Ahem. Their credibility really isn't an issue since they made a trivial factual claim, which happens to be correct, regarding the term of art, brick. Your own credibility has been called into question, however, by your incorrect stance over an issue you could have verified yourself in less time that it took you to type your baseless attack. If you wish to improve your credibility, spend the next hour at Wikipedia reading about logical fallacies. For extra credit, identify by name the logical fallacy you committed.
The term "brick" is being bandied about pretty loosely these days. It does not mean, "I had a problem, possibly even one of my own creation, that can only be cured by re-installation, and that annoys me and I think I can get some blog hits by griping about it."
I'm not sure about Intel's role in this, but Microsoft undoubtedly sees a threat beyond what's being discussed here. The threat isn't directly Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child project, it's Linux. If you put a cheap laptop in the hands of a few hundred million kids, they won't grow up to be afraid of it. That's the real threat. Microsoft's threat horizon exceeds a generation.
They are tracking how many times you check the weather. It's probably to gather data to test the viability of using iPhone to proactively provide mental health services. People who suddenly begin displaying obsessive compulsive tendencies by checking the weather over and over will be offered the new service.
Just when i was wondering why the hell I was still slogging through the comments for this article, I found yours. You made the entire 90 seconds worth while.
His essays are interesting, topical, and full of fascinating facts that can be verified, as well as occasional insider tales which can't but that doesn't stop John Markoff or Jim Carlton or anybody else. His web publishing strategy lets him solicit feedback, and correct factual errors in-situ, which puts him a step ahead of the regular media crowd. He further exploits web technologies by telling complex stories of technology development in ways that allow the reader to spelunk the history of these related technologies, companies, and people from whatever angle interests you: come in from a curiosity about Palm OS, and read and click your way to how its history of OS development failure resembles Apple's past, and how successful OS development is fueling the iPhone present.
His opinions you might not like, but frankly, the quality of the journalism is quite high. Furthermore, his opinions are shared by a lot of the sharpest geeks I know, the kind who are technology sluts, rather than fanbois, and the stories he tells don't get much airplay. Robert X Cringley tries to cover some of this stuff, but in his rush to play himself as an important industry analyst, tries to read between too many lines and as a result his telling is frequently distorted, incomplete, or incorrect. Roughly Drafted by contrast has done a pretty good job of explaining things that geeks understand, in a way that non-geek technology buffs can understand, but the media and wall street analysts don't grok. The stories on Palm are about the most concise and yet comprehensive analysis of that Fucked Company available on the net today.
I for one welcome our new essay pimping roughly drafted overlords. That stuff is a hell of a lot more interesting than the typical Rolland recycled press release to watered down and erroneous blog.
This notion was discussed as recently as Plato and Aristotle. Democracy was thought to be something like a "least worst" form of government, and the best form of government was considered to be an unstable condition, precisely because the Philosopher King didn't want the job.
No, he never wanted a closed iPhone. He wanted to get the SDK right, rather than pooping it out on the world like Windows Mobile, Symbian, and PalmOS. Simply because he did not tell *you* that there would eventually be an SDK for native applications, and simply because he steered developers in June toward the available Web 2.0 option for developing applications for the iPhone, does not mean that he changed his mind.
Even though the parent forgot, "... and blame the developers of third party applications..." it was otherwise accurate, if blunt. The Troll mod is unfair. Mod, you will be punished in meta-mod land.
Your comments remind me that the objective "everything to everyone" very nearly defines a general purpose computer, including the entry level server. There exit better ways to implement complex systems, even though like the general purpose computer which are intended to meet, to a large degree, this somewhat nebulous objective. One architectural principle, which is very important in helping to produce a complex system, and which seems to elude Microsoft is that of "loose coupling".
Some layers or components should be cleanly separated by well designed and well documented interfaces. When loose coupling is considered to be an important design objective, you can wind up with a system in which both a rapid evolution in technology, and a stable technology and production base, are possible. (More generally, the complex system can facilitate multiple competing objectives, and let you, the client, operator, or administrator, choose at run time which objectives you seek.) The architecture permits this, for example, by providing abstractions such as "modules" which let the administrator choose what components to load and run, swapping in new modules if they need to be "on the cutting edge" or using the tried and true ones if they need stability more than any other objective, for example. As a reasonable example of this principle, consider "the web" as a loosely coupled complex system, or consider simply Apache as a very coherent example of a single system where multiple modules doing different things and created by different authors co-exist pretty peacefully over generations of software revisions and wholesale architectural changes.
