True that. I'm a hardcore Mac fan, but their keyboards are crap. I'm typing this on an ancient Cherry keyboard I still have from my pre-Mac times. It even has a Tux key as the Cmd key.:-)
In which universe is abuse equal to rape? There are so many ways in which you can abuse a person. I have literally no idea where you pulled that association from.
And of course I'm being hyperbolical. I don't literally mean to lock anyone up, but people who deny their children the pleasure and experience of physical books are doing them a massive disservice.
I don't care what you think, physical books are in every way but one (weight) superior to e-books. Don't deny a child the experience of handling an actual, physical book. If later in live you decide that e-books suit you better - fine, that can be your decision.
Yes, but not for extended periods of time. The visual is definitely a dramatic difference to looking at a screen. No doubt about that. I'm waiting for the day that affordable, light VR goggles combine with 3D movie technology - that would be my constant companion on flights.
However, I strongly notice the disconnect between a convincing visual environment and the need to manipulate it with a joystick or other device. This is probably related to the uncanny valley, but the more convincing the graphics are, the more I notice that I can't touch anything, don't feel anything when I run into walls, and don't get any body-motion feedback.
Some year ago, after not having a car for many years (lived in the inner city in Europe - good public transport) I bought a 10 year old BMW 5. Reasonably cheap, due to age, nice features and comfort.
Last year it was time for a new car. I checked many. Many. Including most electrical cars on the market, yes including a Tesla Model S. Guess what I bought in the end? A one year old BMW 5. Just everything is in the right place. I wanted to love the Model S (disclaimer: I own Tesla stocks) but as far as interior design and driver comfort is concerned, they still have lessons to learn. I consider touch-screen controls on a car a safety hazard and love it when I can do everything without taking my eyes off the road.
I don't think I will ever go down a class (though the Hyundai Ionic impressed me). So your neighbours might love their cars, or they are simply used to them and don't want to make sacrifices on something that they spend an hour or two in every day on their commute.
It might be just because I'm a very kinaesthetic person, but this is something I find in general computer tech has failed to grasp: How important it is to hold something, to touch something, to feel something touching you.
Among other things, this is the primary reason most keyboards on the market suck, and why VR still hasn't taken off. We techies tend to believe too much that 80% of the human perception is visual, and that is just plain out wrong. The largest sensory organ in your body is your skin.
Computers make great toys for kids, they allow so much creativity and agency, and there are so many skills you can develop with them. But kids should also play with sticks, with Legos, with tools, with wood and metal and stone.
And, frankly speaking, if you don't give your child real, physical books to read, IMHO you should be locked up for child abuse.
So you are selling around 400 million devices every quarter, that is 1.6 billion a year, and you are surprised that doesn't go on forever?
Smartphone users total only about twice that. So the average one buys a new smartphone every two years. That sounds about right, doesn't it?
Even in the USA, smartphone usage is only about 77% of the population. Some people still don't have one, and some are too young, too imprisoned or otherwise incapable (I don't count "too poor" anymore, as even if you are very poor, a smartphone has become a necessity).
"market shrinkage" my ass. The market is still growing (see the link above). You've just saturated it and most sales go not to new owners but to people replacing an existing phone.
"at least 20 years" means early 1998, so we are talking Windows 95 here (Windows 98 came out in summer).
If you seriously claim that drag&drop worked properly in Windows 95, you absolutely need to give me the contact details of your dealer. That guy is selling some seriously good shit. You should probably sniff less of it before posting to the Internet, though.
And it would come with SQL Server I'm sure. OS X comes with PostgreSQL, and that is perfect for me (it's my DB of choice anyways).
Yes, you can install some 3rd party shells. But why do I have to? A system without a proper shell is a crappy system. The OS wars are over, Unix won. With every iteration, windos becomes more Unix-like. So at this pace, in about 20 years, it will be a halfway useable system.:-)
So Windos now has a functional commandline? Proper scripting? A built-in SQL database? That's good to know. I don't use it except at work as a launcher for Office (yes, I know. But the pay includes a good portion of pain fee for that).
I notice that windos has made advances, but even though I use it little, I discover shit that just doesn't work. So thanks but no thanks, I'll continue to stay away from it as much as possible.
