Where's the entitlement that you're complaining about? A woman went to buy something that she had the cash in hand to afford, she got denied on a silly technicality, and the press decided to make a big deal about it because they're too lazy to dig up real news.
The grammatical impossibility of her response to an entirely ridiculous question by the interviewer indicates that she was surprised that he said something so stupid. She wasn't tooting her own horn, she was just trying to figure out a polite response to a really dumb reporter.
I don't doubt that Microsoft is full of intelligent and inventive people. I'll bet that over the years that Vista was in development, their employees had thousands and thousands of interesting, innovative ideas, and probably even prototyped a bunch of them out. Now the nature of innovation is that some ideas just don't work as well in practice as they do in your head, some ideas aren't helpful enough to justify the resources they'd require, and some ideas end up working out just as awesomely as you imagined it.
One of the jobs of the people running the show is to figure out which of those ideas are worth pursuing, make intelligent decisions about which ideas will actually pan out, and prioritize those ideas in order to best use the company's development resources.
In that sense I think Ballmer's quote is exactly right. The people at the top came up with a set of priorities for Vista that, for various reasons, the company was unable to deliver on. That doesn't mean that thousands of their employees didn't spend lots of time, energy, and brain power trying to make things that work. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how hard you paddle if the guy steering the ship heads you towards a waterfall.
And there will always be someone out there to sell you stuff that you like. Meanwhile the bulk of people in the world want easier to use, fuss-free computers, and so Apple is trying to make them. No biggie.
Nobody would ever spend $100 on a fancy chef's knife when they could spend $40 and get a pocket knife that's not only got a blade to cut things, but also a screwdriver, a bottle opener, a tiny saw, and some tweezers.
Except that many people are plenty happy to spend their money on something that is designed to do particular tasks well, even if it can't do everything that a similar product can do.
Just to counter your anecdote, my car's side window was smashed at work in New Orleans, a city renown for it's failure of a police department, and when I called the cops they had someone there in about 20 minutes. And when that cop say some decent fingerprints, they called out a crime lab guy who inspected even more. All this for a car break-in, where I'm not even sure what (if anything) was stolen.
Sorry your local cops are so worthless that they make the NOPD look helpful. Maybe you should complain to your elected officials instead of/.
Even if they're a total bunch of idiots over at gizmodo, I hardly think that it's reasonable for a bunch of people who run a tech blog that has extensively covered Apple to believe that Apple didn't want the phone back.
they knew exactly what they were doing, and they allowed their common sense to be shouted down by visions of millions of page hits and minor Internet celebrity. I have a really hard time feeling sorry for them.
I'm curious why people keep repeating this, presenting it as some sort of insightful comment, and also implying that us viewers are somehow being wronged or tricked by it.
Internet TV is no different from regular TV in that there's really only two established ways to make money with it. Either you go the HBO route and make people subscribe in order to view content, or you show the content for free and try to convince people to pay you for advertisements.
There's nothing new about this, and there's nothing sneaky about it. TV has worked this way for decades, and while the internet has changed many things about the world, it's not going to change the fact that people aren't going to make shows unless they can get paid for it. And in order to get paid for it, someone is going to have to cough up money. Television will slowly continue to make the transition to internet based delivery, eventually we'll be able to watch any show whenever we want, eventually we'll be able to view it all on our little digital watches on the subway or whatever. But what will never change is the fact that someone's going to have to pay for it, and lots of people would rather have the advertisers do the paying.
My mom (a distinctly non-technical person) couldn't give a rats ass about anything that Steve Jobs says, but she still loves her iPhone.
Regardless of what you think about Apple's marketing BS, they're consistently releasing products that people like and choose to buy. Most of the talking that Jobs does isn't for the average non-technical consumer, it's geared towards the tech media.
Non-technical people try Apple's stuff because it looks cool, and then they buy it because they discover they can use it to do things that they couldn't figure out how to do on their previous computer/phone.
Exactly. Badly organized and poorly written code is certainly not exclusive to web development. A truly bad developer can practice his lack of craft in any language, and throw together a poorly designed system for any platform.
Or as your analogy illustrated, while computers allow us to make mistakes more quickly than ever, humanity has been finding new and creative ways to do a crappy job at things for a long time. It's what makes us different from the animals.
Parking meter enforcement is proof that government can be incredibly efficient and productive when it decides to. Here in New Orleans, we just finished 8 years under one of the most useless mayors imaginable, the police department is in shambles, oh and 75% of the city was underwater a few years back, but it'll only take a few minutes for them to ticket your car.
