They're laughing because you're trolling hard based on nothing more than cynicism.

You see one product line and assume that all product lines are going that way. There's no rationale behind your assumption, you're just waving your hands and hoping people are too distracted by the movements to notice that you're just making stuff up.

What happened to /. ? I started reading around the 200K user ID mark (didn't register for another 600K) and somewhere around 1M it went to trolling hell. It used to be just GNAA trolling and abuse trolls. Now it's flavour-of-the-month trolling. This month, it's cool to hate Apple. You'll get easy mod points. Last month it was Microsoft. Next month... maybe back to Microsoft, or keep flaming Apple? So many choices, so few intelligent comments.

If you want to spend all your days keeping your machines working, go nuts. I did that in the 80s (when some of us soldered the damn things together as the first step), I kept Windows and MacOS running in the 90s and I keep them running well today. I don't feel that system maintenance is worth any of my time whatsoever.

Apple are offering something new. Why not talk about where that can go, or better yet, leave Apple out of the equation (which is easy with all their screw-ups) and think about new ways to use computers. Too many /.'ers just can't think of anything outside their little box of "but this is how I've always done it" and damn but that's sad.

I think it's time to drop /. from my bookmarks. Other sites present better, more informed discussions with better moderation of trolls. Other sites present the news earlier, and actually give an article instead of a link.

This place is dead to me now. It's all bitching and no substance, and the trolls are modded up when they say nothing at all.

Good for you, it's great that some people can afford to give so much to the community at large.

I actually do mean that - it's a great thing to write something, get it out there and see others take it up.

It helps me overlook your insultingly stupid comment about me being brainwashed merely because my opinion differs from yours.

My issue comes from those that choose to sell their work. They should have every right to do so if they choose, and not caring if their copyrights are violated (ie their work is pirated) deprives them of that right, and possibly their living. That's not reasonable, not moral and not legal. The last may not be the biggest concern (given the risk of being caught is so tiny), but the other two should be.

Your rights end where the rights of others begin. I believe this to be an absolute truth, and that this should always be the case.

I'm not trying to stop anyone, and neither do I want to. I'm just saying that people who believe they have the right to do anything must realise their rights end where someone else's begin.

I can't see why people react as though that's unreasonable. I suspect most of you are reading my post as though I'm some totalitarian supporter of current copyright laws. I'm not. I'd love to see laws changed dramatically, so that a reasonable maximum period exists (ten years?) and cannot be extended.

Until laws are changed, people who act against them are taking a risk. It's a small risk, yes, but it's still a risk and can result in them being toally screwed over by some huge corporation, who'll write off their expenses a trivial, while the little guy has to sell their house.

It's the old sense of the word, not the new one.

What? Slashdotters are now ashamed to be called "hackers?" Have all the neckbeards shaved?

Giving the "no true Scotsman" line a run, eh?

Good trolling there.

You deserve to be modded down for that tripe.

Bootcamp exists only to help Windows play nicely with an installed OS X. You can simply erase the hard drive and install either Windows or Linux as a fresh install and never touch Apple software again.

The rest of your post is just inane trolling, and not worth commenting.

It's not really accurate to call Apple a computer company anymore...

Absolute rubbish. Total tosh of the highest quality.

Of course Apple are a computer company. Everything they do has its roots in computing.

I can understand the anti-Apple stance taken by a lot of /. posters, but you're starting to wander into total fantasy now.

Not a fast one at all, I'm just showing how your absolutism fails with a trivial example. People who talk in absolutes generally fail pretty badly.

You don't care if someone's copyrights are violated? Well, people who create nothing of value generally don't care about copyright. Perhaps you're one of them.

unless Apple's insidious plan involves breaking into people's homes and replacing their gear with free iPads...

Those bastards!

Extreme example shows the logical flaw: You buy a gun. You simply cannot do anything you like with it.

Okay, so now we're into the world of laws and rights, aka the real world.

