Posts by JEDIDIAH 2525 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2009
Spirt is a nice jailbreaker that will unlock iphones and the ipad. This will let you install an ssh server and do desktop style file sharing with your phone or iThing. This will let you put things on the device at will and install things like VLC.
I've got a flash video file of the 1984 commercial that I put on my iPhone after I jailbroke it.
It may look like an appliance. It might try to be an appliance. But you can still write shell scripts on it.
> I've got a laptop and there are things I can't do with that either,
> so what's the point of creating a list of things that the iPad was
> purposefully designed NOT to do?
...because those of us that aren't content to just blindly follow like sheep have poked and prodded this thing and discovered that it is just another Unix box. It's not even as limited as a Tivo. Get to the point where you can log in and an iThing is pretty mundane really. It looks a lot like MacOS under the covers. Getting a shell prompt on the thing isn't even terribly hard.
Easy doesn't have to mean castrated.
The closed nature of the iThing is self serving. It suits Apple's long term interests much more so than the end user.
In truth, Jobs probably could have had a permissive stance on Flash without any "strategic" loss. It's likely that Adobe would have dropped the ball in the same manner it has dropped the ball on just about every other platform (and even Windows to some degree). Jobs really didn't have to be a jerk and a tyrant about the situation. Jobs is going above and beyond what's really necessary given the situation. He's playing his hand as a jerk and a tyrant when he doesn't really need to. This is a interesting parallel to Microsoft in the 80s and 90s.
> Guess what? All the features you want are irrelevant
> for the vast majority of the target market of the ipad.
> You want them - buy something else, but
What market? Yuppies with too much money?
It's certainly a cool enough looking doo-dad but it has some very severe failings.
Not being able to "browse any website" would be a pretty key failing for a device that's mainly a web terminal.
>> ... that they can't buy a Mercedes at their local Hyundai dealer?
>>
>> Hyundai dealers are being locked out of Mercedes sale!
Guess what? If the Hyundai dealer is also a registered Mercedes dealer then he has standing to gripe if he's being locked out of a hot new product.
If Jobs started making crackers out of grandma you would still make excuses.
> . Find me a netbook with a clean, usable touch screne interface
Yeah, but can it print from it or save from it when I find something interesting on the web?
Or will I be running back to the PC or laptop once I hit a roadbump?
Does it integrate with the rest of the home network and can I play stuff that happens to be sitting on my other machines? Can it play or open what it happens to find there?
Does it have a decent amount of storage so I won't be SOL once I'm away from home or that expensive 3G plan craps out on me?
The ipad makes a spiffy toy. Don't try to make it into something it isn't.
No kidding iPads are being mostly bought by people with more money than sense. Regardless of what some fools might like to claim, $500 is nothing to sneeze at. If it were otherwise, then there would be a lot more Mac users by now (minis are only $600).
So of course most of the iPad buyers at this time are people that view $500 as an impulse buy. That means rich people. Although I disagree with the idea that rich geeks make up the bulk of iPad owners at this point. Geeks are going to be aware of the limitations of this thing and at least kick the tires first. You might get a few Geek curiosity seekers but I expect most iPad owners at this point are not Geeks at all. They just like to buy whatever is in and make sure they are seen with it.
There are plenty of people buying iPads for no other reason than the hype. I suspect they are the overwhelming majority.
Canonical is licensing h264 because codec support is one of those common FUD talking points when it comes to Linux Trolls. It doesn't matter that Ubuntu has a package manager that is easy peasy and has everything you need. It doesn't matter that the Ubuntu video player sorts out all of the details itself automagically. It doesn't matter that Ubuntu is infact better at sorting this stuff out than Windows or MacOS.
The fact that it's not on the install CD will be a FUD talking point.
It's better from a marketing perspective to include it.
> And my installation with nothing addition installed (accepted all the
> suggested defaults) has an effective 17 GIGABYTE footprint. Holy sheet!
Nonsense. At least try to make the FUD somewhat believable.
What you describe takes up about 2.6G.
Even a more interesting install lots of extra odds and ends installed is only going to weigh in at ~6G.
