You don't always need to rely on what others tell you; it's called the power of observation. For things you can't learn through pure observation, yes, you rely on others, but you don't do so blindly, you use those very same powers of observation to tell when what you're being told isn't working or isn't going to work. Will you, yourself, sometimes be wrong? If course, because that, too, is part of learning. I'm sorry I didn't go into enough detail for you, but I'm writing a Slashdot comment, not a Ph.D dissertation; this is something I'm doing for leisure so I might not always maintain your perfect standards of detail. It's funny we should be in disagreement on this point when we're clearly actually not. A source needn't be broadly reliable or unreliable, but for a certain piece of information, yes, a source is either reliable or unreliable; people need to be taught, at the very least, to discern whether a piece of information they are looking at is more potentially accurate or potentially inaccurate and seek out additional sources as necessary, rather than simply relying on a source because "well, I don't know, this guy sounds smart, so he's probably right, I can't check the information for myself because reasons".
Or it means I said re-implement instead of port. for something I'm doing because "that might be fun", that not-so-fun (for me, at least; if you like porting between languages, more power to you) task is a good enough reason to walk away.
My point was that's how you teach people to learn. This is early-childhood stuff, if it's not done by kindergarten or 1st grade, it's probably too late. Once they've learned how to learn, they'll quickly pick up how to apply new things they learn, and the rote memorization of facts our students are expected to do for the entirety of their education suddenly becomes easier, because they've been shown how to find uses for the things they're being taught.
If we can't afford enough kindergarten teachers to keep the classes down to manageable sizes for this, we're already fucked.
Not gonna disagree with that assessment, either. It's not like industry has never been wrong before. I mean, really, the web design community is heading toward vertical-parallax, perpetual-scrolling monstrosities that give 10% of users headaches (literally) and can't be properly bookmarked or navigated. The industry is following them down that path!
There's a reason I'm not following suit: I prefer to make things that are actually usable! Yes, it's cool to add this or that new feature and make it look nice. Everyone wants to feel like what they're building or using is cutting edge, and that's just fine, right up to the point where you start breaking usability in the name of design.
Go ahead, re-implement the select box so you can ensure that it looks the same in all browsers, across all platforms. Add type-to-search and autocomplete to it. I'm all for that, you're improving the UX... unless you don't also handle switching between selections with the up and down arrows, entering and exiting the field via the tab key (trivial if you use a *real* select box and follow progressive-enhancement, replacing the select *for display* with your new control, this is not only possible, but trivial), and confirming the highlighted selection via the enter key. If you don't implement the functionality people are expecting *before* extending, then you're actually *breaking* things. And if you can't implement the native behavior it in a handful of lines of code, you probably shouldn't implement the control at all; most likely, any extensions you make will be inefficient and clunky, as well. But, I digress...
Creating GUI apps on the desktop isn't much better, in reality. You still have a multitude of languages; the application language and GUI framework, which is typically a language of its own (WYSIWYG form builders only carry you so far), if your application interfaces with a database you still have some form of SQL, and that API you need to interface with to access that bit of data from that 3rd party service? If you care about performance, you're proxying API calls through a local server that caches the results; if you need to intelligently clear or refresh bits of that cache based on some bit of application logic, you may need something more sophisticated than a simple HTTP cache, so there's your server-side application language. Don't get me started on version headaches with libraries...
I may have been born in the 80's, but I agree... they'd have laughed and taken away your beer if you had told somebody that programming the web was going to be so much worse than writing native applications. Hell, that's a good way to lose your beer today!
They didn't offer to jailbreak the phone for me, in part I'm sure because at the time they couldn't legally, but they certainly didn't mind if I tried, they just warned me of potential issues.
This is one of the things I like most about T-Mobile. They don't care WHAT you do on their network, as long as you're paying for it. I had an HTC One X on AT&T and I had to flash a different CID onto it in order to use HTC's developer tools (e.g. unlock the bootloader so I could install a custom ROM), as AT&T made them disable the feature for phones locked to their network; I then had to flash the stock CID back in order for my AT&T SIM to work. T-Mobile? When I went into the store to buy my M7, they explicitly asked me if I intended to run a custom ROM; when I told them I was considering it, they directed me to HTC's site, even told me which links to follow to get to the developer tools page. Love it.
I won't disagree with you on that front; however, that doesn't mean all web apps are crap -- just most, as decent web devs who aren't acting under direction of the marketing and accounting departments more-so than their managers in engineering are few and far between.
I moderate; therefore I browse at -1. Word, Office, and yes, sadly, Windows Media Player are very widely used applications; they're the winners in their fields (okay, Media Player may take a back seat to iTunes for iDevice users), which is really painful for me to admit, since I don't use any of them. The products arielCo listed, not so much.
