There may be a concern in healthcare and elsewhere in the industry that iPad, with all its restrictions and kill switches and app stores, is not sufficiently under control of the owner.
Knocking the rhetoric up to 9, eh? Nice work. You could probably use a wee bit more hyperbole... something like "How many deaths will be caused by the iPad?" Maybe you could work in a line about children, that gets people's attention.
Still, good effort. I guess all the healthcare providers run Linux on their tablets then, and have a team of experienced developers inspecting source code for every app they use. Anything less kind of fits into your hysteria about the iPad.
Read it and know that it contains everything about the Doom story, and even expands on it a little. It's probably better, come to think of it. I'm pretty sure it was an official release as well, so if you're one of those "canon / not canon" types, you'll love this.
Bungie introduced a revolutionary game element called "plot" into Marathon, and the terminal text had a depth that was still being discussed years after the game's release.
I don't accept that. Apple released all the development tools necessary for writing software on OS X, and they come for free as either an install option or a download. Adobe have no excuse on this front.
Apple don't need to cooperate. They don't need to do a thing.
The ball's in Adobe's court, and they think they're playing chess.
I say fine. The sooner all the publishers band together and collude with Steve Jobs to raise book prices and dictate the Retail price the sooner the DOJ can step in and smack them down for price fixing.
Where does Jobs fit into this? I mean, apart from conspiracy theories and what you reckon might happen.
And while I'm at it, the history of Apple's music sales is that they kept the prices down. The music industry wanted variable pricing, with new songs around $2.50 instead of $0.99.
Murdoch is way out on this, arguing against capitalism itself.
That's why the "FSF is looney" card works. You don't have to buy anything at all. There are competing products you can buy instead, or you can choose to buy nothing.
Your statement should have been "So if I buy the hardware, I have to buy the right to use the hardware in a way that I want to? I call BS."
Still, you've been modded up for a two-line regurgitation of the groupthink, and I'll probably be modded a troll for pointing out the gaping logical problem in your point.
Well, in just about every area of your life, you're a sheep as well.
Do you fix your own car? Hell, did you build it yourself? Do you work for yourself, with tools you made? Are you content to let some doctor look after you when you're ill? Are you on a health care plan with everyone else? Are you happy to let some lawyer represent you in court? (etc ad nauseum)...
The point is not to deride your lack of ability in most areas of life - we're all like that. The point is that when you call people sheep in your chosen field, there are many, many fields of life where you're the dependant little sheep, meekly following someone else.
Perhaps it might be better to think of people as normal, instead of somewhere below you. Unless you're a true polymath (and I'd bet that no-one on/. is, the odds are well in my favour) then you're on exactly the same footing in most areas of your life.
I generally agree with your point, but take issue with that bit about people being sheep. It's wooly thinking promulgated on sites like/. and really needs to stop.
So you're saying that the FOSS crowd are bereft of innovation? I find that hard to accept.
This is a problem with design - copying existing stuff produces nothing new, nothing interesting. People might deride Apple for their use of patents, but few come up with competing interface models. People might deride Apple for the locked-down nature of the handheld devices, but where are the successful open devices?
The FOSS crowd can come up with something better, if they can be bothered (the jury is still out on Android). I'm hoping that/. is not indicative of that group though, because I see absolutely no new ideas in any thread I've read about the iPad, just regurgitated "I want it to be like the iPad but also like " stuff. The echo chamber is great, but Apple are out there actually producing while the FSF are just whining from their increasingly irrelevant sideline.
So where's the FOSS alternative? And why should people buy it - what compelling reason is there? "Freedom" is a pretty lame reason, nice to talk up but meaningless for the great majority of users. How about a real benefit?
Yep yep. I've hated on Apple from the beginning, because I'm a hacker (in the take-it-apart/tinker/design/build sense) from way back and I very very much like to control all of the assets in my world. And I too was offended at the iPhone's integrated battery.
