They didnt ask to come in and talk, they asked to be allowed to SEARCH it. its much more bolder and on the borderline than talking.
Still legal. I can come to your door and ask for permission to set your couch on fire or take a sledgehammer to your walls. It's still just a request. If he was afraid, he should have called the cops saying he was being harassed, threatened, intimidated, etc. If they tried to force their way in, he could attacked them or even shoot them to defend himself/his property. Either way he could have sued Apple for the harassment/threats/intimidation/trespassing. That's how the process works.
You don't need to hire a P.I. to ask someone a question. The tone of the question doesn't matter. Asking a question in these circumstances is perfectly legal.
you are missing the point - this is the blogger's house. its different. apple went to the guy before the gizmodo guy.
Sorry. You missed the point. The point of that sentence was the warrant part. So I mixed up two people. The police served a warrant on someone who received stolen property. That seems like a pretty good way to find out what they knew (i.e. if they thought it was stolen). It was still a warrant, which means it was signed off on by a judge, and not just some company searching a private citizen. It was the government, after going through the process set out to prevent unreasonable searches.
If he gave it to the bartender, I don't think anyone would be mad at him. But if the bartender said "he didn't give it to me", at least he would have a good case he tried to return it. The fact that bartender may have been crooked doesn't release the finder from his responsiblity. There was still the police. There was still the name he found on Facebook. There was still Apple HQ.
I was under the impression he sold it, but I'll take you at face value for this post.
That means he had someone else's property, which he knew (since he played around on it and found the guy's Facebook). Instead of returning it, he loaned it to someone else for 3 weeks (for a fee), and let them disassemble it (which could easily damage it).
If I "find" your car, I don't get to rent it out for 2 weeks before returning it. If I find your drill with your name on it, I don't get to use it until the bit wears down and then return it. You don't get to extract value out of other people's stuff before you give it back.
It doesn't matter if he sold it, loaned it, rented it, smashed it, hid it, gave it away, whatever. He didn't give it back or really even try (my position, see my other posts) so he was wrong and broke the law.
That was one of the points John Gruber brought up in his analysis last week. Either they thought it was real, in which case they bought stolen property, or they thought it was fake, and wouldn't have paid $5k. Even if they thought there was only a 10% chance it was real, that means they were willing to buy stolen property.
Actually, I guess whether it was real or not doesn't really matter. They knew the story, so they knew it was stolen by California law, or at least that they guy didn't make much effort in turning it in. And I'm sure they asked their lawyers about this situation before buying it.
People identifying themselves as representing Apple last week visited and sought permission to search the Silicon Valley address of the college-age man who came into possession of a next-generation iPhone prototype, according to a person involved with the find.
It's a free country. You are allowed to go to someone's door and ask them a question, and ask to come in. They can say no. If you keep it up, they can call the cops and have you arrested for trespassing/harassment. But asking "can I come in to talk to you" is perfectly legal.
On Friday, the REACT task force executed a warrant to search the home and car of Gizmodo blogger Jason Chen, who had possession of the iPhone prototype before it was returned to Apple, and who was responsible for the gadget blogs breaking stories on the device.
The emphasis is mine, though that was a link in the original. A branch of the police executed a warrant. That's legal too. That's the way it's supposed to work.
If Apple did their own search, that would be bad. But they used the process. They did it by the book. This article says that the police aren't analyzing what they found until the question of the shield law is settled. Does that sound like someone following Apple's agenda, damn the consequences?
Right, but computers can be dangerous tools. You are expected to prove some basic competency before you are licensed to drive. Same thing with operating heavy machinery.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can cause a lot of harm. If you send out a message to a ton of clients and use CC instead of BCC.... you are in deep trouble. You're right that anyone could accidentally do that, but you should make sure they know that in the first place.
I don't see any problem with some basic competency stuff. A little anti-phishing, some basic tasks in an email client, etc. If a job requires knowledge of how to use a computer, the applicants should know how to use a computer.
If they don't? You could not hire them, or you could train them.
Seems pretty reasonable to me. If you hire them and it turns out they don't know what they are doing, you can lose money directly (like the above), or indirectly (as they spend a day or two to do a simple task before you find out they didn't know what they were doing).
I know that there are some things that I would like on the test. It drives me nuts how many people don't know how to send screenshots around. When you get a piece of text on a web page you want me to know about, just send me the text. I don't want a screenshot of the text. I really don't want a word document with a screenshot of the text. I don't want it internally, and I don't want clients/partners seeing that. I'd rather spend the 5 minutes to teach them how to do it correctly.
What did Apple do here? The prosecutor's office (or investigating detective) decided to look into this. A judge decided that the search was reasonable. The police executed it.
I don't see Apple anywhere in there. The only thing Apple has to do with any of this is that they were hurt (through revealing of the device, and loss of their property) and have probably filed a report to the police to that effect.
If this happened to Garmin, don't you think they'd talk to the police and say "hey that's ours"? Dell would do it. So would TIVo, Microsoft, iRobot, and any other company. If they don't file a police report, they don't get it back.
The fact that the circumstances the device was acquired under are fishy enough that the police/prosecutor are looking into it aren't Apple's fault. If everything looked above board, the prosecutor wouldn't have started looking into this, the judge wouldn't have signed a warrant.
People keep posting that, but I just find it so disingenuous.
What part of Apple did he call? Tech support? That would be worthless. The Giz article said he couldn't send them a picture of the thing. Why not? Surely he had his own camera phone. If he sent a pic with the stickers on the back, I think he would have gotten a real response.