The OP I was referring to was the AC with the 0-rated post. And I, personally, think Office and Media Player are pretty obviously named; Word, slightly less so, but "word processor" is near the top of my list of guesses. Everything in arielCo's post, on the other hand, is an example of a non-obvious name, associated with a failed or failing product, further highlighting the point made by the 0-rated AC post, that products with obvious names are more successful.
This post succinctly describes why I'm not a Java developer, no matter how many times I've set out to learn the language. I'm primarily a web developer, full-stack LAMP and JavaScript (with strong sysadmin roots), so everything I've ever set out to develop in Java had followed the same process: start development, determine I could implement it better as a web app, begin implementing as a web app, get annoyed at reimplementing logic I've already done, causing me to eventually abandon the project. It wasn't until recently, when I started a project that can't really work as a web app, that the light came on and the value of Java (likely as a stepping stone to a number of other languages) became concrete for me; as you said, making it much easier to learn and appreciate since it has a useful context.
This is how people learn. Give them a problem, give them the tools. Hell, show them what the solution should look like. Leave it to them to figure out how to get from the problem to the solution; don't tell them anything they don't ask for. Let them fuck up. When they get stumped, they'll ask for help; show them what they did wrong, don't tell them what they should have done, unless they ask. People are inherently smart, unless you teach them to be dumb.
This. Don't tell kids why they need to memorize this facts and formulas, teach them how to figure them out for themselves. Teach them the basics of how things interact and let them decide which things and interactions interest them; they will then seek out the facts and formulas that are relevant to those interests. Then, you have taught them how to learn. On their own.
Which is the best kind.
That's not to say you can't, or shouldn't learn from others. Quite the opposite, in fact. One of the most important things you can possibly learn is how to tell when your source is wrong, (optionally) call them out on it, and find another source. If you can't do that, you'll forever rely on others to tell you what should be important to you and spoon-feed you "facts" about those things. On the other hand, learning "on your own" is a matter of figuring out what's actually important to you, or at least how to discern a reliable source for "what's important" for a particular subject or goal, and seek out that information yourself. That shouldn't stop you from relying on the work and knowledge of others; it just doesn't require you to do so.
I made the switch about 15 months ago. However, as the M8 only came out this March, my most recent experience with them (the one where they talked me out of the upgrade) wasn't so far back; I can't pinpoint the exact date, but it was end of March, beginning of April. That is to say, roughly 4 months ago. Though, I was in store last month with a friend who needed to replace his damaged S3 and they tried to find every solution short of selling him a new phone, even in the face of him having already picked out what he wanted as a replacement and having cash in hand to pay for it.
Maybe the people at your T-Mobile store are just jerks? I've been in 4 different stores around here and they're always great.
All failures. Except, maybe, Visio, though I don't know anyone who actually uses it. I have a friend who own a Zune; he won it, used it once, and it's been holding down the bottom of his sock drawer ever since. You were trying to highlight OP's point, right?
Funny, when I switched to T-Mobile, they were more than happy to get AT&T on the phone for me to get my HTC One X unlocked. Of course, AT&T refused to provide the correct unlock code (they pulled that "we'll text it to you within 24 hours" bullshit, then, when that code didn't work, insisted that they had to escalate it to "engineering", and that I'd hear back in 24 hours again, which I never did -- and I know it wasn't T-Mobile scamming, as I went into an AT&T store when the first code didn't work). In the end, I borrowed a friend's old HD2 and used that until the phone I was waiting for came out, at which point I did end up buying a phone, an HTC One (M7), from T-Mobile. Then the M8 came out and I went in to check it out, fully expecting them to pressure my into paying off my M7 and upgrading; instead, they highlighted some of the feature differences, pointed out that the two were mostly similar, then spoke of what they felt were the drawbacks (the M8 being slightly larger, the fact that I'd have to replace my desk and car docks, etc), eventually saying they'd be more than happy the help me upgrade, but advising me to hang on to the M7 for the time being.
Yes, such vicious salespeople.
It's worth mentioning that, even while paying off two phones, my T-Mobile bill, for unlimited EVERYTHING (with the upgrade to unlimited LTE data on both lines) is still $20/mo less than I was shelling out to AT&T for 2 lines sharing 700 minutes and 500 text messages, with 4GB of data each (before $10/GB overages kicked in). And, when both phones are paid for in 9 months, my bill will drop by an additional $25. Actually, it will probably drop by another $20 when I drop the insurance on both phones (what's the point, when I can just walk in to a T-Mobile store and get a brand new phone at that point?), so my bill ends up being $65 less than AT&T. Sure, that's assuming I keep the same phones for longer than two years, but where's that option with AT&T?
