"We don't want no reward. We didn't bring him back for money." - Ed McDonnough, Raising Arizona
"Uhm... OK, Yeah. That sounds fair." - Gizmodo, upon hearing Apple's offer to not drag them into court on a years long legal crusade, and also to not send the Ninda assassin over to pick up the iPhone prototype, personally."
Congratulations on winning the Bogon of the Day Award, you've earned it. By acting like you know what your talking about when you clearly have not been paying attention to, oh, say, the history of Apple since the Return of Steve Jobs in 1996, and by failing to perform an economic analysis that an 8th grader could explain over lunch, you've upped the bogo-voltage to eleven and shot your bogosity signal way above the typical Slashdot noise (that's quite a feat, your Mom will be proud.)
Apple would under no conceivable circumstances provide information that they wanted to leak, to Gizmodo or Engadget, which are notorious for getting even trivial stuff bloody totally wrong.
Gizmodo has a prototype, almost certainly, yet they are are not bright enough bulbs to prevent the device being remotely bricked by Apple. Everyone with a clue would have known that was a risk. My non-geek friends would have known to turn it off, and leave it off, until they had it out of radio range.
Gizmodo opened the device, but didn't bother to photograph the parts close enough to identify the chips, which a bunch of people hanging out on Slashdot would have been smart enough to do.
Android isn't gaining anywhere near enough traction to justify a leak like this. iPhone sales have been going up, not down, and a leak like this, about a new iPhone due out in June or July is much, much more likely to hurt iPhone sales, than Android sales.
Apple has a long history of taking action against rumor mills, as the rumors, wether right or wrong, can give competitors hints about Apple's direction and future plans, and may seriously damage current sales, future sales. At least one rumors site was sued right out of existence.
Apple is widely believed to control internal information more tightly than any other Fortune 500 company. A small handful of Apple employees have seen the 2010 prototype, most employees would have seen it for the first time on launch day. Employees have been fired for leaking information. Employees cannot even talk to each other about future projects, except on a need to know basis.
Apple has taste. If they were going to leak a next generation iPhone, they would leak it to someone with taste, not the mouth breathers at Gizmodo or Engadget. Apple would leak to John Gruber.
Certainly, one could go on, but your theory is so obviously bogus, that to enumerate more reasons why would border on humiliation, and the Bogon of the Day Award is really only about recognition of your accomplishment. Only 365 people a year get such an award, out of many, many millions who compete.
Of course, that's assuming that the primary reason the iPad used the microSIM was to thwart iPhone users from dropping their SIM into their iPad, which is a pretty silly assumption, and probably not the case at all.
An argument can be made that most "state secrets" are unhealthy in a democratic republic. We might be a lot better off if we admitted openly nearly all government activity.
The mods run amok, today. Although Hushmail was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, the reply to enlighten the previous post shouldn't be modded down to oblivion. Quite the opposite.
You should have been up-modded for your sig alone! OMG I can't stop laughing, at Jean-Louis Gasse. Nonetheless, although I have seen first hand that Windows is responsible for an enormous amount of inefficiency in large Federal bureaucracies, I suspect that the nature of the problems in the NSA is different. The problems and costs introduce by use of Windows on desktops and servers isn't something that anyone in the NSA would blow the whistle on. Since it's not any different any other place in government, it's really difficult to quantify (no basis of comparison to the hypothetical well run Linux or Mac Federal agency. Instead, these problems probably have a lot to do with developing systems which are on par with Google's distributed processing thingy -- big, really really big, complex, insanely complex if you haven't done it before, new thinking required, then more new re-thinking and re-re-thinking until you narrow in on a solution that actually works -- on par with inventing an operating system and a database and the computers they run on, in a foreign language. I expect technical failures and cost overruns in such situations, and Mr. Drake might have been naive to think running over budget by years and many billions wasn't expected by the administration(s) and Congressional oversight committees (if they want the capability, they'll pay for it.)
