The guy probably spent 4+ hours/day on a project that now makes an interesting story. Meanwhile, the rest of us of spend 4+ hours/day screwing around on the web or watching TV. Who's the one with too much free time?
I say good for him. And I yield to his nerd superiority. I'd buy him a beer, but something tells me he only drinks whatever they serve on Deep Space 9.
I have a US Robotics something or other. It's been pretty good in the past. At my last address I sometimes got a 300 KB/sec torrent through it. Now, I never do. Something's fucked. I guess I should probably call customer service instead of whining about it on here, though...
Do you know what a BLOG site is? Yep. You guessed it. Opinions.
Nah, dude. A BLOG is short for "web log". And you can put anything in that web log. Not just opinions. For example, say a blogger is reviewing cell phones. They might observe that one phone has longer battery life than another. That's not an opinion, it's a fact. And they state it. Nobody ever said blogs were limited entirely to opinions. Except you, in your comment.
I'm not sure why you're bringing up blogs, anyway. Slashdot isn't a blog. The ZDNet article in this story is not a blog. What the hell does a blog have to do with anything?
Doesn't mean that disagreeing with one of his opinions makes you stupid or unintelligent.
If one person says, "this is my opinion, I may not be right on this", and the other person says he's lost completely touch with reality, it does make the second person look pretty fucking stupid. That's what happened in the case I replied to.
This TRASH is what gets modded as insightful on/. these days???
Yea, I'm surprised too. I thought what I said was totally obvious. But, I enjoy getting modded up. And as long as there are douchebags going around, not paying attention to the obvious, it'll still get modded up. Normal people (on Slashdot, or not) are generally tired of geeks who are desperate for credibility, which is the kind of geek I was talking about.
It's pretty easy to identify one of those geeks, though. For example, that last paragraph I wrote would probably get them all fired up.
900 KB/s? Damn! I'm jealous of you. How is it that I'm paying $65/month for a (supposedly) 10 Mbps, "extreme high speed" cable connection, and I never get more than 150 KB/sec? On anything? I must be getting the screw job.
Yea, this is a pretty wild way to spend your bandwidth. Supposing you get 150 KB/s sustained on the torrent, your computer's still going to be chewing on it for over 37 hours.
On the other hand, if you drive to the store and back, you can probably have that HD-DVD in about an hour. That's over 5.5 MB/s of bandwidth. Pick up a few more movies at the same time, and your bandwidth increases to 22 MB/s. Sneakernet has a lot going for it, in this case.
Here we go. Bring on the legions of dorks who are hell-bent on appearing more intelligent than Linus. Boy, it sure would be great to be smarter than the guy who wrote Linux, wouldn't it? I would sure love to warp every fucking thing he says in order to make him look stupid, even if it's only to myself! That way, I can cling to my private little fantasy of being smarter than him!
Come on, the guy makes it clear that he is only sharing his gut feelings and personal opinions. He doesn't claim to be right -- unlike you. He's very careful with his words, and we should at least recognize that.
I suspect -- and I may not be right...
I suspect it is not going to be that big. But time will tell...
By qualifying his opinions, he's acknowledging that they are only opinions, and not facts. That's what keeps him in touch with reality. Pay attention to that. We should all choose our words so carefully.
And don't call me a fanboy either, because I don't even use Linux.
It covers everything but the fingertips and the major joints.
Aren't the major joints kind of important? One baseball bat to the pelvis, and the bear-man would be pretty much fubared, no? Doesn't appear to be a real "invincible man" suit like this guy's other inventions.
This AC has a point. The DRM scheme described by the submitter is impossible. No DRM will ever prevent illegal copying. Only curb it. There will always be hacks. So if you ask whether we would support the scheme, you might as well ask whether would support having unicorns in city streets.
On the other hand, if you ask whether DRM is distasteful, you're asking whether or not we like it. I happen to like DRM because it makes studios feel safe enough to distribute their content digitally.
Yea, really. There are two types of people who download from iTunes:
People who want to listen on their PC, their iPod, or a burned CD. They do that. No problem.
