Agreed, although I doubt we'll hear a statement... Apple are very tight-lipped at the best of times. Their actions (or lack of) will just speak for them.
To me it seems more likely that these people have used their Apple ID in a forum and someone's been trying to get into them or something like that, but even if it's Apple's direct actions it's nothing new or particularly bad for them to be protecting their own security by going after the specific individuals breaking it.
If they go after the actual consumers, then yes they're pulling a MAFIAA move and can go to Hell and I'll stop buying their products etc etc. Especially since they'd probably be denying rights to use the applications that you've paid a lot of accumulated money for. But I wouldn't go jumping to conclusions just yet and I doubt they're that stupid. This is just a typical "shock factor" headline (as much as I love Slashdot, I've always said that if they were British they would be one of the tabloids, probably The Sun).
If you want to learn the ins and outs of an operating system, although it's *nix based, OS X probably isn't the best choice, at least until you start learning how best to hide all that stuff.
Surely you'd choose Linux, probably something like LFS if really committed, that's one of the things (many things, don't get me wrong) that it excels at. I do like Apple's stuff, but I don't see the obsession with trying to make them what they're not. Tinkerer's machines, is something that they're not. At all.
I don't see how this is quite as evil of Apple as they're making it out to be. If you want to learn the basics of cooking, you don't start by studying the microwave.
I had a gander in there a month or so back, seems pretty much the same to me (but much bigger).
The article asks "why it’s raking in more cash than ever before" - erm, this must be some new meaning of the phrase "went wrong" that I wasn't previously aware of!
The issue perhaps is that it's highly commercial now and there's a LOT of competition, and also there has been insane expansion during the land boom. So whilst you're probably the only one browsing a shop, there are loads and loads and loads of them. But whilst you have to look on the map for the green dots to see where the actual people are, there are still tens of thousands of them! They're not exactly difficult to find!
The biggest problem it has, is that it's become *too* full and 99.9% of it is crap. So you try to find an interesting event and all you see are pages and pages of yard sales and "money chair" non-events, and so it's a lot more effort trying to find someone or something that isn't about selling you stuff. But 'quiet' or 'empty' are certainly not words I'd used to describe that place. It's just not a media fad any more, but the population itself is right where it's always been.
Parent is worth modding up, that's exactly what I was thinking (speaking as an employee for an LED product manufacturer, albeit not in the actual design department where all this thinking goes on)
Especially with the high power 'light engine' type LEDs that are becoming more common in nowadays than the 3-5mm clusters, being measured in Watts they are not *quite* as energy efficient (but still have the edge over other technologies) and do produce quite a bit of heat. Plenty enough to melt snow, to be quite honest:) If channeled intelligently, a heatpipe design being an obvious possibility, I can see this issue being resolved just fine.
I don't think there's an "if" at this stage. This is the interesting effect of Apple's secrecy combined with the public's excitement about the brand: there's no need for market research, as the market will tell you what it wants through all the rumours that it generates (mostly through fake 'sources'). I honestly think the tablet started out as little other than a sort of 'ricochet' of rumours bouncing from one excited site to the next.
It's at a point now where even if they didn't have a tablet lined up, they'll need to create one sharpish. But I'm sure they heard the thirsty rumours for the past few years and have been beavering away getting something ready so as not to disappoint.
They're a sort of wish-granting genie company. (Well, unless your wish is for customisable mid-high end consumer computers of course)
This sounds like a shocking figure, but don't forget, it doesn't mean that over 60% have managed to jailbreak their phones and have manually added the pirate repository and bypassed the morality message. That would be silly.
People who are heavily into pirating tend to download everything they can get their hands on. Doesn't matter that they won't touch 99% of of it and will just store gigabytes of it on their hard drives and DVD-Rs - that's the point. It's like a game, and many of the hardcore piracy types (no porn jokes!) seem to download *.*
I don't mean to be rude about the game or the author, but if this shared "pool" of hardcore iPhone pirates is 1000 for example, then 1000 people will download _every game in existence_ on the iPhone. If it's a crap game that only 100 people bothered to buy, (1100 total users) then it's over 90% pirated. OTOH some great top-30 game might have had 90000 buyers (plus the 1000 pirates, making 91000 users), in which case it's 1.1% pirated. Either way, it's one static pool of people who have removed themselves from the entire market, and doesn't mean that CrapGameCo has lost 91% of its profit, no matter how shocking their piracy-detecting scoreboard looks.
