Would anyone care if the iCar drove itself on the Highway,
Travelled at 400 miles an hour in silence,
..or flew?
Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
81–90 of 95 posts
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#82People 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.
You are allowed to program in C++ and C, too. There is also a good chance that Ruby will join that list as soon as the LLVM version (that Apple is working on) is finished.
(see http://www.macruby.org/)
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#83Very 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 kn…
I'd say it's more like the organisers of a suit convention not allowing a hotdog vendor to operate inside.
This upsets the people who understand the risks associated with eating hotdogs while wearing their suits, while protecting other suit-wearers who don't appreciate the risk of soiling.
The problem with this analogy is that while any reasonable person can foresee condiment spillage, the average consumer is utterly unaware of the tradeoffs that Apple appears to be concerned about. Nor should they need to be.
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#84People 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.
He got rid of the floppy in the first gen NeXT machines too early. You were supposed to just transfer everything via the network. He was wrong and everyone missed them and he brought them back for the second gen.
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#85I'm sorry. But Flash has a fallback (HTML5 for the web and iPhone Apps if wanna go native), country roads has not. Also, real infrastrucures are a bit distant than web-infrasctructures. I mean, Google could possibly switch it's search engine from XYZ platform to ABC platform in a matter of months (made up numbers), try to switch road infrastructures of a country.
If HTML5 is the fallback why is it working so bad on the iPad?
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The browser. Virtually nothing crashes the actual OS these days (be it Windows, OS X or Linux). I think I've had 1 or 2 complete OS crashes in the last 4 years.
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
yup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_children_(politics)
What's more melodramatic than a company like Apple being afraid of an app like Scratch?
While your post has the superficial form that a retort might have, that word doesn't mean what you think it means...
Melodrama: (noun) a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions. Language, behavior, or events that resemble drama of this kind.
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#88People 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.
I would say usb killed floppies and serial ports.
Built-in modems aren't dead, they are still on a surprisingly number of laptops.
He killed OS 9 so he could sell OS X. That's like saying Microsoft killed Win95. That's planned obsolescence.
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#89People 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.
By way of disclaimer... I recently switched off of iPhone in favor of Android - primarily because AT&T's network sucked and not really as any statement against Apple (I refused to continue paying monthly for a phone which had no reception through much of my workday).
Overall, as a developer I'm highly in favor of open platforms, language choice, etc. However, I can't help but thinking that a tightly controlled application space the way that Apple has maintained so far is what has helped make the iPhone and iPad successful. One thing I notice on android is the lack of consistency in UIs. Sometimes the back button takes me back a screen in an App - sometimes it dumps me back to the Home screen. Sometimes it dumps me back to the last App I was using.
The iPhone apps tend to look relatively uniform UI wise and behave as expected. Encouraging the idea of cross platform apps means you start to get less and less "platform integration". It means we end up with 4 or 5 smartphone platforms none of which have any advantage because they're all running inconsistent crap.
I want my hardware + software platforms to be able to be unique and tailored towards themselves. I have seen very few truly cross platform apps which actually work well. iTunes itself is a great example - it acts weirdly and looks woefully out of place on Windows. It's the ugly duckling, and it behaves like someone chopped one of it's legs off.
The benefits of tailoring software to a particular platform should be obvious, and I much prefer them.
Re: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I took your use of the word "can" to mean "able to". Clearly you meant it in the alternate sense of "permitted to". I see that now.
If your objection rests upon such a distinction, then shouldn't we be a bit more disciplined about exactly who the restriction is being placed upon?
You imply that it's a restriction against the person buying the phone, but this is not the case. They have no such restrictions placed upon them. Section 3.3.1 is in the Terms of Service for the App Store, not in a license for the phone. It is the developer who it restricts, not the owner of the device.