A nonsense article based on a false premise with a trailing admonition that hey, by the way, you might be wrong doesn't make the remainder worthwhile. What part of "keep an eye on 4.0" didn't I understand? None of it: in fact, what I just told you was that the part you've already done was the broken part. Your admonition is the only sensible thing about the article.
You think a company's stock is going to tank because a hundred outlet stores which provide less than a tenth of a percent of its net income stopped selling a few dozen books, when books account for virtually none of the income from the stores and provide a far slimmer profit margin than the real breadwinners like iPods, iMacs and subscriptions to iTunes?
Just because Wiley isn't Ziff Davis doesn't mean it has a thing to do with Apple's success. You might as well say that they're going to tank because they stop selling coffee; coffee almost certainly brings in far more money than those Wiley lines, and it's not like if they didn't buy coffee they'd buy something else, though in the case of the books they most certainly will.
Besides, Wiley sucks. I'd be surprised if even an Apple user was stupid enough to buy their books.
You know, I remember when someone did this to GCC 3, comparing against 2.9.5.
4.0.0 is a brand new compiler. Lots of techniques in it are brand new. Lots of tweaks and polish can be applied. If you actually take the time to compare 3.4 to 3.0, you'll find that the gap is bigger than 4.0 to 3.4. Furthermore, if you compare 2.9.5 to 3.0, you'll find 2.9.5 is better than 3.0 by a much wider margin than 3.4 is to 4.0.
This is a misunderstanding of the nature of progress. 4.0 is a brand new compiler with brand new internal behaviors. Lots of things are at the It Works stage, instead of the It's Efficient stage. You can't compare a 3-year polished compiler to a 3-week polished compiler; it's utter nonsense.
If you want to compare 4.0 to something, compare it to 3.0, or sit down.
My 286 was able to thumbnail 128 jpegs onscreen at once within a single screen refresh. By extension, that means that it would take less than eight screen refreshes (probably substantially less) to do a thousand, though frankly it's my opinion that there's no need for a thousand images onscreen at once.
That said, in order to answer your question, my monitor was running at (if i remember correctly) 60hz back then, so roughly a maximum of one eighth of a second. JPEG is not hard to thumbnail. It's a series of gradients with a primary run color. Draw the primary run color. Done.
Which is exactly what iTunes does, if you've ever used it.
Nah. It says "would you like iTunes to organize your music for you?" When a fifteen year old sees that, they don't think "Would you like iTunes to ruin the existing organization for you?" They expect it to behave like winamp, windows media player, xmms and so forth, and just keep an internal organization with no regard to the filesystem.
At least, that's what everyone I've talked to which is angry about this has expected, and that's why my cousin was in tears when she realized what she'd done.
As for features being undoable, here's an example off the top of my head: 128-bit AES encryption on your home folder, for example,...
Whereas that's an interesting story, I hardly think that a fundamental encryption of a drive is equianomous to mp3 tracking in terms of difficulty of undoing. Any proper drive encryption would have to be at so deep a level that one would basically have to reformat to get rid of it. The comparison is unfair, in my opinion.
A better example might be the difficulty one has uninstalling Creative Labs products, something which there's just no damn good reason for to be so difficult.
As a software engineer, I have very specific beliefs about appropriacy. Encrypted drives, yeah, that's a good reason to not be undoable; that's a fundamental security issue. But mp3s? Why the hell should it need to move them around?
I typically enjoy your grain-of-salt posts, but this is one where I must say you've really overstepped your area of competence.
Don't confuse a differing opinion for stupidity, please. I have used iTunes, I stand by my beliefs regarding it, and I know dozens of individuals which agree with me. It is my belief that if even a small group of people fails to understand a prompt, that that prompt absolutely must be reversible.
There is no reason that that sorting shouldn't be undoable. All they would need to do was keep a std::stack of each move, and then re-walk them in reverse should the person say "nevermind."
