You can't like Dell - because it is albeit useful but only a tool. But you can like Apple products because they are made to be liked. And they are also useful.
What's wrong with liking a company that's focused on making *useful* tools? fuck, plenty of people (myself included) swear by Thinkpads, specially the older ones from IBM, and they aren't "made to be liked". They're business machines first and foremost, but because of that we get useful features (such as titanium cases) without useless ones (integrated webcams) and at prices we can actually afford (not Apple). And if other people find Dell's different focus more suitable for them, and prefer it over Apple's approach, why can't they like them?
I guess this is what bothers me the most about Apple fans, their belief that only Apple creates stuff that Just Works (tm), that only Apple creates usable hardware and software, that only Apple innovates, that only features Apple put in their products are useful and necessary, everything else just "random crap meant to look good on the specs". Based on that, it's easy to see why are they called a *cult* instead of "simply" a religion.
And for that we have all the motorsport championships such as the WRC and Formula 1. Though I wonder, why not include motorsports in the Olympics? much less controversial than legalizing doping, not any farther from the spirit of the competitions than allowing professional players in it, and most importantly, *fun*, which is something that the Olympics has been seriously lacking the last few decades.
Why is the parent modded Funny? mod parent up, Insightful. There's no way I'm allowing *anything* Blizzard on my computer again, after the whole Glider case, they've proved that if they believe I'm harming their bottom line, they'll crush me even if they have to twist copyright and the law to do so. Fuck them.
Same with anything that uses SecuROM. And no, releasing a patch later to remove it doesn't make them trustworthy, only a little less of an idiot.
Fuck, some of us buy more than one copy, either "just because", because we're nerds and want to have a copy in mint condition 5 years from now, or because it was in a bundle with other games that looked nice. I swear, I have 3 different copies of Tomb Raider 3, and I don't even like the POS.
Don't you feel this clashes with all the fine words about privacy that we always hear so much about on Slashdot?
Not really. The US Government is, well, a government, and Google is a private company, with no law enforcement agencies forcing you to cooperate with them, or threatening you with a nice trip to Cuba if you don't comply.
Similarly, I'll protest both against sexual discrimination in the government, as well as against anyone trying to prevent you from shouting "fucking fag!" in an online match, and I see no contradiction in that either.
It's sad that, as a photographer, people like you are the reason why I leave my house armed, instead of robbers. People who, in their quest for privacy, seek to destroy the very freedoms we've come to rely upon, and don't think twice about threatening people for doing an activity that's always been legal.
It was Merda d'Artista and a simple search for "artist shit" on Wikipedia would've sufficed, no need to risk Tubgirl links on Google;)
But the most interesting thing about it was that the people who bought it *weren't* idiots. According to this article, the can was originally priced the same as gold, but had you bought gold instead your $37 investment would be worth $374 today, a far cry from the $25.000-35.000 estimated value for the art world's favorite poop can, let alone the $67.000 the last one sold for.
It remains to be seen, however, if the same will happen with this app.
More comfort, but mainly, *MUCH* more durability, and in my case at least, an extra $60-100 means the difference between "5 years" and "3 months".
Though, "expensive leather hiking boots" is exactly what I use as everyday shoes, so it's probable that Gucci, Prada et al *are* just a label, but with no first-hand experience I can't say.
It is a well known fact that the amount you spend on expensive, extravagant, utterly useless stuff is inversely proportionate to the size of your penis.
So the fact that my girlfriend has no jewelry besides a pair of small earrings and hates extravagant clothing means...
Seconded. I may not be a huge fan of the guy, and I *certainly* don't like his attitude towards Microsoft (as they say, it's not paranoia if they're really after you), but I respect the guy for all the work he's done, both for the GNOME project and all things Mono, he's created an amazing developing enviroment for those of us who live in countries without software patents, and I thank him for it.
Plus, I've got to admit this whole "Moonlight" thingie sounds pretty nice, specially after reading the interview. Flash-killer without excessive use of Javascript = Win!
Wha? no, you're leaving out all the cool non-development-oriented Free Software created in UNIX such as X and TeX/LaTeX, which were already mature software before Linux was even born. And given that they still are, decades after their creation, still the "industry standard" in their respective markets, they certainly qualify as "major".