Unless your bill gets smaller 24 months after you get a new phone, you should be able to get one phone (bought under contract) unlocked for every 24 months of service. That is to say, if you bring your own phone initially, then upgrade, say, 12 months later, those first 12 months in which your bill was exactly the same as it was *after* you upgraded should cover half he cost of the new phone. You were paying for it before you even got it, and they should respect that.
My provider doesn't do service contracts, though; they finance phones. I have 2 phones on my plan currently, and I pay $12.50/mo for each of them. In 9 months, they'll be paid off and my bill will drop by $25 in total, unless I decide to upgrade at that time. Of course, I could pay the $112.50 balance owed on one (or both) of those phones right now and be allowed to upgrade. Or, I could just decide to live with the phones I have, both of which are working quite well and, being the high-end models of their day, should continue to do so until their batteries give out, and enjoy the reduced bill.
Honestly, we don't need a law for this; people just need to wake up, realize what they're signing up for, and just don't sign it if they don't like the terms. Yes, competition is reduced when everyone's locked in a contract. The solution? Don't sign. When they all start hemorrhaging customers, they'll first start competing on price (wherein the remaining customers win) and, when that doesn't work, they'll start competing on terms (wherein we all win). Or, you know, switch to one of the carriers who's already started competing in that manner; maybe you have to wait out your contract, maybe you have to pay a termination fee, whatever, just do it.
an image that has been rasterized at 3840x2400 & then interpolated down & displayed on a 15" 2880x1800 retina screen
When you're doing graphics work (note that I didn't say photo editing), your graphics are being rasterized at your *display* resolution. If that's not the native resolution of the panel, or some resolution that divides cleanly into that resolution, then yes, there is interpolation, and if your work requires pixel-perfect accuracy (a lot of clients want that and will zoom in and attack your work with a ruler to make sure they're getting it -- on the upside, you can charge for it), that display has become useless. And even if we do limit it to photo editing as your description implies, you still have no clue what's actually happening. Am I cramming the whole image onto the screen (as you implied) or am I zooming to 1:1 to fit as many *actual* pixels of the image onto the screen as possible? In the first case, you're right, it doesn't matter; in the second, well,... I've already explained, in this paragraph, why the display is useless except at two specific resolutions.
but mine don't give me super telescopic vision the way you claim to have with yours.
And now you're just being an ass, that much is clear. Good day, sir.
Righto, you just led with the equivalent of "I don't hit women" leaving out "but I do make sure my wife stays in line".
Actually... I can't pass this one up... it's actually more akin to leading with "I beat my wife" and leaving out "but only when she threatens me with a loaded gun pointed at my head". To be clear, *my position* is that I don't carry my 17" places I don't need to carry it, and you've just admitted that this position hasn't changed; you inferred, incorrectly, that this had *anything* to do with weight, when the reality is that it has to do with limiting my exposure to potential data theft by preferring to carry a machine that doesn't contain all of my financials and personal info when I don't need to. You can keep insisting that this is not a valid reason to leave the machine at home or tethered to my desk at work and, instead, carry another machine (that the machine is physically smaller is a factor of cost, not weight) that doesn't contain that data, but insistence does not make you right.
your incoherency & refusal to admit that your any part of position is wrong (ex: your aftermarket SATA drive is clearly slower than the recent rMBP's PCI flash)
Oh? It's not my fault you didn't catch up on the entire thread before posting.
You believe that you're always right, any who disagree with you must be wrong so instances where you've been proven wrong fall into your blind spot so they can be safely ignored.
See above. This does, however, seem to quantify you fairly well, piping up about what someone who does graphics work needs in a display (which is *very* different from what your average user, gamer, or even someone doing video work, needs) when you clearly have no clue, then refusing to listen to sound explanations of why this is the case. Perhaps you'd find my posts more coherent if you actually read them with an open mind, rather than a staunch belief that what works for you must work for everyone else.
Go back to using Windows, you're a bad fit with the Mac crowd
I married a Mac fanatic, I work for a Mac-centric company, and my two best friends are Mac nuts; and all of that is going quite well. I'd say I'm a damn good fit for that crowd. I'm not a part of it, though; I want a UNIX system with a well-supported UI; that's the crowd I'm in, and I'm loving it, thank you. I also never left Windows; I use it *a lot* for testing. Oh, I also use Linux, when it's the right tool for the job. I don't evangelize any platform, which is what you're doing here.
I should have put this in the same post, but it was getting long...