There is no reason for the situation to erupt in the first place, but they damn well could have fixed it, and it cost me quite a bit of time. Yes, if I had seen that prompt, I wouldn't have hit it. Not all users are sophisticated, and I shouldn't have to pay the price for my teenage cousin doing something which was superficially innocuous.
Whether or not iTunes gives that prompt, it does not say "this will destroy your existing organization, thereby destroying all existing playlists and ruining associations with any other music player." If it had, Pam wouldn't have hit the button. She had no idea anything was going to change. The dialog makes it look like a new organization is being made; this is false. What is actually happening is that existing organization is being replaced.
This is a critical failure, IMO, on the part of the iTunes UI team.
When put into those concrete terms, I should hope you'd understand my anger, whether or not you choose to agree with it.
Re:"Paltry" is probably a poor choice of words
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Given that GCC 4 is less than two weeks old, it seems likely that OSX was actually compiled with a GCC 3 branch compiler.
Re:"Paltry" is probably a poor choice of words
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Try this, desktops dwarf servers and such.
And are in turn dwarfed by embedded. Your antilock brakes were almost certainly coded in GCC, if you've got an American car, for example.
Besides, GCC is used for a significant chunk of desktop development, too; thanks to proper support for the flat memory model in DOS way back when, it got a very strong user following as DJGPP, and has ever since carried its momentum on virtue of price. Moreover, GCC is used heavily in corporate development, which accounts for a disproportionately large slice of compiler use.
Your sense of numbers may be fine, but GCC is tricky, and lives everywhere.
and at the same time deny it's customer base access to some damn good reference books
Can I buy some pot from you? I mean jesus, Wiley and Sons is two rungs below the bottom of the barrel; the only two publishers on earth they can laugh at are Wrox and Chick Publications.
Here's some free clue: "Freedom of Speech" and "Freedom of Press":
1. Are _only_ applicable to your dealing with the _government_. Not with private persons, not with corporations, not with anyone else.
Bzzt. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press extend everywhere right up and until the line of slander, are the basis for our laws regarding satire and parody, have been the defense of many outspoken corporate critics, and the watershed by which consumer advocates have held their heads above water. Ask Ralph Nader, who without those guarantees would have long since been sued off of the face of the Earth.
I.e., pay attention, lemming: it means that the government can't ban you from saying that Kerry was a better candidate than Bush, or viceversa. It doesn't however mean that Bush, as a private citizen, can't sue your pants off if you publish libel about him. E.g., if you were to start writing that Bush rapes small babies, he could very well sue your pants off, and "freedom of speech" would have nothing to do with it.
You're so far off base here it's unreal. What you're actually saying is that freedom of speech doesn't defend our rights to tell lies about public citizens. I believe the appropriate phrase here is "duh." That freedom of speech fails to cover libel doesn't mean that it doesn't cover criticism of private individuals.
2. It never said that anyone has to print, broadcast or help sell your bullshit. If anyone, _including_ the government, doesn't want to publish your speech, sell your book, or pay for public access to your blog, they _are_ entirely within their legal righst.
The government doesn't publish private individuals, dope on a rope.
E.g., if an ISP (even a state owned one) decided to unilaterally block all porn sites, or even all opposition sites, they _are_ within their legal rights to do so. Bad PR move? Yes. Violating your sacred "freedom of speech" or "democracy"? Nope.
In the case of a state-owned ISP or other state interference in public matters of communication, the FCC has repeatedly and without exception disagreed with you on this point. For reference, see the recent attempts by the State of Pennsylvania to create a state-level register site which would simply list sites that a concerned parent should block; the FCC said that was too much.
The rest of this is just random blather. I don't think anyone over the troll level suggested this had anything to do with freedom of speech or democracy, and the issue of censorship is a common error, significantly smaller than the ones yu've just trumpeted very loudly as if you were an authority. As far as the bit about voting within a corporation, here's a hint, bucko: there are things other than democracies which vote, and the corporate CIO most certainly does have to worry about the votes of the shareholders. That's not about democracy, that's about incorporation. Corporations are by definition voting-driven collaborative entities.