You're talking about computers? Well, I can easily build a page turner for a shop-bought scanner, and set up a book scanning service. From there I can use OCR and finally distribute the resulting text files around the world.

Do you believe your rights extend that far?

You never had the freedom to do anything you liked with anything you owned. Ever. When you start to impinge upon the rights of others, your freedom ends.

Focus on the reality, not this hand-waving "I should be able to do anything!" crap. You never could, and never will.

Safari is not a real web browser now?

Oh, you meant Flash! Shame you didn't say what you meant, leaving your post as another "I don't understand" failure.

iPad is supposed to be a computer/tablet pc

No it is not. You want it to be, but your wants are irrelevant.

It's an appliance. Like the XBox360, a microwave oven or a clock radio. It's an information appliance.

You are confused on this. Think about it for a bit longer.

So your position is that the iPad is a general purpose computer then?

It's an appliance. Think about that for a bit. What works for appliances does not necessarily work for general purpose computers. Appliances (eg iPhone, iPad, X-Box, PS3, toaster, microwave oven, clock radio, car) can be locked down because they're about doing a small set of tasks really well. The more control the better, in the sense that it allows the designers to focus on those tasks and only those tasks.

Locking down a general purpose computer makes no sense, as you cannot predict the tasks it'll be used for, so there's neither a point in trying to control its environment, nor in trying to control software distribution.

A lot of people are confused by the iPad and iPhone because they can be developed for. The tricky thing to understand is that these appliances allow a wide variety of applications to be run, but those apps are all about the appliance. They're games or information apps.

People on Slashdot have this blind spot with the iPad. They see the device, think "general purpose computer" and criticise it as such. I can't quite get my head around this way of thinking when the device is so clearly an appliance.

People are upset with Windows because while it is the market leader, everyone has a bunch of stories along the lines of "the computer just ." That's all pretty much historical though, as from about XP-SP2 on, Windows has been a pretty solid OS and since the much maligned (and unfairly, in my opinion) Vista, security has been pretty solid on Windows.

People are upset with IE because, while it is still the market leader (for now), there were too many years during which security allowed all sorts of atrocious things to happen, and Microsoft's reimplementation of standards, plus their opening up more programmability to IE (and thus fostering the creation of legions of websites that are IE-only) led to a general antipathy in tech-savvy users, which the /. crowd used to be. Again, this is largely historical, as the last few major released of IE have been pretty good and the push towards other browsers (ie Firefox) has spurred Microsoft to improve their product. IE today is pretty nice.

People around here are upset with Apple because they can deliver precisely what tech-savvy users want, but prefer to target the other 99.99% of the population instead. That leads to products people on /. criticise as too simplistic, too locked down, too controlled, but which are wildly successful among normal people. Readers here seem to hate that their personal needs aren't being met, and so rage against Apple.

Do you see a difference in the three, sopssa? I mean, we know you're either a Microsoft shill, or a rabid fan of theirs, but even you should be able to spot what's going on here.

So you think Apple would like to close of OS X if it could?

And based on what you think, everyone else should avoid Apple?

You're just another rabid Apple hater, one of so many. You'd prefer not to wait for the crime before you give the sentence.

Here's a clue for you, since you're so obviously in need of intellectual assistance - what works in one market segment may not work in another. I'll expand on that a bit, to help you out. For appliances like the iPod, iPhone and iPad, a closed environment seems to make sense. It provides a single, focused place for users to buy media and applications, and minimises risk to users online. For a general purpose computer, a closed environment makes little sense, as the use that people will put it to cannot be easily predicted and therefore no single storefront for media, apps, web doodads, etc can work.

Now when that sinks through your mind, you may understand why your post is based on nothing more than your own delusions.

I swear half the accounts on /. these days were purchased recently from eBay. There's such a lack of clarity in posts, such a lack of thinking that it makes me wonder. Or was it always this bad and I never noticed?