I'll continue to use my rMBP which I've discovered doesn't have the defects you think it does
That's fine. The machine works for you. However, the best Apple can do right now is a 15" machine with a *marginally* faster CPU, the same amount of RAM (yes, despite Apple's documentation, late 2011 MBPs can handle 16GB of RAM), and (thank you for prompting me to look at the disk performance of the current models, my previous benchmark was from 2012) a disk that's about 80% faster, but much smaller (unless I opt for the $500 upgrade). For a full list of my complaints on that front, see here and realize that the defects I see in Apple's current offering are more numerous than you seem to think. And no, your opinion isn't going to fix them, but 32GB of RAM and a physically larger display might.
The difference between using the retina display at it's native 2880x1800 or pushing it to an interpolated 1920x1200 is invisible without a magnifying glass so your main objection is not justified.
When you're doing graphics work, you often find yourself looking *that* closely at your display. Clearly, you've never done any real graphics-intensive work, or you'd fully understand where I'm coming from. Enjoy your crisp text, that's what the hiDPI resolutions on the retina displays are meant to provide; it's not my fault you don't understand the implementation of the technology you are using, what it does, and what its limitations are and how those limitations affect certain use-cases where precision is paramount. You can't see the difference because the difference doesn't matter to you; I'm not faulting you for that, but I'm also not going to argue that the difference *does* matter to people it matters to.
It is more fatiguing working on my 24" 1980x1200 screens where pixels are visible than on the the 15".
If the pixels on your display are visible, you're sitting too close to it. Personally, I wear glasses when staring at a monitor, so I can probably bring mine a little closer than you can before I have that problem. My eyes are odd, one focuses +0.25 diopters and the other focuses -0.25 diopters, both eventually correcting themselves over time, so if I'm working on multiple displays (typically 3) at very slightly differing distances, I have to wear what most people would consider "dizzy" glasses or suffer a massive migraine within an hour or so.
Drawing conclusions from statements is actually fairly reliable, but not from people who change their position. I won't make the mistake of trying to infer anything from you in the future.
When did I change my position? I did not. I did, however, clarify that position. You can insist, all you want, that I don't carry my 17" everywhere due to its size and weight, but insistence doesn't make you correct. I've given you the reasons for that, and it has nothing to do with weight.
It's dangerous to infer the motives of others who you do not know personally, because any such inferences will be based on your own preferences and experiences, which necessarily do differ from theirs; since you don't know them personally, you don't even have the slightest basis by which to compensate for this. Of course, we all do it, so I'm not judging you for that; however, when someone clarifies their reasoning, there is never a situation in which you are right to argue that; you are not them, you are not in their head, and you clearly don't know that person well enough to understand their reasoning, or you wouldn't have incorrectly inferred it in the first place.
Yes, you can *use* the display at that resolution; however, yes, it does certainly make a difference. Perhaps not for text, or vectors drawn by retina-aware applications, because the hiDPI subsystem will still render those at the native resolution, simply adjusting their sizes to scale; but for raster graphics, it most certainly does matter. With a raster, you either scale up by a multiple of the original or you lose sharpness. Why? Because when you scale up by a multiple (say 2:1, which is how hiDPI native scales), 1 pixel simply becomes 4, 2 in each direction; effectively, your pixels become bigger, but they don't change color or placement at all. The moment you start interpolating and antialiasing your output, you no longer have a display fit for graphics work.
If that's what you're using it for, then your resolution choices on a 2880x1800 display are, as I stated, 2880x1800 or 1440x1900. For everyday use, yea, fine, fuck it, run it at any damn resolution you want. If all you care about is the text on the screen, it'll still render at the native 2880x1800, size adjusted to match the hiDPI resolution of your choice.
And I never said the 17" was barely luggable, I simply said I have a smaller machine for travel. Before I had that and, in fact, before I had this 17" MBP, I used (and still have) a slightly larger, twice as heavy 17" PC as my primary machine. I lugged that fucker around with me *everywhere* I needed a computer without complaint. The 17" MBP is *light years* more luggable than that; I just see no need to take the machine that holds a decent amount of my personal data out in public, to potentially unsecure or unsafe locations where it may be stolen, so I take the smaller, cheaper, slightly less capable, but also devoid of personal data, machine with me instead. In a sense, though, I guess you're right; the weight of the potential data goldmine someone would find in this 17" MBP does weigh heavily enough so as to make it unluggable.