That's my theory anyway - no data to back it up, just logic really IMO.
Welcome back to 1990. Same dodgy 3D glasses that probably every household in England had, same rubbish colours and fairly iffy 3D once the novelty wears off. Only with blue/yellow instead of red/green. Progress!
This is definitely not news for our company website. Don't know how well it reflects the rest of the world, but I'm quite surprised so many are still using IE6 in the first place.
Our stats show 24.25% using Firefox and 65.12% using various version of IE. (The rest going to Safari, Chrome etc. Interestingly, Safari and Chrome are almost neck and neck at 4.20 and 4.11% respectively.)
Of the 65.12% using IE, 27.11% of those are using version 6. That's 17.65% total, if my maths is any good. It's not dying (wish it would) but has long since been overtaken by Firefox here. 7% less doesn't sound a lot, but when you consider that Safari and Chrome are 4% on their own, it's a fair difference.
In my day we used a pencil and paper. Always use the correct tool for the job - for class notes a computer isn't one of them.
Except when I was feeling adventurous and would use the Psion Series 5 and scrawl equations and diagrams on the screen, type things in with that nice keyboard and print out to the HP printer via IRDA. One copy to hand in, one for future reference and one donated to the cause of plagiarism. But invariably I was glad to return to pencil and paper.
Failing that another vote for LyX as a way of doing LaTeX without spending ages typing in all that markup nonsense and missing half your notes (and most of your attention)
None of those things are right either! Nobody should be put in that position.
Reality is seldom 'right' of course.
It's the extent of the danger really, and how many innocent people you're willing to kill for your wife and kids, or to avoid regulation of business that would try and prevent people being exploited and overworked. (Which would be very un-American I know, best save that long heated discussion for another day)
Yeah there are of course all those maybes. Which is why there's an investigation, and they're not just fired outright:)
To clarify, *if it was found to be* neglect and they didn't have enough reasonable excuses, they should... at least be reassigned. But it's just personal opinion really - that's why the actual investigators probably get paid a lot more than we do. Or than I do anyway!
I certainly agree that nobody should be fired for a genuine, simple mistake, and with the idea that people will learn from their mistakes and become better at their jobs as a result.
Nor do I particularly like to see people lose their jobs and therefore a lot of their chances of getting another, leading to what could be a very bad impact on their livelihood (and possibly the family's).
But there's a difference between a genuine mistake and neglect. Hearing things on the radio but ignoring it, falls firmly into the neglect category IMO. And that's where they unfortunately but quite rightly shouldn't be trusted to fly again. Mistakes are a learning experience, but neglect is a personality problem.
I sympathise with the difficulty of your employer expecting you to do things while you're not being paid, and therefore attempting to squeeze it in during times when they were.
However I hardly thing that it justifies putting passengers' lives at risk. (If putting lives at risk sounds out of proportion, consider that they could have eventually ended up too short on fuel to safely land, or other things that could happen that they were cheerfully ignoring). If they feel that strongly about it, they could just not find time to learn it. When the management asks why they haven't, say they haven't had time. When they ask why they didn't use their free time, say "because it's my FREE time". Standing up to the management >>> putting lives in danger:)
Yeah an iPhone app is a good idea - ANYTHING to make it not just "yet another MMO".
We have too many MMOs already. The likes of WoW get to be the popular one and the rest of the population is shared between about 20 different MMO games, making them nigh on empty. IMO, it worked better in the days when we only had a few to choose from - a bit of choice, but without saturating the market.
Ah, no, you combine two characters roughly around level 30 (although some elite players manage it at 13, against the rules in most zones) and spawn a new avatar from that. Curiously, Slashdot players often neglect to work on that particular skill set and often fizzle the Matefinding spell.
The new avatar does start at level 1 though and you are normally expected to mentor them until at least level 18. And you don't get to play the new avatar yourself - character death is permanent and linked to your account. However there are rumours that your account may be ported to a secret project when your character dies, either on the good or evil side depending on your actions during the original game.
