Retouching IS an evil which destroys the essence of photography. It's about capturing reality, not presenting an ideal.
This is not true at all. Photography is about capturing a story in a small 2-dimensional image. Sometimes this is done by filters and lighting, as somebody else is mentioned. Nearly all the time, it's about making the right composition. If you're fortunate, you can manipulate the composition by just finding the right spot to take the photo. More times than you'd probably believe, though, the photographer has done some trick to get that composition. Sometimes it's a long exposure. (i.e. a picture of lightning.) Sometimes it's a bounce card to get light into the scene. Sometimes it's taking lots of photos in rapid succession. Heck, sometimes they'll actually move the item they're photographing into the right spot so it plays nicely with the background. (If you could see a wider FOV on most pictures of flowers, you'd be surprised at how many thumbs you'd get an image of.)
The reason photography is an art-form is because a good photographer makes his shot work. It's not because he's a super lucky guy that happens to snap a pic at exactly the right moment. 'Purists' would often be very disappointed if they saw wider FOV versions of the photos they admire.
Okay. So if Microsoft's position is so weak they've gotta hire a company who then hires people to come to Slashdot and rigorously defend them by saying "back up your claim", then you've got actual really really strong reasons... right? Something a little less questionable than "you're an astroturfer", right?
I cannot help you with legal advice or even the ethical question you're proposing. I can, however, tell you from experience that tension at work can really eat away at you. When it becomes difficult to look your boss in the eye, or when it becomes difficult to sleep at night because you're weighing a choice that could affect your employment, you're stressing, and it can really take its toll.
Here's something you should consider: The problem with software patents isn't that companies are filing them, it's that the patent office is letting things get through that are non-sensical. Hypothetically speaking, you could contribute to problems other people are having, or you could deny your company a potential defense against a patent attack from another company. Possibly this isn't strictly true in your case, but that's why there is an arms race going on with patents. "You're infringing on our patent!!" "So? You're infringing on ours!" "Oh, we should cooperate then..."
Maybe my comment there may not have a lot of basis in reality, but that's okay, it's not really critical to my point. You need to choose your battles. Remember, it's your boss making the decision to go forward with it, not you. If you don't do it, he can probably get somebody else who will. From where I sit, it's really a matter of whether or not you want to spend your life energy on it. That is, of course, your choice. But I'd hate to see you go down this path, go through the problems and stress it'll cause, and have it end not far from where you started.
I wish you good luck, and whatever happens, I hope you don't get badly burned. I've never been through the situation you've described, but I have dealt with employment related drama, and I can tell you that being sneaky just isn't worth it. Even if you win. It's supposed to be just about business, nothing personal, but it's hard to remove the 'human' from the question.
The anecdotal rate at which I was finding Kazaa (and thereby spyware) on customer computers a few years ago indicates there was a better than 50% chance that a home computer with a broadband connection was being used to get copyrighted media via P2P.
Okay. Correlate that with actual money not being spent.
Since we're using anecdotal evidence here, I'll throw some in on my own. I know lots of dudes that are fully capable of downloading movies, games, music, you name it. They know how. They have the means. Some of them even have a theater system set up so they can enjoy that content rather luxuriously. Of all those dudes, and I'm talking 20'ish here, only one of them actually avoids spending money on those things because he can get them on the net. The rest? They don't care. They run out and get the DVD or run to iTunes or whatever. Why? Heck, I dunno. They each probably have their own reasons. It doesn't matter. They're spending their money.
I'll tell you this much, though: The big fear is that getting this stuff for free will mean nobody pays for content. Okay, understandable, right? Then I have to ask this: If coffee, for example, is so easy and cheap to get, why are chains that sell coffee for $3 a cup so popular? Heck, why are juice places that sell 32oz carrot juices for $5 so popular? The United States, at least, cannot easily be generalized as being populated by 300 million tightwads.
There is an enormous population of people using p2p software to copy movies, music and software with no plans to ever pay the producers for what they use. This should at least be acknowledged.
An enormous population? No. That cannot be acknowledged until it has been proven. The RIAA, for example, claimed that billions of songs were being illegally downloaded a month. Billions, with a B. A couple of months later, they reported that their profits grew a few percent from the previous year.
