i find it amusing that an mit-trained unix expert doesn't know the difference between hardware and software support for midi playback. i mean, why should he? ever since microsoft included software midi playback in windows xx, midi files have been regarded by non-experts as sound files which maybe require a codec but apart from that aren't any different from all the other sound files out there.
i'm sorry, linux restricted formats? i presume you mean formats which can't be legally used on a free/open-source system (going by microsoft's patent fud)?
nope. you can still send it in to apple where they will... well, what will they do exactly?
i suppose, if i had an iphone, i'd try to find a way of wiping the memory bigtime before sending the device in to have its battery replaced. then i could be sure that apple wasn't gathering personal information about me.
so should i now assume that every product apple makes has a non-user-replaceable battery?
should i automatically expect that the iphone will be the first and only mobile phone on the market without a user-replaceable battery because the ipod also has this?
before reading the comments on this story, i had no idea that the ipod didn't allow the user to replace the battery. this is planned obsolescence and i'm surprised apple hasn't been the defendant in a class-action lawsuit because of it, though it is in no way as critical with an mp3 player as it is with a mobile phone
you seem to be labouring under the delusion that the rest of the world cares what apple products are like and should have an intimate knowledge of them. what i see is a mobile phone with ridiculously reduced capability where apple hasn't informed the prospective customer of this. your quasi religious fervour supporting apple does not allow you to see the logic of this but instead causes you to say "since apple made this design decision with an unrelated product line in an unrelated product market, the customer is expected to assume this is also the case in a product where exactly the same design decision reduces functionality to a huge degree". it's rubbish and i hope one part of you still realises it to be so.
i'd have thought editing of pdfs was pretty trivial nowadays. however i expect to be told that pdfs can have an elaborate master coded locking mechanism on them with public and private keys kept constantly synchronised with a secret lunar base.
such is the state of "communication" today. well, i suppose no communication is also a form of communication.
wasn't there a case of a company in london which got sued for copyright infringement because they had some pdfs with embedded fonts on their hard drives?
it's obviously still not sinking in, so i'm going to hit you on the head with it.
do you tentatively put your foot on each paving stone to check to see if it is actually there and not a mirage before putting your weight on it? no, you don't. you use your common knowledge and experience of the world and assume that the paving stone is real.
all my knowledge of mobile phones tells me that they have battery packs which can be replaced by opening a cover (which is often quite well disguised), taking the old one out and putting the new one in. when purchasing a new mobile phone it has never occurred to me to check this. just as it does not occur to me to check each paving stone before walking on it.
apple has released a product which does not conform to standard models of mobile phones and in fact offers greatly, critically reduced functionality in this regard. that must have been clear to them when they designed it. instead of telling prospective users about this, they were silent.
that is why they would in a just world lose this class action lawsuit.
is that now clear, or do you want to carry on making excuses for your fashion accessoires?
the difference being that it is common knowledge that jeeps require a lot of fuel, just as it is common knowledge that mobile phones have batteries which the user can replace.
not having user replaceable batteries in a mobile phone is a bit like ford selling a station wagon without saying that the back seats can't be folded down. according to law, they would have to make it very clear to the customer that this is the case because a station wagon usually comes with back seats which can be folded down. a mobile phone also comes with batteries which can be replaced or swapped by the user. (there are also good reasons for this. for example, it allows you to use a spare battery in case the first one goes flat and you don't have a recharger nearby)
this argumentation is really very easy to follow. the fact that so many on slashdot refuse to acknowledge this logic is very telling.
i'm sure we all know consumer electronic devices with cases where it isn't immediately obvious how you replace the battery. i'm looking at this moment at a microphone where it took me 2 minutes to figure out how to put a battery into it when i got it. until 5 minutes ago, if i had seen an iPhone or an iPod, i'd have thought the same thing. do portable apple computers also have batteries which the user can't replace? i don't know, but i now suspect that may well be the case.
i'd choose the phone in the current form factor. however, i don't remember ever having been given the choice.
