Seriously. thousand dollars on a laptop and you're bitching about 20 bucks worth of dongles.
Closer to $2000 on the laptop, and at that price point, yeah I expect it to come with a dongle to turn its useless built in port to at least something that will connect to something instead of having to buy a $100 (not $20) worth of dongles to connect it to anything.
everytime I buy a new laptop I need new adapters. At the very least they should COME with mini-vga to vga... mini-dvi to dvi,... mini displayport to hdmi or dvi...
1998 was the last time Apple replaced the peripheral ports. If you still have a computer from before then, I'd think you'd have more trouble than just replacing the peripherals.
Agreed. USB then USB2 being backwards compatible with usb 1 has been a good thing for the entire industry.
The only thing you could really gripe about is the constant change in the video connectors
Bingo.
First it was VGA. Then it was all about DVI. Now it's HDMI. At least with DisplayPort you could get an adapter for them.
The first difference being that even today you can get a laptop with a VGA port, which is valuable if you spend most of your time plugging into other people's projectors and stuff. Or you can get a laptop with HDMI if you want the latest standards and hi-def digital output with hdcp... its at least up to the consumer to purchase a unit that suits their needs.
The second difference is that while VGA, DVI, and HDMI have been the progression, even on PCs, is that they've used the standard connectors, so your standard and readily available cables worked.
Meanwhile Apple ran with Mini-VGA, Mni-DVI, and Mini-displayport. All of which are NEVER available anywhere you go unless you bring your bag of adapters with you.
You realize it was just an RS-232 in a DIN sleeve, right?
Yes I did. But it was pointless and annoying to have to have a set of adapters and cables for a 2ndary form factor. Virtually everything on the planet except apple and apple-editions of things used the 9 or 25 pin d-subs... a 9-pin din was redundant.
(And even much of the mac edition hardware was identical to the pc edition, except that it shipped with a cable with a 9 pin din on one end and a d-sub on the device itself. (my old us robotics modem for example)
ADB was cool in a number of ways, but not being reliably hot-pluggable and frequently having the whole bus freeze up when you attached something or something came loose was a royal PITA. It may have been innovative, but I don't miss it. PS/2 wasn't innovative, and its hotpluggability was just as lousy... but at least having the mouse come unplugged didn't freeze the keyboard and effectively lockup the entire computer.
If Apple hadn't done the USB switch, we'd likely still be stuck with floppies, parallel printers and scanners, and miscellaneous serial devices.
That's a fantasy. Its not like Mac drove the PC market. (especially at that particular point in time.) And the pc market switched to USB on its own time frame, and held onto the legacy ports until there was really no one using them.
But its absurd to say that "Apple drove people to stop using them." Most people didn't interact with macs and Apple's decisions didn't affect them. Most hardware vendors didn't make mac versions or drivers, and Apple's decisions didn't affect them.
They were RS-422, with a DIN standard connector. It was much easier to deal with serial connections on a Macintosh than on anything else at the time.
How was it easier? There was 9-pin d-sub, 25-pin d-sub, and the MUCH RARER 9-pin din. Getting cables/adapters for the d-sub versions was trivial. Their was no need or benefit to having a 2nd 9-pin variation that was rarely found anywhere else.
ADB was an Apple-developed standard, much better than PS/2 or AT keyboard connections, and much better than PS/2 mouse connections
I don't know about much better. It was differently awful.
ADB's hot plugabilty was not reliable, and when it froze when you plugged in a barcode scanner or graphics tablet or reconnected a device that came unplugged you lost everything on the chain including the keyboard and mouse.
PS/2 wasn't any better, hot plugging sucked about as bad, and the hard limit of 2 devices sucked,... but at least when the hot plugging failed the other device still worked, and it was generally possible to shut the pc down and reboot with either the keyboard or the mouse working.
USB was a welcome replacement to ADB and PS/2, my complaint isn't that Apple embraced USB, but that it didn't leave the ADB electronics around for a couple extra years so that you could still use your trackball and graphics tablet and barcode scanner with your new mac without jumping through hoops.
