No generics. Less speed than C. Lame.
And for those who missed my attempt at humor: http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...
You, sir, are a risk taker. Kudos.
That said, it's fun to read the old thread. I like this comment from dbrutus:
Do you want revolutionary? Ask yourself, what chip is this running? Ask yourself, what is the OS on this thing? This is v0.8 of Apple's PDA folks. They're just waiting for the hardware and the economy to get a little better.
Well, opinions can be off base too. Especially in engineering matters.
For example he was totally off base that wireless would be feasible in a 2001 machine, with adequate battery life and performance -- or that it would offer any benefit at the time.
He was also totally off base in commenting about the "less space than a nomad" being lame, ignoring the fact that the iPod was also far more pocketable.
Plus, he deemed it "lame" (probably just for those two reasons) without even commenting on the vastly improved navigation and user experience compared to everything that was there before. Again, off base.
Well I mean, he presumably thought the Nomad was cool, indicating that massive size (nearly a pound!) and shit battery life were not really important to him. The Nokia 9500 came out 3 years later with WiFi and was pretty small, even by today's standards. Could they have put WiFi into a device the size/weight of a Nomad 3 years earlier, and gotten at least some shitty battery life out of it? I suspect so.
"Lame-ness" is an opinion, not really something that you could call objectively wrong. (Though obviously I think we all agree that his degree that the iPod was lame was itself lame).
Had he said "there is no market for this" instead of merely implying it, then he would have been wrong in a more objective way.
It's true that "adequate battery life" does not have a hard, very specific answer, and it's more of a range (and also depends on the capabilities of the era and what users are used to have).
But it's still not "all subjective". E.g if somebody says "1 hour mp3 player battery life is totally fine for me" -- doesn't mean he has a valid opinion that people should respect. In fact, he would probably be laughed off any product design meeting. (Sure, it can be fine "for him". But that's like saying "being hit with a stick if fine for me" if you are a masochist. In no way it represents what would work for most people).
>Personally, I always thought iPods had a terrible UX for forcing you to use iTunes instead of just mounting the drive
That was its definitive advantage. Just mounting the drive would be the backwards option, for people used to manage their own directories instead of letting the computer do it for them.
With iTunes they got people to also grasp the concept of file metadata, playlists, arbitrary organization based on tags and smart playlist queries, etc. And it opened the road for work on them offering a Store, iTunes Match et al.
>And that he just took into account those two reasons is just speculation.
It's based on the only data we have. What he actually said, and the reasons he gave for saying it.
CmdrTaco's opinion ("Lame") is an opinion, not a statement of fact masquerading as an opinion, so it is neither valid nor invalid. Most reasonable people would strongly disagree with this opinion.
Well, for all practical purposes there is.
You're having an underlying premise that personal value/taste judgements cannot by definition be wrong, which I strongly disagree with.
It might not be as clear cut as 1+1=2, but that doesn't mean that everything goes.
If opinions were such as you suggest (totally separate from judgements of fact and totally divorced from the realm of validity or invalidity), there would be no point in sharing them, because they would be totally irrelevant, irreducible and meaningless to anybody but the person having them.
This whole thing is based on the idea of "opinion" as "personal taste beyond critique". Like one happens to like brocolli whereas another likes nachos. Well, in my, err, opinion, even taste for food can be subject to critique. If a food is bad for you, I can say you're wrong to like it. Even if he says "this food is lame FOR ME", one can show him that his "personal taste" is mostly a cultural construction, an effect of early nurture, national cuisine, class, etc. So, it can be "lame for you" just because you don't know any different.
>CmdrTaco's opinion ("Lame") is an opinion, not a statement of fact masquerading as an opinion, so it is neither valid nor invalid.
There is a thing such as an external reality, and in that reality things have attributes and rankings. If from nothing else, at least from expert and general consensus. And I don't think either the expert's or the general consensus validates his opinion.
If opinions could be objectively right or wrong, then they would not be opinions.
No, I'm also making the bigger claim that "most people have a different opinion than him" _for good reason_.
That is based on a qualitative appreciation of certain measurable aspects of reality.
Plus, opinions are also based on facts. If you get the facts wrong, or get what the facts imply wrong, then your opinion is also wrong. (a crude example: I, mistakenly, believe that Mother Teresa killed millions of people, so "in my opinion she is evil")
I assume he is jokingly suggesting that the detractors are wrong.
Yes, I believe the detractors are wrong. And I believe they are especially wrong about generics. One of CloudFlare's most hard core C++/Boost guys 'tried out' Go to see how he liked it and is rewriting everything that needed redoing in Go.
The combination of a 'small, powerful' language that supports multicore machines and the good standard library means people can _get things done_.
CmdrTaco was of course entitled to his opinion, and nobody is suggesting that we take from him that right. However most would also say that in their opinions, which they are also entitled to, his assessment was very lame.
Chet: "Get out the drool cup!" Erik: "In use, my friend! Drooool!" Chet: "Then break out the scraper, because someone's gonna have to scrape my jaw off the floor!" Erik: "That's also in use, to scrape my spooge off the monitor! Spoooge!" Chet: "Ouch! Fetch me my eye medicine, because I have an eyeache from watching a whole mixed bag of eye candy!" Erik: "All of the eye medicine's already in my eye! I'm done with the scraper, though."