TL;DR: Don't infer people's reasons for things; you'll almost always be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't always need to rely on what others tell you; it's called the power of observation. For things you can't learn through pure observation, yes, you rely on others, but you don't do so blindly, you use those very same powers of observation to tell when what you're being told isn't working or isn't going to work. Will you, yourself, sometimes be wrong? If course, because that, too, is part of learning. I'm sorry I didn't go into enough detail for you, but I'm writing a Slashdot comment, not a Ph.D dissertation; this is something I'm doing for leisure so I might not always maintain your perfect standards of detail. It's funny we should be in disagreement on this point when we're clearly actually not. A source needn't be broadly reliable or unreliable, but for a certain piece of information, yes, a source is either reliable or unreliable; people need to be taught, at the very least, to discern whether a piece of information they are looking at is more potentially accurate or potentially inaccurate and seek out additional sources as necessary, rather than simply relying on a source because "well, I don't know, this guy sounds smart, so he's probably right, I can't check the information for myself because reasons".
Or it means I said re-implement instead of port. for something I'm doing because "that might be fun", that not-so-fun (for me, at least; if you like porting between languages, more power to you) task is a good enough reason to walk away.
You must've been replying to a different post...
My point was that's how you teach people to learn. This is early-childhood stuff, if it's not done by kindergarten or 1st grade, it's probably too late. Once they've learned how to learn, they'll quickly pick up how to apply new things they learn, and the rote memorization of facts our students are expected to do for the entirety of their education suddenly becomes easier, because they've been shown how to find uses for the things they're being taught.
If we can't afford enough kindergarten teachers to keep the classes down to manageable sizes for this, we're already fucked.
Not gonna disagree with that assessment, either. It's not like industry has never been wrong before. I mean, really, the web design community is heading toward vertical-parallax, perpetual-scrolling monstrosities that give 10% of users headaches (literally) and can't be properly bookmarked or navigated. The industry is following them down that path!
There's a reason I'm not following suit: I prefer to make things that are actually usable! Yes, it's cool to add this or that new feature and make it look nice. Everyone wants to feel like what they're building or using is cutting edge, and that's just fine, right up to the point where you start breaking usability in the name of design.
Go ahead, re-implement the select box so you can ensure that it looks the same in all browsers, across all platforms. Add type-to-search and autocomplete to it. I'm all for that, you're improving the UX... unless you don't also handle switching between selections with the up and down arrows, entering and exiting the field via the tab key (trivial if you use a *real* select box and follow progressive-enhancement, replacing the select *for display* with your new control, this is not only possible, but trivial), and confirming the highlighted selection via the enter key. If you don't implement the functionality people are expecting *before* extending, then you're actually *breaking* things. And if you can't implement the native behavior it in a handful of lines of code, you probably shouldn't implement the control at all; most likely, any extensions you make will be inefficient and clunky, as well. But, I digress...
Creating GUI apps on the desktop isn't much better, in reality. You still have a multitude of languages; the application language and GUI framework, which is typically a language of its own (WYSIWYG form builders only carry you so far), if your application interfaces with a database you still have some form of SQL, and that API you need to interface with to access that bit of data from that 3rd party service? If you care about performance, you're proxying API calls through a local server that caches the results; if you need to intelligently clear or refresh bits of that cache based on some bit of application logic, you may need something more sophisticated than a simple HTTP cache, so there's your server-side application language. Don't get me started on version headaches with libraries...
I may have been born in the 80's, but I agree... they'd have laughed and taken away your beer if you had told somebody that programming the web was going to be so much worse than writing native applications. Hell, that's a good way to lose your beer today!
A beta user, I see?
They didn't offer to jailbreak the phone for me, in part I'm sure because at the time they couldn't legally, but they certainly didn't mind if I tried, they just warned me of potential issues.
This is one of the things I like most about T-Mobile. They don't care WHAT you do on their network, as long as you're paying for it. I had an HTC One X on AT&T and I had to flash a different CID onto it in order to use HTC's developer tools (e.g. unlock the bootloader so I could install a custom ROM), as AT&T made them disable the feature for phones locked to their network; I then had to flash the stock CID back in order for my AT&T SIM to work. T-Mobile? When I went into the store to buy my M7, they explicitly asked me if I intended to run a custom ROM; when I told them I was considering it, they directed me to HTC's site, even told me which links to follow to get to the developer tools page. Love it.
I won't disagree with you on that front; however, that doesn't mean all web apps are crap -- just most, as decent web devs who aren't acting under direction of the marketing and accounting departments more-so than their managers in engineering are few and far between.
Though, if you'd said no, I'd have done it anyway.
To answer your question...
I'm primarily a web developer, full-stack LAMP and JavaScript (with strong sysadmin roots)
Slashdot is a web app. You're using it. Must not be that bad.
If only I could post and moderate in the same thread... +1, bro... +1
I moderate; therefore I browse at -1. Word, Office, and yes, sadly, Windows Media Player are very widely used applications; they're the winners in their fields (okay, Media Player may take a back seat to iTunes for iDevice users), which is really painful for me to admit, since I don't use any of them. The products arielCo listed, not so much.
