[deleted]
Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
41–50 of 95 posts
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#42People made the same arguments when Jobs killed the floppy. And serial ports. And OS 9. And built-in modems. Surprisingly, nobody misses them. Yawn. More histrionic nerd-posturing. It will be forgotten soon enough.
Killing Turing equivalence is a bigger deal than killing RS-232 ports and floppy drives.
Are there really 9 readers of HN (you and 8 positive mods) who think that neither C, nor Objective C, nor C++, nor JavaScript are as Turing equivalent as any programming language can be said to be whilst constrained in a finite amount of memory?
How else could one be said to have "killed" Turing equivalence unless it didn't remain after other source languages were excluded?
Melodrama trumps computer science today?
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#43People made the same arguments when Jobs killed the floppy. And serial ports. And OS 9. And built-in modems. Surprisingly, nobody misses them. Yawn. More histrionic nerd-posturing. It will be forgotten soon enough.
Weren't there adapters/peripherals so people who had floppy disks and monitors with serial ports could still use them?
(e.g. this one for floppy disks: http://www.jr.com/lacie/pe/LAC_706018)
That is, if you had a floppy disk that you had to read, there was a workaround, even if Macs stopped supporting them natively.
There is no adapter/peripheral/workaround to view some website with Flash that you want to view. (Unless you consider it a workaround to carry, alongside your iPad, a laptop so that you can view websites that haven't yet transitioned to HTML5)
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course no analogy is perfect, but I fail to see the relevance of your point. Country roads can evolve into paved roads and content that is currently coded in Flash can evolve into content that is coded in HTML5. But today , when I want to turn on to a country road / visit a site with Flash, the iCar / iPad won't let me. I, as a consumer, don't care what that ugly/bumpy thing might evolve into. I care whether I can…
Is there a phone on the market today that runs Flash?
N900 runs it swimmingly. <3 my N900
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#45I like the parody but it's not really a fair comparison. In many cases paved roads evolve out of country roads while nothing can ever evolve out of Flash.
I think the parody helps people think a bit more about the issue.
The problem with the analogy is that all Apple has to do to allow the iCar to run on country roads, is allow people to steer onto it. To get flash onto the iPhone/iPad, they have to allow a completely different development team to run code on the root user of their device. They would have to change the OS, to allow unproven code to run, from a company who can't even get the desktop version to work well.
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#46So don't buy an iCar. But if the only driving I do is to work and back and I choose that the iCar is right for me, who cares?
Ok, so you want someone else to decide what you can do with your car. Maybe you wouldn't mind if Apple stopped you from going to certain websites as well. Maybe if they blocked you from calling certain people, that would make life 'better' for you. Maybe you could get some isneakers, that only let you walk from your house to your car, or car to workplace?
I don't understand this point of view, you want less choice? Maybe you miss your mommy making decisions for you?
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#47Very interesting, but I think most of the comments are missing the point that this isn't about the technology. It is about telling the user where they can and cannot go. We wouldn't accept that in a car for any reason. Wanna go to Yosemite, great! But that parking lot isn't paved, so you can't stop there. You can drive by and see the rest of it from the highway though! Oh, that highway is nice and paved, but it leads…
I think most of the comments are missing the point that this isn't about the technology. It is about telling the user where they can and cannot go
Bingo!
It's like if an Italian suite maker somehow made it impossible for you to eat a hot dog while wearing the suite, because of the increased risk of getting mustard on the suite, thus ruining the experience of wearing the perfect suite. Look, I paid for the suite, I know that eating some foods will increase the probability that the suite will be soiled, and, I want to be allowed to make the decision whether or not to take that risk.
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#48[deleted]
Regardless of Job's other comments, the "Flash crashes Macs" isn't FUD by any definition. The SWF plugin is just a pretty bad bit of software. If you don't believe me, check the Firefox crash analysis for today: http://people.mozilla.com/crash_analysis/20100502/20100502_F... . The Flash plugin is the greatest cause of crashes for them on the Mac, and it's pretty damn high on Windows as well. The claim by the Adobe CE…
Are we talking about Flash crashing the browser or the OS? I took the Adobe CEO's comments to mean the latter especially since that was the general impression I'd gotten up to then.
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Killing Turing equivalence is a bigger deal than killing RS-232 ports and floppy drives.
Are there really 9 readers of HN (you and 8 positive mods) who think that neither C, nor Objective C, nor C++, nor JavaScript are as Turing equivalent as any programming language can be said to be whilst constrained in a finite amount of memory? How else could one be said to have "killed" Turing equivalence unless it didn't remain after other source languages were excluded? Melodrama trumps computer science today?
Well, yeah, but you're not allowed to exploit this turing equivalence.
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#50People made the same arguments when Jobs killed the floppy. And serial ports. And OS 9. And built-in modems. Surprisingly, nobody misses them. Yawn. More histrionic nerd-posturing. It will be forgotten soon enough.
Weren't there adapters/peripherals so people who had floppy disks and monitors with serial ports could still use them? (e.g. this one for floppy disks: http://www.jr.com/lacie/pe/LAC_706018 ) That is, if you had a floppy disk that you had to read, there was a workaround, even if Macs stopped supporting them natively. There is no adapter/peripheral/workaround to view some website with Flash that you want to view. (Unl…
Just to be snide: there are plenty of VNC clients for the iPhone OS, which let you view the screen of a full-powered computer, and click and type into it. This would be the same workaround you'd use if you had to run, say, an industrial control system on your iPad. It's also a pretty good idea, UI-wise: since it overlays the mouse metaphor onto your touchpad, the resulting Flash doesn't require adaptation to be used.