Well 14 years ago was 2003, and it definitely beats WindowsME.
And yes, drag & drop actually working surprised me. That tells you more about the crap that windos was at that time than about the Mac.
In the end, people have preferences. You prefer windos or something - ok, I pity you but I'll leave you be. My posting was my personal experience and that's not exactly something you can argue about.
When I switched to Apple about 10 years ago, I thought I'd dual-boot Linux and/or Windows on it, and check out OS X out of curiosity. That I'm still buying their stuff is as good an evidence as I have that they are doing something right, at least as far as my experience is concerned.
It turned out that I never installed Linux, and the Bootcamp Windows install was used mostly for games, and then less and less, and the most recent iMac I bought doesn't even have one anymore.
So what do they do right? Stuff simply works. I've spent countless hours on my previous Linux machines (and Windows, DOS, etc. before that) configuring things just the right way, installing that tool and this to get things to work the way I need them - and still something always failed. The first thing I noticed on my first Mac was that drag & drop actually worked! At that time, on Windows, it was a gamble and half the time it did some shit you didn't want, while the other half of the time it simply didn't work at all.
The same is true for the iPhone. I bought the first one, and it was the first smartphone I owned. Had owned various PDAs and mobile phones before, but the iPhone was the first smartphone that got things right and simply worked.
Tim is right that Apple considers technology to be simply the tool that enables them to do the actual thing that needs to be done. For a nerd, that is at first difficult to get, but more normal people get it immediately. They don't buy a phone for the CPU or the graphics performance or the memory size. They buy it to make calls, take pictures, check their calendar (and today, to use whatever app is hip this week).
From my personal experience, what people misunderstand about Apple is that they use technology the way regular people use it. An airplane is something that gets you from A to B. Only airplane nerds care about wing span, horse powers, control schemes and other details. Most people want to get places and preferably not die, and all the tech is just there to serve that purpose. Apple thinks like that. In all their products and designs, you always see that they are trying to reduce, to take away, anything that is not necessary for the primary task.
Many of those "licenses" are trivial to acquire and contain relevant legal or otherwise need-to-know information. Even if much of that knowledge is trivial, you want to be sure that your (insert-profession-here) in fact does have it.
In particular, licences are more common in legal and health-care occupations than in any other.
And those are exactly the kind of professions where a) a laymen has no chance to spot any even halfway good con-man and b) you really, really want to be in the hands of someone who actually has the skills they claim.
Possible user errors aside, why would you ever willingly give your phone number or any other personal details not strictly necessary to a company in the business of selling your personal data ???
It should be obvious to an idiot that for FB, 2FA is just a welcome excuse to get you to give up your phone number, which of course they will immediately turn around and sell.
Security auditors generally follow a script and the scripts are generally badly written. There are a lot of us security experts out there who have a wider perspective, who knew long before the 2017 NIST about-face that traditional password policies are bullshit, and who smile politely when the security auditors come.
And if some dumbass stores the admin password in cleartext, or writes it on a post-it, then there's a 90% chance that your password policy is to blame.
Been preaching this for 10+ years: Usability and security are allies, not enemies.
If your usability is good, your users make less mistakes, which leads to less unintentional issues. Phishing is largely a usability thing. I have a couple slides about that, the very short version is that all the info you need to spot a phishing mail is typically hidden, while all the info that lures you in is prominent. Proper decision making by users can be guided through usability, to prevent them from doing stupid things. User feedback of most security apps is abysmal, to say it nicely.
There are great examples of usability and security working together. I still wonder why nobody picked up the Chamaeleon concept, for example (basically: A set of user-configurable domains running under one windowing system, with colored borders indicating for every window which domain it belongs to).
Usability needs to be designed into security. We are failing our users with this bullshit 80s attitude of blaming their stupidity.
Yes, imagine. How can a company produce something cheaply if it doesn't have to pay out profits to stakeholders or waste time and effort managing its stock price? When it doesn't have its own mergers & acquisition department, or pays for lobbyists?
I like private companies (my daily rate for them is considerably higher than for the government), but there are some areas where government-run makes sense.
You have to get rid of a LOT of highly radioactive NIMBY waste. Try to find a place to put them.
