Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

SFGary — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:14:48 -0000

Wayne, I am not sure what the argument is about? I said that the new AT&T will try to become more monolithic and monopolistic if at all possible than when they were three different companies. So while I would have bought an iPhone if I was not forced to buy or extend a contract AND if the phone was unlocked. Whether an iPOD or an iPhone is a necessity is besides the point. The rotary phone comment was a joke: at the peril of trying to explain a joke, I meant that the execs running these companies are probably nostalgic of the old days of leased rotary phones and one phone company...

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

GaCowboy — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:47:04 -0000

WTF SFG You said you don't think AT&T will change anything and in the same breath that it wouldn't surprise you if they reverted to rotary. Well, Whitch is it ? Iknow the Cingular
brand will die and being from Georgia I know there will be a lot of empty office space in Atlanta. Not that I give a damn about Atlanta or any other big city for that matter it really
sucks for the whole state. As far as further changes,though they might not be obvious at first, you can bet your ass the consumer is going to take it where the sun don't shine.

To me and people like me a locked device is something we call a work-a round.
If your not up to it. Don't friggin' buy it. If it doesn't do what you want it to do right out of the box and you don't have a friend to convert it, don't buy it.

Is an ipod or iphone a nessesity in your life.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

SFGary — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:44:06 -0000

Wayne, AT&T and Bellsouth own Cingular. Now that they have merged, Cingular is now AT&T and I don't believe they will change anything. I would not be surprised if they try to bring back the rotary phone and leases.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

GaCowboy — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 21:19:47 -0000

Cingular is history. How can you people that contract with them and even one person that is employed by them, not know that. Now, start speculating on what AT&T is going to do.
I'm sure they'll really be intrested.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

SFGary — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 20:54:52 -0000

I am a Cingular customer but unless they sell me one that is unlocked (is it quad band? so I can use it overseas) and without a forced extension of my contract I won't buy one. I was stupid enough to buy an unlocked treo 600 at 500 so the price, though high, is not outrageous. I am not so much put out by the battery issue though I would prefer one that can be changed.

The argument about a closed architecture is a red herring in my opinion. Why does there have to be third party developers for a product to be useful? If it does the three things, music, phone and web surfing as advertised, it should be a winner.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Victor Panlilio — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:24:19 -0000

Not at all Wayne, now why would you come to that conclusion? What my post meant to demonstrate was that a system embraced by "idiots" who shun "openness" (according to Howard Lindzon) is also embraced by alpha geeks in the open source movement. Now why is that, I wonder? If a particular computer system is used by a 5% segment of the computer-using population that includes BOTH ends of the IQ bell curve, do you suppose that might lend support to the hypothesis that said computer system may also be suitable for the other 95% in between? Or did that possibility somehow elude your imagination?

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

GaCowboy — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 10:17:31 -0000

Victor,
Does that make YOU more intelligent by proxy?

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Victor Panlilio — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 10:01:00 -0000

Howard Lindzon wrote: "most apple fans ae idiots and dont need openess."

You may be understating what "openness" means in this context. Here's a study of the DRM features in Vista: http://tinyurl.com/tfly2

"Idiots" who've shunned Microsoft include Bruce Schneier, Bill Joy, Joel Spolsky, Paul Graham, Amit Singh, and David Heinemeier Hansson. Take the last name cited:

http://tinyurl.com/y3m6b9
In 2005 he was recognized by Google and O'Reilly with the Hacker of the Year award... David appeared on the cover of the July 2006 issue of Linux Journal which included an interview with him in the feature story "Opinions on Opinionated Software." The same month Business 2.0 ranked him 34th among "50 people who matter now."

In David's Wikipedia profile photo, he's using an Apple laptop. An "idiot," indeed.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

howardlindzon — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 09:22:38 -0000

By the way Mathew - most apple fans ae idiots and dont need openess. Thats why they left Microsoft. It was idiot unfriendly and worse, distrustful.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

GaCowboy — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:58:16 -0000

Hell, you're just not smart enough to change the battery in an ipod. Take a hard plastic wedge, a guitar pick works, and pry the case apart. Something as complicated for you as a screwdriver might damage the case.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Victor Panlilio — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:22:41 -0000

I think one point obscured by our zeal, was, "Who's the worse a**hole -- Jobs or Gates?"

