Posts by The Other Steve

I was been right

Lusers, PEBKAC ? GTFU. Users pay for you. Without them you are nothing.

"1. Been a geek is not what you do for living"

No one said it was.

"A geek does not accept been "forced in walled garden". "

Oh I don't know, I've been forced in walled gardens a few times and thoroughly enjoyed it. Sadly, they've cut the bushes down now.

"A geek breaks limitation. "

This is your first job out from school then ?

"If you let Steve tells you what you can and cannot do, you are a sheep, not a geek."

He phones me every day. But I regard them more as suggestions than, y'know, rules.

"2. Who said netbook has to run Windoes?"

No one.

"You load a good Linux distro, it has all the apps you need with a few mouse click"

No, it doesn't. Not by a long chalk. I need at least three OSes before I have anywhere close to "all the apps I need"

"100ish Gb hard drive is the bare low end these days."

I use SSD in /my/ net book.

"It is enough for general use."

No, no it isn't. For you it is, but not for me.

Well, I promised I'd show you mine, but I think just the tip, I don't want to traumatise you. A contract I worked on last year involved reverse engineering binary device drivers and my favourite hobby is classical cryptanalysis.

Breakin' enough restrictions for ya ?

Oh, and what's on my iPad right now ? Communications of the ACM and a shit load of PDFs about computational complexity metrics.

But don't tell anyone yeah ? It's our secret.

Nah

You really are just a hater.

Your brain hurts

"the claim that apple invented the tablet"

I don't think that anyone ever claimed that, but do feel free to prove me wrong.

"and revolutionised the whole thing"

Hmm. Total consumer tablet market pre iPad was what ? I mean it existed certainly, I personally own at least three from this era - then again, I don't easily fall into the 'consumer' demographic

Total consumer tablet sales post iPad are, well, Barclays Capital predict upwards of 15 Million units just of iPad sales by year end, and various sources predict somewhere upwards of 28 million sales in 2011. And that's just the iPad, add in the many other manufacturers rushing to market with Android or Windows based tablets, and that's a metric shitload.

And it's a market that simply wasn't there before.

"the inadequacies of the device compared with its cost.... some ipad owners even buy a case/keyboard combo, meaning they've spent more on their ipad + accessories than a reasonably netbook and can't do half of it.

I'm bored with this argument, it's fucking stupid and it isn't even logical. Apart from anything else it's rooted in envy, the price sensitivity whining always is. But aside from that it doesn't actually make any sense. Given the price premium (and it probably isn't as much as you think, but lets assume that it is for the sake of argument) do you honestly think that people would be prepared to pay it for a device that didn't fit their particular needs ?

What part of your brain has difficulty with the idea that people would be prepared to pay for a device that does some particular thing very well, but doesn't do others at all ? My bicycle isn't a jet ski.

What part of your brain has difficulty with the idea that people might own and use more than type of device ?

And lastly, STFU about your damn net book which can do everything. I have a net book, it even has a touch screen. I've hacked the fuck out if it to push it way past it's original capabilities. So the fuck what ? If you really can do everything you ever need to do on your net book then your computational needs are tiny. I couldn't manage my real day to day without the coterie of multi core boxen that live under my desk. Your requirements are yours, and yours alone.

But whatever. Calm the fuck down. Steve Jobs is not going to come round to your house and steal your precious net book, m'kay ?

Throw down your geekWang

Seriously, go on, tell us all what you do that makes you such an über geek. And after it turs out to be web design, I'll show you mine. And you'll cry.

Sunday's child is full of misdirected bile

So I think what you're basically saying here is that you can't have an iPad because your wife takes all your money and spends it on shoes ? Maybe you should go have your little envy tantrum at her instead.

If you have the balls, of course.

More like

http://attrition.org/postal/asshats/asshat.jpg

Here Me ROAR!

"Nothing to see here but "flat-earth" churnalism straight from Apple's PR machine ..."

Erm, no, the report was by a wall street firm, not Apple. If Apple wanted to wow us with their might sales projection, they'd show us some of their own don't you think ?

w@nkers ?

Speak for yourself, because you see :

"$500 for the latest apple toy, or help someone in need."

That might be an either/or for you, but my annual direct debit donations to just the Red Cross, never mind anyone else add up to way more than whatever $500 is in proper money.

Seriously, what is it with you asshats, iPad OR netbook. iPad OR give to charity. What a whining bunch of zero sum dickwads we seem to have collected.

Grow the fuck up and smell the coffee, Jackass.

Yes, the statement is very vague

"The target, is a market, what will probably represent virtually the entire internet-using public"

Virtually the entire internet using public will be using Android ? The hell you say !

