Good point on letting the mobile market work... MS might be better off selling the shovels and picks to the gold-rushers than taking the risks and pains of prospecting themselves.
The subtext of this is people's natural inclination to trust and believe in -- and certainly do not question -- authority figures. The reason so many reflexively think that a defendant is guilty is because, hey, if he hadn't done anything wrong, the police & DA wouldn't have brought him up on charges, now would they?
Ugly truth of the day: Most people's natural predispositions are not compatible with a free, open society. This is why civil liberties can so easily be eroded away.
ACTA is irrelevant to the thread and the empty-sensationaism article posted. No one is denying the Microsoft has a dog in the software-patent and intellectual-property fights. The point of discussion is that the FUD linked to above tells us zippo about any MS plans to "declare patent war on Linux."
Don't forget the flip side to your good friend's career woes: Now the people who used to have to fork over $30 an hour for his labor can get the same work (or near it) for less money. That enhances their lives. "ILLEGAL" immigration enhances competition and is opposed mostly by people who are either xenophobic or are looking to limit economic competition, harming their neighbors in the process.
Except the Chinese have an incentive to play up here, because if it ever comes out that their exported goods are used for espionage, no one will ever by from them again.
Finally, most people understand that email is insecure and unreliable
I disagree on that latter point. People aren't surprised when their messages aren't sent or received, but they do expect/think/believe that the messages they do have can be seen by them and them alone. Next time you talk e-mail with a less-knowledgeable type, tell them that their e-mail can be read by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Guarantee their reaction will be more of shock than of understanding.
And whining about a lack of 401(k) contributions is the same thing as saying "hey, we expect you to fund our retirement years long after we have stopped doing any productive work for you."
So your long-time girlfriend makes fun of your career choice? And your good friend wants in on this fun? Your life, but I'd think I'd want these people out of mine as quickly as I could head out the door.
I agree that "tough shit" is too harsh a term -- we are dealing, after all, with kids here -- but (and I won't call this a character flaw, since that's too judgmental) poor judgment is *why* the system is "broken", or at least it's a major contributor. It's not like education costs spiral up out of immutable cosmic laws or the unrepentant evil that is the avarice of school administrators. The go up because, as a poster upthread said, students are willing to and pay -- and borrow -- almost anything in the name of getting that precious education. If people stop borrowing six figures to go to school and instead select lower-cost educations, then college tuitions *will* drop.
But the point of TFA is that there is little evidence (from the author's viewpoint; it doesn't appear as if this has been rigorously studied) that this is true. It seems like business which suffer breaches do not see a corresponding loss of customers or revenue. I'd bet that this is true.
Let me haul out the RTFA stick. The author states clearly multiple times that he is not violating any agreements or terms of service. He is getting no guidance from Apple on *why* the reviewers think he is, and the company's responses are inconsistent at best. To suggest that the guy's problem is that he simply isn't playing by the rules is to suggest he is lying, because he says repeatedly that he *is* playing by Apple's rules, or is making every effort to. And still his app sits in the wilderness, disallowed from even entering the marketplace.
This, in a nutshell, is the problem. It's not that the centralized review process doesn't have some advantages, but it comes at a big cost. In addition to developers' resistance to heavily investing in an app that has a high chance of being rejected for arbitrary reasons, there's also the reality that Apple will kill (and probably already does) some iPhone apps only because they compete with similar and possibly lesser programs Apple *might* release down the road. Apple's deliberate monopolization of what can and cannot be installed on an iPhone cannot help but limit competition among iPhone tools and utilities, which in turn inevitably stifles innovation within that platform. And as TFA notes, centralized governing/approval processes have a long history of scaling very poorly and sometimes disastrously. Windows would have very little market share if every ISV had to get MS's explicit permission before getting its programs to install on Windows.
It might take two or three years, but there's little doubt in my mind that the iPhone will lose any utility advantage it has to other, more open phones, and its market share will go with it.
Something like McDonalds comes along, it monopolizes the fast food burger market and also serves to suppress the wide-scale popularity of potentially better burger chains. If McDonalds folded tomorrow, we'd see an explosion of innovation and potentially better burgers
On what is this based? I would argue the opposite: By showing the world that enormous profits are to be made by selling hamburgers, McDonald's has *encouraged* burger-joint innovation. There are, within about a ten-minute drive from my office, close to a dozen restaurants (and probably more) that sell hamburgers. There are national chains and mom-and-pops. There are burgers that can be had for a dollar and some "gourmet" ones that sell for six times that. I'd say that burger innovation is doing just fine, and largely because of Mickey D's.
