You're arguing that it's normative, preferable to the other available outcomes (the duck's ass outcome in particular), and that Wintel succeded becasue of a position that manifests a moral value, openness. The word did not excape your lips but your argument is a functional value judgement.
I did no such thing. I'm not really sure how you come to that conclusion by my mostly/snarky/ remark.
Anyway, it was not a wintel hegemony that clobbered apple in the 80's
This is where I'm supposed to sit and let you pretend that people actually were successful selling x86 ISA computers that didn't run MS-DOS and Windows
Hang on, I never said that either - I *said* that they were successful in selling x86 + MSDOS. Where are you getting all this from?
-- the hardware platform was open (GOOD) but none of that openness filtered down to the application developers or end users (BAD).
I'm not sure how to respond to this; how "closed" would you call the software when it could run on a variety of machines from different manufacturers? Contrast with Apple, where the software would run on only a single manufacturers hardware.
This was my original point, btw (since you seemed to have missed it in your haste) - the software (closed or open) could run on any machine the user bought. Not so different from Android as compared with Apple.
MS leveraged an open platform to sell a closed one, and the combination was the thing people bought, because that was how the market worked. Granted it wasn't in their long-term interest to buy the same OS everyone else did, but adverse selection is a tough mistress, and just because someone could sell other OS's, and other people could buy them and use them, this doesn't dispose of the fact that no one did, and all that openness really didn't benefit anyone but the largest market participants.
And there's really no evidence Android will turn out any different, with an open OS,
What makes you think Android is all that open? I'm no expert in Android internals, but I hear that it has its own closed secret stuff?
built to the carrier's orders, selling closed services on locked phones; all the while the fanboys reminding us that people can run cyanogenmod,
I don't even know what this is:-)
while at no time realizing that no one does and thus no one enjoys the benefits.
"Openness" is a statement of potential, nothing more. It says almost nothing about what actually is available in the market, or what an end user can do.
Fair enough, but the analogy I was drawing (which I thought was obvious, but perhaps not) is that I've seen this situation before. The "commodity software" + "hardware from anywhere" did, in the past, beat out Apples "Our software, on our hardware only!!! model.
While you are correct that there is no evidence that "Android will turn out different", there is equally no evidence that the model that failed in the past will succeed now. In fact, since no one can predict the future, if we make anyWEAK extrapolations from the past, it comes out slightly in Androids favour (assuming that the argument is Android vs iOS).
IOW, is there any reason to believe that the failed model from the past will now work?
(ps. You stopped just short of calling me a fanboi. Good on you mate:-) I'm no fan of either business, and am currently investigating the options available to get into iOS development. I've written exactly one Android application, and would like to write it for iOS as well. Targetting both at the same time, in addition to making me anything but a fanboi, is a little under twice the effort. I hope they both do equally well, for my sake, else I would've doubled my effort for less than double the reward.
Anyway, it was not a wintel hegemony that clobbered apple in the 80's, it was the fact that anyone could (and frequently did) build x86 machines, and anyone could (and frequently did) license MSDOS for those cheap machines. The "open" part was the BIOS, and an OS that you could run on any x86 machine, whether that machine was built by IBM or Compaq or whether the chip was Intel or AMD.
...but can someone name one product for me that Apple has made which is "groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate"?
iDunno - Does "Be the first with affordable PC's, then lock them down tighter than a waterfowls arse, and watch an open platform slide your marketshare into low single digit percentages" count as a product?
Because, you see, I've seen this movie before back in the 80's...
Seems to be exactly what the GP said. Only you missed the part where Stephens Media thought they could do that.
Not quite.
GGP -> "You cannot assign the right to sue without assigning copyright"
GP -> "Fine, simply assign copyrights for the sole purpose of suing."
In south africa its slightly different. The arguments presented during trial/hearing can end with a an argument for costs (It must start with it as part of the pleadings). During judgement, the judge hands down his/her decision and also orders someone (if any) to pay costs (No value specified, simply "costs on an attorney/client scale").
