Just wondering... Is it so difficult to put the whole thing into a package that will install with a double click?
So we have a tutorial to download the sources and install it. Which uses a package manager which is "quickly becoming the package manager of choice for OSX" except that I have never heard of it. Which comes with another link for download instructions. Look, we don't want links to download instructions, we want a link that downloads the whole package which installs with a double click.
These "modern" anti-trust laws are a century old, and were instituted because of abuses by 800 lb gorillas like Standard Oil. Microsoft has a monopoly, Apple doesn't; that's the difference, and it's a difference that matters.
Not a car analogy: You shouldn't punch people on the nose. But it makes a difference whether a three year old girl punches me on the nose (I'll say "Ouch") or Mike Tyson punches me on the nose as hard as he can (I'm likely gone). In one case people tell me "don't be such a wuzz" if I complain, in the other case someone could go to jail for murder.
How can VLC and mplayer decode video so much better than the flash player, even though they have the same API access? (Answer: They use more than just one CPU when playing back, and don't use a complete CPU when idleing.)
Don't give them ideas! Flash using 100% of one CPU, no matter how powerful the CPU and how tiny the animation is, that is bad enough. I wouldn't want them to use 100% of 8 CPUs on my MacPro.
It seems to me that this is anti-competitive. They're using the iPhone's market dominance to increase the costs of producing applications on other platforms. And, that's likely to raise an antitrust lawsuit.
Well, no. You are absolutely free to produce applications for other platforms any way you like. Apple doesn't increase the cost of doing that. Apple may increase the cost of developing iPhone applications for you, possibly to the point where you decide not to develop for it. That's one application less for the iPhone.
Fighting competitors is not anti-competitive per se. It is anti-competitive only when you attack others' ability to compete, not if you attack their ability to beat you in competition.
A note on languages: Objective-C does not make for instant parallelism as you still have to fix the giant game of whack-a-mole that goes on with shared memory and have a more effective way of communication between processes/threads/whatever you want to call 'em. Providing some metadata might help, but it's no magic bullet.
I hear the iPhone OS 4.0 supports Grand Central Dispatch. That's about as good as "instant parallelism" in many situations.
Re:Computers are not for Computer People Anymore
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
By "real computer" I mean "a machine capable of arbitrary information processing limited only by engineering capability". Y'know, kind of what Turing had in mind. The computer I'm typing on and the eeepc in the other room are Real Computers. I can make them compute pi to a thousand digits, play Tetris, compute Fourier transforms of fart recordings, or troll Slashdot.
Excuse me? Maybe you can't make an iPad compute pi to a thousand digits. I certainly can.
Re:Jobs always wanted to be Bill Gates
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
Steve Jobs was always obsessed with what Bill Gates had / was. Which is why Apple is what it is today. Closed and controlling.
Pure nonsense. According to Steve Jobs, Microsoft/Gates have no style. Who is more successful?
Compare money: Gates has more than he can spend, Jobs has more than he can spend. That's equal.
Compare things created: Jobs: GUI, Macs, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Pixar. Gates: Windows. Guys, we have a clear winner here.
British friends: Jobs has Jon Ives. Gates has Toni Blair. Clear winner by a mile: Jobs.
... after watching the videos I'd like to have one, but Apple price policy really pisses me off: $139 more for the models with a 3G chip (plus monthly plan) when a 3G chip costs between $5 and $9 (the most expensive one).
I think their pricing policy is brilliant. You save $139 by buying an iPad without 3G chip, when a 3G chip costs between $5 and $9. What a bargain.
Apple fans will probably buy more than one (I remember people buying more than one iphone when it first came out - why would anybody need two identical cell phones I don't know).
Steven Wozniak owns two. In his opinion, the iPhone had two problems: No multitasking, not enough battery life. So he thought how he could solve these problems with minimal investment. Two iPhones is the obvious solution.
When I was 13, I was poking around the source code of libc and gcc; it would be years before I learned how that code worked or was designed, yet I still learned a lot just by reading through it and seeing what would happen if I modified it. Can a kid tinker with the iPhone SDK to see how it works? Can a kid try to modify parts of the standard library on the iPad to see what happens? No.