The OP I was referring to was the AC with the 0-rated post. And I, personally, think Office and Media Player are pretty obviously named; Word, slightly less so, but "word processor" is near the top of my list of guesses. Everything in arielCo's post, on the other hand, is an example of a non-obvious name, associated with a failed or failing product, further highlighting the point made by the 0-rated AC post, that products with obvious names are more successful.
Is it cool if I claim to know you? Then, I'll know someone who uses Visio, which will make it the exception that proves the rule :)
This post succinctly describes why I'm not a Java developer, no matter how many times I've set out to learn the language. I'm primarily a web developer, full-stack LAMP and JavaScript (with strong sysadmin roots), so everything I've ever set out to develop in Java had followed the same process: start development, determine I could implement it better as a web app, begin implementing as a web app, get annoyed at reimplementing logic I've already done, causing me to eventually abandon the project. It wasn't until recently, when I started a project that can't really work as a web app, that the light came on and the value of Java (likely as a stepping stone to a number of other languages) became concrete for me; as you said, making it much easier to learn and appreciate since it has a useful context.
This is how people learn. Give them a problem, give them the tools. Hell, show them what the solution should look like. Leave it to them to figure out how to get from the problem to the solution; don't tell them anything they don't ask for. Let them fuck up. When they get stumped, they'll ask for help; show them what they did wrong, don't tell them what they should have done, unless they ask. People are inherently smart, unless you teach them to be dumb.
This. Don't tell kids why they need to memorize this facts and formulas, teach them how to figure them out for themselves. Teach them the basics of how things interact and let them decide which things and interactions interest them; they will then seek out the facts and formulas that are relevant to those interests. Then, you have taught them how to learn. On their own.
Which is the best kind.
That's not to say you can't, or shouldn't learn from others. Quite the opposite, in fact. One of the most important things you can possibly learn is how to tell when your source is wrong, (optionally) call them out on it, and find another source. If you can't do that, you'll forever rely on others to tell you what should be important to you and spoon-feed you "facts" about those things. On the other hand, learning "on your own" is a matter of figuring out what's actually important to you, or at least how to discern a reliable source for "what's important" for a particular subject or goal, and seek out that information yourself. That shouldn't stop you from relying on the work and knowledge of others; it just doesn't require you to do so.
I made the switch about 15 months ago. However, as the M8 only came out this March, my most recent experience with them (the one where they talked me out of the upgrade) wasn't so far back; I can't pinpoint the exact date, but it was end of March, beginning of April. That is to say, roughly 4 months ago. Though, I was in store last month with a friend who needed to replace his damaged S3 and they tried to find every solution short of selling him a new phone, even in the face of him having already picked out what he wanted as a replacement and having cash in hand to pay for it.
Maybe the people at your T-Mobile store are just jerks? I've been in 4 different stores around here and they're always great.
All failures. Except, maybe, Visio, though I don't know anyone who actually uses it. I have a friend who own a Zune; he won it, used it once, and it's been holding down the bottom of his sock drawer ever since. You were trying to highlight OP's point, right?
Because it hasn't been for the XBox for quite some time now.
Xtreme sounds too much like Xfinity. In fact, Comcast's 105Mbps cable internet offering is named Xtreme. I'm sure they wouldn't care, though.
Funny, when I switched to T-Mobile, they were more than happy to get AT&T on the phone for me to get my HTC One X unlocked. Of course, AT&T refused to provide the correct unlock code (they pulled that "we'll text it to you within 24 hours" bullshit, then, when that code didn't work, insisted that they had to escalate it to "engineering", and that I'd hear back in 24 hours again, which I never did -- and I know it wasn't T-Mobile scamming, as I went into an AT&T store when the first code didn't work). In the end, I borrowed a friend's old HD2 and used that until the phone I was waiting for came out, at which point I did end up buying a phone, an HTC One (M7), from T-Mobile. Then the M8 came out and I went in to check it out, fully expecting them to pressure my into paying off my M7 and upgrading; instead, they highlighted some of the feature differences, pointed out that the two were mostly similar, then spoke of what they felt were the drawbacks (the M8 being slightly larger, the fact that I'd have to replace my desk and car docks, etc), eventually saying they'd be more than happy the help me upgrade, but advising me to hang on to the M7 for the time being.
Yes, such vicious salespeople.