The winner then takes his itemised legal bill to a/taxing master/ who examines it and makes sure its in line with what the court thinks a lawyer should charge. The taxing master himself is a qualified (albeit highly specialised) lawyer. He puts a rand value on the bill, and this gets served to the loser. The loser can then hire then own taxing master to dispute the bill. This hearing then gets heard in a court with another (different, specialised) judge, who decides what the final bill will be.
It works very well in practice - you generally get perhaps 2/3rds of your costs back, and the court feels that that is a good thing as it ensures that fewer people are willing to go to court even if they will win, as they will still be out 1/3rd the bill.
Just the other day there was a shootout between the cops and some hijackers just across the road from where I work, by a school. Being cornered, I must ask the question, why didn't they surrender? Why did they choose to fight it out (and in the process one policeman and two of the hijackers were killed)? Were they just stupid, or maybe they reckoned they could get away, and even if caught it isn't the end of the world for them?
Well, they are criminals by definition - do you expect them to say "fair cop, guv, you caught me, here, bring on the handcuffs"?
Who knows what goes through a criminal's mind, but the point is your theory doesn't tie in with their behavior.
Wait, what? How does my 'theory' not tie in with some random criminals behaviour? There is a reason anecdotes are not accepted as data - you might be just looking at an outlier, after all. This is why the entire field of statistics exist - to determine how expected or unexpected an event is.
Besides, what do you mean "my theory" - lets not get emotionally attached to any arguments now! All I did was look at the relationship between violent crime and capital punishment. No more, no less. I can't help it if forces conclusions that happen to be different to your personal experience.
In my defence, I also point out that I only looked at the extremes of both ends as far as crime stats goes, and I do point out that a followup is needed to see if this relationship exists in the more moderate portions of the dataset.
Or that of many over criminals here. Obviously this "worse penalty" isn't a sufficient deterrent.
I'm not sure if you're agreeing with my premise here - "worse penalty not being a deterrent" is something I agree with if the state in question is on either end of the scale.
And how about the other day when there was a shootout at a school and a couple of school kids were shot?
Well, a properly funded study would very conclusively display any relationship between violent crime and the death penalty. The arguments for and against are much too numerous to put down here, and are also very complex and involved. Please, by all means, I'm open to continuing this argument over email, so feel free.
I'll give you that it may be legal to fight back in certain circumstances, but how practical is it to do so?
This is my main point. We do not have a "punishment based" system here. And it shows. Or do you deny crime is high in Joburg?
What does one thing have to do with the other? Crime is higher in another country that *does* have punishment-based systems. Does that mean our system is better? Statistically, there is no correlation between "having capital punishments" and "low crime rate". If you have data that shows that the crime rate goes down as the punishment goes up, I'd love to see it.
(Tired now, email me to continue this argument without annoying the rest of/.)
With all due respect, I'll call BS on your post - I'm here in Midrand, some 25 kms away from the city centre. The penalty for shooting somone is a great deal worse than not paying your taxes.
Plus, if I'm getting robbed, its entirely legal to fight back; depending on circumstances (say, someone breaking in at night while I'm in the house with my kid), the courts have accepted that flight is not an option, and I'm allowed to shoot the bugger.
Sure, they also have clauses in the law for excessive force in self-defence, but thats no different from other countries.
(Yes, I did actually look it up due to the large number of people who kept saying "its not legal to fight back". see my blog for a surprising fact of crime-rates vs death-penalties)
Not all racing is at NASCAR levels of skill (or lack thereof) - play Colin Mcrae DiRT (any of the games in the series, even the first one) sometime, then come back to me with "left turn racing".
Unrelated - why is TORCS so bad? Ugly graphics, unresponsive controls, brain-damaged UI, indestructable cars and physics a high-school student would be embarrassed about. This has been in development for what, 10 years now? If they haven't released something worth playing now, they are never going to do so.
I think at first they were against it, but after they saw how it was taking off they decided to ride the PR wave.