Agreed. When I heard this story on NPR last night the first thing I thought was that this person might be a protected whistleblower, as it appears that the "state secrets" that were leaked don't relate to national security as much as bureaucratic incompetence and governmental inefficiency. The NPR story doesn't seem to mention the idea that this person might be considered a whistle-blower (admittedly I didn't catch all of the story.) The infamous "most Americans" oh heck, maybe even most Americans (not just the Slashdot libertarian geeks and the teabaggers hanging on Glenn Beck's every utterance) might well wind up thinking something rather different than the government expects them to. If Americans decide he was a whistleblower on billions of dollars of waste fraud and mismanagement, Thomas Drake might wind up as a folk hero and a commentator on the Sunday morning talk circuit. Presumably he'll seek some legal shelter under the Federal Whistleblower Protection Act. However, since he blew the whistle on the NSA and not the park service, that shelter might be pretty thin.
On the brighter side, it will be highly amusing to watch Fox News try to figure out how to present this story, what with it's spooky quantum both a particle and a wave nature (he's a dangerous spy... and a hard working taxpayer folk hero!") We'll get to revive the Shimmer dessert topping and floor wax meme for this one.
Your point was apparently too subtle for the knuckle-draggers with mod points around here. You seem to be suggesting that the crimes of the Bush administration (presumably such clear violations of the letter and spirit of the law as torture and warrantless wiretapping) be prosecuted, too, rather than merely stopped (as though torture were merely a policy decision left entirely up to the executive branch) and covered up by the Obama administration, and that Obama is guilty of continuing at least some of the illegal programs (such as warrantless wiretapping). Seems like a reasonable Slashdot-like libertarian proposition, and you probably expected up-mods. You probably should have been slightly more specific.
I don't want any upmods on this for pointing this out, just go fix what you did to the hapless parent post.
Curiously, Apple is an example of a company with a much longer than typical planning horizon, which has been rewarded by the market. Your point seems to remain valid for the general case, but Apple is an interesting example of an exception.
Steve Wozniak's Apple ceased to be, long before Apple forced out Steve Jobs. His was the Apple of the Apple II. The Apple your ilk fantasize about, so far as I can tell, never really existed, as the Apple of Spindler, et al., certainly wasn't anything like either the Apple of Wozniak, nor of Jobs. Frankly, none of the Apple between the Apple II, and the advent of Mac OS X was really all that interesting. There are parts to love, and parts to hate, but Apple is certainly interesting, in the modern, "return of Jobs" era.
You installed VMWare, obviously don't know much about what the problem was, admit you didn't investigate it, and get enough up mods that I actually see your sorry excuse for contributing to the public discourse. For shame. VMWare is a complicated thing. Your license is hereby revoked, until you go to school on it.
I find it fascinating that you and people like you will not be swayed by three decades of firsthand accounts as to how Jobs treats people, not only competitors but employees and business partners. Why are you so desperate to paint...
How quaint. The rest of us find it fascinating how you, and people like you, want somehow to believe that these other industry players are simply very nice guys, hanging out together, sailing, watching the Super Bowl, and just utterly dismayed as to how the mean old Steve Jobs would be so unkind to them.
Another, and likely more valid, perspective on this bit of industry history is that McNealy and Schwartz thought they could play hard ball with Steve Jobs. They bet their company, and they lost.
The part of the story left out sheds light on this. Lighthouse Design went around buying up several software companies which made the most innovative and popular software packages on NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and OpenStep, then sold the whole kit and caboodle to Sun, which promptly buried all of them.
Here's a brief and amusing summary of the career arcs of McNealy, Jobs, and Schwartz. I stumbled upon it while searching for a reference to the famous McNealy statement, "Sun puts all its wood behind one arrow", which he said when announcing Sun's support for OpenStep. Sun drove that arrow through the heart of OpenStep. Nice guys, Schwartz and McNealy, but hey, that's just business.
Regarding Concurrence, if there exist any patents relevant to the basic concept of a presentation package, those would undoubtedly be held by Microsoft (heard of PowerPoint?) not Sun/Lighthouse Design, and were cross-licensed to Apple years ago as part of a famous "bury the hatchet" move, when Jobs first returned to control of Apple. If Schwartz thought he had a leg to stand on, he might have sued Jobs. Frankly, this part of the story doesn't ring true. Silence on the other end of the phone when provoked in such a manner isn't exactly the style of Mr. Jobs, as you might have suspected since you're actively engaged in propagating rumors of his notorious alleged personality traits. If you're even close to right about that, doesn't it seem more likely that Mr. Schwartz blacked out, as a result of the brief and blunt tirade which he unleashed?