Nerdier, less scrupulous people who want to shuttle those downloads to other PCs, and need to bypass the DRM. Those people use MyTunes, hymn, dBpowerAMP or something. Or if they're less nerdy (or it's 2001), they burn a CD and rip it. No problem. Any geek knows there is no DRM solution good enough to stop those people anyway.
DRM is just a way to "sort of" protect the studios' interests. It turns out it works really well in iTunes. I've tried to explain to iPod users that they don't need to use the iTunes music store. They can download a torrent a put the MP3's on their iPod. But they're not usually interested. They say, "I'll just use the iTunes store". And they pay. It baffled me for a while, but hey, they're happy.
It's true that Apple is quietly making DRM work very well for them. It works for them, because nobody has any problem with it. And if nobody has any problem, there's no problem.
"That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."
You call that moronically shackled? What, were you hoping to run Linux on it? Life's rough, I guess.
Yes. Have you used recent models of iPods? They work *exactly* like this phone, save for the touch-wheel instead of the screen interface.
Nice quote. I have actually used a 30 GB iPod Video recently. And it didn't work "exactly like this phone, save for the touch-wheel instead of the screen interface". For example, there was no way to type anything at all into it. It didn't detect when I turned it sideways or adjust to ambient brightness. I didn't notice any digital camera, web browser or e-mail client, or wireless capability for that matter, either. But those are small things. I might have missed them. And, it didn't have a phone.
Does it have a full-featured calendar and task management suite?
It has a calendar and Notes. Hard to know how full-featured they are yet.
How is the battery life? If it wants to replace my current phone it needs to go at least 3 days without a recharge.
Up to 5 hours talk time. Don't know how long the battery lasts on idle. But my current phone can last more than 3 days without recharge and it dies in just a few hours of talk time.
OK, the desktop computer thing was going a little overboard. But really, 90% of the time I watch anybody use a home computer, they fuck around on the web, write e-mail, maybe listen to some music, then leave. This product will let them do that, and even more easily than on a desktop computer. And I think we should remember that before we start discussing surveys of "what price people will pay for a phone", which is what this Slashdot story proposes we do.
I am a little skeptical about the screen accuracy and the utility of the web browser, because I haven't used it. I've only seen Steve Jobs use it in his presentation. But when I saw him scooting through the web page with his fingers, stretching it and squishing it, I was impressed. I had never imagined the idea, and it could actually work really well. We'll see. This is coming from me, and I can't stand even surfing the web on my Wii. Tried it, won't try it again. As for the screen accuracy, if the on-screen keyboard is accurate enough to type at all, I'll be content with it. But I'm cautiously optimistic it will be better than that.
As for saying it's "just an iPod", I don't think so dude. Can you really say that?
You know, the whole reason we have these discussions is for the sport of predicting what technology will be like in the future, and I'm willing to bet the iPhone is going to direct where things are going in a big way. This thing being what it is, I can see myself picking it up and using it in cases where I might use my notebook instead; checking my e-mail or the weather over breakfast. And I didn't think that about Microsoft's UMPC. In that case, I recognized a turd right away. In the long term, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple started taking more direct bite out of the notebook market by adding a bigger screen and more apps. The touch-interface and the overall seamlessness are what make all the difference.
My post wasn't just a little fanish. It was very fanish. I am a fan of the iPhone. And guess what, I don't own a Mac, an iPod, or any other Apple product. What does that do to your little preconceived view of the world?
Anyway, as soon as this thing is available in Canada, I'm all over it. If the rest of you are happy with your Treos or Zunes or whatever fucked-up thing you've grown accustomed to, then by all means, stick with it.
I think it's completely misleading and off-the-mark to compare the iPhone to a cell phone, at all. The only reason we're tempted to do so is because it has "Phone" in the name. But that's almost as absurd as looking at a $2000 "Apple" computer and calling it expensive because you can get an "apple" at the grocery store for 50 cents.