Apple isn't pulling these books for some great social good. They're not protesting anything that anybody can see except, apparently, the audacity of somebody to dare write a book about Steve Jobs. And to make this point they're pulling a successful publisher from their stores which is obviously going to cost them money and, very likely, stock price. Do they have no obligation to those people who own parts of their company?
You think Apple's stock price is going to tank because they pulled the "for dummies" books from the shelves of their so-called genius stores?
are you also one of those guys who complains that iTunes organizes your music for you? I ask because those guys are impossible for me to understand.
I'll give you a helping hand. Your product's attempts to assist the human are too invasive, cannot be turned off, are intrusive before a human has a chance to say "no," are insufficiently general, do not well match the music habits of people with other-than-mainstream tastes, and are part of a product which doesn't appear to do what it ends up doing.
The idea is pretty simple, really: if you take your Prada wrinkled shirt to the washing machine, and you come back 20 minutes later and it's steam pressed, you're going to be angry. Why? Steam pressing is usually a good thing. Problematically, it's not what everyone wants, it gave you no warning what was going to happen, you didn't have the chance to stop it, and it's a gigantic hassle to undo the damage caused by the original programmer who is unable to conceive of a world in which other people don't do things the way they do.
My young cousin installed iTunes on one of my computers once; it took me two weeks to get things back the way I wanted them, because iTunes is so god damned "helpful."
You want to understand why people are complaining about your products? Try thinking from their viewpoints instead of your own. "Well that's what it's for!" So what? Nobody knew until it was too late. Next time one of your products is going to make sweeping not-undoable changes to something a human has put potentially thousands of hours into, GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO SAY NO FIRST, AND MAKE SURE THEY KNOW WHAT'S ABOUT TO HAPPEN.
Amusingly, this used to be the thing Mac users complained about Windows boxes over: that they never had any fair warning what was about to be changed in their driver setups, and that their Mac gave them control without making them know what was coming, so they didn't have to be computer experts to maintain their boxes. Now that it's the music collection, something the average Joe cares a hell of a lot more about than drivers, the Apple programmers not only cannot fathom that one size does not fit all, but when complaints come by they make snide remarks like "that's what it's for" instead of trying to figure out why people don't understand the purpose of their products.
They insisted that they would rather name and sort each of 20,000 tiny files themselves, with all the obsessive focus of an autistic kid counting paper clips.
Hey, if your product gets it fundamentally wrong, I'm stuck with doing it myself or not being able to find anything at all. If you really don't understand that people don't make their music collections all at once and that people like to sort their records, frankly, you shouldn't be making music interfaces for the public.
Once upon a time Apple users cried to the skies "any interface which someone cannot sit down and use without confusion is faulty." Now, when people use their interfaces and are confused, Apple shrugs and turns its back.
Contempt isn't attractive. Make a product that doesn't suck and that doesn't think it's smarter than its user, and maybe you'll find less complaint.
If you think Apple would be in the (incredibly good) position it's in today without Jobs' leadership, you're delusional.
While it is difficult for me to take an assertion in the form of a psychiatric diagnosis
Hey, as long as you're using nitpicking to embarrass someone else, let me remind you that it's not a diagnosis, even if it uses a word which has one among many meanings as a medical word, unless a doctor repeats it. Hell, I could sit you down and give you a thorough examination, refer to the DSM-IV and come through with a correct assessment of your current emotional state, and it still wouldn't be a diagnosis.
And by the way, that's psychology, not psychiatry. Delusion is mental. When it's physiological, which is the dividing line between psychiatry and psychology, it's called hallucination.
Nice try at being a nit-picking humorless sack, though, and we have some lovely parting gifts for you on your way out.
By that logic, Citizen's Bank is Andrew Mellon, who's been dead for a hundred years. Don't confuse someone being crucial to something's history with their being crucial to said something's current state of being. If Steve Jobs evaporated, Apple would suffer at a marketing level alone.