Why would you plug your mouse into the computer on an iMac? The keyboard had two USB ports, you plug your mouse in one, leaving you one free port on the computer and one on the keyboard.
That's exactly what I said. The one on the keyboard didn't deliver full power. Leaving you one fully usable port, and one slightly gimped one.
And when the computer dies and needs to be replaced, we just sit there and mash the keyboard pretending to do work? Of course not.
With a PC you buy a new computer, it comes with the new ports, but it comes with last years ports too, so your existing peripherals work. If you have half a brain in your head, you replace your peripherals with versions that use the new ports when they need replacing. And there is no transitional pain.
With a Mac, you buy a new computer because your old one died. It comes with the new ports. So you rush out and either buy a bunch of adapters... or you buy all new peripherals. There is considerable transitional pain.
In fact, none of the *nix sysadmins I know would dream of rebooting the box to clear a problem except as a last resort. Where has this come from?
I take a somewhat contrary stance, rebooting is like testing the backup recovery procedure, or the backup power system... you have to do it to know that you can do it.
If you are a afraid to reboot your server when its working fine because you don't know it will come back up, then you ALREADY HAVE A PROBLEM.
That said, I fully understand the desire not to reboot especially if it may take down a production server and cause downtime... but if uptime is that critical you should already have a backup system ready to go.
There are absolutely business situations and scenarios where a 'reboot as a last resort' is the right approach. But for a lot of people... probably the majority of them, rebooting from time to time especially in controlled circumstances makes some sense.
If you've got dodgy hardware that might fail on a reboot olr some other boot sequence problem... its generally better to find out about it under controlled circumstances, rather than in the midst of some other data corruption/service won't start/catastrophe... the last thing you need while fighting a server problem is to have to resort to a reboot and find out your drive controller is toast too... or that some twit mangled/boot.
It took me ten minutes to swap the hard drive on my early-2009 (replaceable battery) Macbook Pro [...] It would probably take me longer to swap drives on most desktop machines of any make.
Then you are doing something wrong.
Hard drive replacement of a good quality screwless desktop case is about 1 minute.
A half decent case (say a Dell optiplex is 5 minutes tops.)
The only way it should take more than 9 minutes to swap a hard drive on a PC would be if someone built a gaming rig instead of a piece of crap case and you had to remove both sides of the case to get at the screws and then remove the SLI video cards and cut all the cable ties just to slide the hard drive out.... but even then 10 minutes is about the longest it should take.
The only reason I swapped drives was to put in an SSD with less capacity than the OEM drive.
Hard drives should be easily swappable on laptops for a couple reasons. Mechanical ones at least are highly prone to failure, and being able to replace one easily instead of having to take it to a technician has value.
I also value being able to swap them out for ease of data recovery in the event the laptop itself fails. Being to throw a laptop drive into a tower chassis and read it as a 2ndary drive is crucial.
Or if the hard drive is damaged / corrupted and won't boot. Sure I can boot of a linux live CD and then copy the data to a usb drive, and blah,blah, blah... but tossing it into a pc chassis and just copying it via SATA is preferable.
Its also valuable for security. We'll pull the hard drives out destroy them, and give the laptops away to staff or charity when we replace them. If it took dissembly of the laptop to get the drive out... we wouldn't bother.
Removable hard drives make sense for a lot more than just "potential upgrades".
Like USB. Remember when everyone laughed at them for being the first to put it on their computers? Ha, the fools.
Apple wasn't the first by a long shot.
Apple was only the first to drop the legacy connectors. And in apple's case, the legacy connectors were proprietary apple crap anyway. ADB for keyboard/mouse, and thier goofy round serial, GeoPort, and other complete CRAP.
And it was still a DICK move, because it meant a pile of people had to purchase over priced adapters for their barcode scanners, printers, and so forth.
And to really top off the dickishness of it, they only gave you 2 usb ports, forcing a bunch of people to buy powered hubs too. (After plugging in your keyboard (and mouse into the keyboard) you had one port left on the computer, and one more on the keyboard that couldn't deliver full power.