When loose coupling is ignored, or subjugated to the desire to create opportunities for "vendor lock", you wind up with things like the SMB/CIFS snafu (that may sound harsh, but calling it a "protocol" is overly generous).
The items you mention in your point "2" above are nearly all rooted, ultimately, in the failure to consider the principle of loose coupling, when designing a complex system. Well, honestly as far as I can tell, Microsoft intentionally undermine it at every turn by trying to tie everything to everything else so that you get snared in the "Chinese finger trap" that is the Microsoft world.
No, the parent conflated two assertions, one of which was incorrect. The iPhone has a SIM slot. Yeah, it sucks that iPhone is locked, but honestly, most other phones are, too, here in the U.S. Just like these other phones, iPhone has a SIM card, an ordinary SIM card, in an ordinary SIM slot (well, a little better than ordinary, as it's far easier to insert and remove than most other phones I've had).
The parent of this tread asserted:
"And on the opposite side of the coin, what could have been so incredibly bad about offering the phone unlocked with a SIM card slot
that they, -who pride themselves in public for being so 'open'- did not see that as a viable option?
Do they act so arrogant that they don't even want to please all of the international travelers who swap SIM cards
every time they arrive in a new country? Someone, please drop some science on us. As it is, it makes no logical sense. "
I agree with the frustration expressed, but it's due to a locked phone, not absence of a SIM slot or card in iPhone. This is a consumer protection issue, which I previously thought could only be solved by a regulatory agency or an act of Congress in the United States (as current laws don't seem to cover this issue of selling me a hardware device which is locked to a service vendor). It seems possible, however, that laws passed in the EU could crack this open in the U.S. by accident. Cheers to overseas champions of consumer rights.
Yup. That's a barrier on the scale of say, opening a small cafe in a small town. Hardly enough of a barrier to entry to maintain an oligopoly. The technology for building the physical recording studio is well known and much less expensive than it used to be, too. Heck, I know one guy who just build a little studio in his back yard.
Well, there are plenty of defects discovered and exploited in closed-source programs, for example, Microsoft Windows (before the source code was stolen) to demonstrate that you don't need the source to crack.
I don't agree, for the record, that source is more secure by virtue of being open. It really isn't clear at all that source is more or less secure by virtue of the source being closed or open. Fuzzing can help good and bad guys narrow in on defects without source. If source is open, perhaps more people help make it more secure over time, including even the bad guys who might well drive a faster evolution in the open source product by finding and exploiting the defects sooner. Closed source might mask defects for a long period of time, which are perhaps exploited only by a few people on a few systems. Not all crackers broadcast their exploits. The Microsoft Office exploits which were discovered some months back, which appear to have targeted individual users, demonstrate that some crackers sit on their exploits, use them discretely, and try to keep them secret. The certain knowledge that this happens makes it quite difficult to claim that closed source is more secure, by virtue of it being closed.
Regarding your other observations, I have little to say, except that Slashdot is full of young people getting started, people trying to learn more, people trying to help, people who haven't had their morning coffee, people who know more than they share, people who don't know as much as they think they do. Just like the rest of the world. If Bert showed you his resume and references, which provided you with compelling evidence that he wrote a compiler, it seems clear that you still would have the same technical disagreement between you about the implications of the security of closed vs. open source. You would continue to have that disagreement because, really, there isn't a clear answer to the question, and there may never be a clear answer to that question.
Some of your comments remind me of one of my own principles for success in a small business, which I used to tell people when they asked me how I managed to assemble such a fine development team. Don't hire anybody who lowers the average IQ of the organization. That means I had to hire only people who were smarter than me. Very few people get the joke. I stopped telling it because some people think it to be an assertion of undue arrogance. Life is like that, sometimes.
Well, to be more precise about it, the major activities of the recording industry which enabled it to maintain itself as an oligopoly are being radically transformed by technology. It no longer takes a multi-million dollar recording studio to cut and mix a decent recording, you can do it with a Macintosh and Logic Pro. Distribution doesn't require production and distribution of expensive physical media. Copy a file to a web server and pay for bandwidth as it's needed. The recording industry won't survive in its current form. It has enormous volumes of valuable copyrighted material, so it will probably survive in some form. There is one leg holding them up right now, which is that new bands don't yet have a way to become super stars without expensive promotion, done by the record labels. If new bands ever figure out how to make money with the record labels, say through some thing like google ads or some mechanism as yet unthunk, this industry is so totally over, overnight.
