striped, wavy black, wavy white, arabesque black, arabesque gold, crocodile black, and crocodile pink. FUCKING. CROCODILE. PINK. So you're clearly an asshat who doesn't know the first thing about accessorizing your computer to your wardrobe, since you should obviously be running Win7 if you have to match your PC to your boots. And by the way, you'll pay as much or more for a Vaio as you will for a Macbook.
- for consumers who will eventually have to pay ~30% more,
That's a fee for marketing and distribution. I'm skeptical that we consumers would pay 30% less if developers all had to manage their own sales, marketing, and distribution channels. The evidence so far indicates that we can expect to pay 60% less on apps delivered through the app store, despite this 30% fee.
So, while DRM is generally obnoxious, it is not nearly so bad when it is not used to artificially restrict the devices that I can watch it on (e.g. as with Kindle or anything Apple).
How does forcing video to HTML5/H.265 artificially restrict the devices you can watch it on?
This book derives from Tolkien's copy, not just his ideas.
I'm afraid you got that backwards. The only derivative "copy" consists of a handful of place names and character names.
Parent is right - an empty executive chair would be funny on so many levels. Balmer's MIA business strategy, defecting MS executives, the CIO purchasing logic that keeps the company profitable, and of course it's the weapon of choice in the MS executive suite.
after all, it's not like you're going to type a novel on a tablet...
Actually, I know a guy who had his laptop stolen, so he has switched to writing his book on his iPad. He says it's actually a better device for the job--once you add a Bluetooth keyboard, of course.
Yeah, saying that the #1 manufacturer of smartphones "ceased to matter" is pretty epic.
They "matter" if they are charting the course of the industry, which they clearly are not. Not in the USA, not in Japan, not even in Finland. The fact that they continue to sell lots of phones and make money does not "matter" to anyone except to their shareholders. And I'm pretty sure that Nokia shareholders are not too happy right now--their stock is trading around $10 from a high of $40 a couple years ago. Their executives publicly admit that they have been clobbered by the iPhone revolution, and they still have no real plan for dealing with it.
Also the starting point is about 1983, before the introduction of the Mac. By the time you added the printer adapter, monitor and other required gear, the //e cost more than a PC compatible when the Mac was introduced.
You are really distorting the value equation here. You've moved the "starting point" to the XT, which made better use of the 16 bit technology and was a superior technical platform. You're ignoring IBM entirely, and basing your prices on clones, but you're still comparing to name brand Apple, not to Apple clones.
My computer history sounds identical to yours, except that my Apple in 1982 was a clone, and way cheaper than any PC, compatible or otherwise.
The IBM PC was for all intents and purposes an 8-bit computer for the first few years of its life, because it only had an 8-bit address space of actual RAM and it could only run the standard 8-bit apps ported from CP/M. So actually the comparison is completely fair. It wasn't until the XT that the 16 bit technology started to make a real difference between the platforms and the PC eclipsed the Apple II (and III). But by then Apple was focussed on the 32-bit Mac. Clones didn't take leadership of the PC industry until the mid-80s.
Some of you should check the statistics on global smart phone dominance.
Do you mean the stats that show Nokia's profitability collapsing, and coming in below analysts' estimates? The stats that show their sales are flat, despite a drop in prices? The stats that show Apple, RIM, and Android phones eating their lunch? The statements from their executives that their profitability problems are due to their inability to deliver a smartphone that could take on the iPhone?
Dude, please. You're getting your anti-Apple memes all mixed up.
Facts: In 1979 the Apple II+ cost $1195 with 48K of RAM. In 1981, the IBM PC cost $1565 with 16K of RAM. Apple had cheaper hardware and software for years. And furthermore Microsoft was a key supplier to both companies, so why on earth would anyone have wanted to crush them?
The cheap PC clones vs. expensive Apple meme had real legs for about 10 years (early 1990s to early 2000's). It has been false for quite a bit longer than it was true.
There is a difference between complicated and expressive.
C++ is complicated. C is expressive. It's no coincidence that C used to have the same reputation as Perl for having too many ways to skin the same cat, hard core geek appeal, and obtuse, punctuation-heavy syntax (witness the IOCCC).