Your strawman is that there was some regulation, so that proves that regulation doesn't work. Perhaps BP should argue that they had some mechanical safeguards at the well head that were supposed to keep this leak from happening and those safeguards didn't stop this disaster, so obviously the lesson here is that safeguards are not the answer.
If you're arguing that government is inherently so corrupt and incompetent that it's impossible for it ever to regulate effectively and so we should stop trying, that's a slightly more valid argument, but I'm going to have to disagree with you. It's not an easy problem, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
We're talking about giant, ridiculously wealthy multinational corporations. The government is the only hope that people have of making any sort of stand against them. The fact that it's imperfect and requires serious work to function properly is a shame, but I fail to see how doing nothing would be any better.
The iPhone app store is full of free apps already. Pick a popular paid app, and chances are you'll find a handful of free apps to choose from that do basically the same thing.
While I'm sure that Apple doesn't mind some income from their percentage of app store sales, it's just a drop in the bucket compared to the truckloads of money they're making from selling hardware. The majority of app downloads are free apps, Apple knows this, and they understand the value that those apps add to their hardware.
It's not about Apple wanting to lock out free applications. They're perfectly happy to have developers make free apps, they just want those apps to be purposefully made for the iphone OS, and not just a recompiled port of some random flash application.
How many iphones do you think Apple has sold on the basis of tech specs? The only spec that 95% of the people who have bought them so far cared about is that it has a big screen. None of the other numbers matter to the average person.
Or maybe with Apple currently being more successful that it's ever been, and the iphone being a hugely popular device right now, the temptation to learn or share privileged information is just well beyond anything that Apple has seen before?
Apple would have zero problems getting more "legitimate" news coverage if they wanted it. They're always so careful with the aesthetics of their marketing, why would they want to leak grainy photos and poorly lit videos by random people when they could easily get crisp clean front page covers of a dozen different magazines/website? I guess they could be trying some sort of "underground" marketing strategy, but that doesn't make sense for a company where image is very important.
If your app is that good and popular, then port it to android. Surely if it's that awesome you'll make back the money that you spend porting it. Or just wait a couple months, and somebody else will write an app that does basically the same thing.
Seriously, there's at least a half dozen of any particular type of app or game or whatever that's shown any level of popularity. The vendor lock-in argument is pretty weak here. Apple isn't make devs sign exclusivity agreements.
Apple has never controlled their desktop OS platform to the degree that they control the iPhone, so it's not even feasible for them to somehow exclude flash from OSX, even if they would like to.
That'll work for menus and such, but wouldn't be playable for a lot of games that are already out there, it'd take too long for the hover to take effect
The solution that they have is that the first tap reads as a hover, and the second tap reads as a click. And yes it does suck. It's a pain, but it's just barely useable for browsing through menus or whatever. But as for a low latency input such that a game might require, it would not work at all.
This isn't just a problem inherent to Apple, it's inherent in the differences between a touch interface and a mouse driven interface. The reality is that websites/applications/whatever that want to work on both types of interfaces are going to have to come up with a design that doesn't rely on the hover effect, or settle for the fact that it'll be cumbersome and crappy on a touch screen.
The way this stuff often works, not just in the oil industry, but in many different areas of business is that the company at the top of the chain takes ultimate responsibility, and then if they can pass the legal blame onto their contractors, then they can try to sue and recoup the money that they had to pay out.
It happens all the time in my profession, architecture. Generally the architecture firm hires various consultants (structural engineer, mechanical engineer, landscape, etc.), and becomes responsible for their work. If the client decides that the mechanical engineering work is insufficient, they sue the architect, and then it's up to the architect to sue their mechanical engineer to recover whatever damages they had to pay out. It's not always quite that simple, but that's generally how it works.
If someone's got a valid complaint that they've been affected by the oil spill and wishes to pursue legal action, they'll likely have to go after BP, and BP will have to pay whatever damages. If BP believes that one of their contractors was actually to blame, then BP will have to go after that contractor to recover that money afterwards. Transocean isn't going to just sail through this unaffected, BP is going to try and get as much out of them as they can.
Why bother picking a lock when there's so many other easier ways to get into the average house? Breaking a window is trivial, drilling out a lock isn't hard, etc. To someone even mildly determined to get in, the average house lock is less of a issue than a weak password is for an email account.
While it's certainly smarter to have a strong password than a weak one, to say that having a weak password should mean that you take on some of the legal responsibility for a crime committed against you by someone else is ridiculous.
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Where's the entitlement that you're complaining about? A woman went to buy something that she had the cash in hand to afford, she got denied on a silly technicality, and the press decided to make a big deal about it because they're too lazy to dig up real news.