I have no problem with apple adding new ports, and bundling peripherals that use them, but to FORCE me to buy expensive adapters and/or all new peripherals everytime Steve Job's gets a hard on for a new port. Fuck him.
tablets can do a large chunk of work - especially pretty basic stuff
I really don't know a lot of people who are given company laptops who don't use them to a significant extent at least often enough to warrant them.
I'm a software developer, database admin, etc... so I need a real computer...
My father is a 'meetings' and 'conference calls' kind of executive type. email and scheduling are the majority of his computing.
But he needs to prepare powerpoint presentations, write proposals, itemize expense reports, create budgets and sales projections, etc, etc. He doesn't do this every day, and he'd be good with a tablet for much of his day... but if they gave him a tablet he'd still need a laptop.
Most of the work I do on my computer is using LaTeX...
Mah, I wouldn't want to do anything substantial in latex on a touch screen. And if you plan to do anything except at your desk... then your back to carrying a dock/keyboard around...
I like tablets. I see a lot of value in them... but I find they are a lousy replacement for a laptop. They do a subset of things better than a laptop... but they are ultimately more limited.
So you still need a laptop.
Hell, most current tablets are effectively PC accessories not standalone devices. They list that you have a computer with OSX 10.6 or Windows XP SP3/Vista/7 as "system requirements"...
How can a device that can't run without a computer replace the computer?
Apple's demands of 30% only take effect if the iOS user subscribes through the app. If the user is an existing subscriber, nothing changes.
Yes I know all that, but then you are faced with a conundrum... you can't charge more on the app store to cover the users who go that route.
And you can't afford to take a loss on the customers who go that route... so you effectively have to raise your prices to cover your losses on the app-store buyers... the more people that use the app store the higher prices go.
Meanwhile those that do not use the app store are effectively subsidizing your losses on those who do... just as a business owner has to raise his prices to cover his losses to shoplifiting and theft.
And that's pretty much the perspective I have on apple: theives.
What I want to know is - there's a TON of apps in the app store that require subscriptions, but they require previous subscriptions (i.e., "to use this app, you must already be a memory of blah"). Does this affect them? If not, there's the solution - don't allow users to subscribe through the app - they must have an existing account.
In what world is erecting an arbitrary barrier and an unnecessary inconvenience to your customers a "solution".
lol, thanks for the heads up. You know I actually did miss the sarcasm.
I should have clued in by the comment about downloading visual studio express that you were envisioning the accountant doing the coding himself... (rofmao)
I guess I've seen enough slashdotters who really do look at a 50k piece of software and then figure they can hack something together in a few hours in perl or something that's equivalent.
(Hell, to be honest, I've done it myself... seen a quote from a vendor for a bit of custom software development running 25k and then decided to just bang it out myself over a weekend... and then did.)
In any case.there is a genuine sense among coders that we can write our own software in a pinch... and some of us actually can and do from time to time.
So its not really a stretch to see someone claiming that's what they would do... to the point that the idea of some software developer thinking they could build an accounting module on a phone in 6 hours... is entirely plausible. (albeit stupid)
each paycheck you get $1000. you can keep that (ie not put your app on the iDevices)
or instead each paycheck will be $700. but you will get three times as many paychecks.
I was generally with you up until this, because it misses the issue. They aren't taking 30% of the PROFIT. They are taking 30% of the REVENUE.
Each subscriber they take has a cost associated with it. Suppose for each sale that generates you a cheque for 1000 you had expenses of 800, and profit of 200. That much more closely models the situation here.
Apple taking 30% of revenue, means you get a cheque for 700. But your expenses are still 800. So now you are in the hole. Getting 3x as many customers just puts you 3 times deeper into the hole.
If apple was taking 30% of the profit, they could swallow it. But very few markets can really afford a 30% swipe at their REVENUE.