I can easily picture there are people out there downloading stuff and never paying for it. But lots of people? No, I can't. If all the P2P traffic out there was really about avoiding paying money to producers, you'd think it'd correlate to some actual measurable numbers somewhere. Until that happens, it's just a baseless accusation.
Which do you think is worse: Loading a 10MB texture image that only works at certain resolutions, and eats up 10MB of space, or Loading up a 1k code segment that generates the same (or similar) texture at any resolution, on the fly, and only generates the texture for the exact pixels you're looking at?
If you're running more lines of code per pixel with a procedural than you are by simply looking up a memory location for an rgb value, how is that going to be 'no overhead'?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding a fundamental concept of how raytracing works, so I won't be ashamed or argumentative if you can correct me on this, but I don't get how raytracing will make procedurals run nearly as fast when the renderer is going to have to ask a shitload of questions per-pixel about what that color is supposed to be. Do forgive me, though, I'm only really thinking of real-world use of procedurals that'd actually compete with high res textures, not simple marble patterns.
Pics or it didn't happen. Or in this case, apps or it happened only in photoshop/whatever.
Perhaps you're right. However, apps like SynthEyes are already like 90% of the way there. Their demos aren't a huge leap away from what is already on the market.
The interesting question is whether you would have paid for it if you hadnt pirated it first.
It's interesting to me that the more popular an app is, the more pirated it gets. Based on 'conventional' wisdom, MAX and Photoshop should be long dead. Heh.
Bull. Mark Hamill successfully played 'average-joe-turned-hero'. That was one of the ingredients of the original Star Wars' success. The kid in Phantom Menace played a kid whose life was taken over by a rather aggressive form of fate. His heroic contributions to the movie were barely more than accidental. Mark Hamill was an attractive point for Episode 4 and Jake Lloyd was a detractor for Episode 1. You can blame the actor or you can blame the director, either way you slice it, he was worse than Mark Hamill. We're not even talking a neck-and-neck race, here.
But the Death Star with its magical earth-like gravity generator makes sense?
Yes, it does, actually. Over-simplification does not a good point make, sorry.
To kids today the new movies are just as good.... At the end of the day I have to agree with Lucas and say that these are really kids movies and we are simply nostalgic for them.
That depends on how you look at it. I cannot generalize about what people like in those movies or how many of them there are. But I can tell you that there are defficiencies within the Star Wars prequels that made them inferior to the original trilogy. This isn't about nostalgia, it's about the stories just plain being weaker. Episode 4 made you care about the Rebellion. Episode I told you that Anakin was special because of Mr. Spock's tricorder readings. Episode 5 ended with the Rebellion losing a battle, an emotional loss, and Luke making a small win against the Dark-Side. Episode 2 ended with Yoda magically appearing just in the nick of time with an army that a dead-Jedi purchased, just after sickening us with the worst love story ever made. Episode 6 gave us a suspensful glimpse of Luke briefly turning to the Dark-Side. Episode 3 gave us "NooOOOOoooOOoooOOOoo!"
The original trilogy, for all its faults, had a measurably good story structure. The prequels, however, weren't given this care. They were, quite arguably, worse than the trilogy. Not just slightly-worse. I mean: hamburger-minus-the-beef worse. None of these movies will ever go down in history as being 'deep'. That doesn't mean they all measure equally against each other. To put it another way, it's not like a club was formed on 05-19-99 whose mission is simply to rid the universe of Star Wars Prequel loving scum.
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of kernel panics I've seen on either my Linux box or my Mac Mini. My Windows machines however.....
I've actually had my Macbook Pro freeze more times in the last year than my Windows machine. In fact, it even hung once when I closed the lid and tried to fry itself with the backlight. That's funny about this is I've had the Macbook for about 4 months, whereas I've had the Windows machine all year.
I promise you this is a true story. Your mileage may vary, even if you're a Mac user.
If you want complete control over devices, why are you even looking at apple's products?