They had to name the product something. But the fact is, you could remove all the phone-related features from this product and it would still be worth $499. It's a PDA and a music and video player and a web browser and a digital camera. It's practically a desktop computer for all the things casual users need. And it's 10 times easier to use than most products in any category you want to put it in. I mean, you point with your damn finger. This is a fucking amazing device. It was amazing yesterday, and it will still be tomorrow.
Can you provide a format that is able to store and transmit graphical data in a way that is easy for a computer and a human to parse and read?
No, and neither can XML.
When a human "reads" formatted data, the human is not reading the fucking data off the hard drive with their eyes. The computer reads the data first, then presents it on a graphical display, in a human-readable way. Even when you read text files or XML, the computer has to do this for you. It just so happens that for text files, there are a lot of tools to present it to you (Notepad, vi, emacs, etc).
With any formatted data, you need tools to manipulate that data. If this realization makes you choose XML for anything and everything, you're just proving you're an inexperienced developer who can't find the right tools for the job. And in fact, you'll notice wherever there is XML, there is usually a lot of shitty code, because the people who choose it are inexperienced. It's a real correlation.
Not to mention, in the real world, XML files usually end up with nodes like this: <encodeddata>a0e7f6253b43c1078...</encodeddata>
Anyway, I'm sure Collada makes nice use of XML to represent 3D data, but let's not overstate the usefulness of XML.
Life will almost certainly arise from Ai (Ai=artificial intelligence).
I'm tired of the fact that intelligent people, such as yourself, continue to dream up these lame prophecies of Ai's "coming to life". Naturally, I assume you are a big fan of Isaac Asimov or Vernor Vinge.
You guys blather on about how a bunch of abstractions processed in a computer could result in life. But can you not see that life happens in reality, before the abstraction process even takes place?
Life creates the very abstractions you are thinking about. You create them, when you think them. Abstractions don't create you, and abstractions don't create life.
The real question is, why, then, is an intelligent person like yourself so convinced that they could, even offering predictions of exactly how it will happen? The simple answer is that you are a computer programmer with an ego to feed. That's all there is to it.
Pardon my bluntness, but this is the only reply which is telling you the truth. All the other replies are from other programmers with their own egos to feed. They just want to argue with your set of predictions because it clashes with their own. It never goes anywhere and, in fact, it never can.
"You can't predict what any one person will do." - Asimov
Actually, you can start to predict what any one person will do, and sometimes even what they will say, once you get to know that person. It's a hell of a thing, this "getting to know somebody". I guess Asimov never tried it.
I totally agree with you. This "yootles" idea is hyper-lame, and doomed from the start. Ohh - some idiot wants to eat supper at Denny's, but instead he has to go to Burger Basket, so he gets compensated 5 yootles? Christ. Get over it, man. Just go eat at Burger Basket already. Seriously, if I have to offer some guy "yootles" to get him to eat a meal with me, I don't want to hang out with that jackass in the first place.
The only people using this crap will be dorks with overdeveloped senses of entitlement. Eventually, they won't be able to stand each other, and they'll just stop doing things together.
On the other hand, one should never perform labor for others for free or without expecting something in return.
You do get something. You get to live in an environment where the lives of the people you deal with have been made a little easier than they would have been, without your help. And that makes your own life a little easier.
However, there is nothing 'selfish' about expecting and/or demanding compensation.
Whether or not you call it "selfish" is not the point. The point is that, if you expect some quantifiable form of compensation, you leave yourself open to disappointment and feelings of resentment. And that's your problem. If you still want to be like that, though, hey, it's your choice.
It's funny that MarketWatch runs an article saying, "Hey, get a load of this: These guys actually don't worship money!" Like that's such a far-fetched concept for the reader. And I suppose it is, for a MarketWatch reader.
Basically, they're praising these Craigslist guys, mildly, for having principles that seem to go beyond money. But that's backwards to me. Perhaps the Craigslist guys just haven't forgotten the obvious: money does not equal wealth. So, they do what they feel like doing in life. It's really the MarketWatch people who operate according to a set of principles: for one, the flawed principle that money = wealth. Seriously, when you're obsessed with cash, you've really just made things more complicated than they are.