> On OS X the dock takes up as much or almost as little screen space as you care to
> configure it to do (and that is childishly easy). The number of
Except the MacOS dock takes up the entire side of the screen it's on. Plus, the "space" part of my rant was about the system menu bar and not the dock.
Whether or not a Linux icon opens a "fresh copy" of something is entirely dependent on the app. OTOH, if I want more than one "window" from the same application on different windows, the Unix approach will at least allow for that.
I still use Linux because something like unloading video from my Sony camera won't give it kittens. There isn't an expectation to funnel all video through quicktime and I am not terribly impressed by Apple apps including iPhoto and iTunes. Even iMovie manages to break basic UI design principles (but I was told Macs don't do that).
If I need to install something, it will sort itself out. There will be no dangling dependencies or dependent bits of crippleware. Basic tools won't be crippleware ether.
If my Unix requirements were stuck back in 1988, I might be more impressed by Macs.
There's a mini collecting dust under the desk. So this isn't just a purely theoretical thing.
> Holy shit, what a mission. After downloading and extracting an archive to my desktop
> it took me about an hour of messing around with a command line to get both it and
> Flash installed. This is mind-bogglingly archaic.
Yes it is mind-bogglingly archaic. That's why Ubuntu doesn't do it that way.
That sort of nonsense is for WinDOS Lemmings.
If you insist on going out of your way to do things the hard way, even the Mac won't stop you from that sort of nonsense.
> Why still TWO menu bars?
Sorry, but a little dot under the icon just doesn't cut it. Also, the dock uses up far too much screen real estate for what it does. OTOH, having 2 bars on the screen allows for much more interesting options. Oddly enough, the taskbar doo-dads available for Linux are much more useful. When it comes to "polish", that part of MacOS fails badly. It's sad looking really.
...and it's really 3 menu bars if you want to be precise since each app has it's own on Linux.
Having the in-focus app basically take ownership of the screen (or some part) of it really is so 80s.
Unix has had some form of "dock" since Apples were running on 68k. So the idea that we would be following Apple around like some sort of lost puppy really is a misguided notion.
Taking another look at it, the menu bar on a Mac really is a crude waste of space. Too small to be really useful and cluttered with stuff that really shouldn't even be there so what space it does take up is wasted even more.
MacOS has this reputation for being the Gold Standard of UIs.
Most of this reputation is hype and mythology but it is still there.
Really, Ubuntu should concentrate more on driver support and applications.
As far as ease goes, automation is the key. Make more things more automatic like package management and plugin updates. Ubuntu already stomps all over the Mac when it comes to being open to different formats and supporting them in a well automated fashion.
Sure. Steal whatever good ideas you can find (and there are some). Just don't drink the cool-aid.
> Will I be able to install arbitrary (non-repo) software without having to go to a shell prompt as root?
Like many things on a modern Linux: you do it the same way you would under Windows.
It's funny how that works, how dragging and clicking on things with a mouse tends to work the same way whether or not it's Linux, Windows, MacOS or even GEM.
That's kind of the whole point of Ubuntu. You don't have to treat it like a 15 year old copy of Slackware. Linux has moved on a bit since then.
Although even "back in the day" there were shiny happy gui installers. Sure, marking them executable with the tool of your choice is an extra bit. However, it also helps keeps other shenangians to a minimum.
> People with lots of money tend not to be in the business of giving it away.
I think Chanel & Versace would beg to differ here.
I recall someone bragging about how they saw all of the people in First Class running iPads. Nothing says "blow the wad like a sailor on leave" like First Class airline seats.
However, that's not the point so much since the malware pretends it's a software update. It doesn't show up like a sales pitch or a Nigerian scam. It's probably meant to get into the parts of the mark's wallet that usually requires a crowbar and blowtorch.
No. The poorly thought out nature of iTunes is readily apparent even on MacOS. The fanboys just don't complain because they've already drunk the cool-aid.
Since the iphone is heavily subsidized, there is a much lower entry barrier for users that might not otherwise buy into a completely different computing platform. It's far more likely that a non-partisan will be running an iphone versus a Mac.
Most people aren't going to blow $600 just so they can thoroughly try out MacOS.
> If you bought an iPhone, you bought it because you wanted an iPhone.