"Tinkering" with the iPhone SDK would be pointless. Just as pointless as testing what happens if you add various materials to the fuel for your car, like water, diesel fuel, sugar and so on. But you can use the iPhone SDK to create an empty application and then add to it. Or take one of the sample applications and change it and see what happens. With a car, you wouldn't tinker with the stuff that an experienced car mechanic leaves well alone; equally you wouldn't be tinkering with the iPhone SDK itself when any professional programmer tells you that doing so s a mugs game. And if you want help, just download Stanford's iPhone programming course on iTunes U.
Doctorow's point was well put: if parents buy this for their kids, their kids will be conditioned not to tinker. I am sure millions will be sold...but those who would otherwise have tinkered will be deprived of an opportunity to do so. Maybe you do not care about such things, but some of us do.
So what kind of tinkering are kids doing then? The most primitive level of tinkering with a computer would be: Find which RAM you need to upgrade your computer on the internet, order it, when it arrives open the computer, remove old RAM, put in the new RAM, close computer, reboot, runs twice as fast. They can't do step 1, they barely can do step 2, they can't do step 3, 4, 5 or 6, they have plenty of experience with step 7, and they get (8) because I do all the work.
What I find fascinating is that when I go on a website selling hard drives, and write reviews, more than half the reviews say "worked fine on my MacBook", "no problems on my MacBook Pro" and so on. It seems that in the UK where PCs outsell Macs 20 to 1 in sales, Mac users must be ten times more able to upgrade their computers. Don't know if Macs are just more hacker friendly or Mac users are more computer savvy.
And there are 150,000 apps on the Appstore. Well, somebody must have written them. My guess is at least 100,000 tinkerers, and the iPad will create lots more.
Also, not being an expert either maybe someone here can explain, does the product have to actually be shipping for it to be prior art? If not, then wouldn't all basic mp3 player patents be void since the idea itself has been around for decades?
The invention must have been _published_ to count as "prior art". And a year or two ago the rules in the USA have changed that adding two and two together also counts as prior art: If invention A does X, and invention B does Y, then this counts as "prior art" for putting A and B together and getting X and Y.
There will be discussions how widely available a publication has to be to count as "published".
You forgot to mention that it will cost you $100 just to replace the battery. You are clearly correct: wait for the competition. There is a reason that Apple is suing companies that are coming out with Android devices.
Wait a second... In the tests that I've read so far, the battery lasts for more than 10 hours of continuous hard use. Let's say that is three days worth of use (if you have a life away from your computer). 400 charges would be much less than MacBooks do, that would be 1200 days or 3 1/2 years. So after 3 1/2 years Apple gives you the choice to replace your old iPad with a new one (probably refurbished) with a brand new battery for just $100? Well, I'll call that a steal. Can you name any competing product that wouldn't be just dumped at that point?
I'd gladly give Apple twice that to replace my 3 1/2 year old MacBook with a refurbished new one with a brand new battery.
Re:Here come the DRM whiners
on
Apple iPad Reviewed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Pointless banter aside I would like to simply point out that UI responsiveness is not an indicator performance. Let alone a metric to use in judging the devices processor!
No, but it is an indicator of UI responsiveness, which for the prospective customers is the most important performance indicator. Well, that and the ability of playing video and music without stuttering.
If only I had mod points left. Eating anything is OK in moderation, and if the bulk of your consumption is reasonably healthy. Eating anything in excess is unhealthy. There is no way around this. And unfortunately, "normal" portion sizes for most people are excessive -- a disturbing number think they need to eat until they are full; but that thin margin is the difference between "moderation" and "excess".
Have to contradict you completely. Go to your nearest super market, look at what they are selling, and you'll find that everything is stuffed full with sugar. Sugar is cheap, it is fat-free (and for thirty years the industry has indoctrinated us with "fat is bad" to the point where jelly babies consisting of 75% sugar are sold as "fat-free" and people buy them thinking it is good for you), it doesn't fill you up, it gives you energy for a short time and craving afterwards, in other words it is _designed_ to make you eat excessive.
And you _can_ eat until you are full _and_ lose weight, if you eat the right stuff, forget about the anti-fat indoctrination and get rid of sugar (and get rid of sugar substitutes as well, because they just lead to more cravings). That is why the Atkins diet actually works, not because any of Atkins' weird theories are correct (they are not), but because the stuff fills you up and you eat less calories.