Here's a final comparison:
Apple itself in Q4 had 20B$ in revenue, and $4B in profits. If someone took 30% of Apple's revenue, it would have gone from 4 billion in profits to a 3 BILLION DOLLAR LOSS last quarter. Its shares would be tanking in that sea of red ink.
That's what siphoning 30% off revenue does to a company.
I think these companies want to complain because 30% cuts into their profits, but I don't know how many will leave because the iOS user base is still worthwhile even at 70%.
No. Its not. That's the issue.
If I write a small app with a subscrption and generate 2,000,000 in sales, and have 1,600,000 in expenses, I'm making a modest but respectable 400k; enough to live comfortably, and even have an employee or two.
Things are sailing just fine. Apple now decides they want 30% of subscription revenue... that's 600k for processing processing a VISA card through their app store. Directly through VISA I was paying 2.5% or $50,000 annually. So I'm now operating at a 150k annual loss from a 400k annual profit.
That's not profitable. I now have to jack up my prices by like 50% just to cover apple's money grab. Customers won't be happy.
1. make friends with truants. 2. collect their GPS devices. 3. enter codes when called to do so. 4. profit.
Meh, too much hassle.
In high school, we'd have tossed them in the goldfish tank, or drilled holes in them in shop class, put them in hydrochrolic acid from the chem lab, or something else equally "creative"...
Either that or just put them into the recyling bins...on our way out to the mall.
So how is restricting yourself to an official marketplace different from having one iOS store? You're arguing in favor of a walled garden!
Google may back the official android marketplace, but suppose valve/steam hosted one... I'd trust that one. Or if GoG did... I'd trust that one too. If Amazon did... that one might be trustworthy if they vetted its contents. If Futureshop / BestBuy had one, I'd feel pretty comfortable there too.
A community one for GPL software... I'm sure a trustworthy one would arise.
If my brother wrote an app and sent it to me, I'd trust it. Naturally I'd trust anything I wrote...
Then what's the difference between Apple's app store and the Official Market Place?
If I have one official app store to choose from and hundreds of malware infected stores...how is that a choice?
The fact that there are hundreds of malware infected stores doesn't mean that there aren't several reputable stores.
You can buy Adidas runners at the actual Adidas store... or you can walk into any other shoe store at the mall and safely buy shoes. But if you wander into a Chinese night market... the "Adidas runners" might be a cheap knockoff.
Would you prefer to live in a world with one legal shoe store simply because their are hundreds of chinese night markets that often carry poorly made low quality crap?
That conversation was at noon, and by 5:30 we had already skipped over the alpha version and were pussy deep in testing out the beta.
Yeah, because the head of the accounting department wants to use a beta quality general ledger written in 5 hrs by a guy who thinks 'pussy deep' is good metaphor with no QA.
You would have to hit submit, look up, and be running somebody over. What are the odds?
Does it really matter what the -odds- are? By that logic when someone wins the lottery, do you say, "No they didn't, just look at the odds.".;)
Maybe she submitted the update, and was checking it out after she submitted it. I often do that with/. posts. But that's not really the point.
If they can establish that she wasn't paying attention to the road while driving around the time when she hit him, its going to establish a "reasonable doubt" that she was paying attention when she hit him.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. thousand dollars on a laptop and you're bitching about 20 bucks worth of dongles.
Closer to $2000 on the laptop, and at that price point, yeah I expect it to come with a dongle to turn its useless built in port to at least something that will connect to something instead of having to buy a $100 (not $20) worth of dongles to connect it to anything.
This isn't a yearly affair. If it was, we'd be having a different discussion.
Except in video connectors, where not only are they changing them every 2 years or less, but they use versions that are non-standard.
mini-vga, mini-dvi, mini-displayport, ... light-peak...
everytime I buy a new laptop I need new adapters. At the very least they should COME with mini-vga to vga... mini-dvi to dvi, ... mini displayport to hdmi or dvi...
1998 was the last time Apple replaced the peripheral ports. If you still have a computer from before then, I'd think you'd have more trouble than just replacing the peripherals.
Agreed. USB then USB2 being backwards compatible with usb 1 has been a good thing for the entire industry.