I cannot speak for the guy you're asking. But I can relate one of my own experiences, here. A buddy of mine got an iPhone and sold me his iPod Touch on the cheap. I had no frickin idea until I bought it just how useful the web browser is on it. Unlike every cell phone I've ever had, for example, it actually... rendered... pages properly. And if that's not icing enough, the browser is tabbed. That's something you really don't hear about, either.
I don't know how the other post-iPhone phones compare (although I'd seriously be interested in hearing about other phones that actually have a comparable browser...) but it's plain as day to me why somebody'd say "Man, I want the iPhone, but I'm giving shit up for it." That stupid thing is the PDA we were all wanting back in 2001.
The classic example is Han and Leia's exchange towards the end of Empire Strikes Back. "I know" as a response to a declaration of love is every bit as bad as "You're breaking my heart!".
... You're joking, right? It's funny, really, if you were talking about that line when it showed up again in Return of the Jedi, I'd agree with you. But Empire? As bad as "you're breaking my heart?". Uh, sorry, no. In Empire, we got a slightly deeper peek into Han Solo. In Revenge, we got a slightly deeper peek into just how terrible George is at writing dialogue.
Fans who put the originals on too high a pedestal gave the movie its reputation, not the quality of the movie itself.
Wrong on both counts. All three of the prequels were riddled with problems and almost completely devoid of redeeming value other than some nice eye-candy. The Phantom Menace, for example, featured a cute little boy with Star Trekkian sensor-readings that claim that he's special that 'accidented' his way into being a hero in the end. Accompanying him was Jar Jar, a clumsy creature that strained the term 'comic relief', two droids, a young queen, and two Jedi who were 'charismatic' enough to put Robin Williams to sleep. They went on an adventure across the stars to... put a stop to a trade blockade.... masterminded by creatures that were sadly unconvincing. Nothing in there about the original trilogy. It's just dull. Dull dull dull. And that's only the first of the three. Thankfully, it's also the least offensive.
It's nice that you enjoyed them because it means you didn't waste your time or your money. Frankly, I envy you for that. But, dude, the prequels are bad. They're not bad because other movies were better, they're bad because they're bad. George Lucas lost something in the mid 80's and never got it back. I wasn't sure of that until I saw Indy 4. His writing has become so sophomoric that he has to defend himself in interviews by blaming the fans and claiming that he's paying homages to other movies. Not good.
I never said there was good dialogue, to be fair. I also wouldn't say any of the Star Wars flicks have had particularly good dialogue, so that isn't a crime I would hold against that movie in particular.
There's a difference between dull dialogue and really bad dialogue. EpIII earned its reputation. Sorry.
You see those things affect everyone because anyone can have an accident even if they don't do something stupid. But clicking "purchase" because you think it's a joke and you're going to have a laugh is something the average person won't do.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm having a laugh about it. The guy was stupid, no debate. But the fact is, $1,000 is a ridiculous amount of money for an iPhone App. That's the sort of amount that can get somebody into serious trouble, like our Destitution-Darwin-Award-Candidate illustrated. So, yeah, it's stupid that he did it, it's also stupid that Apple allowed it.
The whole "what about my old mom, grandmother, etc" automatically assumes that by default being old means you're stupid and we have to protect all the old people from their own stupidity. It's just like a lot of usability experts. They feel feel they're above everyone and must protect the stupid masses.
How is making a product safer and more fault-tolerant a sign of somebody thinking they're above anybody? I don't get that.
Just because one person is obviously a tard doesn't mean things should be dumbed down.
Who said anything about anything being dumbed down? Products don't get better by catering to the ridiculously small number of people who use them to their full potential. If anything, these products would likely get worse, since people who are too deep into this stuff are actually willing to jump through the hoops. For example, would you consider a mouse to be a necessary piece of computer equipment? I think most would. What's amusing about that is that there were probably people way back then that didn't like the idea of the mouse and the GUI catering to 'stupid people'. That didn't turn out true, did it? The mouse is here to stay and everybody loves'em. Instead of computers getting simpler for the change, they got a whole lot more complex. Funny how things turn out, mmm?