Of course, given that some of us believe that Apple is a fundamentally marketing-driven company... well, I guess that's a discussion for another time.
Just because you don't know about JP Morgan, either of the Rockefellers, Howard Hughes, Ross Perots, Turners, Morleys, Michaelsons, Chisholms, Keynes, Kaidans, Tucker, Halliwell, Heinz, Glick, Mellon, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Gould, and so on doesn't mean they weren't there.
There has never been a time in human history in which the rich were not frequently floridly eccentric. Just think about what you're saying: you really seem to believe that 1950 invented the well to do freak. Have you never read The Great Gatsby?
Consider this. Ten Speed Press has published a book called, "How Wal*Mart is Destroying the World." Ten Speed press has published other books such as "Better than Chocolate: 50 Proven Ways to Feel Happier." Guess what--- Wal*Mart happens to sell that book. Even the Most Evil Corporation on the Planet (TM) hasn't stooped down to Apple's level.
Yeah. Let's see if that keeps up when they write an adversarial book about one of Sam Walton's children. It's a lot easier to ignore a book about your business than it is to ignore one about your sordid past.
What do you think is needed to avoid such 'submarine' patent attacks on established standards?
See also MP3 and Frauenhoffer, though they were somewhat less blatantly obvious about it, SGML and a few high-end vendors, and for a while there Sun and Java. That said, exactly what should happen has since happened: PNG, Vorbis and Speex, XML, modern scripted DHTML. Formats designed since day one from novel principles to be unencumbered. (I prefer the patent released to public domain, which is more legally secure, than the no patent and prior art defense, but both work.) Better portable music players occasionally play Vorbis, and everybody but IE supports PNG (hell, even IE does if you make an HTML component and stuff all PNGs through DirectX filters.) Scripted DHTML is pretty uniform and reliable these days, allowing application behavior of a quality which would make Win16 programmers green with envy. Hell, this is even happening in response to good-faith commercial dominants like Flash and PDF, in the form of SVG and (arguably).MHT as RFC2557 archives.
The progress to open standards is a natural one, though a difficult one, and generally one spurred by commercial standards' abuse. That's why Flash has maintained for so long: Macromedia released the standard, making things like Ming possible, maintaining community goodwill and a high quality editor. They fought open standards by becoming one, because there was no real editor competition, and there still pretty much isn't.
Over time, interoperability demands uniform deployment, stable extensibility and generality. Open standards are a natural medium for all three axes. Few approaches serve long-term interests better than open standards in any but the most exceedingly vertical markets.
What do we need? A PNG for lossy compression. JPEG2000 looked like it was going to be that, but the patent situation is just as bad. Someone with sufficient clue simply needs to step in and reinvent with open hands.
This would be a CompuServe tactic. SCO tried to take ownership of things they didn't own. Forgent is trying to charge for something that previous owners made free.
There's no question of ownership here whatsoever, and it's already gone through 31 successful settled lawsuits with major companies to the tune of a hundred million dollars, so the idea that this is a bogus patent or that they don't have a leg to stand on is either silly or means that thirty one major corporations don't have sufficient legal teams to protect nine digits. Which of those seems more likely to you?
America has one of the riches epicurean traditions on Earth, thanks. We've got immigrants from six more countries than actually exist on Earth, and they all brought their cuisines; the pastiche of cuisines which has erupted as a result is nothing short of fantastic.
Slashdot Mirror
A nonsense article based on a false premise with a trailing admonition that hey, by the way, you might be wrong doesn't make the remainder worthwhile. What part of "keep an eye on 4.0" didn't I understand? None of it: in fact, what I just told you was that the part you've already done was the broken part. Your admonition is the only sensible thing about the article.
At all.
Let me repeat.