The only thing you could really gripe about is the constant change in the video connectors
Bingo.
First it was VGA. Then it was all about DVI. Now it's HDMI. At least with DisplayPort you could get an adapter for them.
The first difference being that even today you can get a laptop with a VGA port, which is valuable if you spend most of your time plugging into other people's projectors and stuff. Or you can get a laptop with HDMI if you want the latest standards and hi-def digital output with hdcp... its at least up to the consumer to purchase a unit that suits their needs.
The second difference is that while VGA, DVI, and HDMI have been the progression, even on PCs, is that they've used the standard connectors, so your standard and readily available cables worked.
Meanwhile Apple ran with Mini-VGA, Mni-DVI, and Mini-displayport. All of which are NEVER available anywhere you go unless you bring your bag of adapters with you.
I'm still giving PCs the edge here.
You realize it was just an RS-232 in a DIN sleeve, right?
Yes I did. But it was pointless and annoying to have to have a set of adapters and cables for a 2ndary form factor. Virtually everything on the planet except apple and apple-editions of things used the 9 or 25 pin d-subs... a 9-pin din was redundant.
(And even much of the mac edition hardware was identical to the pc edition, except that it shipped with a cable with a 9 pin din on one end and a d-sub on the device itself. (my old us robotics modem for example)
ADB was cool in a number of ways, but not being reliably hot-pluggable and frequently having the whole bus freeze up when you attached something or something came loose was a royal PITA. It may have been innovative, but I don't miss it. PS/2 wasn't innovative, and its hotpluggability was just as lousy... but at least having the mouse come unplugged didn't freeze the keyboard and effectively lockup the entire computer.
If Apple hadn't done the USB switch, we'd likely still be stuck with floppies, parallel printers and scanners, and miscellaneous serial devices.
That's a fantasy. Its not like Mac drove the PC market. (especially at that particular point in time.) And the pc market switched to USB on its own time frame, and held onto the legacy ports until there was really no one using them.
But its absurd to say that "Apple drove people to stop using them." Most people didn't interact with macs and Apple's decisions didn't affect them. Most hardware vendors didn't make mac versions or drivers, and Apple's decisions didn't affect them.
They were RS-422, with a DIN standard connector. It was much easier to deal with serial connections on a Macintosh than on anything else at the time.
How was it easier? There was 9-pin d-sub, 25-pin d-sub, and the MUCH RARER 9-pin din. Getting cables/adapters for the d-sub versions was trivial. Their was no need or benefit to having a 2nd 9-pin variation that was rarely found anywhere else.
ADB was an Apple-developed standard, much better than PS/2 or AT keyboard connections, and much better than PS/2 mouse connections
I don't know about much better. It was differently awful.
ADB's hot plugabilty was not reliable, and when it froze when you plugged in a barcode scanner or graphics tablet or reconnected a device that came unplugged you lost everything on the chain including the keyboard and mouse.
PS/2 wasn't any better, hot plugging sucked about as bad, and the hard limit of 2 devices sucked, ... but at least when the hot plugging failed the other device still worked, and it was generally possible to shut the pc down and reboot with either the keyboard or the mouse working.
USB was a welcome replacement to ADB and PS/2, my complaint isn't that Apple embraced USB, but that it didn't leave the ADB electronics around for a couple extra years so that you could still use your trackball and graphics tablet and barcode scanner with your new mac without jumping through hoops.
Why would you plug your mouse into the computer on an iMac? The keyboard had two USB ports, you plug your mouse in one, leaving you one free port on the computer and one on the keyboard.
That's exactly what I said. The one on the keyboard didn't deliver full power. Leaving you one fully usable port, and one slightly gimped one.
If you don't like it, don't upgrade.
And when the computer dies and needs to be replaced, we just sit there and mash the keyboard pretending to do work? Of course not.
With a PC you buy a new computer, it comes with the new ports, but it comes with last years ports too, so your existing peripherals work. If you have half a brain in your head, you replace your peripherals with versions that use the new ports when they need replacing. And there is no transitional pain.