if the sales people were required by apple to say "to make the phone more cool-looking, we installed a battery which you can't replace. as soon as the battery's broken, you have to send us the phone and get it replaced. that takes so-and-so many days and you can bridge the gap by paying an additional charge of x-dollars until your phone is returned to you with a new battery" then i wouldn't mind. (while they were about it, they could also say "for your convenience it is impossible for you to modify in any way the software running on this phone nor can you use your existing java programs")
you seem to find it difficult to accept what i'm saying
for someone coming from the windows/kde/gnome way of doing things, osx seems strange, unnatural and untrustworthy. it does not have the benefit of ease of use. using it is to begin with difficult. that is the same for any change.
when it comes to usage paradigmas for windowing systems, knowledge and experience with a standard windows set-up is the norm. everybody knows it. it is quasi by definition the easy-to-use system for most people. osx isn't. and the ipod isn't either. i found the dial on the front to be unnatural. i assume people who use it get to know it quickly, but there is an initial moment of unfamiliarity when you first try it out.
seeing as you use apple products you are no longer aware of this. as someone who doesn't regularly use apple products, i found myself trying to find a shell on osx so i could actually get some work done. i eventually gave up on my search and asked a "power user" where it is. i hope i'll be able to find it again if i ever have to use os x again.
it is actually an interesting story so i'll tell you why i was using os x. i was sitting in a cafe with an open wlan net with my linux laptop (which had recognised the net and logged itself in automatically when i switched the computer on). someone came in with a modern looking white plastic notebook from apple. he switched his wlan on, but the computer didn't connect to the net. fortunately i had a twisted pair cable with me so i connected the computers and configured my iptables to allow masquerading. then i tried to configure his computer to use my computer as a router. at this point i made the mistake of not downloading and configuring dhcp. i thought it would be trivial to configure a static internet connection on osx. it did however prove to be impossible using the gui so i dived into the apple shell. ifconfig worked as expected and i could set the dns as well (i've forgotten how. maybe it was the standard/etc/resolv.conf). then i just had to set the default gateway. here i realised that the route command had some strange syntax. reading the manual page didn't help me. i tried searching the net but couldn't find anything. the result? he couldn't get into the net. strangely his wlan works at home and also in the university, just not in this cafe. don't ask me why.
this was just a story to show you that apple don't make perfect easy-to-use software and hardware. i'm sure i'm not the only person to have had problems with apple products. so the question remains to me, why do people use apple products when they provide no functional benefits for most people and actually require a learning curve?
apple products look good and people who use them feel superior. that's it. that's the whole story.
i've lived for the past 10 years in a small town with a large university for media design and a college for music (weimar/germany). apple computers are probably the norm in this town amongst the students. a large proportion of these students look down their nose at people who don't use apple. the reasoning is pretty consistent. any other operating system is according to them unstable and not powerful enough to do the image, sound and film editing they need to do. on a side note, the much publicised weimar-net (a town-wide open wlan network) will require a windows-client to be installed on a computer for it to book into the network. this is remarkably short-sighted. i did however have to grin recently when the music-lab in the college of music moved their powermacs from whichever-proprietary-solution-for-recording-and-p rocessing-sound to audacity.
while apple used the powerpc processor, i found the computers mildly interesting. i still do have a first generation imac on my desk which i switch on every now and then so i can have the pleasure of writing some inline assembly for it. as soon as they changed to intel their hardware got boring to me. maybe my view on apple is tainted by this. they used to make the poorman's proper computer, so to speak. now they just remind me of one more entry behind alienware and the like in the "pimp my i86" competition.
if osx becomes more popular, microsoft will probably port their software to it (and hopefully do a better job than they did the last time--internet explorer for mac, anyone? i mean, seriously, wtf??)
this would do nothing to break the strength of proprietary software and closed file formats. people in developing countries would still be dependent on the rich western countries if they wish to interoperate with them. people who use free and open source software would still be at a disadvantage.
versions of microsoft products for osx (and that is what must happen if apple's market share is to increase) would benefit the people who make the fashion choice of choosing apple, and using apple is for most people about fashion (using osx is cool because the kids from "smallville" and "another gay movie" used it (okay, maybe less so because of the second item on the list)). for most people it has little benefit over a well configured windows xp installation. these people lose nothing by having apple ports of microsoft software.
using gnu/linux or *bsd or similar is however not always about a fashion choice or about perceived technical advantages. for some people (me included) it is a moral dictate. my morality will not allow me to create documents in a proprietary format or insist that other people use undocumented and patented communication methods.
and when i think about the continued economic dependency of the third world, i cannot and will not close my eyes to this and promote proprietary competitors to the microsoft monopoly.