He could have returned it to the bar, which would have solved everything. He could have at least told the bartender and given his number so the guy who lost it could get in contact with him.
He could have given it to the police
He knew the name of the Apple engineer. He could have called him, or looked him up. He could have found the guy's Facebook as Giz did. If he made a friend request that said "I have your iPhone", don't you think the guy would have responded?
Why not take it to an Apple store? They'd be able to figure out if it was a cheap knockoff pretty fast (as Giz claims everyone first thought). Either way the manager of the store would know someone to contact at Apple to get it checked out.
He could have gone to Apple HQ. It was only 20 miles away. As soon as he discovered it wasn't a normal 3GS and had part number stickers on the back, he could have easily walked into 1 Infinite Loop and turned it in.
It just sounds like he didn't make any real effort. Even ignoring the California "take it to the police" forfeiture law, it just doesn't sound like an ethical thing to do. If he took that to Apple headquarters, my guess is he could have received an award. He might have gotten a tour of Apple, some money, a chance to meet The Great Steve, a promise of a free iPhone 4G on launch day (or many be a free iPad). He couldn't have been a small hero.
I would even accept selling pictures of the thing to Giz (or someone else) and then turning it back in. At least he turned it back in.
Instead, he went for a payday. Then Giz got it and took 3 weeks to decide it was real and notify Apple, after cracking it open and posting all sorts of stuff about it. Then they named the poor guy who lost it and posted pics of his Facebook profile, which seems like rubbing salt in a wound.
It was cheaper to keep using the same old BIOS than to switch, so we've waited WAY too long. It's finally happening through EFI, but it's going slow. OpenFirmware would have been nice. It's actually pretty amazing we've managed to tack stuff on to the BIOS for ~30 years.
Printer drivers exist because everyone has to be 'special'. They could all use PostScript which would suit the vast majority of users, but that would cost $$$ to Adobe. PCL seems to be very common now too, but again, a $50 printer isn't going to spend $2 on licensing something. All the "value add" stuff in drivers is just trash. Often, the drives themselves are trash. $50 printers do that.
Hard drives... I've had that happen. I don't know why OSes don't do save/load checksums on sectors. ZFS can do it. This could be done in hardware too, but that won't catch errors caused by the OS asking to write in the wrong spot.
ECC is cost. My new laptop has 4 GB of RAM in it. ECC is going to have to start going into every machine pretty soon. If everyone did it, the cost would drop since it wouldn't be "special" memory.
No experience with hardware RAID, but it doesn't surprise me the interface is bad. That kind of low level stuff is always written for the guru, as if no mortal would ever touch it
I've been through so much in my years of using PCs that could be avoided with a few more $ in part design. Selling computers with name brand SoundBlaster cards instead of saving $3 on a no-name "compatible". Easy to break connectors and cables (because an extra $0.25 per $150 motherboard to make the thing usable would be too much).
That's one thing you can give Apple credit for. They'll toss stuff out. "You probably don't need ExpressCard, so there isn't one". They were the ones to toss serial ports and actually commit to USB. They were the ones to drop SCSI and commit to FireWire. If it's outdated or possibly unnecessary, Steven will drop if it he thinks it's a good idea. May be hard on some users, like when FireWire disappeared off the MacBook.
Time Machine is what software should be. I've used backup programs for years, but they're all a pain. Plug in a drive, turn on time machine, you have a recent backup. Need to restore off it? Find the files and click the button. Need to restore a whole computer? Boot off the OS X disk and press a button. Old mac got crushed by a bulldozer and you need to transfer everything to a new one? During setup plug in your time machine backup, it takes care of everything. I've restored stuff for my parents from weeks before with no effort. No "go pick the correct backup file", no "only the last version was backed up, the stuff from 2 weeks ago is gone", it's just there.
The things it doesn't do? I'd like to be able to have it give me a list of files that changed since my last backup (or a given backup). I'd like to be able to have it run checksums against files to find silent corruption. But the basic use case works VERY well.
But it's so easy for software to ruin an experience. I just got a PS3, and I've been rather happy with it. But two days ago I noticed the battery on my controller was very low. So I plugged it into the USB port on my PS3. This turned it on (since I probably want to play), but I didn't so I turned it off.
So it didn't charge.
If I want to charge my PS3 controller, I either have to leave my PS3 on, or buy a AC charging kit (which is probably $20 or $30). So what did I do? I plugged it into my Mac. If I'm supposed to plug my controller into my PS3 to charge it, it should charge any time it's plugged in. If the PS3 has power, the controller should charge.
The iPad looks very nice, and I'd like one, but the way you sync documents between the iPad and your Mac or PC to use in iWork just sounds like a horrible pain. Open iTunes, connect the iPad, go to the right tab, drag your document in, sync, disconnect, use iPad to edit, connect back to computer, sync with iTunes, drag file out.
Reviews I've seen say to just skip the whole nonsense and email documents to yourself.
I agree with your assessment. At this pointer computers are usually quite nice. They may have a quizzical decision made about the initial hardware (a secure power cord? Who needs it!), but by and large things are easy now. You don't have to care about IRQs and all that other old stuff of legend that used to cause so many headaches. Just plug that new USB gizmo in.
Software is getting better, but it has a long way to go.
You're right. What I meant was assisted decoding (using the GPU to decode MPEG4), not generic video acceleration (copying memory areas, fast line drawing, etc).
The new fast video switching thing was something I hadn't even considered in all this, that an interesting point.
That's a red herring. See this post. That only effects H.264, and only on a handful of Macs (although it probably works on the new laptops Apple just released).