No, you hate Apple only recently, perhaps the last four years or so. Before that you just hated a different choice that some people made, and back in the pre-Mac days, any self-respecting hacker would've thought quite well of Apple. The hardware was simple to interface with, easy to programme.
And if we wait another 100 years, then 100% of Linux code will be written by historians
Can someone tell me what this means? Code is being updated by historians? How old does the code have to be before the history department of the university takes it from the computer science department? Do history professors have to get qualifications in programming languages?
It's complete nonsense, as far as I can tell.
That's the power of statistics
No, that's the sort of thing people write while off their face on some drug. Of course, if you get enough of them, they'll become a statistic.
I've never understood the draw and allure that WoW provides, and why people get addicted to the point that they drop out of schools. Maybe I am one of the few people that is lucky and doesn't require simulation from an online fake environment to further foster my own mind.
Most of us WoW players are casuals, dropping in for an hour or two each day that would otherwise be spent on television. The rest of the time we work, spend time with our wife/husband/squid/mollusc and lead normal lives. My wife and I are having a child soon, we're moving house, I work too many hours in the office and still I find time for reading books, sleeping relatively normal amounts and playing WoW.
It's just a game. Most of us find balance in our lives.
"Apple near BK" means "Apple had US$4B in the bank as cash, earning all sorts of interest."
I don't even know where people get their wrong info from these days. It's like they don't want to know the facts, preferring a conspiracy theory that would blunt Occam's Razor.
The one-button mouse forced developers to design so that they put all of the options in the app's menus, and not in right-click pop-up menus.
This simplifies the user interface of any complex application, while still allowing developers to put the options in those pop-up menus. They just can't rely on users having that second button.
It was never a mistake to default to one-button mice, despite the revisionist comments from people who never saw the abominations of some early Windows app (thankfully, most devs worth their salt have learned better).
That's not to say that Apple is always right. They were in this case, but their hardware mice have been inferior since the ADB days. My current mouse (and the one I generally buy for any PC I build) is a Microsoft Intellimouse.
Fire up your hex editor, open the file and read it.
That's the only way any self-respecting geek should enjoy their music. Actually sending it to a device for playback is redundant.
Hell, hardcore geeks send the file through a binary LED flasher to enjoy the music.
Anything more means you need some sort of file management. We're only talking about levels of abstraction now, and if you're going to start down that path, why not get an app that does most of the work for you?
Eventually an asteroid will collide with the Earth and wipe out all life larger than a microbe. Infinitely worse threat than a single nuclear weapon, or even a small arsenal of them.
Seems to me we've got a lot to worry about if we get into "what if" scenarios. Perhaps we should stick with the known world.
The answer to that is clear when you rank threats based on pretty much any objective index.
Terrorism is no real threat whatsoever.
Sure, there may be rare 'bursts' of threat, but that's nothing compared to the sustained threat to us posed by our lifestyles, our vehicles and our own propensity towards violence.
Terrorism was never a threat, merely a pretext.
Hell of a lot of votes in it though, and beating it up makes for good newspaper sales.
Most of the hype comes from pundits, not prospective purchasers.
I like your comments though. They reveal why some companies just cannot compete with Apple. Q: Why is Apple doing well? A: The fans who'll buy anything Apple. Q: But why has their market grown? A: Marketing and hype. Decision: Cool. Slash the R&D budget and put more into marketing.
It can't be that some of the things they make are great products. No, it's all marketing and hype.
For the record, I don't believe any company is so poorly informed as to operate in this manner. Only the anti-fanboys on forums (who are exactly as bad as the fanboys) are this clueless./facepalm
You're not at all worried that the Chinese government holds enough US money to cause your economy to tank overnight? If they choose to sell all of their US dollars, your country is screwed for years to come. They don't want to do that, but if you start screwing with them, they can switch to other markets and pretty much screw your country over.