Observers had speculated for years, prior to the announcement of Keynote, that Steve Jobs used a presentation package on stage which appeared to be something other than Microsoft PowerPoint. Rumor at the time was that a special one-user license (with source) had been sold to Mr. Jobs, who despised PowerPoint. Presumably that license would have been sold by Sun, and Schwartz would have been aware of it.
That depends. Finding out why we need air to breathe didn't entail the possibility of ripping a hole in the space time continuum, with dire consequences for the solar system, the galaxy, and possibly the local universe. My money is on a certain percentage of Gamma Ray Bursters being the signature of an advancing civilization snuffing out its first really high energy particle accelerator, and its planet, and that the effects are localized to the vaporization of the planet or solar system. Since we're conducting our experiments on Earth, it's unlikely that I'll be able to collect, should any of you take up this bet.
Microsoft might even agree with your assessment, and may still labor under the delusion that Microsoft Office is their very own Sword of Damocles. However, I suspect that the sword may not be hanging by a thread above the seat in which Steve Jobs is sitting. Perhaps they haven't looked up, lately.
Always with the docking stations crap. When are you people going to learn to use that new fangled Google thing to find your bloody docking stations. Must I always do it for you?
Taliban and the Drug Trade
Some members of the U.S. drug enforcement community suggest that a new strategy may have been adopted by the Taliban in the wake of their July 27, 2000 announced ban on cultivation. This strategy would reflect a desire by the Taliban to use their “monopoly” position to maximize profits, i.e. restrict supply by restricting cultivation; drive prices up dramatically; and sell from an extensive supply of stockpiled opium. According to the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) personnel, in the past, up to 60% of opium stock has been stored for sale in future years."
Uhm, no. What nut jobs like Mullah Omar say, and what they actually do, might overlap, but may not be entirely equivalent.
If she's got a Core2Duo laptop, get her the Mac Box Set for a present. It will be like getting a brand new computer. Even if all she does is use a web browser, it will run so much better under Snow Leopard than it does under Tiger that it's not even funny.
Rats. I meant to call him "Linux Torvalds" only in the subject line, as a bit of humor. Mr. Linus Torvalds delivered the knockout blow, to himself, of course.
"We are not the streamlined, small, hyper-efficient kernel I envisioned 15 years ago. Our kernel is huge and bloated. Whenever we add a new feature, it only gets worse." -- Linus Torvalds [computerworlduk.com], September 2009.
"After spending $9 billion on Constellation, the program to return to the moon, canceling the contracts with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Alliant Techsystems and other companies would cost an additional $2.5 billion, NASA officials said."
Well, it might be the case that some of the funding will come from private companies. I think that's the intent, anyway. NASA seems to have $6 Billion over five years allocated to development of commercial crew transport system(s?). That's half of what has already been spent on Constellation (in four years, plus termination penalties). Presumably they expect private companies to contribute the remaining development investment, in exchange for NASA getting out of the market (and thus becoming a guaranteed buyer, of a sort.)
Slashdot Mirror
The mouth breathers at Gizmodo (presumably) possess assholes (one, each) but they *are* window-lickers.
"We don't want no reward. We didn't bring him back for money."
- Ed McDonnough, Raising Arizona
"Uhm... OK, Yeah. That sounds fair."
- Gizmodo, upon hearing Apple's offer to not drag them into court on a years long legal crusade, and also to not send the Ninda assassin over to pick up the iPhone prototype, personally."
Certainly, one could go on, but your theory is so obviously bogus, that to enumerate more reasons why would border on humiliation, and the Bogon of the Day Award is really only about recognition of your accomplishment. Only 365 people a year get such an award, out of many, many millions who compete.
Congratulations!
Of course, that's assuming that the primary reason the iPad used the microSIM was to thwart iPhone users from dropping their SIM into their iPad, which is a pretty silly assumption, and probably not the case at all.
a Troll mod. Thus proving my point.
