The tight control on the user experience is what maintains the appeal of the device.
They could maintain the quality of the software offered in the App Store without (completely) locking people out of installing non-App-Store software--people who want the Apple Quality User Experience(tm) could stick with App Store software, and people who wanted extra functionality could try alternatives. That would broaden their appeal without reducing the appeal among the existing base. Which pretty much contradicts the sentence above, although we do arrive at similar conclusions, eventually.:)
Heck, with Android, which is generally perceived as being so much more open, you still have to go through the settings to find the proper checkbox before you can install non-Marketplace apps. Joe Sixpack doesn't have the patience or interest to find and click that checkbox, let alone hunt down non-Marketplace apps, so in practical terms, Android-based phones are just as locked down as iPhones as far as the average user is concerned. But for someone like me, who won't consider a system that doesn't at least have that checkbox or some equivalent, Apple's not even an option.
Hardly new. First of all, Apple is one of the only companies (along with Lotus and Xerox) to have been actively boycotted by the FSF and LPF, back in the nineties. The boycott ended in 1995, but still, that proves that Apple has managed to reach a level of dickheadedness that even Microsoft has failed to achieve. So far.:)
(Just to really smear the icing of irony on this cupcake, one of the companies that the LPF/FSF boycott was in defense of was...are you ready for it? That's right...Microsoft!)
Wikipedia also says: "A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could release as much as 5.2 tons/year of uranium (containing 74 pounds (34 kg) of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons/year of thorium." One big difference here is that an event like the Three Mile Island accident is usually a one-time event, while the coal-burning plant goes on releasing its radioactive material year after year after year....
I'm not going to take sides because I don't know how many curies you get from the release of 5.2 tons of uranium and 12.8 tons of thorium, or what the typical lifespan of a coal plant is (the multiplication factor here), but I definitely don't think it's quite as simple a matter as your brief post suggested. Can you show your work in a little more detail?
Microsoft has released device drivers under the GPLv2
Yes, but Microsoft is the licenser, not the licensee, and as such they are not bound by the license terms! It's their "property"; they own the copyright, so they don't need a license to use or distribute it. So your argument kind of falls on its face. Clause 7 does not apply to them (unless they try to distribute the whole kernel, not just one driver), but it applies to us, so if MS asserts a patent claim, it's everyone who is/was distributing the kernel with the contaminated code who needs to stop distributing until the code can be cleaned up.
Remember, the GPL exists to provide a defense against charges of copyright infringement. You can't, generally, be sued for violating the GPL, but if you fail to comply with its terms then "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works", which opens you up for that copyright infringement suit. But if you own the copyright, you don't need permission!
Actually, to show the landing sight, I think they'd actually have to land again. To show the landing site, however, simply requires a sufficiently high-resolution camera.
Used games actually screw up both, the developer AND the consumer.
No. No they do not.
Gamestop does not sell it for 30 bucks, they sell it for 34.95, and they buy it from you for about 10 bucks.
Sounds like there's plenty of room for some competition there. The problem is not used games. The problem is Gamestop's business practices. And the only reason Gamestop is able to get away with their pricing schemes is because of a lack of competition. Despite which, it's still ridiculous to say that Gamestop is hurting the developers. The developers got paid for the game, asking price for each copy, so they've got no beef whatsoever. Tenuous arguments about how they might sell more games if people didn't buy used games are ridiculous given first-sale doctrine. Once they sell it, it's no longer their business what happens with it, even if it ends up competing with them in some abstract way. If they don't produce things that people want to keep, they have no one but themselves to blame for whatever used market might appear. If they don't like it, they're welcome to buy the used games themselves and compete with Gamestop!
I picked up on what happened just fine--it was pointed out that you were wrong, and that "de-orbit" was a valid, correct, and even standard term to use there, and you still don't seem to get it.