But that doesn't explain my Mac (which lacks video decoding acceleration), non-H.264 video, non-video flash, etc.
Why are you doing your own video decoding anyway? That's the point of QuickTime, that it does that stuff and optimizes it for you. It's the system component designed for playing media.
I have a MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz, 2 GB of RAM. It's 2 years old, and doesn't support GPU help decoding video (it's a GeForce 8600M GT). Someone at my work was questioning why I think Flash is so evil, today I was able to show them. I watched three videos today. Let's compare the experiences.
Video one was an MPEG-4 720p trailer for Super Mario Galaxy 2, played in QuickTime Player. When it ran, both of my cores were at 15-20% usage, playback was perfectly smooth.
Video two was an MPEG-4 video played through an HTML5 demo (first demo on this page). According to the article, the video is played onto an HTML Canvas, which is then used to draw on another canvas which is displayed. This video, while smaller, took about 10% of one core and 40-50% of another on Safari, with little hit clicking on the video having it explode. The playback was nice and smooth.
Video three was an old video on YouTube. It wasn't very big (maybe 360px high), and used 75-80% of both cores. Playing this causes my laptop to heat up and fans to kick on. It's pathetic.
Now not all YouTube videos are that bad, for some reason that particular video was just really bad. Many small videos like that will only use 30-50% of both cores. Even smaller videos will have occasional hiccups where it will drop 2 frames. 480p videos will usually use up a good chunk of my CPU (~80%), and 720p videos can drop frames when a lot changes in the scene (like a pan). If I change from Flash to HTML5 video (MPEG4), 720p stuff plays back no problem. OK Go's recent video of a Rube Goldberg machine? My Mac can't play it reliably in Flash at 480p without dropping frames when a lot of action is going on.
It's not just videos, although that's where I usually run into it. Flash sites with animation just suck down CPU, little games can really heat up my Mac. I think the problem is the way Flash displays things, but that's just a hunch.
If you know anyone with a Mac (the older the better), go play around with Flash content. It's almost impressive how poorly it performs. Faster and faster Macs help cover it up, but that's no excuse. I'm pretty sure that I could have played Flash content through Parallels at the same or lower CPU usage, but I don't have Parallels installed anymore to test with.
If Adobe spent any time optimizing Flash on OS X, people wouldn't hate it nearly as much. Apple would still hate it (Steve likes control), but people wouldn't have the "kill it now" attitude.
The game isn't supposed to teach you math, it's supposed to help you keep simple skills up. Memorized multiplication tables won't tell you how to solve 17 x 193, because your table didn't cover that. You still have to know how to solve it through addition.
But someone who has memorized the table and knows 7 x 9 = 63 off the top of their head will be able to carry out the problem faster that someone who doesn't know their tables as well, and has to think that 7 * 9 = 5 * 9 + 9 + 9 = 45 + 9 + 9 = 54 + 9 = 63.
What really caught me was they said that doing the training sped up your ability to do things you trained on (duh). NPR gave the example of a baggage scanner where the number of bags going in and out changes, you you have to keep track of the number of bags in the machine at any given moment.
So that may not be useful to your everyday life, and games that are similar aren't supposed to benefit. But what about the games you do in real life? As I remember, the first two Brain Training games Nintendo put out had many real world things like simple math problems (6 + 3, 7 * 5), reading analog clocks, and making change. These are all things people do in real life. Maybe doing tons of elementary math problems won't make you smarter, but it will make you faster and more confident when you have to do simple math, and that's a plus.
Count the number of spinning yellow number 7s in this jumble may not be that applicable to real life, but some are.
Nintendo never advertised the games would make you smarter. They framed it as "keeping your brain fit", like you keep your muscles fit by using them. There have been tons of copy-cats since Brain Training sold so well, and it wouldn't surprise me they claimed (or hinted) they would make you smarter. But doing simple math problems can't make you smarter, only better at simple math problems.
I'm fully aware. Those were two different thoughts. The point of the first of those two paragraphs was that while the fighting in ICO helped to establish the mood and danger, the number of times you have to go through the fighting process wasn't necessary to tell the story... it just made the game longer (and more of a game). If you only fought 1/2 or 1/3 as often... would the point of the danger to Yorda have been lost on you?
The next paragraph mentioned God of War's fighting purely as an example of a game with a mechanic that was very well done. It wasn't meant as a comparison against ICO's fighting mechanic.
Actually, ICO's fighting worked quite well in that it wasn't very good. If you could easily smite dozens of the shadows to protect Yorda, the tension wouldn't be there.
There are a few games that are really good, and would certainly be art if video games can be. But I can see what he's saying.
While ICO was great, it was, you followed along the path the game designer gave you, stopping off and on to fight the shadow things. While you do have to fight them (for there to be any conflict in the game), you don't need to fight them as much as you do. The fights are basically padding, and the shear number of times you do it isn't necessary for the story. Shadow of the Colossus fixed that in that there were only 12 fights, all necessary to the story.
Other games have had great mechanics. The fighting in God of War is fantastic, and just "feels" right. Kratos does what you want. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time had the best explanation of death I've ever seen in a game. The entire game was a story the prince was telling the princess, and when you would die, he would say something like "No, that's not right" or "That's not how it happened, let me back up". Instead of having arbitrary deaths that didn't exist for the purpose of the story the game was telling, it weaved them in as reminders of how the game was being narrated. PoP also had great controls in the platforming puzzle sections.