As an example, buy a handful of mars bars, and buy some high-cocoa chocolate (more than 70%). Try how much you can eat of each. You can easily stuff yourself with mars bars no end; try eating 50 grams of 70% cocoa chocolate and you won't be able to fit more.
I can redownload games on Steam if I have to, so I use Steam. (The DRM is also unobtrusive.) I can't redownload songs on iTunes without paying for them, so I don't use iTunes. Simple as that.
Rated as total fail for not knowing how to backup valuable data.
The only people who lie about this have been the HDD manufacturers. Wasn't there a class action about that some time back? I expect the court didn't understand the problem of my 120GB drive actually being under 112!
It seems the court understood the matter very well and decided that when a hard drive contains 120 billion bytes, and the prefix "G" means "1 billion" as all international standards say, then calling it a "120 GB" hard drive is absolutely justified and correct, and it is not the hard drive manufacturer's fault if some idiot programmer displays it incorrectly as 112 GB.
a few years ago you didn't need to: 1kb was 1024 byte. it was defined like that. why don't we define 2 as 1 and 1 as 2 next ?
Who modded that as insightful? 1kb was never 1024 byte. It varied between 1000 bits = 125 byte or 1024 bits = 128 byte, but it was never anything near 1000 bytes. As Shuttleworth said, Ubuntu is not controlled by democracy. I'll say it shouldn't be ruled by idiocracy.
Reporting 1 KB = 1000 bytes also fixes the annoying thing that a line transferring 1 MB/sec (which _always_ meant 1 million byte per second) supposedly doesn't manage to transmit 1 MB of data within one second. (Yes guys, bandwidth was _always_ reported using SI prefixes).
"will run the Linux, Windows and Mac OS X operating systems."
Apple vs. Psystar ended with a $30,000 fine for copying MacOS X per se without permission ($30,000 for an unlimited number of copies, RIAA take note), plus $2500 for each individual case of DMCA violation (that is $2500 per each single copy put on a non-Apple branded computer that actually works; that's the expensive part). And if the machine is just _capable_ of running unmodified MacOS X, that is already a DMCA violation, whether the company or an end user installs the OS or not.
The average customer is screwed no matter what. he/she doesnt know the difference between a Pentium II, Pentium Dual Core, Pentium D and a Core 2 Duo. hell, even i would have to look for benchmarks on Tom's Hardware website in order to find out what is what.
And those were the good old days. Now you have i3, i5 and i7, but in so many variations that you don't have the slightest clue what each means. And random four digit numbers. I think Apple is actually one of very few companies that specify GHz, everyone else tells you Intel model numbers which are completely meaningless.
If he formatted his drives then there was no evidence, a technicians testimony is hearsay not evidence.
A technician can always testify in court to what he saw on the hard drive as a witness, and that would not be hearsay. Hearsay would be a policeman testifying in court "the technician told me..." or the technician testifying "the customer told me..."
The real problem then was that they didn't made an in-depth analysis of what they were using originally. It's always the same.
That is not how I understand the blog. They started the transition, and realised that yes, they could do a transition in the allocated time frame, but they wouldn't get the maximum benefit that way. So the plan changed. Instead of saying "we planned to do it in X months, so we do it in X months", they said "we could do it in X months, but we could get much better long term results if we do a better job that takes 2X months".
Maybe so but there are a lot of parents that don't want naked pictures of their perfect child floating around the school and would like to use rule of law to discourage "sexting." It's all about appearances; the parents don't want to look like they raised their kids poorly and the state doesn't want to look like they're soft on crime.
So if your child sends nude pictures of himself or herself around, and you make sure that they go to jail as sex offenders, doesn't that make you look like you raised your kid poorly?
Oh here is another one "I parked my car in front of a fire-hydrant and the firemen had to run around it, delaying them so you burned to death but they scrathed the paint, they should pay me for emotional trauma".
I like the German rules for this situation. The firemen don't mind if you park your car in front of a fire-hydrant. They have these heavy fire engines, and it is heavier than your car, so your car will not _stay_ in front of the fire-hydrant for more than two seconds if they need access. Same if you block an access way, the fire engine _will_ get through undamaged. The same won't be true for your car. And nobody will pay for the damage, including your own fully comprehensive insurance.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wondering... Is it so difficult to put the whole thing into a package that will install with a double click?