The iPhone is great for everyone, even for those who don't care. Even before the iPhone's launch, Palm responded by hiring former Apple people to work on their UI. Other manufacturers will be forced to do the same: Right now, they are selling their phones to the carriers. Apple will force them to start thinking about the actual users, and what they might want.
Even open alternatives will profit. I don't think Ubuntu would be where it is today were it not for Mac OS X. Apple is the main driving force in making digital stuff usable. They are pushing everyone else ahead. Even if you don't agree with their politics, even if you don't use any of their stuff, you still profit tremendously from their existence and from their work. apple is about making money. it does this by being fashionable.
an example, the last time i used mac osx i had great difficulty doing the simplest of tasks (starting applications, saving files etc.). you can probably explain to me in two sentences why "the apple way" is better than the "way other systems use". my point is, i would have to learn it. it's not as if the ability to use os x is a native trait of being human while the ability to use windows xp (or one of its close relatives like gnome or kde) is acquired behaviour.
so basically, you have a mobile phone which has wlan capability but the configuration routine is clumsy. the iphone has wlan capability and you find the configuration routine easier. i fail to see anything truly revolutionary about that, and certainly nothing which would justify thousands of people standing in line on the launch day.
that is my question, why did these people stand in line waiting for the iphone? the only answer i can see is, they saw the iphone as a fashion accessory. even assuming there is no other mobile phone with easy configuration of wlan, did the people standing in line even know this or know of any of the other purported usability benefits of the iphone?
The level of hacking and shareware development on Macs has been HIGH for decades. There were folks tinkering around with source code and resource editors on Macs before Linux was even created. and yet the iphone, just like the ipod, is meant to be unhackable.
for those who labeled my comment flamebait and troll, i'd be truly interested in hearing your argumentation.
from what i can see, the iphone is a fashion accessory being hyped beyond all proportion to its ability. i do also happen to think the world would be better if it failed. the world does not need a proprietary competitor to microsoft, the world needs open standards and laws which protect the rights of the individual to do whatever they want with their property, provided they don't hurt someone. i can't see apple helping to make this happen.
if you want to label the last paragraph off-topic, be my guest. i did start to ramble a bit about things best swept under the carpet while examining the pretty lights of apple's new product.
i worry about this sort of thing. saying that it is possible to hack an iphone and install applications on it can be taken to be a counterargument to the people who reject the restrictions placed on the device. why don't we spend our time complaining about the necessity of this hacking? wouldn't the undeniable skill of these people be better put to use elsewhere? why don't we just chuck the iphone away as the bad apple it is?
what you have seen is the necessary evolution in a field which started splintered and turned to a small number of solutions. think of the car market as an example. to begin with, every crackpot inventor or maker of horse-drawn-carriages made their own make of car. some were successful, some weren't.
due to a sleeping legislative system we have however paid a terrible price. the legislative system should have insisted on standards a long time ago, just like it does for construction work on public buildings or designs of public documentation. however, it slept, with the result that no standards were ever implemented. now there is no interoperability, except for the few crumbs the state-sponsored monopoly chooses to give us. it reminds me of something i would usually read about in a book by douglas adams.
it's interesting to see their old policies coming back to bite them on this one.
microsoft leveraged their monopoly to make it impossible for customers for 6 years to get anything other than windows xp on a new computer. the result? customers think that a new computer means windows xp, and are deeply suspicious of change. now there's suddenly a new operating system none of their friends have. windows xp's main advantage was always its ubiquity. vista, due to being new, does not have this.
microsoft has told the customer for years that different=difficult. now they are reaping what they have sowed.
well, linux is used a lot in the industry for things like hard disk recording and mixing. of course, the software is either in house or ridiculously expensive...