Hammers aren't used instead of rocks because they're more "intuitive", and in fact, I'd say both are equal in that area (you grab 'em, and you pound it against your favorite kind of nail). We use hammers because they're more *efficient*, because they're designed so that the biggest percentage of the energy expended is used to pound the nail instead of being wasted fighting the air's drag or whatever.
And in case you missed it, we're talking about Free Software, not Linux, and while Linux is Free Software, not all Free Software is (or runs on) Linux, for example, FreeBSD which the GP mentioned, or Paint.NET which is Windows-only F/OSS.
Finally, though I don't completely agree with the GP's points, I'd say that anyone designing *anything* of a car should at least know how an engine works, otherwise we could end up with a car that has no exhaust because "it looks ugly", and likewise, I'd prefer it if software designers at least had a clue about how software works, even if they can't write anything more complex than a "Hello World" in BASIC.
And you believe that high-quality software will be written by companies whose entire business model depends on you and a thousand other people buying up the next version, and the version afterwards? come on.
High-quality software is written today by people paid to create specific solutions to the problem at hand, not to create generic solutions to a problem their marketing makes you believe you could have, and that business model has very little to fear from "piracy" or whatever.
Your drug is still the better product. It's just that Joe is the better salesman, so you should probably dump your inferior salesman (read: you) and hire Joe.
Why does the revenue-per-employee statistic matter at *all*? other than to make Apple look good in front of a company with a smaller market value yet made four times as much money, of course.
I've always thought that projects such as OpenOffice.org and aMSN put a "click-through" with the GPL not for legal reasons, but simply because most users are used to seeing such things when they install large programs. It keeps the click-through crowd happy, the few who actually read the thing see how harmless it is for end-users, the GPL gets some free advertisement, everybody wins.
So I guess you agree with me that they're lying, then ?
Yup, they should've changed "completely blocks" to, dunno, "inconvenience users of" or "makes less practical", which sound just as nice for PR purposes, but are actually correct.
Still trying to see why you were modded up Funny, though... must be "smoke crack, moderate slashdot" day or something.
Um, pay the cash if you want to install on the phone, but if all you're interested in are the principles of open-source s/w (which is what I understand by "the point of using Free Software"), then don't pay anything and just use the freely-downloadable SDK and the simulator. No need for any cash payments then....
Still more trouble than it needs to be, and still more trouble than it is on other platforms. Why shouldn't we criticize Apple for that?
It becomes lying once a mistake has been pointed out, when no retraction is published, and when further action is taken which purports to be a consequence of the original position. We're waaaay beyond an innocent mistake here...
If the FSF had said that it's completely impossible to write F/OSS for the iPhone, then yes, it's a lie, but so far all I've seen are comments pointing out that they obfuscate it needlessly, and that said fact is glossed over by most iPhone advocates when mentioning the SDK, both of which are true.
To clarify, I think that their actions discussed here are incredibly stupid, but their motivations for doing so are perfectly valid. Apple may not be making F/OSS on the iPhone impossible, but they *are* making it impractical, which is a good enough reason for a F/OSS developer to criticize them, and doing so in a public way would, hopefully, discourage other companies from following Apple's example in the future. And yes, the word was misspelt (or whatever), sorry for that.
No, you're talking about conditions that don't affect the freedom of the software.
They don't, but they do make the GP's point about F/OSS being "fine and peachy" on the iPhone highly questionable.
Apple isn't required to supply what you demand, just the same as you're not required to purchase what Apple offers.
Nor am I required to be quiet about the shortcomings I see in their platform. Your point, again?
Sorry if the real world intruding on your fantasy is painful, but suck it up, you'll get over it.
Tell that to the Apple fanboys, who still can't acknowledge that their platform is *not* equivalent to their competitors, who put far less obstacles for Free Software to work on their devices.
Proof: Read the first link. I downloaded some source from the 'net, I compiled it, I modified it and compiled it again, then I installed it on my phone and it works just fine.
Yeah, after paying Apple $99 for the priviledge, and forcing every one of your users to do the same if they wish to retain the point of using Free Software, or if you don't want to go through Apple to distribute your app to anyone willing. But of course, that's just "politics", and I'm a "crazie" who's "intelectually dishonest" for even mentioning that, right?