Is there any evidence that the opposite is true? I might be willing to sign on to that if MD's were a true monopoly that had cornered the market on burger-selling and had used that power to erect massive barriers to entry, or if it were a monopsony that forced all burger-ingredient providers to sell their wares at whatever unreasonable price it chose to demand, but I don't see it.
You'll get rejected less often if you're honest about who you are and look for someone like yourself
Maybe the best piece of advice on the thread. There's a lot of "be confident" in this thread, but for many, many people that's like saying "and be sure to sprout wings and learn to fly," because they are so un-confident that they can't even begin to relate to what being/acting confident means. So here's a quick primer for folks in that state:
(1) - Recognize what your skills and weaknesses are. This sounds trite, but it's critical.
(2) - Recognize that those skills -- whatever they are -- have real value to some members of the opposite sex. Don't fall into the trap of believing that the things you're good at don't matter.
(3) - After doing (2), relax and remind yourself that many of your weaknesses can be overcome and the ones that can't don't need to matter.
(4) - If (1), (2), and (3) feel simply unattainable, get ye to a therapist's office. Repeat until you recognize the very true fact that you have something to contribute.
I've been living in Louisiana for about 80 per cent of my life... what are these nice, paved roads of which you speak? My girlfriend lives in a rather affluent section of Orleans Parish, not far from downtown, and the streets are difficult to pass in anything that's not a 4x4.:) Please forgive Louisianians if we're a bit less trusting of our elected officials -- and the taxes they levy to fund their pet projects -- than most.
Yeah, I had a similar thought. The authors never seem to settle their criteria on whether they are going to acknowledge the true innovators (as a poster above mentioned regarding the authors' choice of Lotus 1-2-3 at the expense of VisiCalc) or rather the popularizers who brought those innovations to the mainstream, in the process bringing millions of others into the computing. To me there's really no right or wrong answer, but the inconsistency the writers showed in this regard is a bit irritating.
The anti-Less Majeste comments have nothing to do with whether America represents some sort of pinnacle of philosophical or political thought. To imprison people, regardless of what country, because of what they say is wrong. Period. I understand the king himself is not in favor of these laws and I understand that the Thai themselves feel positively about their king, but that is irrelevant.
This is about right and wrong. To criticize one's rulers is an inalienable human right.
How in the blue blazes of hell does monitoring status = living in a big plastic bubble? Nothing would prevent a user from both a) having quick access to his or her physiological status AND b) "getting out there".
Why if someone is "winning" must someone else be "losing"? Economies, at least those that haven't crippled themselves, are non-zero-sum. Gains need not come at others' expense.
And sweet fancy doughnuts, as another poster said, if Windows *is* a "loser" in this, why in the name of all that is unholy is that a bad thing?
My backup solution: Every couple of weeks I POP my GMail to my local Thunderbird client, then zip/PGP the Inbox file, and upload it to my $6/month Box.net account. Easy as can be and I'm never more than 14 days or so back if I have to restore (note: I don't use GMail for business; if my livelihood depended on it, I'd script the above and do it nightly). Truthfully, my primary concern is less about occasional provider downtime and more about if something happened to my account, not just in the oh-shit-it-was-cracked sense, but what if I were in an accident and in a hospital for x months and my account got disabled, etc. That sort of thing.
At any rate, GMail is ridiculously easy to back up to local. Yahoo is, too, but its POP/IMAP feature requires (or did) a $20/year premium account. I know little of Hotmail's procedures; like many on this board I use it only for registration, etc.
I posted this over at Megan McArdle's blog a while back. It's how I respond to such arguments from anti-FOSS'ers.
Imagine that down the road is a burger stand run by a retiree. She makes the best hamburgers in town and because her focus is not on maximizing income (she has alternate income streams), she is not concerned about finding the highest-revenue price point and sells her hamburgers at damned close to cost. Is she destroying the burger or restaurant industry in her area? No, she's only forcing them to become more efficient, which is all the burger industry's *CUSTOMERS* should care about.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point on letting the mobile market work ... MS might be better off selling the shovels and picks to the gold-rushers than taking the risks and pains of prospecting themselves.
The sad thing is that what we did in a handful of years in the 1960s is going to take us a decade or more 50 years later.