In any event, I'm not really on either side with this particular issue. I will say, though, that there is something about the App store that really bothers me. I had to register an account WITH my credit card in order to get free apps. If somebody gets ahold of my iPod touch, they might be able to really run up my bill. I put a passcode on it to prevent that, but the thought still scares me.* I don't get why they have to be SO insistent on the CC when they could just do it like Amazon does. That is just plain bad design. That has nothing to do with 'stupid people'.
It's actually a good thing that coffee cups have handles, cars have seatbelts, and word processors have 'undo'.
*Note: I actually haven't purchased a non-free app so maybe it's more difficult than I'm thinking for somebody to run my bill up. Maybe somebody could clarify that.
Why is it there is always someone who has a grandma/old mom/old person that uses everything and we're told we have to cater to the fact that this person's grandma/old mom/old person has apple sauce for brains?
For the simple reason that we're all 'applesauce brains' at some point or another. It's like we come down with "incredibly stupid!!!" like some sort of cold from time to time. Besides, you're not an expert on everything, why should everybody else be?
Hell, just as I typed this, I did something amazingly stupid and the IT guy came to my rescue. Feel free to point and laugh at me for personally illustrating the point.
A little off topic, but I totally don't get the unskippable commercials/trailers/MPAA rightthink segments. I mean, I either rented the video or purchased it, and in either case, I've paid my dues.
On three seperate occasions, I've gone to a theater and there was the "piracy is bad, mmmkay?" MPAA ad, and I heard multiple people say: "You can download movies off the internet? How??"
I'm reminded of an experience I had bugging my dad for a raise in my allowance the night he was working on his taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
"The designs are based on the work of Philo T. Farnsworth..."
Ah, so we can expect these in suppository format?
Retouching IS an evil which destroys the essence of photography. It's about capturing reality, not presenting an ideal.
This is not true at all. Photography is about capturing a story in a small 2-dimensional image. Sometimes this is done by filters and lighting, as somebody else is mentioned. Nearly all the time, it's about making the right composition. If you're fortunate, you can manipulate the composition by just finding the right spot to take the photo. More times than you'd probably believe, though, the photographer has done some trick to get that composition. Sometimes it's a long exposure. (i.e. a picture of lightning.) Sometimes it's a bounce card to get light into the scene. Sometimes it's taking lots of photos in rapid succession. Heck, sometimes they'll actually move the item they're photographing into the right spot so it plays nicely with the background. (If you could see a wider FOV on most pictures of flowers, you'd be surprised at how many thumbs you'd get an image of.)
The reason photography is an art-form is because a good photographer makes his shot work. It's not because he's a super lucky guy that happens to snap a pic at exactly the right moment. 'Purists' would often be very disappointed if they saw wider FOV versions of the photos they admire.
Give up the astroturf.
You've been outed already.
Okay. So if Microsoft's position is so weak they've gotta hire a company who then hires people to come to Slashdot and rigorously defend them by saying "back up your claim", then you've got actual really really strong reasons ... right? Something a little less questionable than "you're an astroturfer", right?
I cannot help you with legal advice or even the ethical question you're proposing. I can, however, tell you from experience that tension at work can really eat away at you. When it becomes difficult to look your boss in the eye, or when it becomes difficult to sleep at night because you're weighing a choice that could affect your employment, you're stressing, and it can really take its toll.
Here's something you should consider: The problem with software patents isn't that companies are filing them, it's that the patent office is letting things get through that are non-sensical. Hypothetically speaking, you could contribute to problems other people are having, or you could deny your company a potential defense against a patent attack from another company. Possibly this isn't strictly true in your case, but that's why there is an arms race going on with patents. "You're infringing on our patent!!" "So? You're infringing on ours!" "Oh, we should cooperate then..."
Maybe my comment there may not have a lot of basis in reality, but that's okay, it's not really critical to my point. You need to choose your battles. Remember, it's your boss making the decision to go forward with it, not you. If you don't do it, he can probably get somebody else who will. From where I sit, it's really a matter of whether or not you want to spend your life energy on it. That is, of course, your choice. But I'd hate to see you go down this path, go through the problems and stress it'll cause, and have it end not far from where you started.
I wish you good luck, and whatever happens, I hope you don't get badly burned. I've never been through the situation you've described, but I have dealt with employment related drama, and I can tell you that being sneaky just isn't worth it. Even if you win. It's supposed to be just about business, nothing personal, but it's hard to remove the 'human' from the question.