> Thinking of putting Android on your iPhone? Why the hell didn't you buy an
> Android phone then?
...clearly some people can't make the distinction between hardware and software.
Also, just because you like something in general it doesn't mean that you are in love with every aspect of the thing. This is why proper Mac users install replacements for Apple bundleware.
Apple has just made it unecessarily hard to do that with some of it's devices.
Being a happy homeowner means I can knock down a wall if I want to.
I wonder if this is an idea lost on high rent urbanites.
> why have they waited so long?
The whole thing was a big con.
They started all nice and sweet and then decided to turn into a jerk as soon as they thought they could get away with it. They wanted to sucker everyone into helping them build their mind share. Now that they have that, any particular developer is disposable to them. They view themselves as bigger than any particular developer or developers in general.
They think they've got a repeat of DOS on their hands where they think they have enough critical mass that no one can catch up to them.
I hate to break it to some of you Apple cult members but you don't need Xcode in order to support multiple processor architectures. It's quite orthogonal to the problem infact. As long as your APIs are supported on the shiny new CPU, you won't have any problems.
Arguments like these show a fundemental lack of technical understanding on the part of Apple boosters (which should not be terribly surprising really).
Tools move easily between hardware when they don't make stupid assumptions and then encode those into the guts of the system. This includes Apple's own APIs.
OTOH, the sorts of things that Apple bans most (emulators, VMs, and script languages) are actually the best at avoiding any sort of platform specific assumptions.
These sorts of excuses are hilarious to those of us that actually deal with diverse hardware and operating systems.
Clearly someone that doesn't "get it" in general about Enterprise RDBMS platforms.
Oracle is for the data you care about. Integrity is first and everything else is secondary. This includes cost and performance. This is why companies tend to run Oracle on the reference platform. It doesn't matter if that happens to be Solaris Sparc or Linux x86. You end up with something that is much less buggy.
Whenever <insert favorite platform here> becomes the reference platform, then it will be time
for everyone else to drop their old platform for your personal favorite.
It all boils down to that 6 figure annual support contract. Otherwise you could just run mysql or that other product that was mentioned.
...and I do agree that the idea of Oracle in VMWARE is terribly silly.
Apple pushes it's own standards. Any talk of "open standards" is merely a smokescreen to hide their true and rather self-centered intentions. People that eat up their "open standards" rhetoric are rightfully poked fun at.
Apple seeks to make the use of their own in-house standards easy and the sort of default while everything else remains more difficult if not impossible.
This is the origin of their rift with Adobe. Adobe undermined Apple's attempt to own the web video standards and now Apple is trying to wrestle control back from them.
The fact that Google is now throwing a wrench into the works is terribly funny. They're taking Apple's open systems rhetoric and actually making good on it. It may not be the most practical approach but it is certainly amusing. Perhaps it will keep Apple from running completely amok. Even members of the cult benefit from that (even if they don't realize it and would never admit it).
NONSENSE
as the end user it is up to me to decide what the user experience should be and where the performance tradeoffs should be. In the absence of artificial restrictions ideas can succeed or fail on ther own. It's MY device, not Steves and not bills.
The degree of cargo cultism here is simply appalling.
> and get video (esp. Flash) to actually play at a reasonable pace
Flash is the same on Linux as it is on pretty much any other platform.
Even on a WinDOS PC, you are going to have lots of pain unless you have a bleeding edge version of the Flash plugin and just the right gear unless you've got a nice beefy CPU. Then it doesn't matter because you can just brute force your way around Adobe's general apathy.
The idea that this nonsense is limited to Linux is just mindless FUD. Laying it at the feet of Shuttleworth is also clueless. Linux has PureVideo support, Adobe just doesn't want ot be bothered with using it. They treat the Mac the same way.
> I only use one browser. Maybe you can explain to us retards why you need multiple ones ?
See, this is the sort of argument that triggers derision. This isn't about a person using more than one thing at once but having the ability to choose that option that suits them.
It's about being able to install Picasa if iPhoto sucks, Plex if Front Row feels like a straight jacket and VLC if you would rather not dinker with Quicktime plugins to get strange and interesting video files to play.
Although this presupposes you are interested in venturing beyond the little barriers that Apple has set out for you.