I also find it quite difficult to get vendors to buy spider legs and pieces of rotting zombie skin from me in this world - it's a lot more focused on tradeskills as a way of earning money.
One of the major problems facing worlds such as Everquest is the fact that it's been wonderfully expanded to accommodate the huge player base - and then they've all left. What you're left with is a huge sprawling world with a few players rattling around in one corner of it. Login queues certainly aren't an issue at that point.
Agreed, speaking as a sufferer of now 3 Enermax PSUs with "right, I'm going to die now kthxbai" syndrome. And these are supposedly *good* PSUs. In my case 2 identical systems did this on the same day. Put PSU2 into PC1 and it worked for an extra month - albeit risky - but some motherboards seem to have a greater tolerance of dying PSUs than others.
But the really crap PSUs that you get bundled with a case etc are most likely output all kinds of crap and cause random weirdness and crashing.
The unfortunate reality of PCs, unless anyone informs me otherwise, is that you sometimes have to gamble (an gambling amount, i.e. uncomfortable) on what experience tells you will *probably* be the problem. Only too often it's the PSU, and to minimise more odd errors the replacement will cost £50-100 (ermm... $50-100 these days). The best you can do is get something that, if it doesn't help, can be reallocated and help you somewhere else.
FWIW based on experience and after the usual cooling and elimination checks I usually suspect the memory first (and just to complicate matters, memtest86 doesn't always pick up the problem - you have to try another stick). Then the PSU, even if it looks like a motherboard issue (unless the mobo has visibly leaky/bulging caps). Then the motherboard. Then the CPU, which almost never fails.
But yeah, Microsoft have always aimed ridiculously high with their OS plans from what I recall. Especially recently - remember what a revolution in computing "Longhorn" was originally going to be?:)
I bet when the time comes it'll still come in 32+64bit flavours, with 32-bit being the most popular and some decent PAE support to work around the memory limitations.
I'm sure many will recall the "subtle" (as a sledgehammer) environmental messages of Final Fantasy VII and the religion mocking of X, amongst various other games.
It makes sense really, as a lot of kids will play them and possibly take some of it in... I know I was influenced to some degree by games (and no, I don't go around shooting people! It's pretty obvious where the 'messages/morals' are and where the harmless fun is)
Good point, I'd forgotten about that. Good that at least one of the culprits is starting to think about it from both sides of the issue - although even in SL I still sometimes see that spinner going for a little longer than is comfortable.
(When it comes to _perception_ of time, there's a lot to be said for progress bars such as those in Ubuntu as opposed to watching a spinner going round and round, but that's another story)
Joking aside, I do usually find that OSX and in some cases Windows and even Linux can take longer to shut down than to start up. It makes logical sense as a startup environment is pretty much constant whilst shutdown always has different loose ends to tie. But until recently, it's always been the opposite.
Personally I wish they'd do a "Snow Fox" - zero new features (maybe 1) and concentrate on making it leaner, faster and more reliable. Enough new features and redesigns already.
The thread was going into the hypothetical situation of big companies, and I guess I started assuming you were part of one. When it comes to them (or even the small/medium size that I work for) they want concepts that they recognise like brand names, CEOs/MDs, invoices etc.
As the developments have show, they have indeed tested it, they're just not signing on any dotted lines "officially saying" so. I had the impression that you knew this at the time of writing.
If it was to *not even work* it was definitely a good alternative to being bullied into an upgrade:)
To answer the question, I find GIMP distinctly lacking in comparison to Photoshop but you may find that with training (is there any out there?) or a lot of self-learning you will end up *more* comfortable with it than PS.
Dreamweaver is very clever; as long as you keep on top of it, it's a very good tool. Though I've been investigating the open-source alternative Aptana Studio and am very impressed. Again, it'll need either some very rare training, or a lot of time self-teaching, but the rewards will probably be good.
Not sure about the other Adobe apps. Illustrator will be a difficult one to beat - the OSS alternatives I've tried are almost up to Corel Draw of 1993:)
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, although I doubt we'll hear a statement... Apple are very tight-lipped at the best of times. Their actions (or lack of) will just speak for them.