With a Mac, you buy a new computer because your old one died. It comes with the new ports. So you rush out and either buy a bunch of adapters... or you buy all new peripherals. There is considerable transitional pain.
In fact, none of the *nix sysadmins I know would dream of rebooting the box to clear a problem except as a last resort. Where has this come from?
I take a somewhat contrary stance, rebooting is like testing the backup recovery procedure, or the backup power system... you have to do it to know that you can do it.
If you are a afraid to reboot your server when its working fine because you don't know it will come back up, then you ALREADY HAVE A PROBLEM.
That said, I fully understand the desire not to reboot especially if it may take down a production server and cause downtime... but if uptime is that critical you should already have a backup system ready to go.
There are absolutely business situations and scenarios where a 'reboot as a last resort' is the right approach. But for a lot of people... probably the majority of them, rebooting from time to time especially in controlled circumstances makes some sense.
If you've got dodgy hardware that might fail on a reboot olr some other boot sequence problem... its generally better to find out about it under controlled circumstances, rather than in the midst of some other data corruption/service won't start/catastrophe... the last thing you need while fighting a server problem is to have to resort to a reboot and find out your drive controller is toast too... or that some twit mangled /boot.
It took me ten minutes to swap the hard drive on my early-2009 (replaceable battery) Macbook Pro [...] It would probably take me longer to swap drives on most desktop machines of any make.
Then you are doing something wrong.
Hard drive replacement of a good quality screwless desktop case is about 1 minute.
A half decent case (say a Dell optiplex is 5 minutes tops.)
The only way it should take more than 9 minutes to swap a hard drive on a PC would be if someone built a gaming rig instead of a piece of crap case and you had to remove both sides of the case to get at the screws and then remove the SLI video cards and cut all the cable ties just to slide the hard drive out.... but even then 10 minutes is about the longest it should take.
The only reason I swapped drives was to put in an SSD with less capacity than the OEM drive.
Hard drives should be easily swappable on laptops for a couple reasons. Mechanical ones at least are highly prone to failure, and being able to replace one easily instead of having to take it to a technician has value.
I also value being able to swap them out for ease of data recovery in the event the laptop itself fails. Being to throw a laptop drive into a tower chassis and read it as a 2ndary drive is crucial.
Or if the hard drive is damaged / corrupted and won't boot. Sure I can boot of a linux live CD and then copy the data to a usb drive, and blah,blah, blah... but tossing it into a pc chassis and just copying it via SATA is preferable.
Its also valuable for security. We'll pull the hard drives out destroy them, and give the laptops away to staff or charity when we replace them. If it took dissembly of the laptop to get the drive out... we wouldn't bother.
Removable hard drives make sense for a lot more than just "potential upgrades".
Like USB. Remember when everyone laughed at them for being the first to put it on their computers? Ha, the fools.
Apple wasn't the first by a long shot.
Apple was only the first to drop the legacy connectors. And in apple's case, the legacy connectors were proprietary apple crap anyway. ADB for keyboard/mouse, and thier goofy round serial, GeoPort, and other complete CRAP.
And it was still a DICK move, because it meant a pile of people had to purchase over priced adapters for their barcode scanners, printers, and so forth.
And to really top off the dickishness of it, they only gave you 2 usb ports, forcing a bunch of people to buy powered hubs too. (After plugging in your keyboard (and mouse into the keyboard) you had one port left on the computer, and one more on the keyboard that couldn't deliver full power.
I have no problem with apple adding new ports, and bundling peripherals that use them, but to FORCE me to buy expensive adapters and/or all new peripherals everytime Steve Job's gets a hard on for a new port. Fuck him.
I'm running mad looking for an HDMI-to-RCA downscaler
http://www.svideo.com/hdmi2svideo.html
Yeah, doctors don't do real work, only programmers do, right?
Doctors do a lot of real work.
For most of them, however not all that much of it involves doing anything complicated on a computer.
tablets can do a large chunk of work - especially pretty basic stuff
I really don't know a lot of people who are given company laptops who don't use them to a significant extent at least often enough to warrant them.