I've been playing Heavy Rain and it's pretty impressive. But I think Ebert's right that I'm just doing what I'm told. You see each scene, and play through it. You have choices and consequences to actions (the story changes some depending on how well you do in QTE sequences), but the overall story is the same. It can still easily be seen as a miniseries or long movie with "press button here to continue plot" actions inserted. It's a "choose your own adventure" miniseries, since you can effect the story, but there is something of a sense that it's unnecessary.
Games are just stories that could be told in other mediums, with activities tacked on. A book lets you experience things the way you visualize it, and when you want (music is how you play it). A play gives you the experience the actors and directors think you should have (music performances are how that artist think you should hear it). A movie (or TV series) is like a play but the artist can do things that aren't possible on a physical set. A photograph lets you see a moment in time that no longer exists, and a painting or drawing lets you see an artists perception of that moment, even if it never existed in the first place.
What do video games do that other mediums can't? You can interact, but basically all games we have now are pre-told stories. The gameplay isn't especially necessary to get the story. You can't tell your own story in GTA 4. Sure Niko can go take a 5 day period off to play darts if you want, but the story just sits there waiting for you.
The only games where the story really is yours is in The Sims or other simulation games, but that's the equivalent of playing with blocks. Bioshock let you see and peer into a world that didn't exist anywhere else, studying whatever parts you wanted. But that wasn't the gameplay, the gameplay was standard FPS affair, and you could choose to just ignore Andrew Ryan's world, to a certain degree.
I have played many great games that I won't forget. If making an impact on the player/viewer is the measure of art, games can do that. But other than using button presses to immerse someone more than reading a printed word may do... what stories have games told that other media couldn't?
Psychonauts had a great imaginative world and story, but fighting with hundreds of little enemies wasn't strictly necessary to tell the story. Maybe the problem is that such a game could be made, but it probably sell well. If you just walk around looking at things, is it really a game? Maybe that commercial constraint is causing problems here, and we should be looking at flash games where it's easier for people to have a singular vision and not have to worry about making money if they don't want to.
I'm sure games that do something that can't be done elsewhere exis
The iPad has a lot going for it, especially that you can get one for about 1/3 the price of that thing (if you convert the 1998 dollars, see eldavojon's post) and that you have wireless networking (a major plus).
I think a big part of this (and one that Microsoft has run into with their tablet attempts) is that of expectations. If it looks like a PC (because it has a keyboard), and acts like a PC (because the interface looks like Windows 95/98 did), people expect it to operate like a PC. They should be able to install normal software, it should be fast enough to do normal computer things, etc.
Netbooks ran into this too. They were cheap and cute, so people bought them. Then they found out that weren't "real" laptops and had 1 GHz processors, and were never going to edit video or edit 8 MP photos fast. The things looked like normal computers, but cheaper, so why not get it? Then they weren't happy. Now many "netbooks" are full computers that are just tiny. You can buy netbooks that cost $600+ instead of the early $200-$300. They are what people expect out of a laptop, only tiny.
Apple, on the other hand, made a device that is very clearly not a Macintosh. It does look like an iPhone, which is a plus since people see the iPhone as a appliance and not a computer. These two things add up to people seeing the iPad as an appliance and not a computer, which is exactly what Apple intends. It does what it does, and that's what it's supposed to do.
If Apple released the iPad with a fold out keyboard, people would compare it to another netbook or a normal laptop and criticize it for being so inflexible. I was actually very surprised that Apple is even making a keyboard dock, as it makes it look more like a laptop. The flexibility of being able to easily type a document on the road with the dock (or a bluetooth keyboard) must have been enough to overwhelm the worry, and I can see that being the case.
At this point, an iPhone one generation removed (currently the 3G, by the end of the summer the 3GS) can be had for $100, brand new.
They are going to have to go for the $0-$25 after subsidy market if they want to use price. The Palm Pre is pretty cheap, and has many of these features. There is always a Blackberry that is basically free.
It's an interesting little phone, but it seems like it is a feature phone that should have come out a year or so ago.
In fact, it seems like it would be most interested if not positioned as a smart phone, and thus something you could buy without having to get the $20 or $30 per month data plan. But without that, you can't surf, so you just have a phone with SMS and a keyboard, which are available for free.
All that said, it's nice to see someone try to sell a phone that isn't positioned as an iPhone killer. They clearly went down a different road here.
f the apps are crap and unpopular and don't bring anything to the party why would Apple be worried?
See: Atari 2600
Now that was slightly Atari's fault (they flooded too). But if even 20-30% of the stuff on the app store are crappy ports, it makes the platform look bad.
Let's take the Wii. I think it's a great little system, and it has some very good games. Galaxy alone was nearly worth the price of the system... I thought it was that good. But let's say you don't know that. Let's just look at the library. It's full of shovelware. It's horrible. The DS is full of crud too, as people make cheesy "games" out of whatever they can think of.
And the thing is, all that stuff on the Wii and DS already passed Nintendo, checking to make sure it was vaguely functional.
Can you imagine how frustrating it would be if downloading a game for the iPhone was a 50/50 shoot of getting something good, or a hastily ported flash game that doesn't use the screen well and has text and such that refer to buttons that don't exist? People keep complaining on/. about console games hurriedly ported to the PC, this can be the same thing.
Yes, Apple can reject all those apps, but rejection isn't free, it takes a certain amount of time and resources to review those apps and reject them.
How about this: a car analogy. Honda makes lots of great cars. If tomorrow they announce a new car, that has a tendency for the engines to kill themselves in a few months, even though it's just that one car, it will start to effect the reputation of the entire line of Hondas. "Sure the CRV is nice, but I'm not sure I should get one. My friend's Frizzler killed it's self and took two weeks to repair."