Anyway, the best line in the article is the statement: "Their noble stance gives entrepreneurs from San Francisco a great name." And why is it good for entrepreneurs from San Francisco to have a great name? Why, so they can make more money, of course! Yes!!
Slashdot Mirror
The guy probably spent 4+ hours/day on a project that now makes an interesting story. Meanwhile, the rest of us of spend 4+ hours/day screwing around on the web or watching TV. Who's the one with too much free time?
I say good for him. And I yield to his nerd superiority. I'd buy him a beer, but something tells me he only drinks whatever they serve on Deep Space 9.
I have a US Robotics something or other. It's been pretty good in the past. At my last address I sometimes got a 300 KB/sec torrent through it. Now, I never do. Something's fucked. I guess I should probably call customer service instead of whining about it on here, though...
Nah, dude. A BLOG is short for "web log". And you can put anything in that web log. Not just opinions. For example, say a blogger is reviewing cell phones. They might observe that one phone has longer battery life than another. That's not an opinion, it's a fact. And they state it. Nobody ever said blogs were limited entirely to opinions. Except you, in your comment.
I'm not sure why you're bringing up blogs, anyway. Slashdot isn't a blog. The ZDNet article in this story is not a blog. What the hell does a blog have to do with anything?
If one person says, "this is my opinion, I may not be right on this", and the other person says he's lost completely touch with reality, it does make the second person look pretty fucking stupid. That's what happened in the case I replied to.
Yea, I'm surprised too. I thought what I said was totally obvious. But, I enjoy getting modded up. And as long as there are douchebags going around, not paying attention to the obvious, it'll still get modded up. Normal people (on Slashdot, or not) are generally tired of geeks who are desperate for credibility, which is the kind of geek I was talking about.
It's pretty easy to identify one of those geeks, though. For example, that last paragraph I wrote would probably get them all fired up.
900 KB/s? Damn! I'm jealous of you. How is it that I'm paying $65/month for a (supposedly) 10 Mbps, "extreme high speed" cable connection, and I never get more than 150 KB/sec? On anything? I must be getting the screw job.
Yea, this is a pretty wild way to spend your bandwidth. Supposing you get 150 KB/s sustained on the torrent, your computer's still going to be chewing on it for over 37 hours.
On the other hand, if you drive to the store and back, you can probably have that HD-DVD in about an hour. That's over 5.5 MB/s of bandwidth. Pick up a few more movies at the same time, and your bandwidth increases to 22 MB/s. Sneakernet has a lot going for it, in this case.
Here we go. Bring on the legions of dorks who are hell-bent on appearing more intelligent than Linus. Boy, it sure would be great to be smarter than the guy who wrote Linux, wouldn't it? I would sure love to warp every fucking thing he says in order to make him look stupid, even if it's only to myself! That way, I can cling to my private little fantasy of being smarter than him!
Come on, the guy makes it clear that he is only sharing his gut feelings and personal opinions. He doesn't claim to be right -- unlike you. He's very careful with his words, and we should at least recognize that.
By qualifying his opinions, he's acknowledging that they are only opinions, and not facts. That's what keeps him in touch with reality. Pay attention to that. We should all choose our words so carefully.
And don't call me a fanboy either, because I don't even use Linux.
Yea, seriously. I mean, just look at the end of Revenge of the Nerds 2. The nerds ended up inside an army tank. We don't need a repeat of that.
Only problem is, they'd have to rob a bank to afford one.
From TFA:
Aren't the major joints kind of important? One baseball bat to the pelvis, and the bear-man would be pretty much fubared, no? Doesn't appear to be a real "invincible man" suit like this guy's other inventions.
Looks pimpy, though.
This AC has a point. The DRM scheme described by the submitter is impossible. No DRM will ever prevent illegal copying. Only curb it. There will always be hacks. So if you ask whether we would support the scheme, you might as well ask whether would support having unicorns in city streets.