Actually, it's Apple that's presenting the Pre as an iPod device in iTunes, and Palm's right to represent themselves to the software as an iPod is established case law--see the Supreme Court decision in KSR v Teleflex. There's no trademark violation going on here, because the information that iTunes misinterprets as a trademark is actually a required part of the API--exactly the issue in the KSR case. If Apple doesn't want non-Apple devices to display as iPods, they can either make their APIs more open (so the device can inform the software what it is without confusion or danger of being rejected), or they can play the on-going, never-ending game of whack-a-mole they're trying now (a game they can never win). At some point, someone's going to look (to the API) enough like an iPod that Apple simply won't have any way to prevent interoperability, and their on-going attempts to lock people out will simply be over, and they have no third option.
See the "-v" option to gnu ls(1). If your other applications can't cope, that's because they're broken and/or inferior.
Anyway, you have the same problem when you go from version 9 to version 10. If you're simply using a text sort, emacs v22 will come just before the ancient v3.
Shh! You're going to blow his chance to try to look smart by showing off half-baked knowledge misinterpreted from something he heard in passing, probably on a third-rate Skiffy B-movie (possibly on the Skiffy, er, Sci-Fi, er, SyFy Channel). How can he lord it over his equally ignorant peers when they come to visit his mom's basement if you're going to bring up something as irrelevant as facts!?
Although one could argue that objects on the surface of the Earth still move in a more-or-less elliptical path around the Earth (a circle can be considered a degenerate form of ellipse, after all), so, in a sense, landing is not de-orbiting as much as it is changing orbits. If I still lived in my mom's basement, I think I could turn that into a pretty convincing argument, but I don't, so I won't.
(I could also point out that words sometimes develop more specialized meanings than their roots might suggest, i.e. "defenestrate" has become a little more specific than "unwindowing", but that would just be silly, so I won't bother.):)
Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
Get off my lawn!:p
I suspect that developers at Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair and Digital Research (among others) might dispute that claim.
How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?
I was one of the first people in the world to break an IBM PC keyboard--several months before it was released. But no, that was far from being my first computer experience (or I wouldn't have had access to the as-yet-unreleased IBM PC). Did I say "get off my lawn" yet?:)
Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft?
I think I can safely say yes. There was plenty of competition before Microsoft's unholy alliance with IBM all-but-crushed the burgeoning home and small business computing market. The Internet was already well under way when Microsoft came along, just like the home computing market, and none of the vendors in the home computing market would have hesitated to jump on the Internet when it became apparent what it had to offer any longer than Bill did (note: he almost waited too long, so I think that's a very safe claim).
modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.
Pioneers like BG, perhaps, except, in general, more pioneer-y and more innovative.:)
every square meter of the world has 2 elephants of air on top of them.
And if we assume an elephant covers about a square meter (probably a conservative estimate), then, because of all that air on top of it weighing it down, an elephant must weigh--at a minimum--at least as much as three elephants.:)
(Actually, if I were to pick nits, I would point out that going to "goggle.com" may not be quite as productive--in fact, after a quick skim of that site, I might advise carefully avoiding it if you're running windows.)
And what if your car was parked in front of a hydrant and there was a fire and six people died because the fire department couldn't get access to the hydrant quickly enough? I think you could be in pretty big trouble for that.
I mean, as long as we're stretching out analogies....:)
Specifically, you have learned that it's not a pig in that poke. The metaphor (apparently) stems from a common confidence trick in the middle ages: selling someone a cat in a bag (poke), while claiming it was a pig. So really, the point is that once the cat's out of the bag, you can't put the pig back!
W3 Schools which has an admitted alternate-browser bias does not show any sort of abrupt drop-off for IE, and if anywhere were going to, I would think it would be this site. In fact, it shows Firefox dropping for the first time since September of last year (when Chrome was initially released), but only half a percentage point. IE7 is losing ground to IE8 rather quickly, but IE6 actually gained a half a percentage point since May. Chrome is also up another half a point, and nothing else really had enough movement to be worth mentioning (Safari up a tenth, Opera down a tenth).
Let me guess: you're either posting from somewhere outside America (most likely Europe), or you're Roman Catholic. American Evangelical Christians do not accept that the Bible is fallible, nor do they recognize denominations that do as actually being Christians! (Yes, as far as a large percentage of Americans are concerned, the Catholics are no more Christian than the Latter Day Saints or the Rastafarians or the Tibetan Buddhists.)