You think a company's stock is going to tank because a hundred outlet stores which provide less than a tenth of a percent of its net income stopped selling a few dozen books, when books account for virtually none of the income from the stores and provide a far slimmer profit margin than the real breadwinners like iPods, iMacs and subscriptions to iTunes?
Just because Wiley isn't Ziff Davis doesn't mean it has a thing to do with Apple's success. You might as well say that they're going to tank because they stop selling coffee; coffee almost certainly brings in far more money than those Wiley lines, and it's not like if they didn't buy coffee they'd buy something else, though in the case of the books they most certainly will.
Besides, Wiley sucks. I'd be surprised if even an Apple user was stupid enough to buy their books.
You know, I remember when someone did this to GCC 3, comparing against 2.9.5.
4.0.0 is a brand new compiler. Lots of techniques in it are brand new. Lots of tweaks and polish can be applied. If you actually take the time to compare 3.4 to 3.0, you'll find that the gap is bigger than 4.0 to 3.4. Furthermore, if you compare 2.9.5 to 3.0, you'll find 2.9.5 is better than 3.0 by a much wider margin than 3.4 is to 4.0.
This is a misunderstanding of the nature of progress. 4.0 is a brand new compiler with brand new internal behaviors. Lots of things are at the It Works stage, instead of the It's Efficient stage. You can't compare a 3-year polished compiler to a 3-week polished compiler; it's utter nonsense.
If you want to compare 4.0 to something, compare it to 3.0, or sit down.
I don't get which part of my original statement is funny.
That's because we're laughing at you, not with you.
My 286 was able to thumbnail 128 jpegs onscreen at once within a single screen refresh. By extension, that means that it would take less than eight screen refreshes (probably substantially less) to do a thousand, though frankly it's my opinion that there's no need for a thousand images onscreen at once.
That said, in order to answer your question, my monitor was running at (if i remember correctly) 60hz back then, so roughly a maximum of one eighth of a second. JPEG is not hard to thumbnail. It's a series of gradients with a primary run color. Draw the primary run color. Done.
Which is exactly what iTunes does, if you've ever used it.
...
Nah. It says "would you like iTunes to organize your music for you?" When a fifteen year old sees that, they don't think "Would you like iTunes to ruin the existing organization for you?" They expect it to behave like winamp, windows media player, xmms and so forth, and just keep an internal organization with no regard to the filesystem.
At least, that's what everyone I've talked to which is angry about this has expected, and that's why my cousin was in tears when she realized what she'd done.
As for features being undoable, here's an example off the top of my head: 128-bit AES encryption on your home folder, for example,
Whereas that's an interesting story, I hardly think that a fundamental encryption of a drive is equianomous to mp3 tracking in terms of difficulty of undoing. Any proper drive encryption would have to be at so deep a level that one would basically have to reformat to get rid of it. The comparison is unfair, in my opinion.
A better example might be the difficulty one has uninstalling Creative Labs products, something which there's just no damn good reason for to be so difficult.
As a software engineer, I have very specific beliefs about appropriacy. Encrypted drives, yeah, that's a good reason to not be undoable; that's a fundamental security issue. But mp3s? Why the hell should it need to move them around?
I typically enjoy your grain-of-salt posts, but this is one where I must say you've really overstepped your area of competence.
Don't confuse a differing opinion for stupidity, please. I have used iTunes, I stand by my beliefs regarding it, and I know dozens of individuals which agree with me. It is my belief that if even a small group of people fails to understand a prompt, that that prompt absolutely must be reversible.
There is no reason that that sorting shouldn't be undoable. All they would need to do was keep a std::stack of each move, and then re-walk them in reverse should the person say "nevermind."
There is no reason for the situation to erupt in the first place, but they damn well could have fixed it, and it cost me quite a bit of time. Yes, if I had seen that prompt, I wouldn't have hit it. Not all users are sophisticated, and I shouldn't have to pay the price for my teenage cousin doing something which was superficially innocuous.