An argument can be made that most "state secrets" are unhealthy in a democratic republic. We might be a lot better off if we admitted openly nearly all government activity.
The mods run amok, today. Although Hushmail was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, the reply to enlighten the previous post shouldn't be modded down to oblivion. Quite the opposite.
You should have been up-modded for your sig alone! OMG I can't stop laughing, at Jean-Louis Gasse. Nonetheless, although I have seen first hand that Windows is responsible for an enormous amount of inefficiency in large Federal bureaucracies, I suspect that the nature of the problems in the NSA is different. The problems and costs introduce by use of Windows on desktops and servers isn't something that anyone in the NSA would blow the whistle on. Since it's not any different any other place in government, it's really difficult to quantify (no basis of comparison to the hypothetical well run Linux or Mac Federal agency. Instead, these problems probably have a lot to do with developing systems which are on par with Google's distributed processing thingy -- big, really really big, complex, insanely complex if you haven't done it before, new thinking required, then more new re-thinking and re-re-thinking until you narrow in on a solution that actually works -- on par with inventing an operating system and a database and the computers they run on, in a foreign language. I expect technical failures and cost overruns in such situations, and Mr. Drake might have been naive to think running over budget by years and many billions wasn't expected by the administration(s) and Congressional oversight committees (if they want the capability, they'll pay for it.)
Agreed. When I heard this story on NPR last night the first thing I thought was that this person might be a protected whistleblower, as it appears that the "state secrets" that were leaked don't relate to national security as much as bureaucratic incompetence and governmental inefficiency. The NPR story doesn't seem to mention the idea that this person might be considered a whistle-blower (admittedly I didn't catch all of the story.) The infamous "most Americans" oh heck, maybe even most Americans (not just the Slashdot libertarian geeks and the teabaggers hanging on Glenn Beck's every utterance) might well wind up thinking something rather different than the government expects them to. If Americans decide he was a whistleblower on billions of dollars of waste fraud and mismanagement, Thomas Drake might wind up as a folk hero and a commentator on the Sunday morning talk circuit. Presumably he'll seek some legal shelter under the Federal Whistleblower Protection Act. However, since he blew the whistle on the NSA and not the park service, that shelter might be pretty thin.
On the brighter side, it will be highly amusing to watch Fox News try to figure out how to present this story, what with it's spooky quantum both a particle and a wave nature (he's a dangerous spy... and a hard working taxpayer folk hero!") We'll get to revive the Shimmer dessert topping and floor wax meme for this one.
Your point was apparently too subtle for the knuckle-draggers with mod points around here. You seem to be suggesting that the crimes of the Bush administration (presumably such clear violations of the letter and spirit of the law as torture and warrantless wiretapping) be prosecuted, too, rather than merely stopped (as though torture were merely a policy decision left entirely up to the executive branch) and covered up by the Obama administration, and that Obama is guilty of continuing at least some of the illegal programs (such as warrantless wiretapping). Seems like a reasonable Slashdot-like libertarian proposition, and you probably expected up-mods. You probably should have been slightly more specific.
I don't want any upmods on this for pointing this out, just go fix what you did to the hapless parent post.
Curiously, Apple is an example of a company with a much longer than typical planning horizon, which has been rewarded by the market. Your point seems to remain valid for the general case, but Apple is an interesting example of an exception.
Steve Wozniak's Apple ceased to be, long before Apple forced out Steve Jobs. His was the Apple of the Apple II. The Apple your ilk fantasize about, so far as I can tell, never really existed, as the Apple of Spindler, et al., certainly wasn't anything like either the Apple of Wozniak, nor of Jobs. Frankly, none of the Apple between the Apple II, and the advent of Mac OS X was really all that interesting. There are parts to love, and parts to hate, but Apple is certainly interesting, in the modern, "return of Jobs" era.
You installed VMWare, obviously don't know much about what the problem was, admit you didn't investigate it, and get enough up mods that I actually see your sorry excuse for contributing to the public discourse. For shame. VMWare is a complicated thing. Your license is hereby revoked, until you go to school on it.