In the case of Skype, it benefits from network effects;...
It can also be destroyed by network effects - imagine if the second most popular skype client offered both skype and an open protocol - the world can slowly change over to the open protocol without any of the users even realising it. This is a bad thing for something that depends on lock-in, like skype
Funny - he doesn't like the decades old windowed desktop environment either. I have to be honest here, if you fault Donald Normans logic on something, you better have good reasons - he is a/very/ clear thinker indeed. Read "The Design of Everyday Things".
I expect that there will be a number of people who spend some time getting sodomized in federal prisons around the world followed up by the inability to ever hold a job in the IT industry, ever get any credit, ever hold a job of any trust, or ever
In the US, the very fact that they are "in the home" means they are secure enough. Having them under lock and key is not a requirement of the law, nor will it ever be. A victim of gun theft is not guilty of negligence if the gun is later used in a crime.
What you claim simply isn't true.
GP didn't qualify his statement with a country name - it could still be true
(FWIW, in my country, the statement is fully true)
Far Cry I was good enough and diverse enough that I completed it twice - once when I bought it and 3 years later - and then one more time when I got fed up with Far Cry 2.
Slashdot Mirror
You do that - let us know how it goes.
I never said it was good, did I?
You're arguing that it's normative, preferable to the other available outcomes (the duck's ass outcome in particular), and that Wintel succeded becasue of a position that manifests a moral value, openness. The word did not excape your lips but your argument is a functional value judgement.
I did no such thing. I'm not really sure how you come to that conclusion by my mostly /snarky/ remark.
Anyway, it was not a wintel hegemony that clobbered apple in the 80's
This is where I'm supposed to sit and let you pretend that people actually were successful selling x86 ISA computers that didn't run MS-DOS and Windows
Hang on, I never said that either - I *said* that they were successful in selling x86 + MSDOS. Where are you getting all this from?
-- the hardware platform was open (GOOD) but none of that openness filtered down to the application developers or end users (BAD).
I'm not sure how to respond to this; how "closed" would you call the software when it could run on a variety of machines from different manufacturers? Contrast with Apple, where the software would run on only a single manufacturers hardware.
This was my original point, btw (since you seemed to have missed it in your haste) - the software (closed or open) could run on any machine the user bought. Not so different from Android as compared with Apple.
MS leveraged an open platform to sell a closed one, and the combination was the thing people bought, because that was how the market worked. Granted it wasn't in their long-term interest to buy the same OS everyone else did, but adverse selection is a tough mistress, and just because someone could sell other OS's, and other people could buy them and use them, this doesn't dispose of the fact that no one did, and all that openness really didn't benefit anyone but the largest market participants.
And there's really no evidence Android will turn out any different, with an open OS,
What makes you think Android is all that open? I'm no expert in Android internals, but I hear that it has its own closed secret stuff?
built to the carrier's orders, selling closed services on locked phones; all the while the fanboys reminding us that people can run cyanogenmod,
I don't even know what this is :-)
while at no time realizing that no one does and thus no one enjoys the benefits.
"Openness" is a statement of potential, nothing more. It says almost nothing about what actually is available in the market, or what an end user can do.
Fair enough, but the analogy I was drawing (which I thought was obvious, but perhaps not) is that I've seen this situation before. The "commodity software" + "hardware from anywhere" did, in the past, beat out Apples "Our software, on our hardware only!!! model.
While you are correct that there is no evidence that "Android will turn out different", there is equally no evidence that the model that failed in the past will succeed now. In fact, since no one can predict the future, if we make any WEAK extrapolations from the past, it comes out slightly in Androids favour (assuming that the argument is Android vs iOS).
IOW, is there any reason to believe that the failed model from the past will now work?
(ps. You stopped just short of calling me a fanboi. Good on you mate :-) I'm no fan of either business, and am currently investigating the options available to get into iOS development. I've written exactly one Android application, and would like to write it for iOS as well. Targetting both at the same time, in addition to making me anything but a fanboi, is a little under twice the effort. I hope they both do equally well, for my sake, else I would've doubled my effort for less than double the reward.