If not for "rogue" developers, most of your current computing experience would not exist.
So far, the examples here don't see too terribly tablet-centric. H*ll, they look like they could be implemented on an Archos if you just applied the programming talent and "polish" that the guys in Cupertino have to the current Archos hardware.
When I first heard the details of the iPad, I started shopping the competition. That hasn't changed. As I suspected, it seems that much of the usefulness of multi-touch is in dealing with the screen size limitations on the smaller Apple devices.
Wanting a tablet computer is fine. It is not clear that this thing from Apple is anything more than a supersized ipod. That's fine if you understand that you're probably getting an Apple "Archos 9 knockoff". However, a lot of us suspect that most of the frenzy is being being fueled by people who don't really care if the device is suitable or not.
The iPad is not a tablet computer. It's an oversized PMP.
Google has no monopoly in search.
There is nothing keeping me from finishing this and going and using Bing as my search engine for the rest of the day. This is a key element missing from previous monopoly complaints. I can't trade WinDOS for something else as easily as I can change my shirt. With Google I can.
Google might have the biggest market share but that's something else.
This isn't about the simplistic "number games" that some people like to fixate. This is about whether or not the company in question can force terms on everyone else.
That seems peculiar. There are any number of "slightly out of the ordinary" venues in Britain that have been advertised on the web since pretty much the dawn of (internet) time. The idea that you could be sent to prison for viewing or posessing content of this kind seems Brazil-esque in the least.
It seems like they will need to imprison a good chunk of London.
Fixating on the MP3 store is just moronic. There simply isn't any need. The last thing anyone needs is yet another proprietary vertically integrated media store. Just make integrating with Amazon or any of the other non-DRM music stores better. Or even make dealing with physical ripping better.
There is no DMCA foolishness to slow down ripping physical disks. The need for a special store is no so much. This matters a lot more for video or books since those formats are hip deep in DRM. You need the propretary hooks and deals just to get at the stuff.
An Ubuntu Kindle app would make remarkably more sense, or an Ubuntu version of iTunes.
> Next, Getting a movie on the iPad is as fracking simple as dragging a compatible
> (proper size/dimension, and a QT or H.264 file) file into your iTunes library. I have
> NUMEROUS home movies on my iPhone, as well as
Well,that's the trick now isn't it.
First the video has to be in the right container format.
Then it has to use an h264 profile that's not too "advanced" for the ipod.
Then it can't have too high of a bitrate.
Then it can't have the wrong type of audio.
Then it can't have too large of an image size.
If you get ANY of this wrong, iTunes won't tell you what you did wrong.
Stuff like Handbrake is supposed to make all of that not a problem but I've
recently run into stuff for which it doesn't generate a suitable ipod friendly
file.
Why should the end user be bothered with adapting content to Apple anyways?
There is a reason that VLC is a popular MacOS download.
This is another area that highlights how a proper Mac is a much more
robust solution than taking an iphone and blowing it up. This sort of
battery replacement policy is the perfect use case for Time Machine.
Give the user the option of plugging into a proper USB drive or some
disk that sits on the network. They would even get that nice incremental
backup that comes with Time Machine (and really isn't practical with the
iTunes type tether).
Agreed. Much of the Apple store becomes redundant once you have access to a full featured web browser. Many things that are treated as separate "apps" in the Apple store would be parts of larger compilations in a PC package or just be considered data files.
Blocking of flash or java should be something that's under the control of the end user rather than some sort of Big Brother figure.
Just based on relative heat generation, it looks like letting the GPU do the work is MUCH more efficient than trying to do everything "in software".
Flash uses h264. There's just the question of how efficiently that is going to be implemented and whether or not it will take care of speciality decoding hardware. It's all about how well the decoder is written. Adobe's dragging their feet in this respect.
This isn't about the big high profile web sites that might have the resources or interest to specifically re-code their site for Apple's benefit. This about the rest of the web and some obscure website you've probably never heard of and possibly only 2 or 3 people care about. Flash sucks but it is widely enough used an implemented to be a defacto standard. There are even attempts to clone it with free software.
If any other platform or vendor tried to shut out flash or ignore it they would be universally condemned. There would probably also be anti-monopoly noises.