The grammatical impossibility of her response to an entirely ridiculous question by the interviewer indicates that she was surprised that he said something so stupid. She wasn't tooting her own horn, she was just trying to figure out a polite response to a really dumb reporter.
I don't doubt that Microsoft is full of intelligent and inventive people. I'll bet that over the years that Vista was in development, their employees had thousands and thousands of interesting, innovative ideas, and probably even prototyped a bunch of them out. Now the nature of innovation is that some ideas just don't work as well in practice as they do in your head, some ideas aren't helpful enough to justify the resources they'd require, and some ideas end up working out just as awesomely as you imagined it.
One of the jobs of the people running the show is to figure out which of those ideas are worth pursuing, make intelligent decisions about which ideas will actually pan out, and prioritize those ideas in order to best use the company's development resources.
In that sense I think Ballmer's quote is exactly right. The people at the top came up with a set of priorities for Vista that, for various reasons, the company was unable to deliver on. That doesn't mean that thousands of their employees didn't spend lots of time, energy, and brain power trying to make things that work. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how hard you paddle if the guy steering the ship heads you towards a waterfall.
And there will always be someone out there to sell you stuff that you like. Meanwhile the bulk of people in the world want easier to use, fuss-free computers, and so Apple is trying to make them. No biggie.
Nobody would ever spend $100 on a fancy chef's knife when they could spend $40 and get a pocket knife that's not only got a blade to cut things, but also a screwdriver, a bottle opener, a tiny saw, and some tweezers.
Except that many people are plenty happy to spend their money on something that is designed to do particular tasks well, even if it can't do everything that a similar product can do.
nope. Lived and worked in the city for 10 years.
Just to counter your anecdote, my car's side window was smashed at work in New Orleans, a city renown for it's failure of a police department, and when I called the cops they had someone there in about 20 minutes. And when that cop say some decent fingerprints, they called out a crime lab guy who inspected even more. All this for a car break-in, where I'm not even sure what (if anything) was stolen.
Sorry your local cops are so worthless that they make the NOPD look helpful. Maybe you should complain to your elected officials instead of /.
Even if they're a total bunch of idiots over at gizmodo, I hardly think that it's reasonable for a bunch of people who run a tech blog that has extensively covered Apple to believe that Apple didn't want the phone back.
they knew exactly what they were doing, and they allowed their common sense to be shouted down by visions of millions of page hits and minor Internet celebrity. I have a really hard time feeling sorry for them.
I'm curious why people keep repeating this, presenting it as some sort of insightful comment, and also implying that us viewers are somehow being wronged or tricked by it.
Internet TV is no different from regular TV in that there's really only two established ways to make money with it. Either you go the HBO route and make people subscribe in order to view content, or you show the content for free and try to convince people to pay you for advertisements.
There's nothing new about this, and there's nothing sneaky about it. TV has worked this way for decades, and while the internet has changed many things about the world, it's not going to change the fact that people aren't going to make shows unless they can get paid for it. And in order to get paid for it, someone is going to have to cough up money. Television will slowly continue to make the transition to internet based delivery, eventually we'll be able to watch any show whenever we want, eventually we'll be able to view it all on our little digital watches on the subway or whatever. But what will never change is the fact that someone's going to have to pay for it, and lots of people would rather have the advertisers do the paying.
My mom (a distinctly non-technical person) couldn't give a rats ass about anything that Steve Jobs says, but she still loves her iPhone.
Regardless of what you think about Apple's marketing BS, they're consistently releasing products that people like and choose to buy. Most of the talking that Jobs does isn't for the average non-technical consumer, it's geared towards the tech media.
Non-technical people try Apple's stuff because it looks cool, and then they buy it because they discover they can use it to do things that they couldn't figure out how to do on their previous computer/phone.
Exactly. Badly organized and poorly written code is certainly not exclusive to web development. A truly bad developer can practice his lack of craft in any language, and throw together a poorly designed system for any platform.
Or as your analogy illustrated, while computers allow us to make mistakes more quickly than ever, humanity has been finding new and creative ways to do a crappy job at things for a long time. It's what makes us different from the animals.
Look man, this is a nerdy site. People here are impressed by the underlying tech.
A new way to do things is always interesting.
Parking meter enforcement is proof that government can be incredibly efficient and productive when it decides to. Here in New Orleans, we just finished 8 years under one of the most useless mayors imaginable, the police department is in shambles, oh and 75% of the city was underwater a few years back, but it'll only take a few minutes for them to ticket your car.