I've decompiled stuff before, and I know you get meaningless labels for variables and functions, and that what you get back doesn't match what you put in, due to optimizations. But that's why I mentioned having the original source. If Adobe didn't want to make generating C/C++/Objective-C code an output option (as opposed to a binary), they at least should be able to make their Flash VM bytecode -> machine bytecode compiler generate a second file of metadata that tracks what in the original source became what in the final code, so that a companion decompiler they wrote could create human looking source instead of "function128(param1,param2,param3)" type stuff. Basically, debugging information.
This would certainly take work, but Adobe is obviously quite scared of becoming irrelevant, so they may be willing to do the work.
It would be interesting to see if Apple would go as far as trying to reject an app because it wasn't native, even though the developer had full C code from a technique like this. Would they push that far?
This doesn't surprise me, and it's fine with me too. I don't want apps that were designed to run on three platforms, I want apps that were designed to run on my platform. Gruber's latest article had an excellent comparison of Kindle for Mac (a QT cross platform program) and Kindle for iPhone (a native program).
That said, everything is complied to machine code. Can't you just decompile the applications into C/Objective-C if Apple asks for the code? A decent decompiler should even be able to translate many variable names, given that it has the original source.
Basically, why doesn't Adobe (and the.Net guys) just make their code output C files that people can run through XCode to be "legit"?
I still like the decision, but it seems there is a way around this, just like you could get around the "no interpreted language" thing by compiling the virtual machine bytecode into native ARM code.
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Still legal. I can come to your door and ask for permission to set your couch on fire or take a sledgehammer to your walls. It's still just a request. If he was afraid, he should have called the cops saying he was being harassed, threatened, intimidated, etc. If they tried to force their way in, he could attacked them or even shoot them to defend himself/his property. Either way he could have sued Apple for the harassment/threats/intimidation/trespassing. That's how the process works.
You don't need to hire a P.I. to ask someone a question. The tone of the question doesn't matter. Asking a question in these circumstances is perfectly legal.
Sorry. You missed the point. The point of that sentence was the warrant part. So I mixed up two people. The police served a warrant on someone who received stolen property. That seems like a pretty good way to find out what they knew (i.e. if they thought it was stolen). It was still a warrant, which means it was signed off on by a judge, and not just some company searching a private citizen. It was the government, after going through the process set out to prevent unreasonable searches.
If he gave it to the bartender, I don't think anyone would be mad at him. But if the bartender said "he didn't give it to me", at least he would have a good case he tried to return it. The fact that bartender may have been crooked doesn't release the finder from his responsiblity. There was still the police. There was still the name he found on Facebook. There was still Apple HQ.
I was under the impression he sold it, but I'll take you at face value for this post.
That means he had someone else's property, which he knew (since he played around on it and found the guy's Facebook). Instead of returning it, he loaned it to someone else for 3 weeks (for a fee), and let them disassemble it (which could easily damage it).
If I "find" your car, I don't get to rent it out for 2 weeks before returning it. If I find your drill with your name on it, I don't get to use it until the bit wears down and then return it. You don't get to extract value out of other people's stuff before you give it back.
It doesn't matter if he sold it, loaned it, rented it, smashed it, hid it, gave it away, whatever. He didn't give it back or really even try (my position, see my other posts) so he was wrong and broke the law.
That was one of the points John Gruber brought up in his analysis last week. Either they thought it was real, in which case they bought stolen property, or they thought it was fake, and wouldn't have paid $5k. Even if they thought there was only a 10% chance it was real, that means they were willing to buy stolen property.
Actually, I guess whether it was real or not doesn't really matter. They knew the story, so they knew it was stolen by California law, or at least that they guy didn't make much effort in turning it in. And I'm sure they asked their lawyers about this situation before buying it.
It's a free country. You are allowed to go to someone's door and ask them a question, and ask to come in. They can say no. If you keep it up, they can call the cops and have you arrested for trespassing/harassment. But asking "can I come in to talk to you" is perfectly legal.
According to Apple Insider:
The emphasis is mine, though that was a link in the original. A branch of the police executed a warrant. That's legal too. That's the way it's supposed to work.
If Apple did their own search, that would be bad. But they used the process. They did it by the book. This article says that the police aren't analyzing what they found until the question of the shield law is settled. Does that sound like someone following Apple's agenda, damn the consequences?
Right, but computers can be dangerous tools. You are expected to prove some basic competency before you are licensed to drive. Same thing with operating heavy machinery.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can cause a lot of harm. If you send out a message to a ton of clients and use CC instead of BCC.... you are in deep trouble. You're right that anyone could accidentally do that, but you should make sure they know that in the first place.
I don't see any problem with some basic competency stuff. A little anti-phishing, some basic tasks in an email client, etc. If a job requires knowledge of how to use a computer, the applicants should know how to use a computer.
If they don't? You could not hire them, or you could train them.
Seems pretty reasonable to me. If you hire them and it turns out they don't know what they are doing, you can lose money directly (like the above), or indirectly (as they spend a day or two to do a simple task before you find out they didn't know what they were doing).
I know that there are some things that I would like on the test. It drives me nuts how many people don't know how to send screenshots around. When you get a piece of text on a web page you want me to know about, just send me the text. I don't want a screenshot of the text. I really don't want a word document with a screenshot of the text. I don't want it internally, and I don't want clients/partners seeing that. I'd rather spend the 5 minutes to teach them how to do it correctly.