Being Christian definitely does not mean you're a "religious nutjob" as GPP suggested, but, on the other hand, thinking that Christians are all religious nutjobs is not an entirely unreasonable position for an American. In America, those that aren't are very nearly lost in the noise (the nutjobs are very noisy), and can be dismissed as a statistical anomaly if you're not paying careful attention.
Frankly, if some of the sane and smart Christian out there (and I know they're out there) would speak out more often and more loudly against the religious nutjobs who proclaim so vehemently that they are the only true Christians, I would have a lot more respect for Christians in general.
Furthermore you reveal your own prejudices when you assume that someone who doesn't approve of the Christian nutjobs must be an atheist. I assure you that there are plenty of Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Unitarians, Pagans, just plain agnostics, and even a fair number of Christians (especially Catholics) who would be just as happy to slap these fruitcakes who claim to be the One True Christians with a common-sense fact or two.
Gender is a linguistic term; a grammatical category for words. The term that covers male and female members of a species is "sex".
Actually, as someone who generally favors description over prescription in language, the above claim might seem a trifle hypocritical, but the fact is, I simply like saying "words have gender, people have sex".:)
Furthermore, the use of the namby-pamby term "gender" in cases where "sex" works just fine--merely because some clueless people might feel it's risque or something--is the kind of politically correct garbage that makes me want to kick some...ass. Not bottom, not hiney, not rear, not posterior--ass.
One of the things that's helped Google get away with aggregating other people's contents on their news service is the fact that Google News is non-commercial, doesn't run ads, and doesn't represent a revenue stream for Google. And they still got sued several times. If Dow Jones wants to do something similar, but charge for it, they may find themselves facing a whole stream of lawsuits, and may find that their defense is a lot less effective.
Automatically assuming someone is a shill because they speak positively about Windows is just plain retarded.
Without commenting on whether it's actually "retarded" or not, I'd like to point out that if Microsoft didn't have so many paid shills, then maybe people wouldn't be quite as quick to assume that fans are paid shills.
In fact, in general, if Microsoft were more prone to act ethically and legally, people might not be so quick to assume that the things they do are unethical or even illegal. And you might want to remember: people know you by the company you keep.
I'm sure what the video game industry wants is to get the used game industry somehow part of the video game industry itself
That's simple enough--just invest in some retail locations, open stores, and sell the used games for less (and buy them for more) than the not-part-of-the-industry stores, and Bob's yer uncle.
The problem is, they'd really like to do it without paying rent on brick-and-mortar locations and wages and salaries for extra employees to man those locations and then have even more money tied up in inventory.
How about if I simply disagree? It's perfectly correct and grammatical English, even if that usage of "beg". in the sense of "ask for" or "earnestly request" is a trifle unusual. From the second link in that search page you posted: "Arguments over whether such usage should be considered incorrect are an example of debate over linguistic prescription and description." From the third link: " This one really bugs people who know some logic and are familiar with the classical languages. From my attempts to research the point, it also seems to cause trouble for dictionary writers and compilers of style guides, so much so that I've not found two authorities that entirely agree on the nature of the problem or which senses of beg the question are acceptable."
Furthermore, the phrase "begs the question" is itself an example of an arguably dubious translation from the Latin petitio principii, or "assuming the starting point." "Petitio" can be translated as "beg", but that seems like a bad fit in this case.
So, I don't think you're being a "top-hatted toff" or patronizing; I think you're simply a narrow-minded prescriptionist who should be shot. If there were any danger of confusion, I might reconsider (I am, for example, adamant that "imply" and "infer" are not synonyms), but in this case, there is absolutely no danger of confusion, and I revel in the expanded usage which adds to the poesy of everyday speech.
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The tight control on the user experience is what maintains the appeal of the device.