Like, Dude. With experience like that and all, why not log in and post under your name? I mean, maybe somebody might want to hire you or something. Hell, you don't know. Maybe Bert would even hire you.
Well, the densely populated U.S. cities could have been done. Still could be done. Still are not being done. I suspect the size of Japan isn't the only factor. There might be plenty of blame left over to assign to shortsightedness.
Slashdot Mirror
I see, you're actually just a Troll. Don't feed the Trolls!
Ahem. Their credibility really isn't an issue since they made a trivial factual claim, which happens to be correct, regarding the term of art, brick. Your own credibility has been called into question, however, by your incorrect stance over an issue you could have verified yourself in less time that it took you to type your baseless attack. If you wish to improve your credibility, spend the next hour at Wikipedia reading about logical fallacies. For extra credit, identify by name the logical fallacy you committed.
The term "brick" is being bandied about pretty loosely these days. It does not mean, "I had a problem, possibly even one of my own creation, that can only be cured by re-installation, and that annoys me and I think I can get some blog hits by griping about it."
I'm not sure about Intel's role in this, but Microsoft undoubtedly sees a threat beyond what's being discussed here. The threat isn't directly Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child project, it's Linux. If you put a cheap laptop in the hands of a few hundred million kids, they won't grow up to be afraid of it. That's the real threat. Microsoft's threat horizon exceeds a generation.
They are tracking how many times you check the weather. It's probably to gather data to test the viability of using iPhone to proactively provide mental health services. People who suddenly begin displaying obsessive compulsive tendencies by checking the weather over and over will be offered the new service.
Just when i was wondering why the hell I was still slogging through the comments for this article, I found yours. You made the entire 90 seconds worth while.
His essays are interesting, topical, and full of fascinating facts that can be verified, as well as occasional insider tales which can't but that doesn't stop John Markoff or Jim Carlton or anybody else. His web publishing strategy lets him solicit feedback, and correct factual errors in-situ, which puts him a step ahead of the regular media crowd. He further exploits web technologies by telling complex stories of technology development in ways that allow the reader to spelunk the history of these related technologies, companies, and people from whatever angle interests you: come in from a curiosity about Palm OS, and read and click your way to how its history of OS development failure resembles Apple's past, and how successful OS development is fueling the iPhone present.
His opinions you might not like, but frankly, the quality of the journalism is quite high. Furthermore, his opinions are shared by a lot of the sharpest geeks I know, the kind who are technology sluts, rather than fanbois, and the stories he tells don't get much airplay. Robert X Cringley tries to cover some of this stuff, but in his rush to play himself as an important industry analyst, tries to read between too many lines and as a result his telling is frequently distorted, incomplete, or incorrect. Roughly Drafted by contrast has done a pretty good job of explaining things that geeks understand, in a way that non-geek technology buffs can understand, but the media and wall street analysts don't grok. The stories on Palm are about the most concise and yet comprehensive analysis of that Fucked Company available on the net today.
I for one welcome our new essay pimping roughly drafted overlords. That stuff is a hell of a lot more interesting than the typical Rolland recycled press release to watered down and erroneous blog.
This notion was discussed as recently as Plato and Aristotle. Democracy was thought to be something like a "least worst" form of government, and the best form of government was considered to be an unstable condition, precisely because the Philosopher King didn't want the job.
More power? Dude. Like, get a grip.
No, I'm not Steve Jobs. I'm Fake Bill Gates.
...they want their Apple FUD back.
No, he never wanted a closed iPhone. He wanted to get the SDK right, rather than pooping it out on the world like Windows Mobile, Symbian, and PalmOS. Simply because he did not tell *you* that there would eventually be an SDK for native applications, and simply because he steered developers in June toward the available Web 2.0 option for developing applications for the iPhone, does not mean that he changed his mind.
Even though the parent forgot, "... and blame the developers of third party applications..." it was otherwise accurate, if blunt. The Troll mod is unfair. Mod, you will be punished in meta-mod land.
Your comments remind me that the objective "everything to everyone" very nearly defines a general purpose computer, including the entry level server. There exit better ways to implement complex systems, even though like the general purpose computer which are intended to meet, to a large degree, this somewhat nebulous objective. One architectural principle, which is very important in helping to produce a complex system, and which seems to elude Microsoft is that of "loose coupling".
