I grew up in rural Nebraska, where most of the country roads are fairly well maintained. Despite this, there are cars on the market that are horribly suited to driving on many of these roads, especially during the rainy season when deep ruts form, and thereafter when the ruts harden.
Far away from this setting, in the more urban environments, there is a phenomenon where consumers take vehicles - even those that might otherwise be suitable for these roads - and they modify them to make them exceedingly unfit by lowering the suspension. It has been going on for so long that the song "Low Rider" by the band War is used as a cliched reference to the 70s.
I know of someone, in the 2000s, who had a terrible time finding an apartment because his Jetta, modified at great expense, couldn't survive an apartment with speed-bumps in the parking lot. Not long afterward, he totaled his car - going over a speed bump he did not see.
At the other end of the suspension-spectrum we have millions of SUVs on the road, many of them capable of taking all manner of abuse, only to be driven exclusively on concrete to tame destinations like grocery stores and shopping malls. These vehicles are a suburban male peacock display: the suspension serves no function other than to signal virility.
I'm not trying to extend the analogy by mentioning any of this. But I do think that if we're looking to the automobile industry for guidance we should probably take note of the diversity and realize that there's probably room in the mobile computer space for devices without Flash.
If the iCar is truly revolutionary (for instance, it can guarantee you will NEVER get into a fatal car accident) then I'd say the "full road" is a small sacrifice.
People who want the full road can still buy traditional cars, right?
The iCar might rely on special features in the full roads to provide some level of automated steering.
I've considered some passive "beacons", shaped as nails, to be placed in roads, that can outline the lanes, complete with information about direction, speed-limits, exits etc. A smart car should be able to use those, along with a (ra|li)dar, to provide automated steering on equipped roads.
I know the author's intent is to weaken Jobs' arguments, but to me he seems to strengthen them. The vast majority of people driving cars never need to drive on country roads. Anyone that needs to drive on country roads is by no means forced to drive an iCar - they are free to choose whatever car they want.
Which is why I choose not to buy an iPhone or an iPad. When someone complains about an inadequacy of a product and you replay that they should buy something else, you are missing the point. The ability to buy a real car, does not make an iCar useful.
Many, many people live in areas where they could get away with using public transit only, most of them still own cars because sometimes they still need or want them. Only I can know whether I need to drive on gravel roads, and even I won't know whether I will need to in the future.
If I think Flash is a nuisance, (and I do) I am free to avoid it. But I don't want Steve Jobs or any company making such decisions for me. Jobs is free to sell his phones with whatever policy he wants, and I'm free to think that he sucks for it.
"Vast majority" and "never" are extremely strong qualifiers. It must be nice living in a world where everything is constant and optimum. Granted, nobody is made to drive an iCar. But every so often, you are probably going to need a real car not designed for fantasyland.
Part of this is just a failing of the analogy; Apple has much tighter control over their platform than they ever could over roads networks.
certainly but the question is does the limitation arise from a legitimate technical limitation, or because apple has shorted the country real estate market?
I like the parody but it's not really a fair comparison. In many cases paved roads evolve out of country roads while nothing can ever evolve out of Flash.
Of course no analogy is perfect, but I fail to see the relevance of your point. Country roads can evolve into paved roads and content that is currently coded in Flash can evolve into content that is coded in HTML5.
But today, when I want to turn on to a country road / visit a site with Flash, the iCar / iPad won't let me. I, as a consumer, don't care what that ugly/bumpy thing might evolve into. I care whether I can access it right now.
By the way, I own both an iPhone and an iPad, and I like them. It's just that sometimes I wish I could drive them onto "bumpy roads".
Well, you could also say lots has evolved out of Flash. Quick casual games, fast playing video, micro vector and raster content, experimentation and lots of Flash developers use lots of mathematics (trig, calculus) to make excellent graphic and effects libraries. I think every technology has had something to add in our trial and error machine including Flash.
Flash developers are unique people as well because it is a unique tool that merges code and design. Try Neave out if you haven't: http://www.neave.com/ Flash Earth, planetarium, the rebirth of slick. This stuff won't be cross browser in html5 for years, especially webcam, mic projects.
This work is being reimplemented in html5/canvas/svg and it has added benefits.