What did Apple do here? The prosecutor's office (or investigating detective) decided to look into this. A judge decided that the search was reasonable. The police executed it.
I don't see Apple anywhere in there. The only thing Apple has to do with any of this is that they were hurt (through revealing of the device, and loss of their property) and have probably filed a report to the police to that effect.
If this happened to Garmin, don't you think they'd talk to the police and say "hey that's ours"? Dell would do it. So would TIVo, Microsoft, iRobot, and any other company. If they don't file a police report, they don't get it back.
The fact that the circumstances the device was acquired under are fishy enough that the police/prosecutor are looking into it aren't Apple's fault. If everything looked above board, the prosecutor wouldn't have started looking into this, the judge wouldn't have signed a warrant.
People keep posting that, but I just find it so disingenuous.
It just sounds like he didn't make any real effort. Even ignoring the California "take it to the police" forfeiture law, it just doesn't sound like an ethical thing to do. If he took that to Apple headquarters, my guess is he could have received an award. He might have gotten a tour of Apple, some money, a chance to meet The Great Steve, a promise of a free iPhone 4G on launch day (or many be a free iPad). He couldn't have been a small hero.
I would even accept selling pictures of the thing to Giz (or someone else) and then turning it back in. At least he turned it back in.
Instead, he went for a payday. Then Giz got it and took 3 weeks to decide it was real and notify Apple, after cracking it open and posting all sorts of stuff about it. Then they named the poor guy who lost it and posted pics of his Facebook profile, which seems like rubbing salt in a wound.
Have you tried draining your ethernet cable?
So much of that is cost.
I've been through so much in my years of using PCs that could be avoided with a few more $ in part design. Selling computers with name brand SoundBlaster cards instead of saving $3 on a no-name "compatible". Easy to break connectors and cables (because an extra $0.25 per $150 motherboard to make the thing usable would be too much).
That's one thing you can give Apple credit for. They'll toss stuff out. "You probably don't need ExpressCard, so there isn't one". They were the ones to toss serial ports and actually commit to USB. They were the ones to drop SCSI and commit to FireWire. If it's outdated or possibly unnecessary, Steven will drop if it he thinks it's a good idea. May be hard on some users, like when FireWire disappeared off the MacBook.
Time Machine is what software should be. I've used backup programs for years, but they're all a pain. Plug in a drive, turn on time machine, you have a recent backup. Need to restore off it? Find the files and click the button. Need to restore a whole computer? Boot off the OS X disk and press a button. Old mac got crushed by a bulldozer and you need to transfer everything to a new one? During setup plug in your time machine backup, it takes care of everything. I've restored stuff for my parents from weeks before with no effort. No "go pick the correct backup file", no "only the last version was backed up, the stuff from 2 weeks ago is gone", it's just there.
The things it doesn't do? I'd like to be able to have it give me a list of files that changed since my last backup (or a given backup). I'd like to be able to have it run checksums against files to find silent corruption. But the basic use case works VERY well.
But it's so easy for software to ruin an experience. I just got a PS3, and I've been rather happy with it. But two days ago I noticed the battery on my controller was very low. So I plugged it into the USB port on my PS3. This turned it on (since I probably want to play), but I didn't so I turned it off.
So it didn't charge.
If I want to charge my PS3 controller, I either have to leave my PS3 on, or buy a AC charging kit (which is probably $20 or $30). So what did I do? I plugged it into my Mac. If I'm supposed to plug my controller into my PS3 to charge it, it should charge any time it's plugged in. If the PS3 has power, the controller should charge.
The iPad looks very nice, and I'd like one, but the way you sync documents between the iPad and your Mac or PC to use in iWork just sounds like a horrible pain. Open iTunes, connect the iPad, go to the right tab, drag your document in, sync, disconnect, use iPad to edit, connect back to computer, sync with iTunes, drag file out.
Reviews I've seen say to just skip the whole nonsense and email documents to yourself.
I agree with your assessment. At this pointer computers are usually quite nice. They may have a quizzical decision made about the initial hardware (a secure power cord? Who needs it!), but by and large things are easy now. You don't have to care about IRQs and all that other old stuff of legend that used to cause so many headaches. Just plug that new USB gizmo in.
Software is getting better, but it has a long way to go.
Glenn Beck posts on Slashdot?
Safari on OS X, where it's native software and quite fast. I know it's not that great on Windows, but on OS X it performs excellently.
You're right. What I meant was assisted decoding (using the GPU to decode MPEG4), not generic video acceleration (copying memory areas, fast line drawing, etc).
The new fast video switching thing was something I hadn't even considered in all this, that an interesting point.
That's a red herring. See this post. That only effects H.264, and only on a handful of Macs (although it probably works on the new laptops Apple just released).
But that doesn't explain my Mac (which lacks video decoding acceleration), non-H.264 video, non-video flash, etc.
Why are you doing your own video decoding anyway? That's the point of QuickTime, that it does that stuff and optimizes it for you. It's the system component designed for playing media.
Get a Macintosh.
I have a MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz, 2 GB of RAM. It's 2 years old, and doesn't support GPU help decoding video (it's a GeForce 8600M GT). Someone at my work was questioning why I think Flash is so evil, today I was able to show them. I watched three videos today. Let's compare the experiences.
Now not all YouTube videos are that bad, for some reason that particular video was just really bad. Many small videos like that will only use 30-50% of both cores. Even smaller videos will have occasional hiccups where it will drop 2 frames. 480p videos will usually use up a good chunk of my CPU (~80%), and 720p videos can drop frames when a lot changes in the scene (like a pan). If I change from Flash to HTML5 video (MPEG4), 720p stuff plays back no problem. OK Go's recent video of a Rube Goldberg machine? My Mac can't play it reliably in Flash at 480p without dropping frames when a lot of action is going on.