They could maintain the quality of the software offered in the App Store without (completely) locking people out of installing non-App-Store software--people who want the Apple Quality User Experience(tm) could stick with App Store software, and people who wanted extra functionality could try alternatives. That would broaden their appeal without reducing the appeal among the existing base. Which pretty much contradicts the sentence above, although we do arrive at similar conclusions, eventually. :)
Heck, with Android, which is generally perceived as being so much more open, you still have to go through the settings to find the proper checkbox before you can install non-Marketplace apps. Joe Sixpack doesn't have the patience or interest to find and click that checkbox, let alone hunt down non-Marketplace apps, so in practical terms, Android-based phones are just as locked down as iPhones as far as the average user is concerned. But for someone like me, who won't consider a system that doesn't at least have that checkbox or some equivalent, Apple's not even an option.
Apple is the new Microsoft
Hardly new. First of all, Apple is one of the only companies (along with Lotus and Xerox) to have been actively boycotted by the FSF and LPF, back in the nineties. The boycott ended in 1995, but still, that proves that Apple has managed to reach a level of dickheadedness that even Microsoft has failed to achieve. So far. :)
(Just to really smear the icing of irony on this cupcake, one of the companies that the LPF/FSF boycott was in defense of was...are you ready for it? That's right...Microsoft!)
If you get the government too enthused about Free Software they may decide to "help" it.
Yeah, unlike industry, which always has all our best interests at heart....
Our best hope is to make sure that nobody uses Free/Libre Software. That way, there's guaranteed to be no bad influences. :)
(Frankly, I don't think SELinux is that bad a result; if more gov't help is along those lines, I think we'll do fine.)
Wikipedia also says: "A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could release as much as 5.2 tons/year of uranium (containing 74 pounds (34 kg) of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons/year of thorium." One big difference here is that an event like the Three Mile Island accident is usually a one-time event, while the coal-burning plant goes on releasing its radioactive material year after year after year....
I'm not going to take sides because I don't know how many curies you get from the release of 5.2 tons of uranium and 12.8 tons of thorium, or what the typical lifespan of a coal plant is (the multiplication factor here), but I definitely don't think it's quite as simple a matter as your brief post suggested. Can you show your work in a little more detail?
Microsoft has released device drivers under the GPLv2
Yes, but Microsoft is the licenser, not the licensee, and as such they are not bound by the license terms! It's their "property"; they own the copyright, so they don't need a license to use or distribute it. So your argument kind of falls on its face. Clause 7 does not apply to them (unless they try to distribute the whole kernel, not just one driver), but it applies to us, so if MS asserts a patent claim, it's everyone who is/was distributing the kernel with the contaminated code who needs to stop distributing until the code can be cleaned up.
Remember, the GPL exists to provide a defense against charges of copyright infringement. You can't, generally, be sued for violating the GPL, but if you fail to comply with its terms then "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works", which opens you up for that copyright infringement suit. But if you own the copyright, you don't need permission!
Actually, to show the landing sight, I think they'd actually have to land again. To show the landing site, however, simply requires a sufficiently high-resolution camera.
Used games actually screw up both, the developer AND the consumer.
No. No they do not.
Gamestop does not sell it for 30 bucks, they sell it for 34.95, and they buy it from you for about 10 bucks.
Sounds like there's plenty of room for some competition there. The problem is not used games. The problem is Gamestop's business practices. And the only reason Gamestop is able to get away with their pricing schemes is because of a lack of competition. Despite which, it's still ridiculous to say that Gamestop is hurting the developers. The developers got paid for the game, asking price for each copy, so they've got no beef whatsoever. Tenuous arguments about how they might sell more games if people didn't buy used games are ridiculous given first-sale doctrine. Once they sell it, it's no longer their business what happens with it, even if it ends up competing with them in some abstract way. If they don't produce things that people want to keep, they have no one but themselves to blame for whatever used market might appear. If they don't like it, they're welcome to buy the used games themselves and compete with Gamestop!
I picked up on what happened just fine--it was pointed out that you were wrong, and that "de-orbit" was a valid, correct, and even standard term to use there, and you still don't seem to get it.