That's only because nobody thought of this shit when they built the thing. The place is right there, logically, because taking this waste apart and transporting it somewhere is just crazy, both from a cost and a risk perspective. Bury the entire thing and be done with it. Oh, you don't want a nuclear waste zone just outside your main city? Well why then did you build a nuclear power plant right there? See, didn't think that one through, did you?
That's great for nuclear power companies, of course. You reap the rewards of cheap power, pay your shareholders well and as soon as the plant is no longer viable and needs to get dismantled (i.e. when the big bills catch up to you), your company goes POOF and you dump about 99% of the cost your power plant generates onto the public.
You don't even need to go poof. Germany is demonstrating this right now. For some reason nobody can understand without bribe^H^H^Hcocain^H^H^Hbeing a politician^H^H^Hfuck I don't know how you can understand it under any circumstances, the government is letting the power companies go out and will cover the vast majority of the bill. No seriously. Maybe a combination of being brain dead AND corrupt AND a politician AND sniffing way too much cocain can explain it, but I'm not sure about even that. But it's happening.
I hope you're joking. You do understand that the moon is only visible from half the Earth's surface at any given time?
Noooooo! Reallllyyy???
If the moon will be setting during the eclipse for the eastern half of the US, why would you expect it to be visible in Europe at all?
You think I bother much with orbital geometry when I read/. summaries? A single sentence ("visible in the north and south Americas only") would've done half the world a favour. I don't ask much, but if your audience is global, adding one sentence for half of them is something you can do, right?
Seriously? Not one mention of the rest of the world? This is not a local event, you know, it's a global space event. People in other countries just might be interested, too.
Yes,/. is an american site yada yada yada. I don't care that most of the political and tech topics are focussed on US politics and business - but for a clearly global event, editors could spend 30 seconds to look up the appropriate times at least for rough areas ("Europe", "Asia").
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, didn't mean ONLY Legos. They are great for putting things together, though. But same as computers, they should not be the only diet.
True that. I'm a hardcore Mac fan, but their keyboards are crap. I'm typing this on an ancient Cherry keyboard I still have from my pre-Mac times. It even has a Tux key as the Cmd key. :-)
In which universe is abuse equal to rape? There are so many ways in which you can abuse a person. I have literally no idea where you pulled that association from.
And of course I'm being hyperbolical. I don't literally mean to lock anyone up, but people who deny their children the pleasure and experience of physical books are doing them a massive disservice.
I don't care what you think, physical books are in every way but one (weight) superior to e-books. Don't deny a child the experience of handling an actual, physical book. If later in live you decide that e-books suit you better - fine, that can be your decision.
Have you played VR....?
Yes, but not for extended periods of time. The visual is definitely a dramatic difference to looking at a screen. No doubt about that. I'm waiting for the day that affordable, light VR goggles combine with 3D movie technology - that would be my constant companion on flights.
However, I strongly notice the disconnect between a convincing visual environment and the need to manipulate it with a joystick or other device. This is probably related to the uncanny valley, but the more convincing the graphics are, the more I notice that I can't touch anything, don't feel anything when I run into walls, and don't get any body-motion feedback.
You also get used to them.
Some year ago, after not having a car for many years (lived in the inner city in Europe - good public transport) I bought a 10 year old BMW 5. Reasonably cheap, due to age, nice features and comfort.
Last year it was time for a new car. I checked many. Many. Including most electrical cars on the market, yes including a Tesla Model S. Guess what I bought in the end? A one year old BMW 5. Just everything is in the right place. I wanted to love the Model S (disclaimer: I own Tesla stocks) but as far as interior design and driver comfort is concerned, they still have lessons to learn. I consider touch-screen controls on a car a safety hazard and love it when I can do everything without taking my eyes off the road.
I don't think I will ever go down a class (though the Hyundai Ionic impressed me). So your neighbours might love their cars, or they are simply used to them and don't want to make sacrifices on something that they spend an hour or two in every day on their commute.
It might be just because I'm a very kinaesthetic person, but this is something I find in general computer tech has failed to grasp: How important it is to hold something, to touch something, to feel something touching you.
Among other things, this is the primary reason most keyboards on the market suck, and why VR still hasn't taken off. We techies tend to believe too much that 80% of the human perception is visual, and that is just plain out wrong. The largest sensory organ in your body is your skin.