:)
That's what happens when you use Microsoft Project
The subtext of this is people's natural inclination to trust and believe in -- and certainly do not question -- authority figures. The reason so many reflexively think that a defendant is guilty is because, hey, if he hadn't done anything wrong, the police & DA wouldn't have brought him up on charges, now would they?
Ugly truth of the day: Most people's natural predispositions are not compatible with a free, open society. This is why civil liberties can so easily be eroded away.
ACTA is irrelevant to the thread and the empty-sensationaism article posted. No one is denying the Microsoft has a dog in the software-patent and intellectual-property fights. The point of discussion is that the FUD linked to above tells us zippo about any MS plans to "declare patent war on Linux."
Don't forget the flip side to your good friend's career woes: Now the people who used to have to fork over $30 an hour for his labor can get the same work (or near it) for less money. That enhances their lives. "ILLEGAL" immigration enhances competition and is opposed mostly by people who are either xenophobic or are looking to limit economic competition, harming their neighbors in the process.
Except the Chinese have an incentive to play up here, because if it ever comes out that their exported goods are used for espionage, no one will ever by from them again.
Finally, most people understand that email is insecure and unreliable
I disagree on that latter point. People aren't surprised when their messages aren't sent or received, but they do expect/think/believe that the messages they do have can be seen by them and them alone. Next time you talk e-mail with a less-knowledgeable type, tell them that their e-mail can be read by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Guarantee their reaction will be more of shock than of understanding.
This is even true of Gmail.
Excellent point and it underscores the truth that for some people and some sites, merely the act of visiting the site is confidential information.
So in your world workers are not responsible for not doing the job they willingly chose to do?
And whining about a lack of 401(k) contributions is the same thing as saying "hey, we expect you to fund our retirement years long after we have stopped doing any productive work for you."
So your long-time girlfriend makes fun of your career choice? And your good friend wants in on this fun? Your life, but I'd think I'd want these people out of mine as quickly as I could head out the door.
I agree that "tough shit" is too harsh a term -- we are dealing, after all, with kids here -- but (and I won't call this a character flaw, since that's too judgmental) poor judgment is *why* the system is "broken", or at least it's a major contributor. It's not like education costs spiral up out of immutable cosmic laws or the unrepentant evil that is the avarice of school administrators. The go up because, as a poster upthread said, students are willing to and pay -- and borrow -- almost anything in the name of getting that precious education. If people stop borrowing six figures to go to school and instead select lower-cost educations, then college tuitions *will* drop.
But the point of TFA is that there is little evidence (from the author's viewpoint; it doesn't appear as if this has been rigorously studied) that this is true. It seems like business which suffer breaches do not see a corresponding loss of customers or revenue. I'd bet that this is true.
Bipolars also have smoking rates over 70%.
Let me haul out the RTFA stick. The author states clearly multiple times that he is not violating any agreements or terms of service. He is getting no guidance from Apple on *why* the reviewers think he is, and the company's responses are inconsistent at best. To suggest that the guy's problem is that he simply isn't playing by the rules is to suggest he is lying, because he says repeatedly that he *is* playing by Apple's rules, or is making every effort to. And still his app sits in the wilderness, disallowed from even entering the marketplace.
This, in a nutshell, is the problem. It's not that the centralized review process doesn't have some advantages, but it comes at a big cost. In addition to developers' resistance to heavily investing in an app that has a high chance of being rejected for arbitrary reasons, there's also the reality that Apple will kill (and probably already does) some iPhone apps only because they compete with similar and possibly lesser programs Apple *might* release down the road. Apple's deliberate monopolization of what can and cannot be installed on an iPhone cannot help but limit competition among iPhone tools and utilities, which in turn inevitably stifles innovation within that platform. And as TFA notes, centralized governing/approval processes have a long history of scaling very poorly and sometimes disastrously. Windows would have very little market share if every ISV had to get MS's explicit permission before getting its programs to install on Windows.
It might take two or three years, but there's little doubt in my mind that the iPhone will lose any utility advantage it has to other, more open phones, and its market share will go with it.
Something like McDonalds comes along, it monopolizes the fast food burger market and also serves to suppress the wide-scale popularity of potentially better burger chains. If McDonalds folded tomorrow, we'd see an explosion of innovation and potentially better burgers
On what is this based? I would argue the opposite: By showing the world that enormous profits are to be made by selling hamburgers, McDonald's has *encouraged* burger-joint innovation. There are, within about a ten-minute drive from my office, close to a dozen restaurants (and probably more) that sell hamburgers. There are national chains and mom-and-pops. There are burgers that can be had for a dollar and some "gourmet" ones that sell for six times that. I'd say that burger innovation is doing just fine, and largely because of Mickey D's.