Whether or not iTunes gives that prompt, it does not say "this will destroy your existing organization, thereby destroying all existing playlists and ruining associations with any other music player." If it had, Pam wouldn't have hit the button. She had no idea anything was going to change. The dialog makes it look like a new organization is being made; this is false. What is actually happening is that existing organization is being replaced.
This is a critical failure, IMO, on the part of the iTunes UI team.
When put into those concrete terms, I should hope you'd understand my anger, whether or not you choose to agree with it.
Given that GCC 4 is less than two weeks old, it seems likely that OSX was actually compiled with a GCC 3 branch compiler.
Try this, desktops dwarf servers and such.
And are in turn dwarfed by embedded. Your antilock brakes were almost certainly coded in GCC, if you've got an American car, for example.
Besides, GCC is used for a significant chunk of desktop development, too; thanks to proper support for the flat memory model in DOS way back when, it got a very strong user following as DJGPP, and has ever since carried its momentum on virtue of price. Moreover, GCC is used heavily in corporate development, which accounts for a disproportionately large slice of compiler use.
Your sense of numbers may be fine, but GCC is tricky, and lives everywhere.
Not to mention that GCC is behind three nintendo and two sony platforms...
His attitude is why I no longer buy Apple products.
Really? For me it's beacuse they're Macs.
and at the same time deny it's customer base access to some damn good reference books
Can I buy some pot from you? I mean jesus, Wiley and Sons is two rungs below the bottom of the barrel; the only two publishers on earth they can laugh at are Wrox and Chick Publications.
Here's some free clue: "Freedom of Speech" and "Freedom of Press":
1. Are _only_ applicable to your dealing with the _government_. Not with private persons, not with corporations, not with anyone else.
Bzzt. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press extend everywhere right up and until the line of slander, are the basis for our laws regarding satire and parody, have been the defense of many outspoken corporate critics, and the watershed by which consumer advocates have held their heads above water. Ask Ralph Nader, who without those guarantees would have long since been sued off of the face of the Earth.
I.e., pay attention, lemming: it means that the government can't ban you from saying that Kerry was a better candidate than Bush, or viceversa. It doesn't however mean that Bush, as a private citizen, can't sue your pants off if you publish libel about him. E.g., if you were to start writing that Bush rapes small babies, he could very well sue your pants off, and "freedom of speech" would have nothing to do with it.
You're so far off base here it's unreal. What you're actually saying is that freedom of speech doesn't defend our rights to tell lies about public citizens. I believe the appropriate phrase here is "duh." That freedom of speech fails to cover libel doesn't mean that it doesn't cover criticism of private individuals.
2. It never said that anyone has to print, broadcast or help sell your bullshit. If anyone, _including_ the government, doesn't want to publish your speech, sell your book, or pay for public access to your blog, they _are_ entirely within their legal righst.
The government doesn't publish private individuals, dope on a rope.
E.g., if an ISP (even a state owned one) decided to unilaterally block all porn sites, or even all opposition sites, they _are_ within their legal rights to do so. Bad PR move? Yes. Violating your sacred "freedom of speech" or "democracy"? Nope.
In the case of a state-owned ISP or other state interference in public matters of communication, the FCC has repeatedly and without exception disagreed with you on this point. For reference, see the recent attempts by the State of Pennsylvania to create a state-level register site which would simply list sites that a concerned parent should block; the FCC said that was too much.
The rest of this is just random blather. I don't think anyone over the troll level suggested this had anything to do with freedom of speech or democracy, and the issue of censorship is a common error, significantly smaller than the ones yu've just trumpeted very loudly as if you were an authority. As far as the bit about voting within a corporation, here's a hint, bucko: there are things other than democracies which vote, and the corporate CIO most certainly does have to worry about the votes of the shareholders. That's not about democracy, that's about incorporation. Corporations are by definition voting-driven collaborative entities.