So we have a tutorial to download the sources and install it. Which uses a package manager which is "quickly becoming the package manager of choice for OSX" except that I have never heard of it. Which comes with another link for download instructions. Look, we don't want links to download instructions, we want a link that downloads the whole package which installs with a double click.
Someone has to learn a bit about user interfaces.
These "modern" anti-trust laws are a century old, and were instituted because of abuses by 800 lb gorillas like Standard Oil. Microsoft has a monopoly, Apple doesn't; that's the difference, and it's a difference that matters.
Not a car analogy: You shouldn't punch people on the nose. But it makes a difference whether a three year old girl punches me on the nose (I'll say "Ouch") or Mike Tyson punches me on the nose as hard as he can (I'm likely gone). In one case people tell me "don't be such a wuzz" if I complain, in the other case someone could go to jail for murder.
How can VLC and mplayer decode video so much better than the flash player, even though they have the same API access? (Answer: They use more than just one CPU when playing back, and don't use a complete CPU when idleing.)
Don't give them ideas! Flash using 100% of one CPU, no matter how powerful the CPU and how tiny the animation is, that is bad enough. I wouldn't want them to use 100% of 8 CPUs on my MacPro.
It seems to me that this is anti-competitive. They're using the iPhone's market dominance to increase the costs of producing applications on other platforms. And, that's likely to raise an antitrust lawsuit.
Well, no. You are absolutely free to produce applications for other platforms any way you like. Apple doesn't increase the cost of doing that. Apple may increase the cost of developing iPhone applications for you, possibly to the point where you decide not to develop for it. That's one application less for the iPhone.
Fighting competitors is not anti-competitive per se. It is anti-competitive only when you attack others' ability to compete, not if you attack their ability to beat you in competition.
A note on languages: Objective-C does not make for instant parallelism as you still have to fix the giant game of whack-a-mole that goes on with shared memory and have a more effective way of communication between processes/threads/whatever you want to call 'em. Providing some metadata might help, but it's no magic bullet.
I hear the iPhone OS 4.0 supports Grand Central Dispatch. That's about as good as "instant parallelism" in many situations.
By "real computer" I mean "a machine capable of arbitrary information processing limited only by engineering capability". Y'know, kind of what Turing had in mind. The computer I'm typing on and the eeepc in the other room are Real Computers. I can make them compute pi to a thousand digits, play Tetris, compute Fourier transforms of fart recordings, or troll Slashdot.
Excuse me? Maybe you can't make an iPad compute pi to a thousand digits. I certainly can.
Steve Jobs was always obsessed with what Bill Gates had / was. Which is why Apple is what it is today. Closed and controlling.
Pure nonsense. According to Steve Jobs, Microsoft/Gates have no style. Who is more successful?
Compare money: Gates has more than he can spend, Jobs has more than he can spend. That's equal.
Compare things created: Jobs: GUI, Macs, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Pixar. Gates: Windows. Guys, we have a clear winner here.
British friends: Jobs has Jon Ives. Gates has Toni Blair. Clear winner by a mile: Jobs.
... after watching the videos I'd like to have one, but Apple price policy really pisses me off: $139 more for the models with a 3G chip (plus monthly plan) when a 3G chip costs between $5 and $9 (the most expensive one).
I think their pricing policy is brilliant. You save $139 by buying an iPad without 3G chip, when a 3G chip costs between $5 and $9. What a bargain.
Apple fans will probably buy more than one (I remember people buying more than one iphone when it first came out - why would anybody need two identical cell phones I don't know).
Steven Wozniak owns two. In his opinion, the iPhone had two problems: No multitasking, not enough battery life. So he thought how he could solve these problems with minimal investment. Two iPhones is the obvious solution.
When I was 13, I was poking around the source code of libc and gcc; it would be years before I learned how that code worked or was designed, yet I still learned a lot just by reading through it and seeing what would happen if I modified it. Can a kid tinker with the iPhone SDK to see how it works? Can a kid try to modify parts of the standard library on the iPad to see what happens? No.