:-)

iPhone -- nice-looking gadget, but if the non-tactile onscreen keyboard sucks for SMS text messaging (we shall see), that might be a showstopper. Besides, multitouch really needs more than two fingers. See http://tinyurl.com/fx98d

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Mathew Ingram — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 21:57:22 -0000

You win, Victor. I've already forgotten what the point was anyway :-)

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Victor Panlilio — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 21:52:01 -0000

I claimed that XP was “unusable on a PC of that vintage,” - let me elaborate a bit since "usable" can mean anything from "boots up" to "runs major applications that tax the processor and graphics subsystems." Can you take a 400MHz PC built in late 1999 or early 2000 with a 16MB VRAM video card, put Windows XP SP2 on it, turn on the UI effects (e.g. fades, shadows under menus, semitransparent windows, etc.), and still use it productively as a Photoshop CS image editing workstation? Sure, you can run XP SP2 with all UI effects turned off, but then you're looking at the Classic Windows UI -- in other words, like Win95. MacOS X running on a 6+ year old G4 looks like Vista. In fact, a mid-2001 500MHz G3 iBook with an even punier 8MB VRAM card can run OS X quite well, and the UI also looks like Vista -- not XP or Win95.

In my original post, I should have said Vista to begin with, since it's more comparable to OS X than XP is anyway.

Speaking of goalposts, Jim Allchin wrote Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates:

"I am not sure how the company last sight of what matters to our customers (both
business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams
lest sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean,
what security means, what performance means, how important current applications
are, and really understanding what the most important problems are customers face
are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn’t translate tnto great products.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. If you run the equivalent of VPC on a MAC you get access to basically all Windows application software (although not the hardware). Apple did not lose their way."

See http://tinyurl.com/y4rhjk

So, here's the head of the Vista team talking about buying a Mac. Now that Macs can run Windows natively, that's not really saying much -- but he wrote it in 2004, when Macs weren't even shipping with Intel processors.

And as for "Steve having 5% of the market" -- that 5% includes Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web on NeXTSTEP -- forerunner of MacOS X -- in 1990. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

We can keep this pissing match going if you'd like, but since I've been citing sources instead of relying only on my anecdotal experience, perhaps you could do the same?

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Mathew Ingram — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 16:31:32 -0000

I would agree about the a**hole thing, Victor. And the only reason Steve gets away with it and Bill doesn't is that Steve only has 5 per cent of the market and Bill has 95.

But back to the pissing match: You said that XP was "unusable on a PC of that vintage," but I proved you wrong -- and now you're arguing that it wouldn't run Vista. That's called moving the goalposts :-)

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Victor Panlilio — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 15:26:16 -0000

Just thought I'd repeat something I said to my colleagues early last week -- both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are a**holes, but in different ways. Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org site has plenty of background information, here are two great examples from 1981 and 1983:

http://tinyurl.com/y3grlw
http://tinyurl.com/y2oa4r

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Victor Panlilio — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 15:16:26 -0000

Matt Hendry wrote: "Mac users tend to forget that the Mac OS is only installed on about 10% of computers in the world so that means less than 10% of virus and malware coders are even bothered with the platform"

Ah, so following your reasoning, the average user should automatically prefer the platform that is more frequently targeted by cyber criminals? Isn't' that sort of like saying "Eat at Joe's Diner -- a million flies can't be wrong!"? :-)

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Victor Panlilio — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 15:05:47 -0000

"I have a six-year-old Acer that runs XP just fine" -- XP does not draw doule-buffered windows, unlike MacOS X, which is doing much more in its UI layer (think Vista), and although my 6+year old G4 only has a 16MB ATI Rage128, it can display most of the UI effects in OS X. Can your 6 year old Acer run Vista? I didn't think so. In other words, it can't do Expose, Widgets, etc. Listen, if you have extensive cross-platform experience, as I do, we'll have a geek pissing match. Otherwise, don't even try to impress me with your Windows-only experience, okay? I have a Dell PowerEdge server running Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition too -- but I control it remotely from a Mac running OS X. And since Macs now run on Intel Core CPU's, they can run just about any x86 operating system natively or in a virtual machine. Got that? Good.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Matt Hendry — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 12:01:06 -0000

Mac users tend to forget that the Mac OS is only installed on about 10% of computers in the world so that means less than 10% of virus and malware coders are even bothered with the platform .