To me it seems more likely that these people have used their Apple ID in a forum and someone's been trying to get into them or something like that, but even if it's Apple's direct actions it's nothing new or particularly bad for them to be protecting their own security by going after the specific individuals breaking it.
If they go after the actual consumers, then yes they're pulling a MAFIAA move and can go to Hell and I'll stop buying their products etc etc. Especially since they'd probably be denying rights to use the applications that you've paid a lot of accumulated money for. But I wouldn't go jumping to conclusions just yet and I doubt they're that stupid. This is just a typical "shock factor" headline (as much as I love Slashdot, I've always said that if they were British they would be one of the tabloids, probably The Sun).
If you want to learn the ins and outs of an operating system, although it's *nix based, OS X probably isn't the best choice, at least until you start learning how best to hide all that stuff.
Surely you'd choose Linux, probably something like LFS if really committed, that's one of the things (many things, don't get me wrong) that it excels at. I do like Apple's stuff, but I don't see the obsession with trying to make them what they're not. Tinkerer's machines, is something that they're not. At all.
I don't see how this is quite as evil of Apple as they're making it out to be. If you want to learn the basics of cooking, you don't start by studying the microwave.
I had a gander in there a month or so back, seems pretty much the same to me (but much bigger).
The article asks "why it’s raking in more cash than ever before" - erm, this must be some new meaning of the phrase "went wrong" that I wasn't previously aware of!
The issue perhaps is that it's highly commercial now and there's a LOT of competition, and also there has been insane expansion during the land boom. So whilst you're probably the only one browsing a shop, there are loads and loads and loads of them. But whilst you have to look on the map for the green dots to see where the actual people are, there are still tens of thousands of them! They're not exactly difficult to find!
The biggest problem it has, is that it's become *too* full and 99.9% of it is crap. So you try to find an interesting event and all you see are pages and pages of yard sales and "money chair" non-events, and so it's a lot more effort trying to find someone or something that isn't about selling you stuff. But 'quiet' or 'empty' are certainly not words I'd used to describe that place. It's just not a media fad any more, but the population itself is right where it's always been.
Parent is worth modding up, that's exactly what I was thinking (speaking as an employee for an LED product manufacturer, albeit not in the actual design department where all this thinking goes on)
Especially with the high power 'light engine' type LEDs that are becoming more common in nowadays than the 3-5mm clusters, being measured in Watts they are not *quite* as energy efficient (but still have the edge over other technologies) and do produce quite a bit of heat. Plenty enough to melt snow, to be quite honest :) If channeled intelligently, a heatpipe design being an obvious possibility, I can see this issue being resolved just fine.
I don't think there's an "if" at this stage. This is the interesting effect of Apple's secrecy combined with the public's excitement about the brand: there's no need for market research, as the market will tell you what it wants through all the rumours that it generates (mostly through fake 'sources'). I honestly think the tablet started out as little other than a sort of 'ricochet' of rumours bouncing from one excited site to the next.
It's at a point now where even if they didn't have a tablet lined up, they'll need to create one sharpish. But I'm sure they heard the thirsty rumours for the past few years and have been beavering away getting something ready so as not to disappoint.
They're a sort of wish-granting genie company. (Well, unless your wish is for customisable mid-high end consumer computers of course)
Saw a similar 'study' a few weeks ago.
This sounds like a shocking figure, but don't forget, it doesn't mean that over 60% have managed to jailbreak their phones and have manually added the pirate repository and bypassed the morality message. That would be silly.
People who are heavily into pirating tend to download everything they can get their hands on. Doesn't matter that they won't touch 99% of of it and will just store gigabytes of it on their hard drives and DVD-Rs - that's the point. It's like a game, and many of the hardcore piracy types (no porn jokes!) seem to download *.*
I don't mean to be rude about the game or the author, but if this shared "pool" of hardcore iPhone pirates is 1000 for example, then 1000 people will download _every game in existence_ on the iPhone. If it's a crap game that only 100 people bothered to buy, (1100 total users) then it's over 90% pirated. OTOH some great top-30 game might have had 90000 buyers (plus the 1000 pirates, making 91000 users), in which case it's 1.1% pirated. Either way, it's one static pool of people who have removed themselves from the entire market, and doesn't mean that CrapGameCo has lost 91% of its profit, no matter how shocking their piracy-detecting scoreboard looks.