"Tinkering" with the iPhone SDK would be pointless. Just as pointless as testing what happens if you add various materials to the fuel for your car, like water, diesel fuel, sugar and so on. But you can use the iPhone SDK to create an empty application and then add to it. Or take one of the sample applications and change it and see what happens. With a car, you wouldn't tinker with the stuff that an experienced car mechanic leaves well alone; equally you wouldn't be tinkering with the iPhone SDK itself when any professional programmer tells you that doing so s a mugs game. And if you want help, just download Stanford's iPhone programming course on iTunes U.
Doctorow's point was well put: if parents buy this for their kids, their kids will be conditioned not to tinker. I am sure millions will be sold...but those who would otherwise have tinkered will be deprived of an opportunity to do so. Maybe you do not care about such things, but some of us do.
So what kind of tinkering are kids doing then? The most primitive level of tinkering with a computer would be: Find which RAM you need to upgrade your computer on the internet, order it, when it arrives open the computer, remove old RAM, put in the new RAM, close computer, reboot, runs twice as fast. They can't do step 1, they barely can do step 2, they can't do step 3, 4, 5 or 6, they have plenty of experience with step 7, and they get (8) because I do all the work.
What I find fascinating is that when I go on a website selling hard drives, and write reviews, more than half the reviews say "worked fine on my MacBook", "no problems on my MacBook Pro" and so on. It seems that in the UK where PCs outsell Macs 20 to 1 in sales, Mac users must be ten times more able to upgrade their computers. Don't know if Macs are just more hacker friendly or Mac users are more computer savvy.
And there are 150,000 apps on the Appstore. Well, somebody must have written them. My guess is at least 100,000 tinkerers, and the iPad will create lots more.
Also, not being an expert either maybe someone here can explain, does the product have to actually be shipping for it to be prior art? If not, then wouldn't all basic mp3 player patents be void since the idea itself has been around for decades?
The invention must have been _published_ to count as "prior art". And a year or two ago the rules in the USA have changed that adding two and two together also counts as prior art: If invention A does X, and invention B does Y, then this counts as "prior art" for putting A and B together and getting X and Y.
There will be discussions how widely available a publication has to be to count as "published".
You forgot to mention that it will cost you $100 just to replace the battery. You are clearly correct: wait for the competition. There is a reason that Apple is suing companies that are coming out with Android devices.
Wait a second... In the tests that I've read so far, the battery lasts for more than 10 hours of continuous hard use. Let's say that is three days worth of use (if you have a life away from your computer). 400 charges would be much less than MacBooks do, that would be 1200 days or 3 1/2 years. So after 3 1/2 years Apple gives you the choice to replace your old iPad with a new one (probably refurbished) with a brand new battery for just $100? Well, I'll call that a steal. Can you name any competing product that wouldn't be just dumped at that point?
I'd gladly give Apple twice that to replace my 3 1/2 year old MacBook with a refurbished new one with a brand new battery.
Pointless banter aside I would like to simply point out that UI responsiveness is not an indicator performance. Let alone a metric to use in judging the devices processor!
No, but it is an indicator of UI responsiveness, which for the prospective customers is the most important performance indicator. Well, that and the ability of playing video and music without stuttering.
But does it run Linux ?
No, but it runs a full Posix compliant Unix implementation.
If only I had mod points left. Eating anything is OK in moderation, and if the bulk of your consumption is reasonably healthy. Eating anything in excess is unhealthy. There is no way around this. And unfortunately, "normal" portion sizes for most people are excessive -- a disturbing number think they need to eat until they are full; but that thin margin is the difference between "moderation" and "excess".
Have to contradict you completely. Go to your nearest super market, look at what they are selling, and you'll find that everything is stuffed full with sugar. Sugar is cheap, it is fat-free (and for thirty years the industry has indoctrinated us with "fat is bad" to the point where jelly babies consisting of 75% sugar are sold as "fat-free" and people buy them thinking it is good for you), it doesn't fill you up, it gives you energy for a short time and craving afterwards, in other words it is _designed_ to make you eat excessive.
And you _can_ eat until you are full _and_ lose weight, if you eat the right stuff, forget about the anti-fat indoctrination and get rid of sugar (and get rid of sugar substitutes as well, because they just lead to more cravings). That is why the Atkins diet actually works, not because any of Atkins' weird theories are correct (they are not), but because the stuff fills you up and you eat less calories.