If you want to play hardball, you'd better have a better plan. You can't intimidate, physically attack, legally attack or even threaten them. You need them too much. So what do you have left? I'd say try to bring them around through trade. You have no other option.
Censorship is nothing compared to your economy being made to look like the whole financial crisis was a warm up for the next Great Depression.
Also in the bulletin, armchair commentators claim "I would do it differently," but lack any motivation or ability to do so.
Later, people criticising a nation while simultaneously lapping up everything it produces, failing to see the hypocrisy in their own actions. When questioned, they managed to compartmentalise the actions of support an oppressive regime and buying products produced under that regime.
Finally tonight, shocking news that laws are different in different nations. Many people in the US are amazed that their legal system isn't somehow carried over into the other 95% of the planet. Even more shocking is the news that people in other nations view their rights differently to people in the US.
My view of the posts in this topic - moral outrage based on nothing more than hot air. Sure, China is a bad place in some ways, but if you're going to criticise a company for doing business with them in a manner acceptable to the Chinese government, then you'd better follow that up by personally not purchasing anything made by any company with links to China. Anything less is pure hypocrisy. If you really care enough, drop the pretence of a moral high ground and talk to the average Chinese people. Get them interested in slow changes, and eventually the system will turn around. Going in with metaphorical guns blazing is a guaranteed failure with strong governments.
Slashdot Mirror
There may be a concern in healthcare and elsewhere in the industry that iPad, with all its restrictions and kill switches and app stores, is not sufficiently under control of the owner.
Knocking the rhetoric up to 9, eh? Nice work. You could probably use a wee bit more hyperbole... something like "How many deaths will be caused by the iPad?" Maybe you could work in a line about children, that gets people's attention.
Still, good effort. I guess all the healthcare providers run Linux on their tablets then, and have a team of experienced developers inspecting source code for every app they use. Anything less kind of fits into your hysteria about the iPad.
It's not communism either.
It's more like fascism I guess, but really it's a bit flaky to tie a political or economic theory to an information appliance.
Only the trolls are claiming the iPad will "sweep away real computers" and even then, it's usually used as a straw man.
As indeed you are using it.
story line is simple
There was a story?
I was a bit stunned by the comment, until I remembered that there was a story... sadly
http://www.doomworld.com/10years/doomcomic/
Read it and know that it contains everything about the Doom story, and even expands on it a little. It's probably better, come to think of it. I'm pretty sure it was an official release as well, so if you're one of those "canon / not canon" types, you'll love this.
Bungie introduced a revolutionary game element called "plot" into Marathon, and the terminal text had a depth that was still being discussed years after the game's release.
Great times...
I don't accept that. Apple released all the development tools necessary for writing software on OS X, and they come for free as either an install option or a download. Adobe have no excuse on this front.
Apple don't need to cooperate. They don't need to do a thing.
The ball's in Adobe's court, and they think they're playing chess.
I say fine. The sooner all the publishers band together and collude with Steve Jobs to raise book prices and dictate the Retail price the sooner the DOJ can step in and smack them down for price fixing.
Where does Jobs fit into this? I mean, apart from conspiracy theories and what you reckon might happen.
And while I'm at it, the history of Apple's music sales is that they kept the prices down. The music industry wanted variable pricing, with new songs around $2.50 instead of $0.99.
Murdoch is way out on this, arguing against capitalism itself.
2 to 3 times? Your hyperbole-fu is weak, old man.
I was given a PC once, but when I bought a Mac it cost me over a thousand dollars. That's infinitely more than the PC!
Macs are infinitely expensive. Soon, only the three richest people on Earth will own one.
So I have to buy the hardware
That's why the "FSF is looney" card works. You don't have to buy anything at all. There are competing products you can buy instead, or you can choose to buy nothing.
Your statement should have been "So if I buy the hardware, I have to buy the right to use the hardware in a way that I want to? I call BS."