That's my theory anyway - no data to back it up, just logic really IMO.
... That my facial expression has matched that of the fake alien thingy whenever it's been used as an article icon. 8-o
Should be interesting to see!
I got a good chunk of Turkey caught in my esophagus.
Yes it's a bugger when you get part of a 300k square mile country stuck down there :)
Welcome back to 1990. Same dodgy 3D glasses that probably every household in England had, same rubbish colours and fairly iffy 3D once the novelty wears off. Only with blue/yellow instead of red/green. Progress!
This is definitely not news for our company website. Don't know how well it reflects the rest of the world, but I'm quite surprised so many are still using IE6 in the first place.
Our stats show 24.25% using Firefox and 65.12% using various version of IE. (The rest going to Safari, Chrome etc. Interestingly, Safari and Chrome are almost neck and neck at 4.20 and 4.11% respectively.)
Of the 65.12% using IE, 27.11% of those are using version 6. That's 17.65% total, if my maths is any good. It's not dying (wish it would) but has long since been overtaken by Firefox here. 7% less doesn't sound a lot, but when you consider that Safari and Chrome are 4% on their own, it's a fair difference.
In my day we used a pencil and paper. Always use the correct tool for the job - for class notes a computer isn't one of them.
Except when I was feeling adventurous and would use the Psion Series 5 and scrawl equations and diagrams on the screen, type things in with that nice keyboard and print out to the HP printer via IRDA. One copy to hand in, one for future reference and one donated to the cause of plagiarism. But invariably I was glad to return to pencil and paper.
Failing that another vote for LyX as a way of doing LaTeX without spending ages typing in all that markup nonsense and missing half your notes (and most of your attention)
None of those things are right either! Nobody should be put in that position.
Reality is seldom 'right' of course.
It's the extent of the danger really, and how many innocent people you're willing to kill for your wife and kids, or to avoid regulation of business that would try and prevent people being exploited and overworked. (Which would be very un-American I know, best save that long heated discussion for another day)
Yeah there are of course all those maybes. Which is why there's an investigation, and they're not just fired outright :)
To clarify, *if it was found to be* neglect and they didn't have enough reasonable excuses, they should... at least be reassigned. But it's just personal opinion really - that's why the actual investigators probably get paid a lot more than we do. Or than I do anyway!
I certainly agree that nobody should be fired for a genuine, simple mistake, and with the idea that people will learn from their mistakes and become better at their jobs as a result.
Nor do I particularly like to see people lose their jobs and therefore a lot of their chances of getting another, leading to what could be a very bad impact on their livelihood (and possibly the family's).
But there's a difference between a genuine mistake and neglect. Hearing things on the radio but ignoring it, falls firmly into the neglect category IMO. And that's where they unfortunately but quite rightly shouldn't be trusted to fly again. Mistakes are a learning experience, but neglect is a personality problem.
I sympathise with the difficulty of your employer expecting you to do things while you're not being paid, and therefore attempting to squeeze it in during times when they were.
However I hardly thing that it justifies putting passengers' lives at risk. (If putting lives at risk sounds out of proportion, consider that they could have eventually ended up too short on fuel to safely land, or other things that could happen that they were cheerfully ignoring). If they feel that strongly about it, they could just not find time to learn it. When the management asks why they haven't, say they haven't had time. When they ask why they didn't use their free time, say "because it's my FREE time". Standing up to the management >>> putting lives in danger :)
Yeah an iPhone app is a good idea - ANYTHING to make it not just "yet another MMO".
We have too many MMOs already. The likes of WoW get to be the popular one and the rest of the population is shared between about 20 different MMO games, making them nigh on empty. IMO, it worked better in the days when we only had a few to choose from - a bit of choice, but without saturating the market.
Ah, no, you combine two characters roughly around level 30 (although some elite players manage it at 13, against the rules in most zones) and spawn a new avatar from that. Curiously, Slashdot players often neglect to work on that particular skill set and often fizzle the Matefinding spell.
The new avatar does start at level 1 though and you are normally expected to mentor them until at least level 18. And you don't get to play the new avatar yourself - character death is permanent and linked to your account. However there are rumours that your account may be ported to a secret project when your character dies, either on the good or evil side depending on your actions during the original game.