It's not just videos, although that's where I usually run into it. Flash sites with animation just suck down CPU, little games can really heat up my Mac. I think the problem is the way Flash displays things, but that's just a hunch.
If you know anyone with a Mac (the older the better), go play around with Flash content. It's almost impressive how poorly it performs. Faster and faster Macs help cover it up, but that's no excuse. I'm pretty sure that I could have played Flash content through Parallels at the same or lower CPU usage, but I don't have Parallels installed anymore to test with.
If Adobe spent any time optimizing Flash on OS X, people wouldn't hate it nearly as much. Apple would still hate it (Steve likes control), but people wouldn't have the "kill it now" attitude.
The game isn't supposed to teach you math, it's supposed to help you keep simple skills up. Memorized multiplication tables won't tell you how to solve 17 x 193, because your table didn't cover that. You still have to know how to solve it through addition.
But someone who has memorized the table and knows 7 x 9 = 63 off the top of their head will be able to carry out the problem faster that someone who doesn't know their tables as well, and has to think that 7 * 9 = 5 * 9 + 9 + 9 = 45 + 9 + 9 = 54 + 9 = 63.
What really caught me was they said that doing the training sped up your ability to do things you trained on (duh). NPR gave the example of a baggage scanner where the number of bags going in and out changes, you you have to keep track of the number of bags in the machine at any given moment.
So that may not be useful to your everyday life, and games that are similar aren't supposed to benefit. But what about the games you do in real life? As I remember, the first two Brain Training games Nintendo put out had many real world things like simple math problems (6 + 3, 7 * 5), reading analog clocks, and making change. These are all things people do in real life. Maybe doing tons of elementary math problems won't make you smarter, but it will make you faster and more confident when you have to do simple math, and that's a plus.
Count the number of spinning yellow number 7s in this jumble may not be that applicable to real life, but some are.
Nintendo never advertised the games would make you smarter. They framed it as "keeping your brain fit", like you keep your muscles fit by using them. There have been tons of copy-cats since Brain Training sold so well, and it wouldn't surprise me they claimed (or hinted) they would make you smarter. But doing simple math problems can't make you smarter, only better at simple math problems.
I'm fully aware. Those were two different thoughts. The point of the first of those two paragraphs was that while the fighting in ICO helped to establish the mood and danger, the number of times you have to go through the fighting process wasn't necessary to tell the story... it just made the game longer (and more of a game). If you only fought 1/2 or 1/3 as often... would the point of the danger to Yorda have been lost on you?
The next paragraph mentioned God of War's fighting purely as an example of a game with a mechanic that was very well done. It wasn't meant as a comparison against ICO's fighting mechanic.
Actually, ICO's fighting worked quite well in that it wasn't very good. If you could easily smite dozens of the shadows to protect Yorda, the tension wouldn't be there.
There are a few games that are really good, and would certainly be art if video games can be. But I can see what he's saying.
While ICO was great, it was, you followed along the path the game designer gave you, stopping off and on to fight the shadow things. While you do have to fight them (for there to be any conflict in the game), you don't need to fight them as much as you do. The fights are basically padding, and the shear number of times you do it isn't necessary for the story. Shadow of the Colossus fixed that in that there were only 12 fights, all necessary to the story.
Other games have had great mechanics. The fighting in God of War is fantastic, and just "feels" right. Kratos does what you want. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time had the best explanation of death I've ever seen in a game. The entire game was a story the prince was telling the princess, and when you would die, he would say something like "No, that's not right" or "That's not how it happened, let me back up". Instead of having arbitrary deaths that didn't exist for the purpose of the story the game was telling, it weaved them in as reminders of how the game was being narrated. PoP also had great controls in the platforming puzzle sections.
I've been playing Heavy Rain and it's pretty impressive. But I think Ebert's right that I'm just doing what I'm told. You see each scene, and play through it. You have choices and consequences to actions (the story changes some depending on how well you do in QTE sequences), but the overall story is the same. It can still easily be seen as a miniseries or long movie with "press button here to continue plot" actions inserted. It's a "choose your own adventure" miniseries, since you can effect the story, but there is something of a sense that it's unnecessary.
Games are just stories that could be told in other mediums, with activities tacked on. A book lets you experience things the way you visualize it, and when you want (music is how you play it). A play gives you the experience the actors and directors think you should have (music performances are how that artist think you should hear it). A movie (or TV series) is like a play but the artist can do things that aren't possible on a physical set. A photograph lets you see a moment in time that no longer exists, and a painting or drawing lets you see an artists perception of that moment, even if it never existed in the first place.
What do video games do that other mediums can't? You can interact, but basically all games we have now are pre-told stories. The gameplay isn't especially necessary to get the story. You can't tell your own story in GTA 4. Sure Niko can go take a 5 day period off to play darts if you want, but the story just sits there waiting for you.
The only games where the story really is yours is in The Sims or other simulation games, but that's the equivalent of playing with blocks. Bioshock let you see and peer into a world that didn't exist anywhere else, studying whatever parts you wanted. But that wasn't the gameplay, the gameplay was standard FPS affair, and you could choose to just ignore Andrew Ryan's world, to a certain degree.
I have played many great games that I won't forget. If making an impact on the player/viewer is the measure of art, games can do that. But other than using button presses to immerse someone more than reading a printed word may do... what stories have games told that other media couldn't?