Still, you've been modded up for a two-line regurgitation of the groupthink, and I'll probably be modded a troll for pointing out the gaping logical problem in your point.
You say users are sheep?
Well, in just about every area of your life, you're a sheep as well.
Do you fix your own car? Hell, did you build it yourself? ...
Do you work for yourself, with tools you made?
Are you content to let some doctor look after you when you're ill? Are you on a health care plan with everyone else?
Are you happy to let some lawyer represent you in court?
(etc ad nauseum)
The point is not to deride your lack of ability in most areas of life - we're all like that. The point is that when you call people sheep in your chosen field, there are many, many fields of life where you're the dependant little sheep, meekly following someone else.
Perhaps it might be better to think of people as normal, instead of somewhere below you. Unless you're a true polymath (and I'd bet that no-one on /. is, the odds are well in my favour) then you're on exactly the same footing in most areas of your life.
I generally agree with your point, but take issue with that bit about people being sheep. It's wooly thinking promulgated on sites like /. and really needs to stop.
So you're saying that the FOSS crowd are bereft of innovation? I find that hard to accept.
This is a problem with design - copying existing stuff produces nothing new, nothing interesting. People might deride Apple for their use of patents, but few come up with competing interface models. People might deride Apple for the locked-down nature of the handheld devices, but where are the successful open devices?
The FOSS crowd can come up with something better, if they can be bothered (the jury is still out on Android). I'm hoping that /. is not indicative of that group though, because I see absolutely no new ideas in any thread I've read about the iPad, just regurgitated "I want it to be like the iPad but also like " stuff. The echo chamber is great, but Apple are out there actually producing while the FSF are just whining from their increasingly irrelevant sideline.
So where's the FOSS alternative? And why should people buy it - what compelling reason is there? "Freedom" is a pretty lame reason, nice to talk up but meaningless for the great majority of users. How about a real benefit?
Yep yep. I've hated on Apple from the beginning, because I'm a hacker (in the take-it-apart/tinker/design/build sense) from way back and I very very much like to control all of the assets in my world. And I too was offended at the iPhone's integrated battery.
No, you hate Apple only recently, perhaps the last four years or so. Before that you just hated a different choice that some people made, and back in the pre-Mac days, any self-respecting hacker would've thought quite well of Apple. The hardware was simple to interface with, easy to programme.
And if we wait another 100 years, then 100% of Linux code will be written by historians
Can someone tell me what this means? Code is being updated by historians? How old does the code have to be before the history department of the university takes it from the computer science department? Do history professors have to get qualifications in programming languages?
It's complete nonsense, as far as I can tell.
That's the power of statistics
No, that's the sort of thing people write while off their face on some drug. Of course, if you get enough of them, they'll become a statistic.
I've never understood the draw and allure that WoW provides, and why people get addicted to the point that they drop out of schools. Maybe I am one of the few people that is lucky and doesn't require simulation from an online fake environment to further foster my own mind.
Most of us WoW players are casuals, dropping in for an hour or two each day that would otherwise be spent on television. The rest of the time we work, spend time with our wife/husband/squid/mollusc and lead normal lives. My wife and I are having a child soon, we're moving house, I work too many hours in the office and still I find time for reading books, sleeping relatively normal amounts and playing WoW.
It's just a game. Most of us find balance in our lives.
"Apple near BK" means "Apple had US$4B in the bank as cash, earning all sorts of interest."
I don't even know where people get their wrong info from these days. It's like they don't want to know the facts, preferring a conspiracy theory that would blunt Occam's Razor.
The one-button mouse forced developers to design so that they put all of the options in the app's menus, and not in right-click pop-up menus.
This simplifies the user interface of any complex application, while still allowing developers to put the options in those pop-up menus. They just can't rely on users having that second button.
It was never a mistake to default to one-button mice, despite the revisionist comments from people who never saw the abominations of some early Windows app (thankfully, most devs worth their salt have learned better).