It's worth mentioning that, even while paying off two phones, my T-Mobile bill, for unlimited EVERYTHING (with the upgrade to unlimited LTE data on both lines) is still $20/mo less than I was shelling out to AT&T for 2 lines sharing 700 minutes and 500 text messages, with 4GB of data each (before $10/GB overages kicked in). And, when both phones are paid for in 9 months, my bill will drop by an additional $25. Actually, it will probably drop by another $20 when I drop the insurance on both phones (what's the point, when I can just walk in to a T-Mobile store and get a brand new phone at that point?), so my bill ends up being $65 less than AT&T. Sure, that's assuming I keep the same phones for longer than two years, but where's that option with AT&T?
Unless your bill gets smaller 24 months after you get a new phone, you should be able to get one phone (bought under contract) unlocked for every 24 months of service. That is to say, if you bring your own phone initially, then upgrade, say, 12 months later, those first 12 months in which your bill was exactly the same as it was *after* you upgraded should cover half he cost of the new phone. You were paying for it before you even got it, and they should respect that.
My provider doesn't do service contracts, though; they finance phones. I have 2 phones on my plan currently, and I pay $12.50/mo for each of them. In 9 months, they'll be paid off and my bill will drop by $25 in total, unless I decide to upgrade at that time. Of course, I could pay the $112.50 balance owed on one (or both) of those phones right now and be allowed to upgrade. Or, I could just decide to live with the phones I have, both of which are working quite well and, being the high-end models of their day, should continue to do so until their batteries give out, and enjoy the reduced bill.
Honestly, we don't need a law for this; people just need to wake up, realize what they're signing up for, and just don't sign it if they don't like the terms. Yes, competition is reduced when everyone's locked in a contract. The solution? Don't sign. When they all start hemorrhaging customers, they'll first start competing on price (wherein the remaining customers win) and, when that doesn't work, they'll start competing on terms (wherein we all win). Or, you know, switch to one of the carriers who's already started competing in that manner; maybe you have to wait out your contract, maybe you have to pay a termination fee, whatever, just do it.
an image that has been rasterized at 3840x2400 & then interpolated down & displayed on a 15" 2880x1800 retina screen
When you're doing graphics work (note that I didn't say photo editing), your graphics are being rasterized at your *display* resolution. If that's not the native resolution of the panel, or some resolution that divides cleanly into that resolution, then yes, there is interpolation, and if your work requires pixel-perfect accuracy (a lot of clients want that and will zoom in and attack your work with a ruler to make sure they're getting it -- on the upside, you can charge for it), that display has become useless. And even if we do limit it to photo editing as your description implies, you still have no clue what's actually happening. Am I cramming the whole image onto the screen (as you implied) or am I zooming to 1:1 to fit as many *actual* pixels of the image onto the screen as possible? In the first case, you're right, it doesn't matter; in the second, well, ... I've already explained, in this paragraph, why the display is useless except at two specific resolutions.
but mine don't give me super telescopic vision the way you claim to have with yours.
And now you're just being an ass, that much is clear. Good day, sir.
Righto, you just led with the equivalent of "I don't hit women" leaving out "but I do make sure my wife stays in line".
Actually... I can't pass this one up... it's actually more akin to leading with "I beat my wife" and leaving out "but only when she threatens me with a loaded gun pointed at my head". To be clear, *my position* is that I don't carry my 17" places I don't need to carry it, and you've just admitted that this position hasn't changed; you inferred, incorrectly, that this had *anything* to do with weight, when the reality is that it has to do with limiting my exposure to potential data theft by preferring to carry a machine that doesn't contain all of my financials and personal info when I don't need to. You can keep insisting that this is not a valid reason to leave the machine at home or tethered to my desk at work and, instead, carry another machine (that the machine is physically smaller is a factor of cost, not weight) that doesn't contain that data, but insistence does not make you right.
your incoherency & refusal to admit that your any part of position is wrong (ex: your aftermarket SATA drive is clearly slower than the recent rMBP's PCI flash)
Oh? It's not my fault you didn't catch up on the entire thread before posting.
You believe that you're always right, any who disagree with you must be wrong so instances where you've been proven wrong fall into your blind spot so they can be safely ignored.
See above. This does, however, seem to quantify you fairly well, piping up about what someone who does graphics work needs in a display (which is *very* different from what your average user, gamer, or even someone doing video work, needs) when you clearly have no clue, then refusing to listen to sound explanations of why this is the case. Perhaps you'd find my posts more coherent if you actually read them with an open mind, rather than a staunch belief that what works for you must work for everyone else.
Go back to using Windows, you're a bad fit with the Mac crowd
I married a Mac fanatic, I work for a Mac-centric company, and my two best friends are Mac nuts; and all of that is going quite well. I'd say I'm a damn good fit for that crowd. I'm not a part of it, though; I want a UNIX system with a well-supported UI; that's the crowd I'm in, and I'm loving it, thank you. I also never left Windows; I use it *a lot* for testing. Oh, I also use Linux, when it's the right tool for the job. I don't evangelize any platform, which is what you're doing here.