Slashdot Mirror
plus 5 insightful? you can't be serious.
i find it amusing that an mit-trained unix expert doesn't know the difference between hardware and software support for midi playback. i mean, why should he? ever since microsoft included software midi playback in windows xx, midi files have been regarded by non-experts as sound files which maybe require a codec but apart from that aren't any different from all the other sound files out there.
i'm sorry, linux restricted formats? i presume you mean formats which can't be legally used on a free/open-source system (going by microsoft's patent fud)?
now why has this been modded troll? he seems to be making a perfectly valid point. but maybe it's just an inconvenient truth for the mac-fanboys.
while you're about it, you can also wish for the source code, the right to modify this as you see fit, and an open source ide.
nope. you can still send it in to apple where they will... well, what will they do exactly?
i suppose, if i had an iphone, i'd try to find a way of wiping the memory bigtime before sending the device in to have its battery replaced. then i could be sure that apple wasn't gathering personal information about me.
- so should i now assume that every product apple makes has a non-user-replaceable battery?
- should i automatically expect that the iphone will be the first and only mobile phone on the market without a user-replaceable battery because the ipod also has this?
- before reading the comments on this story, i had no idea that the ipod didn't allow the user to replace the battery. this is planned obsolescence and i'm surprised apple hasn't been the defendant in a class-action lawsuit because of it, though it is in no way as critical with an mp3 player as it is with a mobile phone
you seem to be labouring under the delusion that the rest of the world cares what apple products are like and should have an intimate knowledge of them. what i see is a mobile phone with ridiculously reduced capability where apple hasn't informed the prospective customer of this. your quasi religious fervour supporting apple does not allow you to see the logic of this but instead causes you to say "since apple made this design decision with an unrelated product line in an unrelated product market, the customer is expected to assume this is also the case in a product where exactly the same design decision reduces functionality to a huge degree". it's rubbish and i hope one part of you still realises it to be so.i'd have thought editing of pdfs was pretty trivial nowadays. however i expect to be told that pdfs can have an elaborate master coded locking mechanism on them with public and private keys kept constantly synchronised with a secret lunar base.
such is the state of "communication" today. well, i suppose no communication is also a form of communication.
offtopic:::
wasn't there a case of a company in london which got sued for copyright infringement because they had some pdfs with embedded fonts on their hard drives?
the OO people do not own odf. it is a standard and therefore owned by you and me.
it's obviously still not sinking in, so i'm going to hit you on the head with it.
do you tentatively put your foot on each paving stone to check to see if it is actually there and not a mirage before putting your weight on it? no, you don't. you use your common knowledge and experience of the world and assume that the paving stone is real.
all my knowledge of mobile phones tells me that they have battery packs which can be replaced by opening a cover (which is often quite well disguised), taking the old one out and putting the new one in. when purchasing a new mobile phone it has never occurred to me to check this. just as it does not occur to me to check each paving stone before walking on it.
apple has released a product which does not conform to standard models of mobile phones and in fact offers greatly, critically reduced functionality in this regard. that must have been clear to them when they designed it. instead of telling prospective users about this, they were silent.
that is why they would in a just world lose this class action lawsuit.
is that now clear, or do you want to carry on making excuses for your fashion accessoires?
the difference being that it is common knowledge that jeeps require a lot of fuel, just as it is common knowledge that mobile phones have batteries which the user can replace.
not having user replaceable batteries in a mobile phone is a bit like ford selling a station wagon without saying that the back seats can't be folded down. according to law, they would have to make it very clear to the customer that this is the case because a station wagon usually comes with back seats which can be folded down. a mobile phone also comes with batteries which can be replaced or swapped by the user. (there are also good reasons for this. for example, it allows you to use a spare battery in case the first one goes flat and you don't have a recharger nearby)
this argumentation is really very easy to follow. the fact that so many on slashdot refuse to acknowledge this logic is very telling.