Actually, it's Apple that's presenting the Pre as an iPod device in iTunes, and Palm's right to represent themselves to the software as an iPod is established case law--see the Supreme Court decision in KSR v Teleflex. There's no trademark violation going on here, because the information that iTunes misinterprets as a trademark is actually a required part of the API--exactly the issue in the KSR case. If Apple doesn't want non-Apple devices to display as iPods, they can either make their APIs more open (so the device can inform the software what it is without confusion or danger of being rejected), or they can play the on-going, never-ending game of whack-a-mole they're trying now (a game they can never win). At some point, someone's going to look (to the API) enough like an iPod that Apple simply won't have any way to prevent interoperability, and their on-going attempts to lock people out will simply be over, and they have no third option.
Really? So what about this "Authentic Roman Coin(tm)" I have that is clearly stamped "34 BC"?
(Apologies to Terry Pratchett for mangling his joke.)
See the "-v" option to gnu ls(1). If your other applications can't cope, that's because they're broken and/or inferior.
Anyway, you have the same problem when you go from version 9 to version 10. If you're simply using a text sort, emacs v22 will come just before the ancient v3.
Shh! You're going to blow his chance to try to look smart by showing off half-baked knowledge misinterpreted from something he heard in passing, probably on a third-rate Skiffy B-movie (possibly on the Skiffy, er, Sci-Fi, er, SyFy Channel). How can he lord it over his equally ignorant peers when they come to visit his mom's basement if you're going to bring up something as irrelevant as facts!?
Although one could argue that objects on the surface of the Earth still move in a more-or-less elliptical path around the Earth (a circle can be considered a degenerate form of ellipse, after all), so, in a sense, landing is not de-orbiting as much as it is changing orbits. If I still lived in my mom's basement, I think I could turn that into a pretty convincing argument, but I don't, so I won't.
(I could also point out that words sometimes develop more specialized meanings than their roots might suggest, i.e. "defenestrate" has become a little more specific than "unwindowing", but that would just be silly, so I won't bother.) :)
Well...at least, he learned to recognize the sounds "Bee A Tee Aitch" :)
Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
Get off my lawn! :p
I suspect that developers at Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair and Digital Research (among others) might dispute that claim.
How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?
I was one of the first people in the world to break an IBM PC keyboard--several months before it was released. But no, that was far from being my first computer experience (or I wouldn't have had access to the as-yet-unreleased IBM PC). Did I say "get off my lawn" yet? :)
Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft?
I think I can safely say yes. There was plenty of competition before Microsoft's unholy alliance with IBM all-but-crushed the burgeoning home and small business computing market. The Internet was already well under way when Microsoft came along, just like the home computing market, and none of the vendors in the home computing market would have hesitated to jump on the Internet when it became apparent what it had to offer any longer than Bill did (note: he almost waited too long, so I think that's a very safe claim).
modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.
Pioneers like BG, perhaps, except, in general, more pioneer-y and more innovative. :)
every square meter of the world has 2 elephants of air on top of them.
And if we assume an elephant covers about a square meter (probably a conservative estimate), then, because of all that air on top of it weighing it down, an elephant must weigh--at a minimum--at least as much as three elephants. :)
or to put it another way: just fucking google it! :)
(Actually, if I were to pick nits, I would point out that going to "goggle.com" may not be quite as productive--in fact, after a quick skim of that site, I might advise carefully avoiding it if you're running windows.)
And what if your car was parked in front of a hydrant and there was a fire and six people died because the fire department couldn't get access to the hydrant quickly enough? I think you could be in pretty big trouble for that.
I mean, as long as we're stretching out analogies.... :)
Specifically, you have learned that it's not a pig in that poke. The metaphor (apparently) stems from a common confidence trick in the middle ages: selling someone a cat in a bag (poke), while claiming it was a pig. So really, the point is that once the cat's out of the bag, you can't put the pig back!
W3 Schools which has an admitted alternate-browser bias does not show any sort of abrupt drop-off for IE, and if anywhere were going to, I would think it would be this site. In fact, it shows Firefox dropping for the first time since September of last year (when Chrome was initially released), but only half a percentage point. IE7 is losing ground to IE8 rather quickly, but IE6 actually gained a half a percentage point since May. Chrome is also up another half a point, and nothing else really had enough movement to be worth mentioning (Safari up a tenth, Opera down a tenth).