Sigh. :-)
I never said it was good, did I?
Anyway, it was not a wintel hegemony that clobbered apple in the 80's, it was the fact that anyone could (and frequently did) build x86 machines, and anyone could (and frequently did) license MSDOS for those cheap machines. The "open" part was the BIOS, and an OS that you could run on any x86 machine, whether that machine was built by IBM or Compaq or whether the chip was Intel or AMD.
...but can someone name one product for me that Apple has made which is "groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate"?
iDunno - Does "Be the first with affordable PC's, then lock them down tighter than a waterfowls arse, and watch an open platform slide your marketshare into low single digit percentages" count as a product?
...
Because, you see, I've seen this movie before back in the 80's
Seems to be exactly what the GP said. Only you missed the part where Stephens Media thought they could do that.
Not quite.
GGP -> "You cannot assign the right to sue without assigning copyright"
GP -> "Fine, simply assign copyrights for the sole purpose of suing."
In south africa its slightly different. The arguments presented during trial/hearing can end with a an argument for costs (It must start with it as part of the pleadings). During judgement, the judge hands down his/her decision and also orders someone (if any) to pay costs (No value specified, simply "costs on an attorney/client scale").
/taxing master/ who examines it and makes sure its in line with what the court thinks a lawyer should charge. The taxing master himself is a qualified (albeit highly specialised) lawyer. He puts a rand value on the bill, and this gets served to the loser. The loser can then hire then own taxing master to dispute the bill. This hearing then gets heard in a court with another (different, specialised) judge, who decides what the final bill will be.
The winner then takes his itemised legal bill to a
It works very well in practice - you generally get perhaps 2/3rds of your costs back, and the court feels that that is a good thing as it ensures that fewer people are willing to go to court even if they will win, as they will still be out 1/3rd the bill.
I do buy it - spam has to hit an equilibrium sooner or later, and the equilibrium is always reached after a final peak,
Just the other day there was a shootout between the cops and some hijackers just across the road from where I work, by a school. Being cornered, I must ask the question, why didn't they surrender? Why did they choose to fight it out (and in the process one policeman and two of the hijackers were killed)? Were they just stupid, or maybe they reckoned they could get away, and even if caught it isn't the end of the world for them?
Well, they are criminals by definition - do you expect them to say "fair cop, guv, you caught me, here, bring on the handcuffs"?
Who knows what goes through a criminal's mind, but the point is your theory doesn't tie in with their behavior.
Wait, what? How does my 'theory' not tie in with some random criminals behaviour? There is a reason anecdotes are not accepted as data - you might be just looking at an outlier, after all. This is why the entire field of statistics exist - to determine how expected or unexpected an event is.
Besides, what do you mean "my theory" - lets not get emotionally attached to any arguments now! All I did was look at the relationship between violent crime and capital punishment. No more, no less. I can't help it if forces conclusions that happen to be different to your personal experience.
In my defence, I also point out that I only looked at the extremes of both ends as far as crime stats goes, and I do point out that a followup is needed to see if this relationship exists in the more moderate portions of the dataset.
Or that of many over criminals here. Obviously this "worse penalty" isn't a sufficient deterrent.
I'm not sure if you're agreeing with my premise here - "worse penalty not being a deterrent" is something I agree with if the state in question is on either end of the scale.
And how about the other day when there was a shootout at a school and a couple of school kids were shot?
Well, a properly funded study would very conclusively display any relationship between violent crime and the death penalty. The arguments for and against are much too numerous to put down here, and are also very complex and involved. Please, by all means, I'm open to continuing this argument over email, so feel free.
I'll give you that it may be legal to fight back in certain circumstances, but how practical is it to do so?
This is my main point. We do not have a "punishment based" system here. And it shows. Or do you deny crime is high in Joburg?