Peace be with you, friend.
I should have put this in the same post, but it was getting long...
I'll continue to use my rMBP which I've discovered doesn't have the defects you think it does
That's fine. The machine works for you. However, the best Apple can do right now is a 15" machine with a *marginally* faster CPU, the same amount of RAM (yes, despite Apple's documentation, late 2011 MBPs can handle 16GB of RAM), and (thank you for prompting me to look at the disk performance of the current models, my previous benchmark was from 2012) a disk that's about 80% faster, but much smaller (unless I opt for the $500 upgrade). For a full list of my complaints on that front, see here and realize that the defects I see in Apple's current offering are more numerous than you seem to think. And no, your opinion isn't going to fix them, but 32GB of RAM and a physically larger display might.
The difference between using the retina display at it's native 2880x1800 or pushing it to an interpolated 1920x1200 is invisible without a magnifying glass so your main objection is not justified.
When you're doing graphics work, you often find yourself looking *that* closely at your display. Clearly, you've never done any real graphics-intensive work, or you'd fully understand where I'm coming from. Enjoy your crisp text, that's what the hiDPI resolutions on the retina displays are meant to provide; it's not my fault you don't understand the implementation of the technology you are using, what it does, and what its limitations are and how those limitations affect certain use-cases where precision is paramount. You can't see the difference because the difference doesn't matter to you; I'm not faulting you for that, but I'm also not going to argue that the difference *does* matter to people it matters to.
It is more fatiguing working on my 24" 1980x1200 screens where pixels are visible than on the the 15".
If the pixels on your display are visible, you're sitting too close to it. Personally, I wear glasses when staring at a monitor, so I can probably bring mine a little closer than you can before I have that problem. My eyes are odd, one focuses +0.25 diopters and the other focuses -0.25 diopters, both eventually correcting themselves over time, so if I'm working on multiple displays (typically 3) at very slightly differing distances, I have to wear what most people would consider "dizzy" glasses or suffer a massive migraine within an hour or so.
Drawing conclusions from statements is actually fairly reliable, but not from people who change their position. I won't make the mistake of trying to infer anything from you in the future.
When did I change my position? I did not. I did, however, clarify that position. You can insist, all you want, that I don't carry my 17" everywhere due to its size and weight, but insistence doesn't make you correct. I've given you the reasons for that, and it has nothing to do with weight.
It's dangerous to infer the motives of others who you do not know personally, because any such inferences will be based on your own preferences and experiences, which necessarily do differ from theirs; since you don't know them personally, you don't even have the slightest basis by which to compensate for this. Of course, we all do it, so I'm not judging you for that; however, when someone clarifies their reasoning, there is never a situation in which you are right to argue that; you are not them, you are not in their head, and you clearly don't know that person well enough to understand their reasoning, or you wouldn't have incorrectly inferred it in the first place.
Yes, you can *use* the display at that resolution; however, yes, it does certainly make a difference. Perhaps not for text, or vectors drawn by retina-aware applications, because the hiDPI subsystem will still render those at the native resolution, simply adjusting their sizes to scale; but for raster graphics, it most certainly does matter. With a raster, you either scale up by a multiple of the original or you lose sharpness. Why? Because when you scale up by a multiple (say 2:1, which is how hiDPI native scales), 1 pixel simply becomes 4, 2 in each direction; effectively, your pixels become bigger, but they don't change color or placement at all. The moment you start interpolating and antialiasing your output, you no longer have a display fit for graphics work.
If that's what you're using it for, then your resolution choices on a 2880x1800 display are, as I stated, 2880x1800 or 1440x1900. For everyday use, yea, fine, fuck it, run it at any damn resolution you want. If all you care about is the text on the screen, it'll still render at the native 2880x1800, size adjusted to match the hiDPI resolution of your choice.
And I never said the 17" was barely luggable, I simply said I have a smaller machine for travel. Before I had that and, in fact, before I had this 17" MBP, I used (and still have) a slightly larger, twice as heavy 17" PC as my primary machine. I lugged that fucker around with me *everywhere* I needed a computer without complaint. The 17" MBP is *light years* more luggable than that; I just see no need to take the machine that holds a decent amount of my personal data out in public, to potentially unsecure or unsafe locations where it may be stolen, so I take the smaller, cheaper, slightly less capable, but also devoid of personal data, machine with me instead. In a sense, though, I guess you're right; the weight of the potential data goldmine someone would find in this 17" MBP does weigh heavily enough so as to make it unluggable.
TL;DR: Don't infer people's reasons for things; you'll almost always be wrong.