Having biked 5073 miles across the country in question on many of those country roads, I can say that they tend to have a certain 'rustic charm' despite all the bumps. The same could be said of Flash content on the web, in 2020. Do we really just want to throw all that content in the trash, never to be viewed or interacted with again?
I think the parody helps people think a bit more about the issue.
The problem with the analogy is that all Apple has to do to allow the iCar to run on country roads, is allow people to steer onto it. To get flash onto the iPhone/iPad, they have to allow a completely different development team to run code on the root user of their device. They would have to change the OS, to allow unproven code to run, from a company who can't even get the desktop version to work well.
Very 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 to google and some fancy voice technology they built. I'm sure as a driver you'd like to see it, but you'll just have to stick to our roads and roads that don't compete with us on any level.
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.
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 know that eating some foods will increase the probability that the suite will be soiled, and, I want to be allowed to make the decision whether or not to take that risk.
This parody did more to convince me of Jobs' point of view than anything I've read so far. If my car were as impressive an improvement over the status quo car as the iPhone is over the phone, I'd gladly give up the ability to drive on rural roads.
That's ridiculous. The iPhone was a huge improvement over the status quo, but there are plenty of phones today that are comparable, if not better.
All of the goals Jobs mentioned in the article could be achieved just as easily by imposing those restrictions on the App Store, but still allowing users to install apps on their own. Apple's policies are harmful to its users compared to the alternatives.
With that said, a car that couldn't drive on rural roads would make sense if it drove itself, but required infrastructure that wasn't universal.
I find the other extreme of this satire -- the idea that every car would have to be as fully capable as a military grade Hummer, to be far more off putting. The market will decide what it wants. Hopefully that includes a wide variety of options.
I'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 a "fallback" for Flash, surely paving is a fallback for country roads. I mean, sure, it's nontrivial to change any nontrivial amount of existing work, but that's analogously true in both cases."
Ok, so you want someone else to decide what you can do with your car. Maybe you wouldn't mind if Apple stopped you from going to certain websites as well. Maybe if they blocked you from calling certain people, that would make life 'better' for you. Maybe you could get some isneakers, that only let you walk from your house to your car, or car to workplace?
I don't understand this point of view, you want less choice? Maybe you miss your mommy making decisions for you?
Weren't there adapters/peripherals so people who had floppy disks and monitors with serial ports could still use them?
(e.g. this one for floppy disks: http://www.jr.com/lacie/pe/LAC_706018)
That is, if you had a floppy disk that you had to read, there was a workaround, even if Macs stopped supporting them natively.
There is no adapter/peripheral/workaround to view some website with Flash that you want to view. (Unless you consider it a workaround to carry, alongside your iPad, a laptop so that you can view websites that haven't yet transitioned to HTML5)
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.
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.
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 CEO that Mac flash crashes are "to do with the Apple operating system" is complete and total nonsense (there's nothing in OS X that would cause Flash to be crashy, and the data supports the fact that it's bad on Windows as well).
I thought Hacker News readers were educated and intelligent but there are so many iTards it's not funny anymore. The Apple Cult ... is depressing. You are little ants who forgot what freedom means. Wake up guys ! Sorry to be harsh but I'm starting to be really angry I'm gonna stop reading anything about Apple/Adobe.
[+] [-] pohl|16 years ago|reply
Far away from this setting, in the more urban environments, there is a phenomenon where consumers take vehicles - even those that might otherwise be suitable for these roads - and they modify them to make them exceedingly unfit by lowering the suspension. It has been going on for so long that the song "Low Rider" by the band War is used as a cliched reference to the 70s.
I know of someone, in the 2000s, who had a terrible time finding an apartment because his Jetta, modified at great expense, couldn't survive an apartment with speed-bumps in the parking lot. Not long afterward, he totaled his car - going over a speed bump he did not see.
At the other end of the suspension-spectrum we have millions of SUVs on the road, many of them capable of taking all manner of abuse, only to be driven exclusively on concrete to tame destinations like grocery stores and shopping malls. These vehicles are a suburban male peacock display: the suspension serves no function other than to signal virility.
I'm not trying to extend the analogy by mentioning any of this. But I do think that if we're looking to the automobile industry for guidance we should probably take note of the diversity and realize that there's probably room in the mobile computer space for devices without Flash.