I'm a software developer, database admin, etc... so I need a real computer...
My father is a 'meetings' and 'conference calls' kind of executive type. email and scheduling are the majority of his computing.
But he needs to prepare powerpoint presentations, write proposals, itemize expense reports, create budgets and sales projections, etc, etc. He doesn't do this every day, and he'd be good with a tablet for much of his day... but if they gave him a tablet he'd still need a laptop.
Most of the work I do on my computer is using LaTeX...
Mah, I wouldn't want to do anything substantial in latex on a touch screen. And if you plan to do anything except at your desk... then your back to carrying a dock/keyboard around...
I like tablets. I see a lot of value in them... but I find they are a lousy replacement for a laptop. They do a subset of things better than a laptop... but they are ultimately more limited.
So you still need a laptop.
Hell, most current tablets are effectively PC accessories not standalone devices. They list that you have a computer with OSX 10.6 or Windows XP SP3/Vista/7 as "system requirements"...
How can a device that can't run without a computer replace the computer?
Apple's demands of 30% only take effect if the iOS user subscribes through the app. If the user is an existing subscriber, nothing changes.
Yes I know all that, but then you are faced with a conundrum... you can't charge more on the app store to cover the users who go that route.
And you can't afford to take a loss on the customers who go that route... so you effectively have to raise your prices to cover your losses on the app-store buyers... the more people that use the app store the higher prices go.
Meanwhile those that do not use the app store are effectively subsidizing your losses on those who do... just as a business owner has to raise his prices to cover his losses to shoplifiting and theft.
And that's pretty much the perspective I have on apple: theives.
What I want to know is - there's a TON of apps in the app store that require subscriptions, but they require previous subscriptions (i.e., "to use this app, you must already be a memory of blah"). Does this affect them? If not, there's the solution - don't allow users to subscribe through the app - they must have an existing account.
In what world is erecting an arbitrary barrier and an unnecessary inconvenience to your customers a "solution".
lol, thanks for the heads up. You know I actually did miss the sarcasm.
I should have clued in by the comment about downloading visual studio express that you were envisioning the accountant doing the coding himself... (rofmao)
I guess I've seen enough slashdotters who really do look at a 50k piece of software and then figure they can hack something together in a few hours in perl or something that's equivalent.
(Hell, to be honest, I've done it myself... seen a quote from a vendor for a bit of custom software development running 25k and then decided to just bang it out myself over a weekend... and then did.)
In any case.there is a genuine sense among coders that we can write our own software in a pinch... and some of us actually can and do from time to time.
So its not really a stretch to see someone claiming that's what they would do... to the point that the idea of some software developer thinking they could build an accounting module on a phone in 6 hours... is entirely plausible. (albeit stupid)
each paycheck you get $1000. you can keep that (ie not put your app on the iDevices)
or instead each paycheck will be $700. but you will get three times as many paychecks.
I was generally with you up until this, because it misses the issue. They aren't taking 30% of the PROFIT. They are taking 30% of the REVENUE.
Each subscriber they take has a cost associated with it. Suppose for each sale that generates you a cheque for 1000 you had expenses of 800, and profit of 200. That much more closely models the situation here.
Apple taking 30% of revenue, means you get a cheque for 700. But your expenses are still 800. So now you are in the hole. Getting 3x as many customers just puts you 3 times deeper into the hole.
If apple was taking 30% of the profit, they could swallow it. But very few markets can really afford a 30% swipe at their REVENUE.
Here's a final comparison:
Apple itself in Q4 had 20B$ in revenue, and $4B in profits. If someone took 30% of Apple's revenue, it would have gone from 4 billion in profits to a 3 BILLION DOLLAR LOSS last quarter. Its shares would be tanking in that sea of red ink.
That's what siphoning 30% off revenue does to a company.
I think these companies want to complain because 30% cuts into their profits, but I don't know how many will leave because the iOS user base is still worthwhile even at 70%.