Apple isn't pulling these books for some great social good. They're not protesting anything that anybody can see except, apparently, the audacity of somebody to dare write a book about Steve Jobs. And to make this point they're pulling a successful publisher from their stores which is obviously going to cost them money and, very likely, stock price. Do they have no obligation to those people who own parts of their company?
You think Apple's stock price is going to tank because they pulled the "for dummies" books from the shelves of their so-called genius stores?
Obviously, this leads to massive processor usage.
My 286 was able to do that realtime. You have a curious definition of "massive," even for a Mac user.
are you also one of those guys who complains that iTunes organizes your music for you? I ask because those guys are impossible for me to understand.
I'll give you a helping hand. Your product's attempts to assist the human are too invasive, cannot be turned off, are intrusive before a human has a chance to say "no," are insufficiently general, do not well match the music habits of people with other-than-mainstream tastes, and are part of a product which doesn't appear to do what it ends up doing.
The idea is pretty simple, really: if you take your Prada wrinkled shirt to the washing machine, and you come back 20 minutes later and it's steam pressed, you're going to be angry. Why? Steam pressing is usually a good thing. Problematically, it's not what everyone wants, it gave you no warning what was going to happen, you didn't have the chance to stop it, and it's a gigantic hassle to undo the damage caused by the original programmer who is unable to conceive of a world in which other people don't do things the way they do.
My young cousin installed iTunes on one of my computers once; it took me two weeks to get things back the way I wanted them, because iTunes is so god damned "helpful."
You want to understand why people are complaining about your products? Try thinking from their viewpoints instead of your own. "Well that's what it's for!" So what? Nobody knew until it was too late. Next time one of your products is going to make sweeping not-undoable changes to something a human has put potentially thousands of hours into, GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO SAY NO FIRST, AND MAKE SURE THEY KNOW WHAT'S ABOUT TO HAPPEN.
Amusingly, this used to be the thing Mac users complained about Windows boxes over: that they never had any fair warning what was about to be changed in their driver setups, and that their Mac gave them control without making them know what was coming, so they didn't have to be computer experts to maintain their boxes. Now that it's the music collection, something the average Joe cares a hell of a lot more about than drivers, the Apple programmers not only cannot fathom that one size does not fit all, but when complaints come by they make snide remarks like "that's what it's for" instead of trying to figure out why people don't understand the purpose of their products.
They insisted that they would rather name and sort each of 20,000 tiny files themselves, with all the obsessive focus of an autistic kid counting paper clips.
Hey, if your product gets it fundamentally wrong, I'm stuck with doing it myself or not being able to find anything at all. If you really don't understand that people don't make their music collections all at once and that people like to sort their records, frankly, you shouldn't be making music interfaces for the public.
Once upon a time Apple users cried to the skies "any interface which someone cannot sit down and use without confusion is faulty." Now, when people use their interfaces and are confused, Apple shrugs and turns its back.
Contempt isn't attractive. Make a product that doesn't suck and that doesn't think it's smarter than its user, and maybe you'll find less complaint.
If you think Apple would be in the (incredibly good) position it's in today without Jobs' leadership, you're delusional.
While it is difficult for me to take an assertion in the form of a psychiatric diagnosis
Hey, as long as you're using nitpicking to embarrass someone else, let me remind you that it's not a diagnosis, even if it uses a word which has one among many meanings as a medical word, unless a doctor repeats it. Hell, I could sit you down and give you a thorough examination, refer to the DSM-IV and come through with a correct assessment of your current emotional state, and it still wouldn't be a diagnosis.
And by the way, that's psychology, not psychiatry. Delusion is mental. When it's physiological, which is the dividing line between psychiatry and psychology, it's called hallucination.
Nice try at being a nit-picking humorless sack, though, and we have some lovely parting gifts for you on your way out.
But ask yourself this: what good has ever come from governments or corporations bullying the press?
Kept The Figurehead off of the shelves a few extra years. If that's not a service to humanity, I don't know what is.
