Posts by Keir Leslie
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What's the betting that Apple will try and move the App Store paradigm up the functionality chain until either Mac OS is a locked system, or the Mac is replaced by machines running an iPad derived OS?
Slimmer than the odds that I'm going to win the Grand National. Turning the Mac into a closed system would utterly kill it in weeks, and Jobs knows that. It isn't just that the publicity would be atrocious: it would utterly kill it in the high-margin creative industries, where pretty much every shop has a collection of creaky scripts sitting around to help out with work flow. (& in fact almost every workplace out there would have similar issues, esp. given that no-one really wants to let Apple sit between you and your software suppliers.)
The iPhone model's ok for what are basically fun devices that everybody knows are peripherals involving trade-offs. But it won't fly with people's main machines, where you can expect top quality on everything.
Further, philosophically, suppose Apple do do that, and people are willing to pay for devices like that. Why is it a bad thing? There's something awfully paternalistic about the linux geek thing that linux is somehow better for you, in some abstract way. It's somehow better that one could potentially write a useful application rather than actually having it; it is better to have the possibility than to have the actuality.
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Apple now owns CUPS
That does explain why the printer test page says Apple on it, doesn't it?
I knew about WebKit and Darwin and all that, but CUPS was new to me.
The other classic driver for free software is someone needing it for themselves, and then doing the generous thing and letting anyone else who needs it have it: Knuth with TeX, Stallman with Emacs. You can hardly criticise that and say that the world would be better off if Knuth charged $e^n or whatever for TeX.
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Don't take it personally. I'm simply making a point that few outside the geek community seem willing to make.
I think you meant to say BOFH community there; there's a screamingly good argument that `fuck the users, we're in charge' is about as anti-geek a notion as you could possibly imagine.
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Once again - I will say it again - it might not be sexy. It might not be cool. But that is the way of the business world.
You know, IBM used to think like this, and turns out, It Just Isn't True. You can't coast like that for very long, & sure there's money in them thar hills for old Cobol codejockeys and all, but legacy systems are called that for a reason.
Look at Sun, or SCO, or Hewlett-Packard.
Personally I think iPhones aren't particularly great telephones, & Apple is not exactly a leader in telephony. But you know what? Nobody gives a damn. I like Nokias, and in terms of cool shit in the exciting world of telecoms system engineering I am told they are doing great stuff. But advances in micro-billing in the Third World don't sell in California*; really cool little computers do.
* yes yes, the Californians aren't up to the standards of Botswana.
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(Should add I'm buggered if I know what IBM pays people to work on, but it's one of the great facts everyone knows: Big Blue hearts Linux these days.)
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And one reason why Apple is still consistently preferable to Linux, who as yet have provided no way for developers to earn the fruits of their labour.
This is a bit nonsense. `Linux' isn't a body like Apple that could be expected to take responsibility for paying developers. (Linux as a thing that acts probably means the kernel email list, but that's not really sensible.)
There are actually quite a lot of people getting paid for work on various free/open source projects. (Including by Apple as a matter of fact, but see also IBM, MySQL, the FSF.)
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[all] I had to do was write a few lines of code, reconfigure some configurations, pair my device, enter the APN, discover the correct protocol, chose the Bluetooth services I required and then it was just a case of making sure Bluetooth was active on the phone before seeking a GPRS connection because then it would corrupt the .conf file [...]
Then all you had to do was recite the paternoster backwards, while constructing a mental image of the Earthly Paradise in your head, before sacrificing a chicken to the spirits of the ether.
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Is that even legal in the States, considering their really creepy corporate laws? They're obliged to maximise profits no matter what.
Eh, it gets a bit murky, because even though arguably yes management have a duty to maximise shareholder value, (a) shareholders could renounce that, (b) it's very arguable that that is a rule, because (c) courts never have to rule on it, given management just say `in our opinion this maximises shareholder value' and the court goes, right, good enough for me, next.
Except! I'm not an American lawyer, so that's not exactly hugely reliable, and I suspect that it can vary state-to-state as a matter of public policy.
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At the moment I'm kind of undecided. I think I want one, but I'm not sure why. Lack of multitasking is a bit of a shocker - no iTunes while cruising the net is simply astounding. Can the current iPod Touches multitask?
iTunes will work in the background, I am sure. (The rule is that Apple can break the rules -- Apple applications do all sorts of stuff third party apps can't.)
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While we're all being pendantic about science and logic and stuff, I feel compelled out that in that PhD. comic that Lucy posted, Galileo appears on the Medieval News Network, when in fact he lived in the early-modern era, or, for the Italians, during the late-Renaissance.
And no educated Medieval denied the world's roundness: see Dante's Inferno, & Purgatory, both of which assume the existence of an antipodes to Jerusalem. And substantively, of course one can meaningfully comment on changes between polls that differ but by no more than the margin of error.
(Live by the geekery, die by the geekery.)