i'm sure we all know consumer electronic devices with cases where it isn't immediately obvious how you replace the battery. i'm looking at this moment at a microphone where it took me 2 minutes to figure out how to put a battery into it when i got it. until 5 minutes ago, if i had seen an iPhone or an iPod, i'd have thought the same thing. do portable apple computers also have batteries which the user can't replace? i don't know, but i now suspect that may well be the case.
i'd choose the phone in the current form factor. however, i don't remember ever having been given the choice.
if the sales people were required by apple to say "to make the phone more cool-looking, we installed a battery which you can't replace. as soon as the battery's broken, you have to send us the phone and get it replaced. that takes so-and-so many days and you can bridge the gap by paying an additional charge of x-dollars until your phone is returned to you with a new battery" then i wouldn't mind. (while they were about it, they could also say "for your convenience it is impossible for you to modify in any way the software running on this phone nor can you use your existing java programs")
subject says it all. op is succinct and accurate.
you seem to find it difficult to accept what i'm saying
/etc/resolv.conf). then i just had to set the default gateway. here i realised that the route command had some strange syntax. reading the manual page didn't help me. i tried searching the net but couldn't find anything. the result? he couldn't get into the net. strangely his wlan works at home and also in the university, just not in this cafe. don't ask me why.
p rocessing-sound to audacity.
for someone coming from the windows/kde/gnome way of doing things, osx seems strange, unnatural and untrustworthy. it does not have the benefit of ease of use. using it is to begin with difficult. that is the same for any change.
when it comes to usage paradigmas for windowing systems, knowledge and experience with a standard windows set-up is the norm. everybody knows it. it is quasi by definition the easy-to-use system for most people. osx isn't. and the ipod isn't either. i found the dial on the front to be unnatural. i assume people who use it get to know it quickly, but there is an initial moment of unfamiliarity when you first try it out.
seeing as you use apple products you are no longer aware of this. as someone who doesn't regularly use apple products, i found myself trying to find a shell on osx so i could actually get some work done. i eventually gave up on my search and asked a "power user" where it is. i hope i'll be able to find it again if i ever have to use os x again.
it is actually an interesting story so i'll tell you why i was using os x. i was sitting in a cafe with an open wlan net with my linux laptop (which had recognised the net and logged itself in automatically when i switched the computer on). someone came in with a modern looking white plastic notebook from apple. he switched his wlan on, but the computer didn't connect to the net. fortunately i had a twisted pair cable with me so i connected the computers and configured my iptables to allow masquerading. then i tried to configure his computer to use my computer as a router. at this point i made the mistake of not downloading and configuring dhcp. i thought it would be trivial to configure a static internet connection on osx. it did however prove to be impossible using the gui so i dived into the apple shell. ifconfig worked as expected and i could set the dns as well (i've forgotten how. maybe it was the standard
this was just a story to show you that apple don't make perfect easy-to-use software and hardware. i'm sure i'm not the only person to have had problems with apple products. so the question remains to me, why do people use apple products when they provide no functional benefits for most people and actually require a learning curve?
apple products look good and people who use them feel superior. that's it. that's the whole story.
i've lived for the past 10 years in a small town with a large university for media design and a college for music (weimar/germany). apple computers are probably the norm in this town amongst the students. a large proportion of these students look down their nose at people who don't use apple. the reasoning is pretty consistent. any other operating system is according to them unstable and not powerful enough to do the image, sound and film editing they need to do. on a side note, the much publicised weimar-net (a town-wide open wlan network) will require a windows-client to be installed on a computer for it to book into the network. this is remarkably short-sighted. i did however have to grin recently when the music-lab in the college of music moved their powermacs from whichever-proprietary-solution-for-recording-and-
while apple used the powerpc processor, i found the computers mildly interesting. i still do have a first generation imac on my desk which i switch on every now and then so i can have the pleasure of writing some inline assembly for it. as soon as they changed to intel their hardware got boring to me. maybe my view on apple is tainted by this. they used to make the poorman's proper computer, so to speak. now they just remind me of one more entry behind alienware and the like in the "pimp my i86" competition.
