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Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

startuptrekking.com

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Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

#51
post #27

So 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? M…

did everyone just miss the point where Jobs said that Apple wanted to be able to be free to release new hardware features and not have to wait for some 3rd party to support development for them?

Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

#52
post #27

So 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? M…

All 'cars' are compromises. Any low-riding sports car would be damaged by riding on a rutted road, that's the tradeoff inherent in purchasing one.

Lotus (say) isn't saying you can't drive here or there, they just build cars that happen not to be suitable for a given activity. A passable analogy since car manufacturers have far less ongoing control might be Lotus voiding the warranty for your Elise if you took it on a rough track.

In any case, if that choice is not one you're comfortable with don't buy $PRODUCT, problem solved.

Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

#54

People 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.

That's funny. When you said: "built-in modems", I turned my Macbook up to the side, and sure enough... no modem.

And funny enough, I don't miss not having a modem on my macbook, not in the least. I also have a thinkpad which I never use the modem either, and my now long in the tooth Palm TX which doesn't have one (yeah, its a PDA, so we normally don't expect it to have one, but then why do we expect a notepbook to have a modem, because they have? That is the same argument as "It was good enough for my daddy so it is good enough for me."

And as another poster wrote, we can always vote with our dollars.

Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

#55
post #42

Earlier 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?

Turing equivalence guarantees there's a way to write a program in some other language that produces exactly the same results as a program in ObjC. This deep compatibility made it feasible for the industry to adopt better and better languages. But now Apple wants to put a stop to it and enshrine a few decrepit languages with flaws most of us escaped a decade ago.

(As I understand it, JavaScript doesn't belong on the list. It's permitted, but some of the Cocoa Touch API isn't accessible, so it's not really a substitute for the others.)

Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

#57
post #37

Very 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…

We wouldn't accept that in a car for any reason. Really? I see these on the road all the time and I would have no trouble whatsoever finding a road they couldn't handle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_(automobile) Consumers do, in fact, willingly buy cars that limit their travels. Heck, a lot of people willingly buy cars that don't have enough oomph to take an entirely paved route over the rocky mountains.

A Smart car CAN'T go on an unpaved road?

'maybe' a Smart car shouldn't go on an unpaved road, but that decision isn't made for you by the manufacturer, or anybody else. You're free to take the Smart car you purchased anywhere you want.

Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

#58
post #4

[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…

Flash isn't the only victim in Apples locked down environment, which is why I pointed at Google Voice. Flash is the only example (currently) where you have a commonly used plug-in which is blocked from being installed, as Google Voice didn't nearly have the reach of Flash.

Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

#59
post #42

Earlier 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?

[deleted]

Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

#60
post #42

Earlier 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?

Melodrama?

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/apple-scratch-app/

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