Actually, the guy has proven that Foxconn specifically targets Windows' latest and greatest, and breaks everything else. And since almost all my Windows-using friends are still happily in Windows 2000, I shall caution them against buying from this POS too.
Now, I wonder who would have anything to win from making Linux and old versions of Windows look bad, while making XP and Vista look like paragons of stability...
Actually, all that math is an abstraction of electronics, and electronics is just an abstraction of physics.
Not really, software is merely an expression of an abstract, mathematical concept that's able to be interpreted by actual, physical machines, but that means that the *machines* could be patented, not the software itself. That's because when you write software, you don't write it against the hardware itself, you write it against an abstract *specification*, and if the implementation of it works differently than expected, the problem is in the implementation, not the spec.
It'd be, for example, as if scientists decided to nuke Uranus to make it go through the orbit Newton's law of gravity predicted, instead of re-analizing the data and discovering Neptune. Here the abstraction is more important than the physical thing, whereas with physics it's the other way around.
Then you should look harder, because my laser printer clearly advertised Linux support on the box, and the last Ethernet card I bought (about 3 or 4 years ago) *did* have a little penguin besides Mac's happy face and Windows' whatever-it-is. And for anything else, there's always good ol' "ask the vendor", which is how I got my cheap-n-nice WiFi card.
I often wonder how many people who make your same complain have ever tried to see whether a given piece of hardware works with Linux or not. Maybe in 2001 you had to check online HCLs and all that, but nowadays there's plenty of hardware advertising Linux support on their boxes, plenty of salesmen with a f'in clue, and plenty of pinguin-ready logos floating around, the only thing is that you can't be sure that those that don't advertise support won't work on it, but why buy something that "may" work when you can buy one that "will"?
You don't want Linux to be better, you want Linux to be a cheap OSX clone. Go back to your Mac, little AC, and take your absurd package management and your "only works for web, movies, mail and photos" philosophy with you, thank you very much.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't like Dell - because it is albeit useful but only a tool. But you can like Apple products because they are made to be liked. And they are also useful.
What's wrong with liking a company that's focused on making *useful* tools? fuck, plenty of people (myself included) swear by Thinkpads, specially the older ones from IBM, and they aren't "made to be liked". They're business machines first and foremost, but because of that we get useful features (such as titanium cases) without useless ones (integrated webcams) and at prices we can actually afford (not Apple). And if other people find Dell's different focus more suitable for them, and prefer it over Apple's approach, why can't they like them?
I guess this is what bothers me the most about Apple fans, their belief that only Apple creates stuff that Just Works (tm), that only Apple creates usable hardware and software, that only Apple innovates, that only features Apple put in their products are useful and necessary, everything else just "random crap meant to look good on the specs". Based on that, it's easy to see why are they called a *cult* instead of "simply" a religion.
And for that we have all the motorsport championships such as the WRC and Formula 1. Though I wonder, why not include motorsports in the Olympics? much less controversial than legalizing doping, not any farther from the spirit of the competitions than allowing professional players in it, and most importantly, *fun*, which is something that the Olympics has been seriously lacking the last few decades.
Why is the parent modded Funny? mod parent up, Insightful. There's no way I'm allowing *anything* Blizzard on my computer again, after the whole Glider case, they've proved that if they believe I'm harming their bottom line, they'll crush me even if they have to twist copyright and the law to do so. Fuck them.
Same with anything that uses SecuROM. And no, releasing a patch later to remove it doesn't make them trustworthy, only a little less of an idiot.
Fuck, some of us buy more than one copy, either "just because", because we're nerds and want to have a copy in mint condition 5 years from now, or because it was in a bundle with other games that looked nice. I swear, I have 3 different copies of Tomb Raider 3, and I don't even like the POS.
Don't you feel this clashes with all the fine words about privacy that we always hear so much about on Slashdot?
Not really. The US Government is, well, a government, and Google is a private company, with no law enforcement agencies forcing you to cooperate with them, or threatening you with a nice trip to Cuba if you don't comply.
Similarly, I'll protest both against sexual discrimination in the government, as well as against anyone trying to prevent you from shouting "fucking fag!" in an online match, and I see no contradiction in that either.