That's not to say that Apple is always right. They were in this case, but their hardware mice have been inferior since the ADB days. My current mouse (and the one I generally buy for any PC I build) is a Microsoft Intellimouse.
Why stop there?
Fire up your hex editor, open the file and read it.
That's the only way any self-respecting geek should enjoy their music. Actually sending it to a device for playback is redundant.
Hell, hardcore geeks send the file through a binary LED flasher to enjoy the music.
Anything more means you need some sort of file management. We're only talking about levels of abstraction now, and if you're going to start down that path, why not get an app that does most of the work for you?
I think you're on-message here. Let's leverage this response in a win-win manner, so we can fully incentivise later posters. ...
Corporate-speak should never leave corporate documents. It's corrupting the language.
Eventually an asteroid will collide with the Earth and wipe out all life larger than a microbe. Infinitely worse threat than a single nuclear weapon, or even a small arsenal of them.
Seems to me we've got a lot to worry about if we get into "what if" scenarios. Perhaps we should stick with the known world.
The answer to that is clear when you rank threats based on pretty much any objective index.
Terrorism is no real threat whatsoever.
Sure, there may be rare 'bursts' of threat, but that's nothing compared to the sustained threat to us posed by our lifestyles, our vehicles and our own propensity towards violence.
Terrorism was never a threat, merely a pretext.
Hell of a lot of votes in it though, and beating it up makes for good newspaper sales.
Most of the hype comes from pundits, not prospective purchasers.
I like your comments though. They reveal why some companies just cannot compete with Apple.
Q: Why is Apple doing well?
A: The fans who'll buy anything Apple.
Q: But why has their market grown?
A: Marketing and hype.
Decision: Cool. Slash the R&D budget and put more into marketing.
It can't be that some of the things they make are great products. No, it's all marketing and hype.
For the record, I don't believe any company is so poorly informed as to operate in this manner. Only the anti-fanboys on forums (who are exactly as bad as the fanboys) are this clueless. /facepalm
I can't work that out either. If people hate everything about the iPhone so much, why don't they just go for the competing product?
It seems one of those "I want it, therefore I should have it" arguments. I can't imagine how people become so... entitled in their attitudes.
You're not at all worried that the Chinese government holds enough US money to cause your economy to tank overnight? If they choose to sell all of their US dollars, your country is screwed for years to come. They don't want to do that, but if you start screwing with them, they can switch to other markets and pretty much screw your country over.
If you want to play hardball, you'd better have a better plan. You can't intimidate, physically attack, legally attack or even threaten them. You need them too much. So what do you have left? I'd say try to bring them around through trade. You have no other option.
Censorship is nothing compared to your economy being made to look like the whole financial crisis was a warm up for the next Great Depression.
Company complies with local laws. More at 11.
Also in the bulletin, armchair commentators claim "I would do it differently," but lack any motivation or ability to do so.
Later, people criticising a nation while simultaneously lapping up everything it produces, failing to see the hypocrisy in their own actions. When questioned, they managed to compartmentalise the actions of support an oppressive regime and buying products produced under that regime.
Finally tonight, shocking news that laws are different in different nations. Many people in the US are amazed that their legal system isn't somehow carried over into the other 95% of the planet. Even more shocking is the news that people in other nations view their rights differently to people in the US.
My view of the posts in this topic - moral outrage based on nothing more than hot air. Sure, China is a bad place in some ways, but if you're going to criticise a company for doing business with them in a manner acceptable to the Chinese government, then you'd better follow that up by personally not purchasing anything made by any company with links to China. Anything less is pure hypocrisy. If you really care enough, drop the pretence of a moral high ground and talk to the average Chinese people. Get them interested in slow changes, and eventually the system will turn around. Going in with metaphorical guns blazing is a guaranteed failure with strong governments.
*You* test to make sure the product is saleable.
*They* test to make sure it meets their needs.
If you don't do your part, they won't even get to their testing, as your product won't be considered.