On the other hand, if you ask whether DRM is distasteful, you're asking whether or not we like it. I happen to like DRM because it makes studios feel safe enough to distribute their content digitally.
Yea, really. There are two types of people who download from iTunes:
DRM is just a way to "sort of" protect the studios' interests. It turns out it works really well in iTunes. I've tried to explain to iPod users that they don't need to use the iTunes music store. They can download a torrent a put the MP3's on their iPod. But they're not usually interested. They say, "I'll just use the iTunes store". And they pay. It baffled me for a while, but hey, they're happy.
It's true that Apple is quietly making DRM work very well for them. It works for them, because nobody has any problem with it. And if nobody has any problem, there's no problem.
Ironically enough, there is one! It's called Steal This Film. Here's a torrent. Maybe this new stuff about Sealand will be in Part 2.
FTFA:
You call that moronically shackled? What, were you hoping to run Linux on it? Life's rough, I guess.
Nice quote. I have actually used a 30 GB iPod Video recently. And it didn't work "exactly like this phone, save for the touch-wheel instead of the screen interface". For example, there was no way to type anything at all into it. It didn't detect when I turned it sideways or adjust to ambient brightness. I didn't notice any digital camera, web browser or e-mail client, or wireless capability for that matter, either. But those are small things. I might have missed them. And, it didn't have a phone.
Here's some information about the iPhone, if you'd like to educate yourself about it.
It has a calendar and Notes. Hard to know how full-featured they are yet.
Up to 5 hours talk time. Don't know how long the battery lasts on idle. But my current phone can last more than 3 days without recharge and it dies in just a few hours of talk time.
OK, the desktop computer thing was going a little overboard. But really, 90% of the time I watch anybody use a home computer, they fuck around on the web, write e-mail, maybe listen to some music, then leave. This product will let them do that, and even more easily than on a desktop computer. And I think we should remember that before we start discussing surveys of "what price people will pay for a phone", which is what this Slashdot story proposes we do.
I am a little skeptical about the screen accuracy and the utility of the web browser, because I haven't used it. I've only seen Steve Jobs use it in his presentation. But when I saw him scooting through the web page with his fingers, stretching it and squishing it, I was impressed. I had never imagined the idea, and it could actually work really well. We'll see. This is coming from me, and I can't stand even surfing the web on my Wii. Tried it, won't try it again. As for the screen accuracy, if the on-screen keyboard is accurate enough to type at all, I'll be content with it. But I'm cautiously optimistic it will be better than that.
As for saying it's "just an iPod", I don't think so dude. Can you really say that?
You know, the whole reason we have these discussions is for the sport of predicting what technology will be like in the future, and I'm willing to bet the iPhone is going to direct where things are going in a big way. This thing being what it is, I can see myself picking it up and using it in cases where I might use my notebook instead; checking my e-mail or the weather over breakfast. And I didn't think that about Microsoft's UMPC. In that case, I recognized a turd right away. In the long term, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple started taking more direct bite out of the notebook market by adding a bigger screen and more apps. The touch-interface and the overall seamlessness are what make all the difference.
My post wasn't just a little fanish. It was very fanish. I am a fan of the iPhone. And guess what, I don't own a Mac, an iPod, or any other Apple product. What does that do to your little preconceived view of the world?
Anyway, as soon as this thing is available in Canada, I'm all over it. If the rest of you are happy with your Treos or Zunes or whatever fucked-up thing you've grown accustomed to, then by all means, stick with it.
I think it's completely misleading and off-the-mark to compare the iPhone to a cell phone, at all. The only reason we're tempted to do so is because it has "Phone" in the name. But that's almost as absurd as looking at a $2000 "Apple" computer and calling it expensive because you can get an "apple" at the grocery store for 50 cents.
