Posts by Hipsterina 25 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Sep 2014
"They stitch you up with eBay fees and gouge you again by taking a cut from PayPal. Avoid this tat bazaar."
Yes.
Just like anyone stitches you up by advertising services with associated costs, and punters say yes, take the services and the costs and feel well and truly stitched up.
Every service should be cost free. Obviously.
I'm sure that whatever you do, you do for no charge. I'm sure that you wouldn't stitch anyone up and then gouge them by charging anything for whatever you provide.
"Then would you mind awfully explaining why you and your peers insist on telling us, over and over and over and over again, at tedious fucking length, how much you "don't care what others think" every bloody time there's a news story about Apple?"
Because the funniest thing about Apple flaunters is their conspicuous flauntiness.
And it's hilarious.
Remember those oh-so-coolsters who flaunted shell-suits a few years ago, while others sniggered at their flauntiness?
Don't begrudge those who aren't hipsters their moments of mirth.
'There is no charge to the user.
The "charge" is paid by the merchant processor, who is already charging the merchant about 2.5% of your purchase price.'
And the funding comes from a coffee-break whip-round amongst employees, topped up by generous donations by shareholders?
Well, that's much more enlightened than the usual practice of adding any charges straight onto the amounts charged to punters.
"And what would be the benefit to Apple in any case? There's nothing in it for them to track the kind of purchases that you make."
Have your eyes been averted as the payments made by Shhhh-secret-squirrel agencies to those who help feed their data lust have been revealed?
And Apple just says, "Yessir, MyPleasureSir", when everyone else is getting cash for "private citizens' data"?
is a small, slim, last-several-days-battery, trouserpocket-without-bulges phone,
and a tablet-like, decent-screen device, with real keyboard-on-demand,
and a large-screen (real / virtual / projected / unrollable-from-rice-paper-thin, blemish-and-smear-free, stuff-in-your-pocket polymer film - not too picky, any such variant will do)
with a proper, human-finger-sized, tactile-clicky enough keyboard,
with good-graphics for photo / video editing and gaming,
and enough compute power for all the above,
and high-speed, low-cost network connectivity,
and defeat-all snoopy-spying seedy-government-and-seedy-commerce-agency encryption,
for, say, 100 dollars / pounds / Euros.
A few years, then maybe.
Meanwhile, I have to make do with expensive, underpowered, overpriced iShit, And-shit, Win-shit (not even any Lin-shit available, so leave that out).
Thankfully, although I've had a geeky life for, hmmm, 40-plus years, mainframe manufacturer to micro hobbyist, Sinclair-to-Sun-to-Cray, Wordpress to Drupal (bypassing kiddy-fads of Facebook, Twitter, Snapcrap, tomorrow's 'App'), emacs-to-APL, Lisp-to-Smalltalk to Assembler (Z80, 360/370/XA (IPL sequences and channel programs along the way), Sparc... BBCX-circa-1971(!)), Slackware-to-Suse-to-Debian/Ubuntu, via UTS, MVS/VM, TSO/CMS, crap web-and-domain-hosting (and some less crap), AWS/EC2...
... there are things other than today's early-evolution compustuff to ponder. The meaning of life, Buddha to (Douglas) Adams via Aristotle and Descartes. Bach to Beethoven to Beetles to Abba. Glenn Gould. Dickens to Murakami. Hesse (Herman), Tolkien, Marquez. Bertand Russell. Sartre. 100 others. 1,000 to discover. Turner. Caravaggio. Van Gogh.
And, with such choice and so few years to explore, the crappy limitedness of current computing can safely be left to provide amusement and distraction as it struggles out of its primeval swamp days that we are privileged or, at least, amused, to observe. Let's just not take it too seriously if we have broader horizons, as many of us do.
It would be good, though trivial in the scheme of things, if, when AI passes human intelligence it finds a place for us to still enjoy ourselves. Maybe in an Iain M. Banksian future we can coexist.
Until then, if a few folks want to 'High Five' and 'Whoop, whoop!' every September in shiny-glass shops, it is no different, in essence, from woad-painted ancestors or Wicker Man allegories. If others want to celebrate 'daisy-cutter' isobaric bomb barbarities, 'water-boarding', beheading, in ways that would do medieval witchfinder ancestors proud, such has always been the way of the followers.
But the wonder of humanity is that it has produced forward thinkers. And practical do-ers. From cave-men to Christ. Anonymous Mr. Smiths and Mrs Joneses from down the road. The Jobses, jobs-worths, Gateses, the Kate Mosses and Moss Brosses, they, we, have their, our, little roles to play as transient incarnations of the universe's molecules briefly align to make us, a dinosaur, a distant supernova, a tadpole, a virus, a piece of chalk or a piece of piss.
Until our time is gone, when we are not doing significant things, why not squander jus a few of our precious moments on iStuff, Moto-thises, Sam-thats, Goog-the-others.
And raise a glass to humanity and other sentient beings: God bless us, every one.
And let us remember that we are not defined by this season's anything-but-smart 'phones.
'Hmm, buying an Android phone somehow gives you "different" status?
You are indeed different, and in need of some remedial math.'
If you look carefully you will see that buying an Android phone gives you a very wide choice, including of size, price, style, manufacturer.
Spot the difference now? The difference between being able to think differently and 'think different' (Jobsian Newspeak for all think the same).
Remedial maths, anyone?
Remedial spelling?
"If the web site outages are not part of some marketing scheme then they truly have poor engineers working in Cupertino to have such access issues time after time, year after year."
Poor engineers, likely. Products way below what they're cracked up to be, as any actual engineer quickly detects.
But marketing scheme? Yes.
A vast underground Orc-dom of marketbois selling Emperor's New Clothes for all they're worth. Which isn't a lot, actually.
If 'Apple Watch' is really the best hipster name that fruity firm can come up with these days it's slipped way down into middle-aged bean-countery corporatehood.
Bor-ing.
Maybe someone here could have helped choose a name?
iPod Nano Strappy?
"Apple is more fashion than function. The Jordache jeans of the tech world where you pay a premium for a name and little else."
Except...
You can enjoy Jordache jeans without paying a penny using only your eyes: they're often close to a very attractive arse.
With Apple:
(i) you pay through the nose;
(ii) the proximal arse is rarely attractive, though often smirk-worthy.
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