Not to sane people it doesn't

"The offence should be committed when someone *acts on* information they were not supposed to have known"

No, the offence is clearly defined (why do I have to keep repeating this every time a CMA story comes along) by S1 of the CMA. You don't get to break the law and then say "no harm, no foul", it doesn't - and shouldn't - work like that.

For the hard of thinking, the offence was not "looking at the data", but breaching the CMA in getting access to the data to look at in the first place, m'kay ?

Wow, it must be hard being you

"these devs are chip chip chipping away looking for revenue based on selling databases of personal information, esp in the mobile sphere"

Yes, and after that we're coming for your children. Then your pets.

You have a choice, you can have free stuff and give up some private data. Or you can pay for shit.

That's what it amounts to in crude economic terms. Facebook (e.g.) sells your data because you don't pay them. Period.

Ouch

"Err , no - a MAC address is not unique - I have three PCs and an ADSL modem, all with the same MAC address"

Erm, your network is broken.

RE : Too much API

"You can't serve sidebar ads as a seperate API service, as no API client is going to deliver that content to the user anyway, "

Well you can try by simply enforcing at the API level that you must pull the promoted tweets stream every x number of requests, and by banning any appication that it turns out isn't showing the promoted material.

Or, since client apps are being encouraged to move to the streaming API in any case , you can ...

"which leaves you with having to serve commercialised content direct into the feeds / timelines themselves."

...do exactly that, yes, but since you are in control of what goes into the stream, you can make sure that only client apps get this. Again, you can ban the fuck out of any client app that doesn't play nice with your rules, assuming you can see it, obviously. Each client app has it's own ID in order to work with oAuth, BTW, so banning a client app is trivial once you know it's a rouge.

Speculation on my part, of course.

"I can't see what Twitter has which it CAN commercialise? ... Or am I missing something?"

Yes. Think real time marketing and trend analytics, especially with the roll out of the t.co URL shortening service which will most likely eventually move all clickthrough stats in house. Think influence marketing, think subliminal marketing, think astroturfing.

How much, for instance, do you think certain parties (ad firms, political parties, etc) would be willing to pay for access to (or more likely leased usage of a service based on) k shell decomposition data for the entire twitter social graph ?

You can get some bits of this now if you plug in to the 'firehose' (near) real time stream, which is not free. As indeed Google and MS have done to include tweets in their search offerings.

And once you're plugged into the hosebird, you can of course crunchify the data any which way you see fit.

Meds

"I think you forgot to take to two little yellow pills this morning."

Au contraire, mon ami, I took four. Everything now has a nice yellow tinge to it.

RE So don't quote them

No, no, that's the sensible adult way. The freetard way is to stomp your little feet, spit out your dummy and DEMAND your RIGHT to freely take other peoples stuff. For bonus points you can do this while rabidly insisting that the copyrights enforcing the GPL are absolutely sacrosanct.

+1 for reading paper

Unlike most of the commentaries so far.

In other words, nothing but prejudice

Fail.

Which ...

"Trying to do your day to day on an iPad is like living in North Korea."

... is precisely why you aren't supposed to.

And I don't about you, but I'm pretty sure my iPad isn't starving its citizens to death, trying to develop nuclear weapons or torpedoing foreign shipping in blatant acts of war. YMMV, apparently.

Open as in not open

"Open as in "you are not locked down""

That's right, instead of 'Jailbreaking' your droid phone, which involves exploiting a security vulnerability to bypass the restrictions, you 'root it, which involves exploiting a security vulnerability to bypass ... oh no, wait.

RE: Who cares if open means open anymore

"You can't choose which brand or platform to monetize with simply based on it's openness. Consumers don't care about openness, they just want the next fad."

That's easy for you to say, since you are obviously sane. You have forgotten that the "free and open" crowd are not sane, and do not want you to monetize anything. Unless you're Redhat, for some reason.

"Only the geek minority care about such things."

In fact it's actually a (vocal) minority of the geek minority, grown up sensible people just care if shit works the way it is supposed to, and don't mind paying for things.

There also seems to be a growing minority of actual consumers (the gen Y entitle-tards) who insist on banging the "FREE! OPEN!" drum without actually having a solid understanding of what any of it means. Mostly they just like free stuff - because the internet teaches them that everything is free - and they genuinely don't appear to understand that big corps exist for the single reason of making cash.

Google - who as was pointed out above are first and foremost a marketing shop - know this, and it is most likely this demograph as well the more ill informed of the geek boys that they are targeting with all their cheerleading of their ill defines (and illusory) openness.

Android for instance is open to precisely one group of people. Cell carriers. And yet the droid fanbois exist in droves, all singing from the "Google is open" hymn sheet. And these people call out Apple users for being sheep. Curious.