How quaint. The rest of us find it fascinating how you, and people like you, want somehow to believe that these other industry players are simply very nice guys, hanging out together, sailing, watching the Super Bowl, and just utterly dismayed as to how the mean old Steve Jobs would be so unkind to them.
Another, and likely more valid, perspective on this bit of industry history is that McNealy and Schwartz thought they could play hard ball with Steve Jobs. They bet their company, and they lost.
The part of the story left out sheds light on this. Lighthouse Design went around buying up several software companies which made the most innovative and popular software packages on NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and OpenStep, then sold the whole kit and caboodle to Sun, which promptly buried all of them.
Here's a brief and amusing summary of the career arcs of McNealy, Jobs, and Schwartz. I stumbled upon it while searching for a reference to the famous McNealy statement, "Sun puts all its wood behind one arrow", which he said when announcing Sun's support for OpenStep. Sun drove that arrow through the heart of OpenStep. Nice guys, Schwartz and McNealy, but hey, that's just business.
Regarding Concurrence, if there exist any patents relevant to the basic concept of a presentation package, those would undoubtedly be held by Microsoft (heard of PowerPoint?) not Sun/Lighthouse Design, and were cross-licensed to Apple years ago as part of a famous "bury the hatchet" move, when Jobs first returned to control of Apple. If Schwartz thought he had a leg to stand on, he might have sued Jobs. Frankly, this part of the story doesn't ring true. Silence on the other end of the phone when provoked in such a manner isn't exactly the style of Mr. Jobs, as you might have suspected since you're actively engaged in propagating rumors of his notorious alleged personality traits. If you're even close to right about that, doesn't it seem more likely that Mr. Schwartz blacked out, as a result of the brief and blunt tirade which he unleashed?
Observers had speculated for years, prior to the announcement of Keynote, that Steve Jobs used a presentation package on stage which appeared to be something other than Microsoft PowerPoint. Rumor at the time was that a special one-user license (with source) had been sold to Mr. Jobs, who despised PowerPoint. Presumably that license would have been sold by Sun, and Schwartz would have been aware of it.
The plural of sheep is sheep, when referring to sheep. When referring to people, it's sheeple.
Exactement. Ennui of Henri
It was me. (Or it would have been, had I thought of this.)
That depends. Finding out why we need air to breathe didn't entail the possibility of ripping a hole in the space time continuum, with dire consequences for the solar system, the galaxy, and possibly the local universe. My money is on a certain percentage of Gamma Ray Bursters being the signature of an advancing civilization snuffing out its first really high energy particle accelerator, and its planet, and that the effects are localized to the vaporization of the planet or solar system. Since we're conducting our experiments on Earth, it's unlikely that I'll be able to collect, should any of you take up this bet.
Microsoft might even agree with your assessment, and may still labor under the delusion that Microsoft Office is their very own Sword of Damocles. However, I suspect that the sword may not be hanging by a thread above the seat in which Steve Jobs is sitting. Perhaps they haven't looked up, lately.
I've already said too much.
Always with the docking stations crap. When are you people going to learn to use that new fangled Google thing to find your bloody docking stations. Must I always do it for you?
Uhm, no. What nut jobs like Mullah Omar say, and what they actually do, might overlap, but may not be entirely equivalent.
If she's got a Core2Duo laptop, get her the Mac Box Set for a present. It will be like getting a brand new computer. Even if all she does is use a web browser, it will run so much better under Snow Leopard than it does under Tiger that it's not even funny.
Rats. I meant to call him "Linux Torvalds" only in the subject line, as a bit of humor. Mr. Linus Torvalds delivered the knockout blow, to himself, of course.
This round of the The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate on kernel architecture seems to be a self-administered blow from Linux to himself.
Jus' sayin'.
Well, it might be the case that some of the funding will come from private companies. I think that's the intent, anyway. NASA seems to have $6 Billion over five years allocated to development of commercial crew transport system(s?). That's half of what has already been spent on Constellation (in four years, plus termination penalties). Presumably they expect private companies to contribute the remaining development investment, in exchange for NASA getting out of the market (and thus becoming a guaranteed buyer, of a sort.)