Let me guess: you're either posting from somewhere outside America (most likely Europe), or you're Roman Catholic. American Evangelical Christians do not accept that the Bible is fallible, nor do they recognize denominations that do as actually being Christians! (Yes, as far as a large percentage of Americans are concerned, the Catholics are no more Christian than the Latter Day Saints or the Rastafarians or the Tibetan Buddhists.)
Being Christian definitely does not mean you're a "religious nutjob" as GPP suggested, but, on the other hand, thinking that Christians are all religious nutjobs is not an entirely unreasonable position for an American. In America, those that aren't are very nearly lost in the noise (the nutjobs are very noisy), and can be dismissed as a statistical anomaly if you're not paying careful attention.
Frankly, if some of the sane and smart Christian out there (and I know they're out there) would speak out more often and more loudly against the religious nutjobs who proclaim so vehemently that they are the only true Christians, I would have a lot more respect for Christians in general.
Furthermore you reveal your own prejudices when you assume that someone who doesn't approve of the Christian nutjobs must be an atheist. I assure you that there are plenty of Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Unitarians, Pagans, just plain agnostics, and even a fair number of Christians (especially Catholics) who would be just as happy to slap these fruitcakes who claim to be the One True Christians with a common-sense fact or two.
Gender is a linguistic term; a grammatical category for words. The term that covers male and female members of a species is "sex".
Actually, as someone who generally favors description over prescription in language, the above claim might seem a trifle hypocritical, but the fact is, I simply like saying "words have gender, people have sex". :)
Furthermore, the use of the namby-pamby term "gender" in cases where "sex" works just fine--merely because some clueless people might feel it's risque or something--is the kind of politically correct garbage that makes me want to kick some...ass. Not bottom, not hiney, not rear, not posterior--ass.
One of the things that's helped Google get away with aggregating other people's contents on their news service is the fact that Google News is non-commercial, doesn't run ads, and doesn't represent a revenue stream for Google. And they still got sued several times. If Dow Jones wants to do something similar, but charge for it, they may find themselves facing a whole stream of lawsuits, and may find that their defense is a lot less effective.
Automatically assuming someone is a shill because they speak positively about Windows is just plain retarded.
Without commenting on whether it's actually "retarded" or not, I'd like to point out that if Microsoft didn't have so many paid shills, then maybe people wouldn't be quite as quick to assume that fans are paid shills.
In fact, in general, if Microsoft were more prone to act ethically and legally, people might not be so quick to assume that the things they do are unethical or even illegal. And you might want to remember: people know you by the company you keep.
I'm sure what the video game industry wants is to get the used game industry somehow part of the video game industry itself
That's simple enough--just invest in some retail locations, open stores, and sell the used games for less (and buy them for more) than the not-part-of-the-industry stores, and Bob's yer uncle.
The problem is, they'd really like to do it without paying rent on brick-and-mortar locations and wages and salaries for extra employees to man those locations and then have even more money tied up in inventory.
How about if I simply disagree? It's perfectly correct and grammatical English, even if that usage of "beg". in the sense of "ask for" or "earnestly request" is a trifle unusual. From the second link in that search page you posted: "Arguments over whether such usage should be considered incorrect are an example of debate over linguistic prescription and description." From the third link: " This one really bugs people who know some logic and are familiar with the classical languages. From my attempts to research the point, it also seems to cause trouble for dictionary writers and compilers of style guides, so much so that I've not found two authorities that entirely agree on the nature of the problem or which senses of beg the question are acceptable."
Furthermore, the phrase "begs the question" is itself an example of an arguably dubious translation from the Latin petitio principii, or "assuming the starting point." "Petitio" can be translated as "beg", but that seems like a bad fit in this case.
So, I don't think you're being a "top-hatted toff" or patronizing; I think you're simply a narrow-minded prescriptionist who should be shot. If there were any danger of confusion, I might reconsider (I am, for example, adamant that "imply" and "infer" are not synonyms), but in this case, there is absolutely no danger of confusion, and I revel in the expanded usage which adds to the poesy of everyday speech.