Some layers or components should be cleanly separated by well designed and well documented interfaces. When loose coupling is considered to be an important design objective, you can wind up with a system in which both a rapid evolution in technology, and a stable technology and production base, are possible. (More generally, the complex system can facilitate multiple competing objectives, and let you, the client, operator, or administrator, choose at run time which objectives you seek.) The architecture permits this, for example, by providing abstractions such as "modules" which let the administrator choose what components to load and run, swapping in new modules if they need to be "on the cutting edge" or using the tried and true ones if they need stability more than any other objective, for example. As a reasonable example of this principle, consider "the web" as a loosely coupled complex system, or consider simply Apache as a very coherent example of a single system where multiple modules doing different things and created by different authors co-exist pretty peacefully over generations of software revisions and wholesale architectural changes.
When loose coupling is ignored, or subjugated to the desire to create opportunities for "vendor lock", you wind up with things like the SMB/CIFS snafu (that may sound harsh, but calling it a "protocol" is overly generous).
The items you mention in your point "2" above are nearly all rooted, ultimately, in the failure to consider the principle of loose coupling, when designing a complex system. Well, honestly as far as I can tell, Microsoft intentionally undermine it at every turn by trying to tie everything to everything else so that you get snared in the "Chinese finger trap" that is the Microsoft world.
Chu Chi has seen it. It must be so.
Even the insides of your eyelids. Chu Chi has seen it. It must be done.
Your discussion remind me of this excellent essay by Robert J. Samuelson entitled The Sad Fate of the Comma.
Yup. That's a barrier on the scale of say, opening a small cafe in a small town. Hardly enough of a barrier to entry to maintain an oligopoly. The technology for building the physical recording studio is well known and much less expensive than it used to be, too. Heck, I know one guy who just build a little studio in his back yard.
Well, there are plenty of defects discovered and exploited in closed-source programs, for example, Microsoft Windows (before the source code was stolen) to demonstrate that you don't need the source to crack.
I don't agree, for the record, that source is more secure by virtue of being open. It really isn't clear at all that source is more or less secure by virtue of the source being closed or open. Fuzzing can help good and bad guys narrow in on defects without source. If source is open, perhaps more people help make it more secure over time, including even the bad guys who might well drive a faster evolution in the open source product by finding and exploiting the defects sooner. Closed source might mask defects for a long period of time, which are perhaps exploited only by a few people on a few systems. Not all crackers broadcast their exploits. The Microsoft Office exploits which were discovered some months back, which appear to have targeted individual users, demonstrate that some crackers sit on their exploits, use them discretely, and try to keep them secret. The certain knowledge that this happens makes it quite difficult to claim that closed source is more secure, by virtue of it being closed.
Regarding your other observations, I have little to say, except that Slashdot is full of young people getting started, people trying to learn more, people trying to help, people who haven't had their morning coffee, people who know more than they share, people who don't know as much as they think they do. Just like the rest of the world. If Bert showed you his resume and references, which provided you with compelling evidence that he wrote a compiler, it seems clear that you still would have the same technical disagreement between you about the implications of the security of closed vs. open source. You would continue to have that disagreement because, really, there isn't a clear answer to the question, and there may never be a clear answer to that question.
Some of your comments remind me of one of my own principles for success in a small business, which I used to tell people when they asked me how I managed to assemble such a fine development team. Don't hire anybody who lowers the average IQ of the organization. That means I had to hire only people who were smarter than me. Very few people get the joke. I stopped telling it because some people think it to be an assertion of undue arrogance. Life is like that, sometimes.
s//with the record labels/without the record labels/
Well, to be more precise about it, the major activities of the recording industry which enabled it to maintain itself as an oligopoly are being radically transformed by technology. It no longer takes a multi-million dollar recording studio to cut and mix a decent recording, you can do it with a Macintosh and Logic Pro. Distribution doesn't require production and distribution of expensive physical media. Copy a file to a web server and pay for bandwidth as it's needed. The recording industry won't survive in its current form. It has enormous volumes of valuable copyrighted material, so it will probably survive in some form. There is one leg holding them up right now, which is that new bands don't yet have a way to become super stars without expensive promotion, done by the record labels. If new bands ever figure out how to make money with the record labels, say through some thing like google ads or some mechanism as yet unthunk, this industry is so totally over, overnight.
Like, Dude. With experience like that and all, why not log in and post under your name? I mean, maybe somebody might want to hire you or something. Hell, you don't know. Maybe Bert would even hire you.
Well, the densely populated U.S. cities could have been done. Still could be done. Still are not being done. I suspect the size of Japan isn't the only factor. There might be plenty of blame left over to assign to shortsightedness.
Are you referring to the iPhone GUI? I thought everyone knew they pinched that from Star Trek TNG?