As an example, buy a handful of mars bars, and buy some high-cocoa chocolate (more than 70%). Try how much you can eat of each. You can easily stuff yourself with mars bars no end; try eating 50 grams of 70% cocoa chocolate and you won't be able to fit more.
I can redownload games on Steam if I have to, so I use Steam. (The DRM is also unobtrusive.) I can't redownload songs on iTunes without paying for them, so I don't use iTunes. Simple as that.
Rated as total fail for not knowing how to backup valuable data.
The only people who lie about this have been the HDD manufacturers. Wasn't there a class action about that some time back? I expect the court didn't understand the problem of my 120GB drive actually being under 112!
It seems the court understood the matter very well and decided that when a hard drive contains 120 billion bytes, and the prefix "G" means "1 billion" as all international standards say, then calling it a "120 GB" hard drive is absolutely justified and correct, and it is not the hard drive manufacturer's fault if some idiot programmer displays it incorrectly as 112 GB.
a few years ago you didn't need to: 1kb was 1024 byte. it was defined like that. why don't we define 2 as 1 and 1 as 2 next ?
Who modded that as insightful? 1kb was never 1024 byte. It varied between 1000 bits = 125 byte or 1024 bits = 128 byte, but it was never anything near 1000 bytes. As Shuttleworth said, Ubuntu is not controlled by democracy. I'll say it shouldn't be ruled by idiocracy.
Reporting 1 KB = 1000 bytes also fixes the annoying thing that a line transferring 1 MB/sec (which _always_ meant 1 million byte per second) supposedly doesn't manage to transmit 1 MB of data within one second. (Yes guys, bandwidth was _always_ reported using SI prefixes).
"will run the Linux, Windows and Mac OS X operating systems."
Apple vs. Psystar ended with a $30,000 fine for copying MacOS X per se without permission ($30,000 for an unlimited number of copies, RIAA take note), plus $2500 for each individual case of DMCA violation (that is $2500 per each single copy put on a non-Apple branded computer that actually works; that's the expensive part). And if the machine is just _capable_ of running unmodified MacOS X, that is already a DMCA violation, whether the company or an end user installs the OS or not.
The average customer is screwed no matter what. he/she doesnt know the difference between a Pentium II, Pentium Dual Core, Pentium D and a Core 2 Duo. hell, even i would have to look for benchmarks on Tom's Hardware website in order to find out what is what.
And those were the good old days. Now you have i3, i5 and i7, but in so many variations that you don't have the slightest clue what each means. And random four digit numbers. I think Apple is actually one of very few companies that specify GHz, everyone else tells you Intel model numbers which are completely meaningless.
If he formatted his drives then there was no evidence, a technicians testimony is hearsay not evidence.
A technician can always testify in court to what he saw on the hard drive as a witness, and that would not be hearsay. Hearsay would be a policeman testifying in court "the technician told me..." or the technician testifying "the customer told me..."
The real problem then was that they didn't made an in-depth analysis of what they were using originally. It's always the same.
That is not how I understand the blog. They started the transition, and realised that yes, they could do a transition in the allocated time frame, but they wouldn't get the maximum benefit that way. So the plan changed. Instead of saying "we planned to do it in X months, so we do it in X months", they said "we could do it in X months, but we could get much better long term results if we do a better job that takes 2X months".
Maybe so but there are a lot of parents that don't want naked pictures of their perfect child floating around the school and would like to use rule of law to discourage "sexting." It's all about appearances; the parents don't want to look like they raised their kids poorly and the state doesn't want to look like they're soft on crime.
So if your child sends nude pictures of himself or herself around, and you make sure that they go to jail as sex offenders, doesn't that make you look like you raised your kid poorly?
Oh here is another one "I parked my car in front of a fire-hydrant and the firemen had to run around it, delaying them so you burned to death but they scrathed the paint, they should pay me for emotional trauma".
I like the German rules for this situation. The firemen don't mind if you park your car in front of a fire-hydrant. They have these heavy fire engines, and it is heavier than your car, so your car will not _stay_ in front of the fire-hydrant for more than two seconds if they need access. Same if you block an access way, the fire engine _will_ get through undamaged. The same won't be true for your car. And nobody will pay for the damage, including your own fully comprehensive insurance.