They had to name the product something. But the fact is, you could remove all the phone-related features from this product and it would still be worth $499. It's a PDA and a music and video player and a web browser and a digital camera. It's practically a desktop computer for all the things casual users need. And it's 10 times easier to use than most products in any category you want to put it in. I mean, you point with your damn finger. This is a fucking amazing device. It was amazing yesterday, and it will still be tomorrow.
No, and neither can XML.
When a human "reads" formatted data, the human is not reading the fucking data off the hard drive with their eyes. The computer reads the data first, then presents it on a graphical display, in a human-readable way. Even when you read text files or XML, the computer has to do this for you. It just so happens that for text files, there are a lot of tools to present it to you (Notepad, vi, emacs, etc).
With any formatted data, you need tools to manipulate that data. If this realization makes you choose XML for anything and everything, you're just proving you're an inexperienced developer who can't find the right tools for the job. And in fact, you'll notice wherever there is XML, there is usually a lot of shitty code, because the people who choose it are inexperienced. It's a real correlation.
Not to mention, in the real world, XML files usually end up with nodes like this: <encodeddata>a0e7f6253b43c1078...</encodeddata>
Anyway, I'm sure Collada makes nice use of XML to represent 3D data, but let's not overstate the usefulness of XML.
I'm tired of the fact that intelligent people, such as yourself, continue to dream up these lame prophecies of Ai's "coming to life". Naturally, I assume you are a big fan of Isaac Asimov or Vernor Vinge.
You guys blather on about how a bunch of abstractions processed in a computer could result in life. But can you not see that life happens in reality, before the abstraction process even takes place?
Life creates the very abstractions you are thinking about. You create them, when you think them. Abstractions don't create you, and abstractions don't create life.
The real question is, why, then, is an intelligent person like yourself so convinced that they could, even offering predictions of exactly how it will happen? The simple answer is that you are a computer programmer with an ego to feed. That's all there is to it.
Pardon my bluntness, but this is the only reply which is telling you the truth. All the other replies are from other programmers with their own egos to feed. They just want to argue with your set of predictions because it clashes with their own. It never goes anywhere and, in fact, it never can.
"You can't predict what any one person will do." - Asimov
Actually, you can start to predict what any one person will do, and sometimes even what they will say, once you get to know that person. It's a hell of a thing, this "getting to know somebody". I guess Asimov never tried it.
I totally agree with you. This "yootles" idea is hyper-lame, and doomed from the start. Ohh - some idiot wants to eat supper at Denny's, but instead he has to go to Burger Basket, so he gets compensated 5 yootles? Christ. Get over it, man. Just go eat at Burger Basket already. Seriously, if I have to offer some guy "yootles" to get him to eat a meal with me, I don't want to hang out with that jackass in the first place.
The only people using this crap will be dorks with overdeveloped senses of entitlement. Eventually, they won't be able to stand each other, and they'll just stop doing things together.
You do get something. You get to live in an environment where the lives of the people you deal with have been made a little easier than they would have been, without your help. And that makes your own life a little easier.
Whether or not you call it "selfish" is not the point. The point is that, if you expect some quantifiable form of compensation, you leave yourself open to disappointment and feelings of resentment. And that's your problem. If you still want to be like that, though, hey, it's your choice.
Why don't they just integrate the iPod scroll wheel onto the remote?
It's funny that MarketWatch runs an article saying, "Hey, get a load of this: These guys actually don't worship money!" Like that's such a far-fetched concept for the reader. And I suppose it is, for a MarketWatch reader.
Basically, they're praising these Craigslist guys, mildly, for having principles that seem to go beyond money. But that's backwards to me. Perhaps the Craigslist guys just haven't forgotten the obvious: money does not equal wealth. So, they do what they feel like doing in life. It's really the MarketWatch people who operate according to a set of principles: for one, the flawed principle that money = wealth. Seriously, when you're obsessed with cash, you've really just made things more complicated than they are.
Anyway, the best line in the article is the statement: "Their noble stance gives entrepreneurs from San Francisco a great name." And why is it good for entrepreneurs from San Francisco to have a great name? Why, so they can make more money, of course! Yes!!