It's sad that, as a photographer, people like you are the reason why I leave my house armed, instead of robbers. People who, in their quest for privacy, seek to destroy the very freedoms we've come to rely upon, and don't think twice about threatening people for doing an activity that's always been legal.
It was Merda d'Artista and a simple search for "artist shit" on Wikipedia would've sufficed, no need to risk Tubgirl links on Google ;)
But the most interesting thing about it was that the people who bought it *weren't* idiots. According to this article, the can was originally priced the same as gold, but had you bought gold instead your $37 investment would be worth $374 today, a far cry from the $25.000-35.000 estimated value for the art world's favorite poop can, let alone the $67.000 the last one sold for.
It remains to be seen, however, if the same will happen with this app.
More comfort, but mainly, *MUCH* more durability, and in my case at least, an extra $60-100 means the difference between "5 years" and "3 months".
Though, "expensive leather hiking boots" is exactly what I use as everyday shoes, so it's probable that Gucci, Prada et al *are* just a label, but with no first-hand experience I can't say.
It is a well known fact that the amount you spend on expensive, extravagant, utterly useless stuff is inversely proportionate to the size of your penis.
So the fact that my girlfriend has no jewelry besides a pair of small earrings and hates extravagant clothing means...
Excuse me, I think I'll have to puke.
Seconded. I may not be a huge fan of the guy, and I *certainly* don't like his attitude towards Microsoft (as they say, it's not paranoia if they're really after you), but I respect the guy for all the work he's done, both for the GNOME project and all things Mono, he's created an amazing developing enviroment for those of us who live in countries without software patents, and I thank him for it.
Plus, I've got to admit this whole "Moonlight" thingie sounds pretty nice, specially after reading the interview. Flash-killer without excessive use of Javascript = Win!
Outside of that, nothing I guess.
Wha? no, you're leaving out all the cool non-development-oriented Free Software created in UNIX such as X and TeX/LaTeX, which were already mature software before Linux was even born. And given that they still are, decades after their creation, still the "industry standard" in their respective markets, they certainly qualify as "major".
Hammers aren't used instead of rocks because they're more "intuitive", and in fact, I'd say both are equal in that area (you grab 'em, and you pound it against your favorite kind of nail). We use hammers because they're more *efficient*, because they're designed so that the biggest percentage of the energy expended is used to pound the nail instead of being wasted fighting the air's drag or whatever.
And in case you missed it, we're talking about Free Software, not Linux, and while Linux is Free Software, not all Free Software is (or runs on) Linux, for example, FreeBSD which the GP mentioned, or Paint.NET which is Windows-only F/OSS.
Finally, though I don't completely agree with the GP's points, I'd say that anyone designing *anything* of a car should at least know how an engine works, otherwise we could end up with a car that has no exhaust because "it looks ugly", and likewise, I'd prefer it if software designers at least had a clue about how software works, even if they can't write anything more complex than a "Hello World" in BASIC.
And you believe that high-quality software will be written by companies whose entire business model depends on you and a thousand other people buying up the next version, and the version afterwards? come on.
High-quality software is written today by people paid to create specific solutions to the problem at hand, not to create generic solutions to a problem their marketing makes you believe you could have, and that business model has very little to fear from "piracy" or whatever.
Your drug is still the better product. It's just that Joe is the better salesman, so you should probably dump your inferior salesman (read: you) and hire Joe.
Now that he's back, they've gone from about 5% to nearly 20% in less than a decade.
I'm usually not the one going for this Wikipedia-style shit, but... [citation needed]
Why does the revenue-per-employee statistic matter at *all*? other than to make Apple look good in front of a company with a smaller market value yet made four times as much money, of course.
I've always thought that projects such as OpenOffice.org and aMSN put a "click-through" with the GPL not for legal reasons, but simply because most users are used to seeing such things when they install large programs. It keeps the click-through crowd happy, the few who actually read the thing see how harmless it is for end-users, the GPL gets some free advertisement, everybody wins.
So I guess you agree with me that they're lying, then ?
Yup, they should've changed "completely blocks" to, dunno, "inconvenience users of" or "makes less practical", which sound just as nice for PR purposes, but are actually correct.