I also find it quite difficult to get vendors to buy spider legs and pieces of rotting zombie skin from me in this world - it's a lot more focused on tradeskills as a way of earning money.
One of the major problems facing worlds such as Everquest is the fact that it's been wonderfully expanded to accommodate the huge player base - and then they've all left. What you're left with is a huge sprawling world with a few players rattling around in one corner of it. Login queues certainly aren't an issue at that point.
Agreed, speaking as a sufferer of now 3 Enermax PSUs with "right, I'm going to die now kthxbai" syndrome. And these are supposedly *good* PSUs. In my case 2 identical systems did this on the same day. Put PSU2 into PC1 and it worked for an extra month - albeit risky - but some motherboards seem to have a greater tolerance of dying PSUs than others.
But the really crap PSUs that you get bundled with a case etc are most likely output all kinds of crap and cause random weirdness and crashing.
The unfortunate reality of PCs, unless anyone informs me otherwise, is that you sometimes have to gamble (an gambling amount, i.e. uncomfortable) on what experience tells you will *probably* be the problem. Only too often it's the PSU, and to minimise more odd errors the replacement will cost £50-100 (ermm... $50-100 these days). The best you can do is get something that, if it doesn't help, can be reallocated and help you somewhere else.
FWIW based on experience and after the usual cooling and elimination checks I usually suspect the memory first (and just to complicate matters, memtest86 doesn't always pick up the problem - you have to try another stick). Then the PSU, even if it looks like a motherboard issue (unless the mobo has visibly leaky/bulging caps). Then the motherboard. Then the CPU, which almost never fails.
Well, it's not a promise, it's a leak.
But yeah, Microsoft have always aimed ridiculously high with their OS plans from what I recall. Especially recently - remember what a revolution in computing "Longhorn" was originally going to be? :)
I bet when the time comes it'll still come in 32+64bit flavours, with 32-bit being the most popular and some decent PAE support to work around the memory limitations.
I'm sure many will recall the "subtle" (as a sledgehammer) environmental messages of Final Fantasy VII and the religion mocking of X, amongst various other games.
It makes sense really, as a lot of kids will play them and possibly take some of it in... I know I was influenced to some degree by games (and no, I don't go around shooting people! It's pretty obvious where the 'messages/morals' are and where the harmless fun is)
Same with cartoons and anime.
Good point, I'd forgotten about that. Good that at least one of the culprits is starting to think about it from both sides of the issue - although even in SL I still sometimes see that spinner going for a little longer than is comfortable.
(When it comes to _perception_ of time, there's a lot to be said for progress bars such as those in Ubuntu as opposed to watching a spinner going round and round, but that's another story)
How quickly does it shut down?
Joking aside, I do usually find that OSX and in some cases Windows and even Linux can take longer to shut down than to start up. It makes logical sense as a startup environment is pretty much constant whilst shutdown always has different loose ends to tie. But until recently, it's always been the opposite.
Personally I wish they'd do a "Snow Fox" - zero new features (maybe 1) and concentrate on making it leaner, faster and more reliable. Enough new features and redesigns already.
Cool. Well that's fair enough :)
The thread was going into the hypothetical situation of big companies, and I guess I started assuming you were part of one. When it comes to them (or even the small/medium size that I work for) they want concepts that they recognise like brand names, CEOs/MDs, invoices etc.
As the developments have show, they have indeed tested it, they're just not signing on any dotted lines "officially saying" so. I had the impression that you knew this at the time of writing.
If it was to *not even work* it was definitely a good alternative to being bullied into an upgrade :)
To answer the question, I find GIMP distinctly lacking in comparison to Photoshop but you may find that with training (is there any out there?) or a lot of self-learning you will end up *more* comfortable with it than PS.
Dreamweaver is very clever; as long as you keep on top of it, it's a very good tool. Though I've been investigating the open-source alternative Aptana Studio and am very impressed. Again, it'll need either some very rare training, or a lot of time self-teaching, but the rewards will probably be good.
Not sure about the other Adobe apps. Illustrator will be a difficult one to beat - the OSS alternatives I've tried are almost up to Corel Draw of 1993 :)