if osx becomes more popular, microsoft will probably port their software to it (and hopefully do a better job than they did the last time--internet explorer for mac, anyone? i mean, seriously, wtf??)
this would do nothing to break the strength of proprietary software and closed file formats. people in developing countries would still be dependent on the rich western countries if they wish to interoperate with them. people who use free and open source software would still be at a disadvantage.
versions of microsoft products for osx (and that is what must happen if apple's market share is to increase) would benefit the people who make the fashion choice of choosing apple, and using apple is for most people about fashion (using osx is cool because the kids from "smallville" and "another gay movie" used it (okay, maybe less so because of the second item on the list)). for most people it has little benefit over a well configured windows xp installation. these people lose nothing by having apple ports of microsoft software.
using gnu/linux or *bsd or similar is however not always about a fashion choice or about perceived technical advantages. for some people (me included) it is a moral dictate. my morality will not allow me to create documents in a proprietary format or insist that other people use undocumented and patented communication methods.
and when i think about the continued economic dependency of the third world, i cannot and will not close my eyes to this and promote proprietary competitors to the microsoft monopoly.
an example, the last time i used mac osx i had great difficulty doing the simplest of tasks (starting applications, saving files etc.). you can probably explain to me in two sentences why "the apple way" is better than the "way other systems use". my point is, i would have to learn it. it's not as if the ability to use os x is a native trait of being human while the ability to use windows xp (or one of its close relatives like gnome or kde) is acquired behaviour.
so basically, you have a mobile phone which has wlan capability but the configuration routine is clumsy. the iphone has wlan capability and you find the configuration routine easier. i fail to see anything truly revolutionary about that, and certainly nothing which would justify thousands of people standing in line on the launch day.
that is my question, why did these people stand in line waiting for the iphone? the only answer i can see is, they saw the iphone as a fashion accessory. even assuming there is no other mobile phone with easy configuration of wlan, did the people standing in line even know this or know of any of the other purported usability benefits of the iphone?
for those who labeled my comment flamebait and troll, i'd be truly interested in hearing your argumentation.
from what i can see, the iphone is a fashion accessory being hyped beyond all proportion to its ability. i do also happen to think the world would be better if it failed. the world does not need a proprietary competitor to microsoft, the world needs open standards and laws which protect the rights of the individual to do whatever they want with their property, provided they don't hurt someone. i can't see apple helping to make this happen.
if you want to label the last paragraph off-topic, be my guest. i did start to ramble a bit about things best swept under the carpet while examining the pretty lights of apple's new product.
i worry about this sort of thing. saying that it is possible to hack an iphone and install applications on it can be taken to be a counterargument to the people who reject the restrictions placed on the device. why don't we spend our time complaining about the necessity of this hacking? wouldn't the undeniable skill of these people be better put to use elsewhere? why don't we just chuck the iphone away as the bad apple it is?
the gnu philosophy will gel a lot better with india (and is already doing so, as we see).
what you have seen is the necessary evolution in a field which started splintered and turned to a small number of solutions. think of the car market as an example. to begin with, every crackpot inventor or maker of horse-drawn-carriages made their own make of car. some were successful, some weren't.
due to a sleeping legislative system we have however paid a terrible price. the legislative system should have insisted on standards a long time ago, just like it does for construction work on public buildings or designs of public documentation. however, it slept, with the result that no standards were ever implemented. now there is no interoperability, except for the few crumbs the state-sponsored monopoly chooses to give us. it reminds me of something i would usually read about in a book by douglas adams.
it's interesting to see their old policies coming back to bite them on this one.
microsoft leveraged their monopoly to make it impossible for customers for 6 years to get anything other than windows xp on a new computer. the result? customers think that a new computer means windows xp, and are deeply suspicious of change. now there's suddenly a new operating system none of their friends have. windows xp's main advantage was always its ubiquity. vista, due to being new, does not have this.
microsoft has told the customer for years that different=difficult. now they are reaping what they have sowed.
well, linux is used a lot in the industry for things like hard disk recording and mixing. of course, the software is either in house or ridiculously expensive...