By that logic, Citizen's Bank is Andrew Mellon, who's been dead for a hundred years. Don't confuse someone being crucial to something's history with their being crucial to said something's current state of being. If Steve Jobs evaporated, Apple would suffer at a marketing level alone.
... well, I guess that's a discussion for another time.
Of course, given that some of us believe that Apple is a fundamentally marketing-driven company
From 1840 - 1980's, business was based on capital
Just because you don't know about JP Morgan, either of the Rockefellers, Howard Hughes, Ross Perots, Turners, Morleys, Michaelsons, Chisholms, Keynes, Kaidans, Tucker, Halliwell, Heinz, Glick, Mellon, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Gould, and so on doesn't mean they weren't there.
There has never been a time in human history in which the rich were not frequently floridly eccentric. Just think about what you're saying: you really seem to believe that 1950 invented the well to do freak. Have you never read The Great Gatsby?
I mean c'mon: Caligula.
Consider this. Ten Speed Press has published a book called, "How Wal*Mart is Destroying the World." Ten Speed press has published other books such as "Better than Chocolate: 50 Proven Ways to Feel Happier." Guess what--- Wal*Mart happens to sell that book. Even the Most Evil Corporation on the Planet (TM) hasn't stooped down to Apple's level.
Yeah. Let's see if that keeps up when they write an adversarial book about one of Sam Walton's children. It's a lot easier to ignore a book about your business than it is to ignore one about your sordid past.
OOOOH SHIT HE CALLED YOU AMBIC ... no, doesn't quite work.
(Rat bastard lameness filter is making me strip down my yelling post because it looks like yelling. Let's bulk it up with some more material, folks.)
What do you think is needed to avoid such 'submarine' patent attacks on established standards?
.MHT as RFC2557 archives.
See also MP3 and Frauenhoffer, though they were somewhat less blatantly obvious about it, SGML and a few high-end vendors, and for a while there Sun and Java. That said, exactly what should happen has since happened: PNG, Vorbis and Speex, XML, modern scripted DHTML. Formats designed since day one from novel principles to be unencumbered. (I prefer the patent released to public domain, which is more legally secure, than the no patent and prior art defense, but both work.) Better portable music players occasionally play Vorbis, and everybody but IE supports PNG (hell, even IE does if you make an HTML component and stuff all PNGs through DirectX filters.) Scripted DHTML is pretty uniform and reliable these days, allowing application behavior of a quality which would make Win16 programmers green with envy. Hell, this is even happening in response to good-faith commercial dominants like Flash and PDF, in the form of SVG and (arguably)
The progress to open standards is a natural one, though a difficult one, and generally one spurred by commercial standards' abuse. That's why Flash has maintained for so long: Macromedia released the standard, making things like Ming possible, maintaining community goodwill and a high quality editor. They fought open standards by becoming one, because there was no real editor competition, and there still pretty much isn't.
Over time, interoperability demands uniform deployment, stable extensibility and generality. Open standards are a natural medium for all three axes. Few approaches serve long-term interests better than open standards in any but the most exceedingly vertical markets.
What do we need? A PNG for lossy compression. JPEG2000 looked like it was going to be that, but the patent situation is just as bad. Someone with sufficient clue simply needs to step in and reinvent with open hands.
This would be a CompuServe tactic. SCO tried to take ownership of things they didn't own. Forgent is trying to charge for something that previous owners made free.
There's no question of ownership here whatsoever, and it's already gone through 31 successful settled lawsuits with major companies to the tune of a hundred million dollars, so the idea that this is a bogus patent or that they don't have a leg to stand on is either silly or means that thirty one major corporations don't have sufficient legal teams to protect nine digits. Which of those seems more likely to you?
That's not what Irony means.
America has one of the riches epicurean traditions on Earth, thanks. We've got immigrants from six more countries than actually exist on Earth, and they all brought their cuisines; the pastiche of cuisines which has erupted as a result is nothing short of fantastic.
Besides, you eat spotted dick, and that's not what irony is.