Computers make great toys for kids, they allow so much creativity and agency, and there are so many skills you can develop with them. But kids should also play with sticks, with Legos, with tools, with wood and metal and stone.
And, frankly speaking, if you don't give your child real, physical books to read, IMHO you should be locked up for child abuse.
Sorry, I disagree. Not having a smartphone is a luxury these days. It appears that vast majority of the population agrees with me.
If they don't find, they will simply invent one. Maybe another "structured" product?
Several major factors caused the market shrinkage
So you are selling around 400 million devices every quarter, that is 1.6 billion a year, and you are surprised that doesn't go on forever?
Smartphone users total only about twice that. So the average one buys a new smartphone every two years. That sounds about right, doesn't it?
Even in the USA, smartphone usage is only about 77% of the population. Some people still don't have one, and some are too young, too imprisoned or otherwise incapable (I don't count "too poor" anymore, as even if you are very poor, a smartphone has become a necessity).
"market shrinkage" my ass. The market is still growing (see the link above). You've just saturated it and most sales go not to new owners but to people replacing an existing phone.
Quantity does not equal quality. Ask any prostitute.
"at least 20 years" means early 1998, so we are talking Windows 95 here (Windows 98 came out in summer).
If you seriously claim that drag&drop worked properly in Windows 95, you absolutely need to give me the contact details of your dealer. That guy is selling some seriously good shit. You should probably sniff less of it before posting to the Internet, though.
And it would come with SQL Server I'm sure. OS X comes with PostgreSQL, and that is perfect for me (it's my DB of choice anyways).
Yes, you can install some 3rd party shells. But why do I have to? A system without a proper shell is a crappy system. The OS wars are over, Unix won. With every iteration, windos becomes more Unix-like. So at this pace, in about 20 years, it will be a halfway useable system. :-)
So Windos now has a functional commandline? Proper scripting? A built-in SQL database? That's good to know. I don't use it except at work as a launcher for Office (yes, I know. But the pay includes a good portion of pain fee for that).
I notice that windos has made advances, but even though I use it little, I discover shit that just doesn't work. So thanks but no thanks, I'll continue to stay away from it as much as possible.
Well 14 years ago was 2003, and it definitely beats WindowsME.
And yes, drag & drop actually working surprised me. That tells you more about the crap that windos was at that time than about the Mac.
In the end, people have preferences. You prefer windos or something - ok, I pity you but I'll leave you be. My posting was my personal experience and that's not exactly something you can argue about.
Flamebait question, but I'll bite:
When I switched to Apple about 10 years ago, I thought I'd dual-boot Linux and/or Windows on it, and check out OS X out of curiosity. That I'm still buying their stuff is as good an evidence as I have that they are doing something right, at least as far as my experience is concerned.
It turned out that I never installed Linux, and the Bootcamp Windows install was used mostly for games, and then less and less, and the most recent iMac I bought doesn't even have one anymore.
So what do they do right? Stuff simply works. I've spent countless hours on my previous Linux machines (and Windows, DOS, etc. before that) configuring things just the right way, installing that tool and this to get things to work the way I need them - and still something always failed. The first thing I noticed on my first Mac was that drag & drop actually worked! At that time, on Windows, it was a gamble and half the time it did some shit you didn't want, while the other half of the time it simply didn't work at all.
The same is true for the iPhone. I bought the first one, and it was the first smartphone I owned. Had owned various PDAs and mobile phones before, but the iPhone was the first smartphone that got things right and simply worked.
Tim is right that Apple considers technology to be simply the tool that enables them to do the actual thing that needs to be done. For a nerd, that is at first difficult to get, but more normal people get it immediately. They don't buy a phone for the CPU or the graphics performance or the memory size. They buy it to make calls, take pictures, check their calendar (and today, to use whatever app is hip this week).
From my personal experience, what people misunderstand about Apple is that they use technology the way regular people use it. An airplane is something that gets you from A to B. Only airplane nerds care about wing span, horse powers, control schemes and other details. Most people want to get places and preferably not die, and all the tech is just there to serve that purpose. Apple thinks like that. In all their products and designs, you always see that they are trying to reduce, to take away, anything that is not necessary for the primary task.