The anecdotal rate at which I was finding Kazaa (and thereby spyware) on customer computers a few years ago indicates there was a better than 50% chance that a home computer with a broadband connection was being used to get copyrighted media via P2P.
Okay. Correlate that with actual money not being spent.
Since we're using anecdotal evidence here, I'll throw some in on my own. I know lots of dudes that are fully capable of downloading movies, games, music, you name it. They know how. They have the means. Some of them even have a theater system set up so they can enjoy that content rather luxuriously. Of all those dudes, and I'm talking 20'ish here, only one of them actually avoids spending money on those things because he can get them on the net. The rest? They don't care. They run out and get the DVD or run to iTunes or whatever. Why? Heck, I dunno. They each probably have their own reasons. It doesn't matter. They're spending their money.
I'll tell you this much, though: The big fear is that getting this stuff for free will mean nobody pays for content. Okay, understandable, right? Then I have to ask this: If coffee, for example, is so easy and cheap to get, why are chains that sell coffee for $3 a cup so popular? Heck, why are juice places that sell 32oz carrot juices for $5 so popular? The United States, at least, cannot easily be generalized as being populated by 300 million tightwads.
There is an enormous population of people using p2p software to copy movies, music and software with no plans to ever pay the producers for what they use. This should at least be acknowledged.
An enormous population? No. That cannot be acknowledged until it has been proven. The RIAA, for example, claimed that billions of songs were being illegally downloaded a month. Billions, with a B. A couple of months later, they reported that their profits grew a few percent from the previous year.
I can easily picture there are people out there downloading stuff and never paying for it. But lots of people? No, I can't. If all the P2P traffic out there was really about avoiding paying money to producers, you'd think it'd correlate to some actual measurable numbers somewhere. Until that happens, it's just a baseless accusation.
Which do you think is worse:
Loading a 10MB texture image that only works at certain resolutions, and eats up 10MB of space, or
Loading up a 1k code segment that generates the same (or similar) texture at any resolution, on the fly, and only generates the texture for the exact pixels you're looking at?
If you're running more lines of code per pixel with a procedural than you are by simply looking up a memory location for an rgb value, how is that going to be 'no overhead'?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding a fundamental concept of how raytracing works, so I won't be ashamed or argumentative if you can correct me on this, but I don't get how raytracing will make procedurals run nearly as fast when the renderer is going to have to ask a shitload of questions per-pixel about what that color is supposed to be. Do forgive me, though, I'm only really thinking of real-world use of procedurals that'd actually compete with high res textures, not simple marble patterns.
Pics or it didn't happen. Or in this case, apps or it happened only in photoshop/whatever.
Perhaps you're right. However, apps like SynthEyes are already like 90% of the way there. Their demos aren't a huge leap away from what is already on the market.
The interesting question is whether you would have paid for it if you hadnt pirated it first.
It's interesting to me that the more popular an app is, the more pirated it gets. Based on 'conventional' wisdom, MAX and Photoshop should be long dead. Heh.
He's no worse than Mark Hamil.
Bull. Mark Hamill successfully played 'average-joe-turned-hero'. That was one of the ingredients of the original Star Wars' success. The kid in Phantom Menace played a kid whose life was taken over by a rather aggressive form of fate. His heroic contributions to the movie were barely more than accidental. Mark Hamill was an attractive point for Episode 4 and Jake Lloyd was a detractor for Episode 1. You can blame the actor or you can blame the director, either way you slice it, he was worse than Mark Hamill. We're not even talking a neck-and-neck race, here.
But the Death Star with its magical earth-like gravity generator makes sense?
Yes, it does, actually. Over-simplification does not a good point make, sorry.
To kids today the new movies are just as good.... At the end of the day I have to agree with Lucas and say that these are really kids movies and we are simply nostalgic for them.