No. Its not. That's the issue.
If I write a small app with a subscrption and generate 2,000,000 in sales, and have 1,600,000 in expenses, I'm making a modest but respectable 400k; enough to live comfortably, and even have an employee or two.
Things are sailing just fine. Apple now decides they want 30% of subscription revenue... that's 600k for processing processing a VISA card through their app store. Directly through VISA I was paying 2.5% or $50,000 annually. So I'm now operating at a 150k annual loss from a 400k annual profit.
That's not profitable. I now have to jack up my prices by like 50% just to cover apple's money grab. Customers won't be happy.
This was my first thought as well.
1. make friends with truants.
2. collect their GPS devices.
3. enter codes when called to do so.
4. profit.
Meh, too much hassle.
In high school, we'd have tossed them in the goldfish tank, or drilled holes in them in shop class, put them in hydrochrolic acid from the chem lab, or something else equally "creative"...
Either that or just put them into the recyling bins...on our way out to the mall.
Laptops are now the middle-ground, and less needed all the time.
Um no. Laptops are still good for what they've always been good at. portable computing. doing real work when you aren't at your desk.
Tablets are just filling the couch niche that laptops were used for but never were very good at.
Between a laptop and a tablet I need a laptop. Once I already have a laptop, then sure a tablet would be useful but not necessary.
I can't wait for the day I can finally stop carrying my "work computer" back and forth every day.
If your work computer (laptop) can really be replaced by a tablet, then you don't do much real work with it.
Well, good thing there have never been malware apps on the NONALTERNATIVE Android Marketplace then.
No marketplace is 100% safe from malware apps. If you want 100% safety from malware apps don't download apps period.
But that's really beside the point.
So how is restricting yourself to an official marketplace different from having one iOS store? You're arguing in favor of a walled garden!
Google may back the official android marketplace, but suppose valve/steam hosted one... I'd trust that one. Or if GoG did... I'd trust that one too. If Amazon did... that one might be trustworthy if they vetted its contents. If Futureshop / BestBuy had one, I'd feel pretty comfortable there too.
A community one for GPL software... I'm sure a trustworthy one would arise.
If my brother wrote an app and sent it to me, I'd trust it. Naturally I'd trust anything I wrote...
Doesn't really help. If the malware is wrapped into a game with an online leaderboard its going to ask for internet permissions legitimately.
Then what's the difference between Apple's app store and the Official Market Place?
If I have one official app store to choose from and hundreds of malware infected stores...how is that a choice?
The fact that there are hundreds of malware infected stores doesn't mean that there aren't several reputable stores.
You can buy Adidas runners at the actual Adidas store... or you can walk into any other shoe store at the mall and safely buy shoes. But if you wander into a Chinese night market... the "Adidas runners" might be a cheap knockoff.
Would you prefer to live in a world with one legal shoe store simply because their are hundreds of chinese night markets that often carry poorly made low quality crap?
That conversation was at noon, and by 5:30 we had already skipped over the alpha version and were pussy deep in testing out the beta.
Yeah, because the head of the accounting department wants to use a beta quality general ledger written in 5 hrs by a guy who thinks 'pussy deep' is good metaphor with no QA.
You would have to hit submit, look up, and be running somebody over. What are the odds?
Does it really matter what the -odds- are? By that logic when someone wins the lottery, do you say, "No they didn't, just look at the odds.". ;)
Maybe she submitted the update, and was checking it out after she submitted it. I often do that with /. posts. But that's not really the point.
If they can establish that she wasn't paying attention to the road while driving around the time when she hit him, its going to establish a "reasonable doubt" that she was paying attention when she hit him.
...why Apple's "Walled Garden" for the iPhone is such a bad thing?
Because you can't choose not to use it.
The non-story here is that people carelessly installing bad software from ALTERNATIVE android marketplaces got malware.
Newsflash, if you want assurances of software without malware, don't shop at the internet equivalent of the chinatown night markets.
If you want to be as safe as apple's walled garden, stay within the official marketplaces and you get that.