[+] [-] mathamagics|16 years ago|reply
People who want the full road can still buy traditional cars, right?
Vote with your dollar.
[+] [-] mseebach|16 years ago|reply
I've considered some passive "beacons", shaped as nails, to be placed in roads, that can outline the lanes, complete with information about direction, speed-limits, exits etc. A smart car should be able to use those, along with a (ra|li)dar, to provide automated steering on equipped roads.
[+] [-] huangm|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astine|16 years ago|reply
Many, many people live in areas where they could get away with using public transit only, most of them still own cars because sometimes they still need or want them. Only I can know whether I need to drive on gravel roads, and even I won't know whether I will need to in the future.
If I think Flash is a nuisance, (and I do) I am free to avoid it. But I don't want Steve Jobs or any company making such decisions for me. Jobs is free to sell his phones with whatever policy he wants, and I'm free to think that he sucks for it.
[+] [-] i80and|16 years ago|reply
Part of this is just a failing of the analogy; Apple has much tighter control over their platform than they ever could over roads networks.
[+] [-] spot|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] th|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sendos|16 years ago|reply
But today, when I want to turn on to a country road / visit a site with Flash, the iCar / iPad won't let me. I, as a consumer, don't care what that ugly/bumpy thing might evolve into. I care whether I can access it right now.
By the way, I own both an iPhone and an iPad, and I like them. It's just that sometimes I wish I could drive them onto "bumpy roads".
[+] [-] crux_|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|16 years ago|reply
Flash developers are unique people as well because it is a unique tool that merges code and design. Try Neave out if you haven't: http://www.neave.com/ Flash Earth, planetarium, the rebirth of slick. This stuff won't be cross browser in html5 for years, especially webcam, mic projects.
This work is being reimplemented in html5/canvas/svg and it has added benefits.
[+] [-] Qz|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|16 years ago|reply
The problem with the analogy is that all Apple has to do to allow the iCar to run on country roads, is allow people to steer onto it. To get flash onto the iPhone/iPad, they have to allow a completely different development team to run code on the root user of their device. They would have to change the OS, to allow unproven code to run, from a company who can't even get the desktop version to work well.
[+] [-] ANH|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedalpete|16 years ago|reply
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 to google and some fancy voice technology they built. I'm sure as a driver you'd like to see it, but you'll just have to stick to our roads and roads that don't compete with us on any level.
[+] [-] pohl|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sendos|16 years ago|reply
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 know that eating some foods will increase the probability that the suite will be soiled, and, I want to be allowed to make the decision whether or not to take that risk.
[+] [-] boredguy8|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natrius|16 years ago|reply
All of the goals Jobs mentioned in the article could be achieved just as easily by imposing those restrictions on the App Store, but still allowing users to install apps on their own. Apple's policies are harmful to its users compared to the alternatives.
With that said, a car that couldn't drive on rural roads would make sense if it drove itself, but required infrastructure that wasn't universal.
[+] [-] jsz0|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waxman|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Qz|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manish|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frisco|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barredo|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chc|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biafra|16 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bkorte|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|16 years ago|reply
I don't understand this point of view, you want less choice? Maybe you miss your mommy making decisions for you?
[+] [-] sambeau|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ahoyhere|16 years ago|reply
And OS 9.
And built-in modems.
Surprisingly, nobody misses them.
Yawn. More histrionic nerd-posturing. It will be forgotten soon enough.
[+] [-] sendos|16 years ago|reply
That is, if you had a floppy disk that you had to read, there was a workaround, even if Macs stopped supporting them natively.
There is no adapter/peripheral/workaround to view some website with Flash that you want to view. (Unless you consider it a workaround to carry, alongside your iPad, a laptop so that you can view websites that haven't yet transitioned to HTML5)
[+] [-] rit|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euroclydon|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalore|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CamperBob|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] archgrove|16 years ago|reply
The claim by the Adobe CEO that Mac flash crashes are "to do with the Apple operating system" is complete and total nonsense (there's nothing in OS X that would cause Flash to be crashy, and the data supports the fact that it's bad on Windows as well).
[+] [-] pohl|16 years ago|reply
I have never needed to install a flash plugin on a Mac.
[+] [-] jsz0|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Qz|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveklabnik|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bsergean|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|16 years ago|reply