Your strawman is that there was some regulation, so that proves that regulation doesn't work. Perhaps BP should argue that they had some mechanical safeguards at the well head that were supposed to keep this leak from happening and those safeguards didn't stop this disaster, so obviously the lesson here is that safeguards are not the answer.
If you're arguing that government is inherently so corrupt and incompetent that it's impossible for it ever to regulate effectively and so we should stop trying, that's a slightly more valid argument, but I'm going to have to disagree with you. It's not an easy problem, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
We're talking about giant, ridiculously wealthy multinational corporations. The government is the only hope that people have of making any sort of stand against them. The fact that it's imperfect and requires serious work to function properly is a shame, but I fail to see how doing nothing would be any better.
The iPhone app store is full of free apps already. Pick a popular paid app, and chances are you'll find a handful of free apps to choose from that do basically the same thing.
While I'm sure that Apple doesn't mind some income from their percentage of app store sales, it's just a drop in the bucket compared to the truckloads of money they're making from selling hardware. The majority of app downloads are free apps, Apple knows this, and they understand the value that those apps add to their hardware.
It's not about Apple wanting to lock out free applications. They're perfectly happy to have developers make free apps, they just want those apps to be purposefully made for the iphone OS, and not just a recompiled port of some random flash application.
How many iphones do you think Apple has sold on the basis of tech specs? The only spec that 95% of the people who have bought them so far cared about is that it has a big screen. None of the other numbers matter to the average person.
Or maybe with Apple currently being more successful that it's ever been, and the iphone being a hugely popular device right now, the temptation to learn or share privileged information is just well beyond anything that Apple has seen before?
Apple would have zero problems getting more "legitimate" news coverage if they wanted it. They're always so careful with the aesthetics of their marketing, why would they want to leak grainy photos and poorly lit videos by random people when they could easily get crisp clean front page covers of a dozen different magazines/website? I guess they could be trying some sort of "underground" marketing strategy, but that doesn't make sense for a company where image is very important.
If your app is that good and popular, then port it to android. Surely if it's that awesome you'll make back the money that you spend porting it. Or just wait a couple months, and somebody else will write an app that does basically the same thing.
Seriously, there's at least a half dozen of any particular type of app or game or whatever that's shown any level of popularity. The vendor lock-in argument is pretty weak here. Apple isn't make devs sign exclusivity agreements.
Apple has never controlled their desktop OS platform to the degree that they control the iPhone, so it's not even feasible for them to somehow exclude flash from OSX, even if they would like to.
Cool. It still wouldn't work for many games that require hover, but it sounds like a decent solution.
That'll work for menus and such, but wouldn't be playable for a lot of games that are already out there, it'd take too long for the hover to take effect
Interesting. How does it work?
The solution that they have is that the first tap reads as a hover, and the second tap reads as a click. And yes it does suck. It's a pain, but it's just barely useable for browsing through menus or whatever. But as for a low latency input such that a game might require, it would not work at all.
This isn't just a problem inherent to Apple, it's inherent in the differences between a touch interface and a mouse driven interface. The reality is that websites/applications/whatever that want to work on both types of interfaces are going to have to come up with a design that doesn't rely on the hover effect, or settle for the fact that it'll be cumbersome and crappy on a touch screen.
The way this stuff often works, not just in the oil industry, but in many different areas of business is that the company at the top of the chain takes ultimate responsibility, and then if they can pass the legal blame onto their contractors, then they can try to sue and recoup the money that they had to pay out.
It happens all the time in my profession, architecture. Generally the architecture firm hires various consultants (structural engineer, mechanical engineer, landscape, etc.), and becomes responsible for their work. If the client decides that the mechanical engineering work is insufficient, they sue the architect, and then it's up to the architect to sue their mechanical engineer to recover whatever damages they had to pay out. It's not always quite that simple, but that's generally how it works.
If someone's got a valid complaint that they've been affected by the oil spill and wishes to pursue legal action, they'll likely have to go after BP, and BP will have to pay whatever damages. If BP believes that one of their contractors was actually to blame, then BP will have to go after that contractor to recover that money afterwards. Transocean isn't going to just sail through this unaffected, BP is going to try and get as much out of them as they can.
Why bother picking a lock when there's so many other easier ways to get into the average house? Breaking a window is trivial, drilling out a lock isn't hard, etc. To someone even mildly determined to get in, the average house lock is less of a issue than a weak password is for an email account.
While it's certainly smarter to have a strong password than a weak one, to say that having a weak password should mean that you take on some of the legal responsibility for a crime committed against you by someone else is ridiculous.
There are a bazillion free apps available through the App store. Some of them are even rather good.