What does one thing have to do with the other? Crime is higher in another country that *does* have punishment-based systems. Does that mean our system is better? Statistically, there is no correlation between "having capital punishments" and "low crime rate". If you have data that shows that the crime rate goes down as the punishment goes up, I'd love to see it.
/.)
(Tired now, email me to continue this argument without annoying the rest of
With all due respect, I'll call BS on your post - I'm here in Midrand, some 25 kms away from the city centre. The penalty for shooting somone is a great deal worse than not paying your taxes.
Plus, if I'm getting robbed, its entirely legal to fight back; depending on circumstances (say, someone breaking in at night while I'm in the house with my kid), the courts have accepted that flight is not an option, and I'm allowed to shoot the bugger.
Sure, they also have clauses in the law for excessive force in self-defence, but thats no different from other countries.
(Yes, I did actually look it up due to the large number of people who kept saying "its not legal to fight back". see my blog for a surprising fact of crime-rates vs death-penalties)
The pentium one was definately a joke - even engineers have a sense of humour
Not all racing is at NASCAR levels of skill (or lack thereof) - play Colin Mcrae DiRT (any of the games in the series, even the first one) sometime, then come back to me with "left turn racing".
Unrelated - why is TORCS so bad? Ugly graphics, unresponsive controls, brain-damaged UI, indestructable cars and physics a high-school student would be embarrassed about. This has been in development for what, 10 years now? If they haven't released something worth playing now, they are never going to do so.
I think at first they were against it, but after they saw how it was taking off they decided to ride the PR wave.
In the case of Skype, it benefits from network effects; ...
It can also be destroyed by network effects - imagine if the second most popular skype client offered both skype and an open protocol - the world can slowly change over to the open protocol without any of the users even realising it. This is a bad thing for something that depends on lock-in, like skype
I'm guessing parts of the protocol were leaked by a malcontent employee who was pissed at the sellout
Funny - he doesn't like the decades old windowed desktop environment either. I have to be honest here, if you fault Donald Normans logic on something, you better have good reasons - he is a /very/ clear thinker indeed. Read "The Design of Everyday Things".
I expect that there will be a number of people who spend some time getting sodomized in federal prisons around the world followed up by the inability to ever hold a job in the IT industry, ever get any credit, ever hold a job of any trust, or ever
Uh ...
"Pains taking", not "pain staking"
"civil damages" = criminal damages
To prove this to yourself, imagine what the state does when you don't pay the civil damages.
Or else, what's the difference between the two?
Burden of proof?
If you give the lion a wide berth and a calm gaze as you circle him, eventually the lion will relax and be unprepared for a lunge from behind.
Are you mad? The male interprets eye contact as a challenge, the females hunt when hungry regardless of your levels of exuded calm (or lack thereof!)
(Posting from South Africa, where I once had my car break down and got surrounded by a pride of lions).
In the US, the very fact that they are "in the home" means they are secure enough. Having them under lock and key is not a requirement of the law, nor will it ever be. A victim of gun theft is not guilty of negligence if the gun is later used in a crime. What you claim simply isn't true.
GP didn't qualify his statement with a country name - it could still be true
(FWIW, in my country, the statement is fully true)
Apparently you only need 23 people and then you stand a good chance of the number of celebrations being half the number of people :-)
... too tired now to come up with whatever equation describes the number of b/days vs people once you go over 23)
(Yes, its wrong, but its funny anyway
Actually he's correct about the navigation; the data itself is a goldmine (thanks). I've bookmarked for later use.
Do Not
You mean "prospectors".
Anyway, TFA states that this practice usually involves collecting unused copper wires. I don't really see how that's stealing.
The "unused" bit is from the point of view of the thief. There is no such thing as buried cable that is "unused".
FWIW, I live in South Africa where copper thieves abound, and we frequently lose power or phone lines because of this.
Basically never. Mosquitoes were once considered as a possibility for transmission of HIV however there have been no cases of that happening.
Viruses can't evolve?
Far Cry I was good enough and diverse enough that I completed it twice - once when I bought it and 3 years later - and then one more time when I got fed up with Far Cry 2.