That depends on how you look at it. I cannot generalize about what people like in those movies or how many of them there are. But I can tell you that there are defficiencies within the Star Wars prequels that made them inferior to the original trilogy. This isn't about nostalgia, it's about the stories just plain being weaker. Episode 4 made you care about the Rebellion. Episode I told you that Anakin was special because of Mr. Spock's tricorder readings. Episode 5 ended with the Rebellion losing a battle, an emotional loss, and Luke making a small win against the Dark-Side. Episode 2 ended with Yoda magically appearing just in the nick of time with an army that a dead-Jedi purchased, just after sickening us with the worst love story ever made. Episode 6 gave us a suspensful glimpse of Luke briefly turning to the Dark-Side. Episode 3 gave us "NooOOOOoooOOoooOOOoo!"
The original trilogy, for all its faults, had a measurably good story structure. The prequels, however, weren't given this care. They were, quite arguably, worse than the trilogy. Not just slightly-worse. I mean: hamburger-minus-the-beef worse. None of these movies will ever go down in history as being 'deep'. That doesn't mean they all measure equally against each other. To put it another way, it's not like a club was formed on 05-19-99 whose mission is simply to rid the universe of Star Wars Prequel loving scum.
When Greedo shot first that just made Han somewhat less a scoundrel but didn't completely change the meaning of that scene.
Small nitpick: It's not the Greedo scene that it changed. It's the Millineum Falcon's return to save the day at the end that it severely damaged.
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of kernel panics I've seen on either my Linux box or my Mac Mini. My Windows machines however.....
I've actually had my Macbook Pro freeze more times in the last year than my Windows machine. In fact, it even hung once when I closed the lid and tried to fry itself with the backlight. That's funny about this is I've had the Macbook for about 4 months, whereas I've had the Windows machine all year.
I promise you this is a true story. Your mileage may vary, even if you're a Mac user.
I still don't get why it was pulled.
Let rich idiots throw their money away on tat.
Yeah, that's smart.
"Hey man, lemme borrow your iPhone for a moment.... snicker snicker snicker."
If you want complete control over devices, why are you even looking at apple's products?
I cannot speak for the guy you're asking. But I can relate one of my own experiences, here. A buddy of mine got an iPhone and sold me his iPod Touch on the cheap. I had no frickin idea until I bought it just how useful the web browser is on it. Unlike every cell phone I've ever had, for example, it actually... rendered... pages properly. And if that's not icing enough, the browser is tabbed. That's something you really don't hear about, either.
I don't know how the other post-iPhone phones compare (although I'd seriously be interested in hearing about other phones that actually have a comparable browser...) but it's plain as day to me why somebody'd say "Man, I want the iPhone, but I'm giving shit up for it." That stupid thing is the PDA we were all wanting back in 2001.
The classic example is Han and Leia's exchange towards the end of Empire Strikes Back. "I know" as a response to a declaration of love is every bit as bad as "You're breaking my heart!".
... You're joking, right? It's funny, really, if you were talking about that line when it showed up again in Return of the Jedi, I'd agree with you. But Empire? As bad as "you're breaking my heart?". Uh, sorry, no. In Empire, we got a slightly deeper peek into Han Solo. In Revenge, we got a slightly deeper peek into just how terrible George is at writing dialogue.
Fans who put the originals on too high a pedestal gave the movie its reputation, not the quality of the movie itself.
Wrong on both counts. All three of the prequels were riddled with problems and almost completely devoid of redeeming value other than some nice eye-candy. The Phantom Menace, for example, featured a cute little boy with Star Trekkian sensor-readings that claim that he's special that 'accidented' his way into being a hero in the end. Accompanying him was Jar Jar, a clumsy creature that strained the term 'comic relief', two droids, a young queen, and two Jedi who were 'charismatic' enough to put Robin Williams to sleep. They went on an adventure across the stars to ... put a stop to a trade blockade.... masterminded by creatures that were sadly unconvincing. Nothing in there about the original trilogy. It's just dull. Dull dull dull. And that's only the first of the three. Thankfully, it's also the least offensive.
It's nice that you enjoyed them because it means you didn't waste your time or your money. Frankly, I envy you for that. But, dude, the prequels are bad. They're not bad because other movies were better, they're bad because they're bad. George Lucas lost something in the mid 80's and never got it back. I wasn't sure of that until I saw Indy 4. His writing has become so sophomoric that he has to defend himself in interviews by blaming the fans and claiming that he's paying homages to other movies. Not good.
