Thumbs

Try using your opposable thumb - it's the same method that the rest of us use to hold books, laptops and other flat objects. If you practice long enough, picking up and holding objects becomes second nature. Try it, it's easy.

Missing the point somewhat?

They're not protesting about the price tag, they're protesting about the old OSS saying 'free as in free speech', not 'free as in free beer' (which would be nice also.)

You don't purchase the iPad or iPhone from Apple, you pay them for permission to use it. They maintain control over the device, and can as has been found on the iPhone, can remotely decide what you do with it.

i.e. you're sure "that the iPad will play your DRM-less MP3 or Oggs", but the point is that if it doesn't, it's down to Apple whether you can add that functionality, not the "owner" of the device.

It's the sole reason I will never own an iPad/iPhone, and personally I think people who pay what is an excessive amount of money for that "privilege" are idiots.

Spoken like a chinese citizen

When asked in a survey 80+ % of Chinese citizens feel that the state operated "Great firewall of China" is perfectly O.K. most stating that the only purpose it serves is to filter "harmful filth" that runs rampant through the rest of the world.

And you sir, with the statement above sound just like the poor brainwashed souls that are victim to state ran censorship...

Please sir, put down the cup of "St. Steve's Holy Tea" and seek help at once...

Try this...

I say xyz old boy i have found this natty .mp3 ditty on the jolly old interweb, just the ticket for an humourous ring tone on the old eyepone eh.

Here, have it by bluetooth... you cant? for why old boy... Steve says you cant have it because its not via eyetunes. Well its your 'choice' old bean.

"freely produced stuff just doesn't measure up"

www.bigbuckbunny.org - proof that Blender (freely available) is on par with stuff Pixar, ILM, and Dreamworks use.

www.gimp.org - proof that you don't need Photoshop to make great pictures.

www.openoffice.org - proof that you don't need Microsoft Office.

www.avast.com free.avg.com www.avira.com - Proof that you don't need Symantec or McAfee, but if you want to pay for all the bells and whistles, they have options for that too. (Avast's boot-time scan has saved many people I know from root-kit infections while Norton and McAfee can't even touch it.)

Need more examples? www.thefreecountry.com

oh... and btw, only Apple approved apps can be loaded on the iPad. It's just a giant iPhone without the phone functions. This means that you can't just install software like you could on a Macbook (or any other tablet PC on the market).

The point is that it's not free software that's the problem. The problem is that the platform is so restrictive as to make it not near as useful as a lower cost Asus EEE T91 (that's the tablet version in case you don't know... go look it up... it even has a real keyboard and USB ports for copying files over without having to dock it to another computer) for example.

oh... and the iPad won't play flash content. sorry, all that user created (and corporate created for that matter) stuff in flash is off limits to iPad users. And then it's not a real computer but a proprietary system on chip device more like the iPods so calling it a tablet PC is a misnomer. It's not a computer, but a multimedia viewing device with certain limitations, or a grown up iPod. But it's nowhere near a full blown computer. Just another restrictive device that wants you to think it's a computer.

Foolish and weak?

Kinda like those people that have the pathological compulsion to buy anything bearing the image of a pale piece of fruit, simply because it's there?

I grant you, Apple devotees choose to be restricted like cattle, because that's their choice to make, but the fact that such a fluff novelty device (essentially chav kit) is treated like God in a Box makes me sick to my stomach. iSlaves make Scientologists look normal.

Arise...

Robert Hill, King of the Proprietards!

Many people who have developed things of note also happen to be against vendor lock-down: not everyone producing software or content has some kind of remuneration entitlement complex escalating to a full-blown desire to minutely control every aspect of "the experience" that their oh-so-precious work supposedly demands. To imply that only control freaks and multiple dippers cut from the cloth of the likes of Cliff "royalties in perpetuity" Richard are the only "people who can create and can produce" is absurd and wrong, possibly suggesting an unhealthy level of cultural and corporate indoctrination sadly prevalent in many Britards these days.

Aside from the very fact that people pay good money for devices and should reasonably expect to control what they do - they are, after all, the customer's property - and not have to brush up against corporate legislation which attempts to criminalise someone for merely trying to control how their own property is used, it doesn't serve society to have lots of closed devices for whom support will be discontinued by the manufacturer when they decide that everyone must upgrade, thus resulting in these devices being thrown away in favour of the "new shiny" being peddled by the corporate overlords, who have, of course, offshored manufacturing to a place where the environmental costs are unlikely to have been priced in.

Foolish and weak, indeed. By failing or refusing to understand distinctions between gratis and freedom, you look foolish, King Robert, and by failing to imagine that anything other than that pushed at you through the usual mainstream "big label must be good" channels could have merit in its own right, you look weak. You may now drink from the royal well of fail!

flash

joecartoon.com

Free /= free

You have to know that they are talking about Free Software-not free software.

Quoting from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html :

"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer."

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

* The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

AC 22:16

> Naysayers the lot of you.

I bet you think that the climate change industry is about science not profit & taxation don't you?

And I value quality

and that is why I do.

Welcome to Oceania

> Please don't tell me you use winblows then?

The "music related" things you want to do aren't available in the type of Apple product we're talking about right here and right now. That's rather the point. This new generation of Apple devices is locked down to the point of being unusable to anyone but a "mere consumer". Even a "power consumer" doesn't have any means of controlling their experience.

If this is the future of Apple then you really don't have any choice.

It's either Windows or Linux for you. Like it or not.

Realignment with reality

"Who the fuck do you think kept Apple alive through their dark days in the mid 90s?"

Microsoft. They invested in Apple in order to sustain the illusion that they had independent competition in the retail computing marketplace and weren't by any means a monopoly, and they continued producing Office for Mac - a product whose absence would have devastated Apple's sales since all you "creative types" apparently couldn't manage without it. Certainly all those "Johnny-come-lately" types really wanted something that ran Office.

But yes, Apple's a consumer electronics firm now: peddler of "fruit-themed toys" is how they put it in The Inquirer.

Macs cure cancer, make people noble...

>>Macs are used by people who have infinitely more capacity for imaginative thought than MOST winddozzze box luser types.

They are all Scientology-approved types, I reckon.

MActard alert!!!

The poor widdle mac user is upset.

The wonks who use macs, the supposedly creative types are just to stupid to own a real computer, as

your post so aptly demonstrates.

I rekon you should get a mac laptop, it wouldnt need a battery charger, you could power it with your own sense of self impotance

lol

I'm a real techie - that's the reason I don't want to HAVE to fanny about on my computer when I get home. I want it to work!

Apart from programming, I want to do some music-related things too.

So, not too stupid to own a "real computer" but too intelligent to put up with any more MS bullshit.

I reckon you probably don't need a battery charger either - you could power it from your own ignorance.

err...

I think it was more a reference to a comedy program on the tellybox where dom jolly would stand up with a massive mobile phone and bellow HELLO at it rather than a dig at an extremely serious disease that the poor man suffered from. In this way the original poster has, quite subtly in my view, made reference to the various comments circulating the 'tubes about it being very much akin to a huge iphone, although by laboriously explaining this for your benefit it I fear I have shat on whatever comedy remained.

Try and keep up in future to avoid these predicaments.