> towards commodity x86 systems and away from Unix. The kinds of data centers
> being built out by Microsoft, Facebook, and others are running x86 servers from
> companies like Dell.
This might be a compelling point if not for the fact that Dell sells Linux boxes to run Oracle.
Big names like Playboy? Are you kidding? They are no less despised by the sorts of people Apple is trying to pander too right now than Penthouse or Hustler. They are only slightly more respectable to less uptight coastal urbanites. In the heartland, the distinctions they are trying to make here are completely bogus.
> 5) Media player? So all your gadgets to 720P or higher output to a TV? (The iPad actually
> supports 1080p, we're simply waiting on the announcement of a wireless HDMI Dock adapter...) I > know your netbook either doesn't do 720p at all
It's not about the screen output. It's about whether or not you have to mess with a conversion
process that will take HOURS AND HOURS before you can play the video in question. A device
that can "play anything" is much easier to deal with in this respect. A device that is less "picky" and
is more flexible will subject users of all kinds to less inconvenience.
Being forced through iTunes or into a particular format is just another bother for users many of
whom can't really cope with such a thing.
The iPad is being grossly oversold at this point. It's strictly a walled garden device which is
going to be quickly bested by anything else including Apple's own less restricted products.
Not aimed at us?
How about not aimed at anyone that reads product labels of any sort?
This thing does not replace your desktop web browser. That's the whole point of the whining and hatred directed at this thing since it was announced.
Although I am sure plenty of people will buy it for it's shiny happiness. Some of us may even have members of our own households that are already ensnared. So look forward to some well informed whining and hatred in the future. '-)
I would sympathize with any civilians that got in the way of two armies
in war time. If you are going to whine about this, you should at least be
fair and include ALL of the cities that we flattened.
Although this sort of whining ultimately shows a shocking ignorance of
the events leading up to these two bombings and also shows a bit of
disrespect for the Japanese.
They are not people to be trifled with in wartime.
The nature of free software is that it simply doesn't require a corporate patron for it's continued existence. It doesn't matter what they conspciously consuming naysayers say. Linux will stick around as long as anyone is interested in using it or supporting it. World domination simply isn't neccessary.
> The GPL—and all its bastard children and relatives—are just a way for the more
> egocentric programmers to *pretend* to give their work away with no
The GPL is the result of practical experience dealing with contributors to such
"gratis-ware" products. It is not something that was merely plucked from the
nether-regions of someone with an axe to grind. It was created to address an
actual real world problem. People who "give" quite often don't like to feel
"taken advantage of". The GPL addresses this issue.
Anyone that bothered to actually look into the issue would quickly learn this.
> Why on earth would an Android device run Win CE apps?
> What next - you going to complain that your Mac doesn't
> run windows apps, or vice versa?
This is 2010. The only thing preventing Windows from running Mac apps is the relative hostility that Apple has for virtualization. I already run my copy of iTunes this way on my Linux box. If Apple weren't such control freaks, I would do the same thing with MacOS.
...and yes I do have 3 legitimate copies of MacOS. I would rather just run them on my Quad Core monster Linux desktop rather than an underpowered Mac.
> You ever consider the fact that not ALL overweight people eat tons of calories? Of course not,
> because you are a self-indugent tosser who
No. I don't consider the idea because I realize that the universe is governed by universal laws that can be easily expressed in terms of numbers and equations. Some people are genuinely big. They have long legs or wide shoulders. However, most people become big because they eat crap and they eat far too much of it. They also don't bother to exercise.
Eat too much. Don't exercise enough.
Everyone that makes excuses are just enablers and are doing no one any favors.
Chances are, you have no clue what's in what you eat.
> If I am deploying a product to thousands of desktops, I want to know
> that I am going to get help from the manufacturer if something goes
> wrong. This is something Microsoft do well,
What does that level of support cost per year and what's SLA like?
If the problem is severe enough will a team be working on it 24/7 until it's fixed (like Oracle does)? How much will this level of support cost? Have you ever used this yourself?
Open Office was previously a product of Sun Microsystems. Now it's a product of Oracle. Both are companies that much better conform to the ideal you are trying to claim that Microsoft lives up to.
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