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Mathew Ingram — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 11:48:28 -0000

You had me right up until the end there, Victor. Much as I hate to get into a geek pissing match (aw, who am I kidding -- I love geek pissing matches) I have a six-year-old Acer that runs XP just fine, and is connected to the Internet 24/7, and apart from running Spybot now and then I have had no issues with it whatsoever.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Victor Panlilio — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 11:42:21 -0000

“Apples never break or get viruses” is a conflation of two separate ideas, both based on partial misunderstandings. Let's take the first idea -- that Apples never break. Obviously not true. Or how about "Never get viruses" -- malware exists to exploit vulnerabilities in MacOS X, but in practical terms, the risk profile is much lower (I have no antivirus software on any of my MacOS X boxes, which are all connected to the Internet, some 24/7). As for repairs taking much longer to fix, it depends on what breaks and where you live. The hard drive in my primary Apple notebook died in July 2005 and was replaced by a local Apple dealer within a day; the labor cost $85. When I had to replace a dead hard drive under warranty in a Dell tower PC, it took Dell 2 days just to get me the required part. I have a 6+ year old 400MHz Mac G4 that runs OS X perfectly well. XP is unusable on a PC of that vintage.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Mathew Ingram — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 11:17:28 -0000

Sorry to disappoint you, Victor -- I only brought up the "Apples never break or get viruses" idea because I continue to hear it from people I know who are enticed into buying Apple computers for that very reason.

I'm willing to take your word for the fact that Apples are generally more reliable than Windows machines (although I have had three Windows machines for more than three years and have had virtually no serious issues, either hardware or virus-related).

But I would argue that it's also true that when something does go wrong with a Mac, it takes a lot longer to fix and is more expensive, which is something many people don't realize when they buy one.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Matt Hendry — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 09:33:25 -0000

If you want a phone thats just a phone you dont need a IPhone you need a Tracphone ;)

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Paul — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 06:20:22 -0000

What is all this fuss about closed systems/open systems?

Just look at the gaming market. Think anyone can develop on a Playstation? No. You have to go through Sony. Can anyone just create (legally) apps that run on the Xbox? No. Can you play a Zelda game on anything but a Nintendo console?

Yet, no one seems to say how the console market is doomed to failure or lacking in innovation because of its closed nature.

There are pros and cons to work - being one or the other does not predict nor guarantee failure. Because in the end, execution and consumer value is what determines whether a closed or open system will succeed or fail . Nothing more, nothing less.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Joe — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 02:58:17 -0000

What was that website for bloggers that Winer decided to shutdown without notice because he got tired of maintaining it? And how is it that with Winer at the RSS development helm we ended up with 3 different standards for doing simple newsfeeds?

Winer's a great guy, and a visionary. But I'm going to stick with Steve Jobs who designs things to just work. (No, Jobs isn't perfect either.) I don't want a phone I can hack, I just want one that works like the demo and won't require me to spend a weekend reading a manual. Which is what most people want. And most of us don't care to edit MS Word documents while driving down the highway either.

I do think that Linux phone is a great idea. If Apple wasn't coming out with the iPhone I would probably be buying it. For those of you who do buy it be thankful that Dave Winer was not involved with its development, because unlike Jobs he's wrong more than he's right.

Re: Thanks be to Steve for locking us in

Victor Panlilio — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 02:00:40 -0000

No computer is perfect, but as the owner of of Dell, Toshiba, and Apple computers, I must say that Apple's hardware in general tends to be more reliable, and the stats of Consumer Reports support my personal experience. Matthew's citation of "Macs never break and never get viruses and never do anything bad” is known as a straw man argument, and it does him no credit whatsoever to use this kind of shallow reasoning amongst educated readers. Oh, and people -- I've deployed hundreds of Dell and Toshiba PCs in large corporations, so I might know a little bit about hardware quality, but don't let that stop you from treating my observations as the delusion of an Apple fanboi. You're all so much wiser and experienced than I am, after all.