Many of those "licenses" are trivial to acquire and contain relevant legal or otherwise need-to-know information. Even if much of that knowledge is trivial, you want to be sure that your (insert-profession-here) in fact does have it.
In particular, licences are more common in legal and health-care occupations than in any other.
And those are exactly the kind of professions where a) a laymen has no chance to spot any even halfway good con-man and b) you really, really want to be in the hands of someone who actually has the skills they claim.
Possible user errors aside, why would you ever willingly give your phone number or any other personal details not strictly necessary to a company in the business of selling your personal data ???
It should be obvious to an idiot that for FB, 2FA is just a welcome excuse to get you to give up your phone number, which of course they will immediately turn around and sell.
Honestly, you have to be stupid not to spot that.
Security auditors generally follow a script and the scripts are generally badly written. There are a lot of us security experts out there who have a wider perspective, who knew long before the 2017 NIST about-face that traditional password policies are bullshit, and who smile politely when the security auditors come.
And if some dumbass stores the admin password in cleartext, or writes it on a post-it, then there's a 90% chance that your password policy is to blame.
Been preaching this for 10+ years: Usability and security are allies, not enemies.
If your usability is good, your users make less mistakes, which leads to less unintentional issues.
Phishing is largely a usability thing. I have a couple slides about that, the very short version is that all the info you need to spot a phishing mail is typically hidden, while all the info that lures you in is prominent.
Proper decision making by users can be guided through usability, to prevent them from doing stupid things.
User feedback of most security apps is abysmal, to say it nicely.
There are great examples of usability and security working together. I still wonder why nobody picked up the Chamaeleon concept, for example (basically: A set of user-configurable domains running under one windowing system, with colored borders indicating for every window which domain it belongs to).
Usability needs to be designed into security. We are failing our users with this bullshit 80s attitude of blaming their stupidity.
Yes, imagine. How can a company produce something cheaply if it doesn't have to pay out profits to stakeholders or waste time and effort managing its stock price? When it doesn't have its own mergers & acquisition department, or pays for lobbyists?
I like private companies (my daily rate for them is considerably higher than for the government), but there are some areas where government-run makes sense.
You have to get rid of a LOT of highly radioactive NIMBY waste. Try to find a place to put them.
That's only because nobody thought of this shit when they built the thing. The place is right there, logically, because taking this waste apart and transporting it somewhere is just crazy, both from a cost and a risk perspective. Bury the entire thing and be done with it. Oh, you don't want a nuclear waste zone just outside your main city? Well why then did you build a nuclear power plant right there? See, didn't think that one through, did you?
That's great for nuclear power companies, of course. You reap the rewards of cheap power, pay your shareholders well and as soon as the plant is no longer viable and needs to get dismantled (i.e. when the big bills catch up to you), your company goes POOF and you dump about 99% of the cost your power plant generates onto the public.
You don't even need to go poof. Germany is demonstrating this right now. For some reason nobody can understand without bribe^H^H^Hcocain^H^H^Hbeing a politician^H^H^Hfuck I don't know how you can understand it under any circumstances, the government is letting the power companies go out and will cover the vast majority of the bill. No seriously. Maybe a combination of being brain dead AND corrupt AND a politician AND sniffing way too much cocain can explain it, but I'm not sure about even that. But it's happening.
I hope you're joking. You do understand that the moon is only visible from half the Earth's surface at any given time?
Noooooo! Reallllyyy???
If the moon will be setting during the eclipse for the eastern half of the US, why would you expect it to be visible in Europe at all?
You think I bother much with orbital geometry when I read /. summaries? A single sentence ("visible in the north and south Americas only") would've done half the world a favour. I don't ask much, but if your audience is global, adding one sentence for half of them is something you can do, right?
could've mentioned where it was visible, then.
Seriously? Not one mention of the rest of the world? This is not a local event, you know, it's a global space event. People in other countries just might be interested, too.
Yes, /. is an american site yada yada yada. I don't care that most of the political and tech topics are focussed on US politics and business - but for a clearly global event, editors could spend 30 seconds to look up the appropriate times at least for rough areas ("Europe", "Asia").