Psychonauts had a great imaginative world and story, but fighting with hundreds of little enemies wasn't strictly necessary to tell the story. Maybe the problem is that such a game could be made, but it probably sell well. If you just walk around looking at things, is it really a game? Maybe that commercial constraint is causing problems here, and we should be looking at flash games where it's easier for people to have a singular vision and not have to worry about making money if they don't want to.
I'm sure games that do something that can't be done elsewhere exis
The iPad has a lot going for it, especially that you can get one for about 1/3 the price of that thing (if you convert the 1998 dollars, see eldavojon's post) and that you have wireless networking (a major plus).
I think a big part of this (and one that Microsoft has run into with their tablet attempts) is that of expectations. If it looks like a PC (because it has a keyboard), and acts like a PC (because the interface looks like Windows 95/98 did), people expect it to operate like a PC. They should be able to install normal software, it should be fast enough to do normal computer things, etc.
Netbooks ran into this too. They were cheap and cute, so people bought them. Then they found out that weren't "real" laptops and had 1 GHz processors, and were never going to edit video or edit 8 MP photos fast. The things looked like normal computers, but cheaper, so why not get it? Then they weren't happy. Now many "netbooks" are full computers that are just tiny. You can buy netbooks that cost $600+ instead of the early $200-$300. They are what people expect out of a laptop, only tiny.
Apple, on the other hand, made a device that is very clearly not a Macintosh. It does look like an iPhone, which is a plus since people see the iPhone as a appliance and not a computer. These two things add up to people seeing the iPad as an appliance and not a computer, which is exactly what Apple intends. It does what it does, and that's what it's supposed to do.
If Apple released the iPad with a fold out keyboard, people would compare it to another netbook or a normal laptop and criticize it for being so inflexible. I was actually very surprised that Apple is even making a keyboard dock, as it makes it look more like a laptop. The flexibility of being able to easily type a document on the road with the dock (or a bluetooth keyboard) must have been enough to overwhelm the worry, and I can see that being the case.
At this point, an iPhone one generation removed (currently the 3G, by the end of the summer the 3GS) can be had for $100, brand new.
They are going to have to go for the $0-$25 after subsidy market if they want to use price. The Palm Pre is pretty cheap, and has many of these features. There is always a Blackberry that is basically free.
It's an interesting little phone, but it seems like it is a feature phone that should have come out a year or so ago.
In fact, it seems like it would be most interested if not positioned as a smart phone, and thus something you could buy without having to get the $20 or $30 per month data plan. But without that, you can't surf, so you just have a phone with SMS and a keyboard, which are available for free.
All that said, it's nice to see someone try to sell a phone that isn't positioned as an iPhone killer. They clearly went down a different road here.
See: Atari 2600
Now that was slightly Atari's fault (they flooded too). But if even 20-30% of the stuff on the app store are crappy ports, it makes the platform look bad.
Let's take the Wii. I think it's a great little system, and it has some very good games. Galaxy alone was nearly worth the price of the system... I thought it was that good. But let's say you don't know that. Let's just look at the library. It's full of shovelware. It's horrible. The DS is full of crud too, as people make cheesy "games" out of whatever they can think of.
And the thing is, all that stuff on the Wii and DS already passed Nintendo, checking to make sure it was vaguely functional.
Can you imagine how frustrating it would be if downloading a game for the iPhone was a 50/50 shoot of getting something good, or a hastily ported flash game that doesn't use the screen well and has text and such that refer to buttons that don't exist? People keep complaining on /. about console games hurriedly ported to the PC, this can be the same thing.
Yes, Apple can reject all those apps, but rejection isn't free, it takes a certain amount of time and resources to review those apps and reject them.
How about this: a car analogy. Honda makes lots of great cars. If tomorrow they announce a new car, that has a tendency for the engines to kill themselves in a few months, even though it's just that one car, it will start to effect the reputation of the entire line of Hondas. "Sure the CRV is nice, but I'm not sure I should get one. My friend's Frizzler killed it's self and took two weeks to repair."
I've decompiled stuff before, and I know you get meaningless labels for variables and functions, and that what you get back doesn't match what you put in, due to optimizations. But that's why I mentioned having the original source. If Adobe didn't want to make generating C/C++/Objective-C code an output option (as opposed to a binary), they at least should be able to make their Flash VM bytecode -> machine bytecode compiler generate a second file of metadata that tracks what in the original source became what in the final code, so that a companion decompiler they wrote could create human looking source instead of "function128(param1,param2,param3)" type stuff. Basically, debugging information.
This would certainly take work, but Adobe is obviously quite scared of becoming irrelevant, so they may be willing to do the work.
It would be interesting to see if Apple would go as far as trying to reject an app because it wasn't native, even though the developer had full C code from a technique like this. Would they push that far?
This doesn't surprise me, and it's fine with me too. I don't want apps that were designed to run on three platforms, I want apps that were designed to run on my platform. Gruber's latest article had an excellent comparison of Kindle for Mac (a QT cross platform program) and Kindle for iPhone (a native program).
That said, everything is complied to machine code. Can't you just decompile the applications into C/Objective-C if Apple asks for the code? A decent decompiler should even be able to translate many variable names, given that it has the original source.
Basically, why doesn't Adobe (and the .Net guys) just make their code output C files that people can run through XCode to be "legit"?
I still like the decision, but it seems there is a way around this, just like you could get around the "no interpreted language" thing by compiling the virtual machine bytecode into native ARM code.