Is there any evidence that the opposite is true? I might be willing to sign on to that if MD's were a true monopoly that had cornered the market on burger-selling and had used that power to erect massive barriers to entry, or if it were a monopsony that forced all burger-ingredient providers to sell their wares at whatever unreasonable price it chose to demand, but I don't see it.
You'll get rejected less often if you're honest about who you are and look for someone like yourself
Maybe the best piece of advice on the thread. There's a lot of "be confident" in this thread, but for many, many people that's like saying "and be sure to sprout wings and learn to fly," because they are so un-confident that they can't even begin to relate to what being/acting confident means. So here's a quick primer for folks in that state:
(1) - Recognize what your skills and weaknesses are. This sounds trite, but it's critical.
(2) - Recognize that those skills -- whatever they are -- have real value to some members of the opposite sex. Don't fall into the trap of believing that the things you're good at don't matter.
(3) - After doing (2), relax and remind yourself that many of your weaknesses can be overcome and the ones that can't don't need to matter.
(4) - If (1), (2), and (3) feel simply unattainable, get ye to a therapist's office. Repeat until you recognize the very true fact that you have something to contribute.
I've been living in Louisiana for about 80 per cent of my life ... what are these nice, paved roads of which you speak? My girlfriend lives in a rather affluent section of Orleans Parish, not far from downtown, and the streets are difficult to pass in anything that's not a 4x4. :) Please forgive Louisianians if we're a bit less trusting of our elected officials -- and the taxes they levy to fund their pet projects -- than most.
Yeah, I had a similar thought. The authors never seem to settle their criteria on whether they are going to acknowledge the true innovators (as a poster above mentioned regarding the authors' choice of Lotus 1-2-3 at the expense of VisiCalc) or rather the popularizers who brought those innovations to the mainstream, in the process bringing millions of others into the computing. To me there's really no right or wrong answer, but the inconsistency the writers showed in this regard is a bit irritating.
The anti-Less Majeste comments have nothing to do with whether America represents some sort of pinnacle of philosophical or political thought. To imprison people, regardless of what country, because of what they say is wrong. Period. I understand the king himself is not in favor of these laws and I understand that the Thai themselves feel positively about their king, but that is irrelevant.
This is about right and wrong. To criticize one's rulers is an inalienable human right.
How in the blue blazes of hell does monitoring status = living in a big plastic bubble? Nothing would prevent a user from both a) having quick access to his or her physiological status AND b) "getting out there".
Monitor != protect.
Why if someone is "winning" must someone else be "losing"? Economies, at least those that haven't crippled themselves, are non-zero-sum. Gains need not come at others' expense.
And sweet fancy doughnuts, as another poster said, if Windows *is* a "loser" in this, why in the name of all that is unholy is that a bad thing?
All hail SSHFS. My all-time favorite remote tool.
My backup solution: Every couple of weeks I POP my GMail to my local Thunderbird client, then zip/PGP the Inbox file, and upload it to my $6/month Box.net account. Easy as can be and I'm never more than 14 days or so back if I have to restore (note: I don't use GMail for business; if my livelihood depended on it, I'd script the above and do it nightly). Truthfully, my primary concern is less about occasional provider downtime and more about if something happened to my account, not just in the oh-shit-it-was-cracked sense, but what if I were in an accident and in a hospital for x months and my account got disabled, etc. That sort of thing.
At any rate, GMail is ridiculously easy to back up to local. Yahoo is, too, but its POP/IMAP feature requires (or did) a $20/year premium account. I know little of Hotmail's procedures; like many on this board I use it only for registration, etc.
I posted this over at Megan McArdle's blog a while back. It's how I respond to such arguments from anti-FOSS'ers.
Imagine that down the road is a burger stand run by a retiree. She makes the best hamburgers in town and because her focus is not on maximizing income (she has alternate income streams), she is not concerned about finding the highest-revenue price point and sells her hamburgers at damned close to cost. Is she destroying the burger or restaurant industry in her area? No, she's only forcing them to become more efficient, which is all the burger industry's *CUSTOMERS* should care about.