Still trying to see why you were modded up Funny, though... must be "smoke crack, moderate slashdot" day or something.
Um, pay the cash if you want to install on the phone, but if all you're interested in are the principles of open-source s/w (which is what I understand by "the point of using Free Software"), then don't pay anything and just use the freely-downloadable SDK and the simulator. No need for any cash payments then....
Still more trouble than it needs to be, and still more trouble than it is on other platforms. Why shouldn't we criticize Apple for that?
It becomes lying once a mistake has been pointed out, when no retraction is published, and when further action is taken which purports to be a consequence of the original position. We're waaaay beyond an innocent mistake here...
If the FSF had said that it's completely impossible to write F/OSS for the iPhone, then yes, it's a lie, but so far all I've seen are comments pointing out that they obfuscate it needlessly, and that said fact is glossed over by most iPhone advocates when mentioning the SDK, both of which are true.
To clarify, I think that their actions discussed here are incredibly stupid, but their motivations for doing so are perfectly valid. Apple may not be making F/OSS on the iPhone impossible, but they *are* making it impractical, which is a good enough reason for a F/OSS developer to criticize them, and doing so in a public way would, hopefully, discourage other companies from following Apple's example in the future. And yes, the word was misspelt (or whatever), sorry for that.
No, you're talking about conditions that don't affect the freedom of the software.
They don't, but they do make the GP's point about F/OSS being "fine and peachy" on the iPhone highly questionable.
Apple isn't required to supply what you demand, just the same as you're not required to purchase what Apple offers.
Nor am I required to be quiet about the shortcomings I see in their platform. Your point, again?
Sorry if the real world intruding on your fantasy is painful, but suck it up, you'll get over it.
Tell that to the Apple fanboys, who still can't acknowledge that their platform is *not* equivalent to their competitors, who put far less obstacles for Free Software to work on their devices.
Proof: Read the first link. I downloaded some source from the 'net, I compiled it, I modified it and compiled it again, then I installed it on my phone and it works just fine.
Yeah, after paying Apple $99 for the priviledge, and forcing every one of your users to do the same if they wish to retain the point of using Free Software, or if you don't want to go through Apple to distribute your app to anyone willing. But of course, that's just "politics", and I'm a "crazie" who's "intelectually dishonest" for even mentioning that, right?
Actually, the guy has proven that Foxconn specifically targets Windows' latest and greatest, and breaks everything else. And since almost all my Windows-using friends are still happily in Windows 2000, I shall caution them against buying from this POS too.
Now, I wonder who would have anything to win from making Linux and old versions of Windows look bad, while making XP and Vista look like paragons of stability...
Actually, all that math is an abstraction of electronics, and electronics is just an abstraction of physics.
Not really, software is merely an expression of an abstract, mathematical concept that's able to be interpreted by actual, physical machines, but that means that the *machines* could be patented, not the software itself. That's because when you write software, you don't write it against the hardware itself, you write it against an abstract *specification*, and if the implementation of it works differently than expected, the problem is in the implementation, not the spec.
It'd be, for example, as if scientists decided to nuke Uranus to make it go through the orbit Newton's law of gravity predicted, instead of re-analizing the data and discovering Neptune. Here the abstraction is more important than the physical thing, whereas with physics it's the other way around.
Then you should look harder, because my laser printer clearly advertised Linux support on the box, and the last Ethernet card I bought (about 3 or 4 years ago) *did* have a little penguin besides Mac's happy face and Windows' whatever-it-is. And for anything else, there's always good ol' "ask the vendor", which is how I got my cheap-n-nice WiFi card.
I often wonder how many people who make your same complain have ever tried to see whether a given piece of hardware works with Linux or not. Maybe in 2001 you had to check online HCLs and all that, but nowadays there's plenty of hardware advertising Linux support on their boxes, plenty of salesmen with a f'in clue, and plenty of pinguin-ready logos floating around, the only thing is that you can't be sure that those that don't advertise support won't work on it, but why buy something that "may" work when you can buy one that "will"?
You don't want Linux to be better, you want Linux to be a cheap OSX clone. Go back to your Mac, little AC, and take your absurd package management and your "only works for web, movies, mail and photos" philosophy with you, thank you very much.