I never said there was good dialogue, to be fair. I also wouldn't say any of the Star Wars flicks have had particularly good dialogue, so that isn't a crime I would hold against that movie in particular.
There's a difference between dull dialogue and really bad dialogue. EpIII earned its reputation. Sorry.
Hell, Episode 3 was the crowning achievement in the Star Wars saga, what with having an actual interesting plot and all.
You're breaking my heart!
The Wang was just a toy I acquired somewhere for the fun of it.
How old were you?
You see those things affect everyone because anyone can have an accident even if they don't do something stupid. But clicking "purchase" because you think it's a joke and you're going to have a laugh is something the average person won't do.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm having a laugh about it. The guy was stupid, no debate. But the fact is, $1,000 is a ridiculous amount of money for an iPhone App. That's the sort of amount that can get somebody into serious trouble, like our Destitution-Darwin-Award-Candidate illustrated. So, yeah, it's stupid that he did it, it's also stupid that Apple allowed it.
The whole "what about my old mom, grandmother, etc" automatically assumes that by default being old means you're stupid and we have to protect all the old people from their own stupidity. It's just like a lot of usability experts. They feel feel they're above everyone and must protect the stupid masses.
How is making a product safer and more fault-tolerant a sign of somebody thinking they're above anybody? I don't get that.
Just because one person is obviously a tard doesn't mean things should be dumbed down.
Who said anything about anything being dumbed down? Products don't get better by catering to the ridiculously small number of people who use them to their full potential. If anything, these products would likely get worse, since people who are too deep into this stuff are actually willing to jump through the hoops. For example, would you consider a mouse to be a necessary piece of computer equipment? I think most would. What's amusing about that is that there were probably people way back then that didn't like the idea of the mouse and the GUI catering to 'stupid people'. That didn't turn out true, did it? The mouse is here to stay and everybody loves'em. Instead of computers getting simpler for the change, they got a whole lot more complex. Funny how things turn out, mmm?
In any event, I'm not really on either side with this particular issue. I will say, though, that there is something about the App store that really bothers me. I had to register an account WITH my credit card in order to get free apps. If somebody gets ahold of my iPod touch, they might be able to really run up my bill. I put a passcode on it to prevent that, but the thought still scares me.* I don't get why they have to be SO insistent on the CC when they could just do it like Amazon does. That is just plain bad design. That has nothing to do with 'stupid people'.
It's actually a good thing that coffee cups have handles, cars have seatbelts, and word processors have 'undo'.
*Note: I actually haven't purchased a non-free app so maybe it's more difficult than I'm thinking for somebody to run my bill up. Maybe somebody could clarify that.
...imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
Anybody remember: "This is not news!!" phase on Slashdot? It went sorta like this:
"Nintendo announces Game Boy Advance."
"It's just a Game Boy with a color screen and much better processing hardware. This is not news!!!" (Score 5, Insightful)
It was a big race to greatly oversimplify something and call it 'not news'.
Why is it there is always someone who has a grandma/old mom/old person that uses everything and we're told we have to cater to the fact that this person's grandma/old mom/old person has apple sauce for brains?
For the simple reason that we're all 'applesauce brains' at some point or another. It's like we come down with "incredibly stupid!!!" like some sort of cold from time to time. Besides, you're not an expert on everything, why should everybody else be?
Hell, just as I typed this, I did something amazingly stupid and the IT guy came to my rescue. Feel free to point and laugh at me for personally illustrating the point.
This all kinda reminds me of a Star Wars prequel plot...
Where'd you find that? One of the extras DVDs?
A little off topic, but I totally don't get the unskippable commercials/trailers/MPAA rightthink segments. I mean, I either rented the video or purchased it, and in either case, I've paid my dues.
On three seperate occasions, I've gone to a theater and there was the "piracy is bad, mmmkay?" MPAA ad, and I heard multiple people say: "You can download movies off the internet? How??"
I'm reminded of an experience I had bugging my dad for a raise in my allowance the night he was working on his taxes.
No, they're gold.
They're copper, and they're quite prone to corrosion.