'The Analyst movement is designed to sell services.... Out of over 200 survey participants, we received only four detailed comments describing success with Analysts.' 'Survey participants report that developers use the guise of Analyst to avoid planning...'
I've never head "flatline" mean anything but "dead." (Note: I'm 39. Far have I been and much have I seen.) Yes, it's originally a medical term, but everyone outside of medicine knows it. If it was only used in medicine there wouldn't be 4.3 million matches for it. The term became very well known after the 1990 movie of the same name. The proper (though less exciting) term that should be used here is "leveling off."
>> This table is sold probably at the price it costs to make or even less,
> The teardown suggests Google is making about $15 over hardware cost
Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile at Google, told AllThingsD "When it gets sold through the Play store, there's no margin." The article says "Google is selling the device through its Google Play store, essentially at cost, and also absorbing the marketing costs associated with the device."
I'm responding to a lot of posts here because I see a lot of bad info modded up to +5.
Yes, it may be hard to disassemble Apple products, but it's not impossible. Apple has to be able to repair all those things that come in for warranty repairs at the very least, right? So Apple will recycle your old Apple gear* for you. For free. They'll even send you a free box with prepaid shipping if there's not an Apple store near you.
Not only will they take gear off your hands, they'll pay you for your computer if it's still worth a bit (granted, you could probably do better by reselling it) or you can bring in any old iPod and they'll give you 10% off a new one. It would seem to me that they're trying very, very hard to get people to recycle.
> The reality that their design choices have political consequences, and that > these consequences should and will have effects on the salability of their > offerings is not respected, because they are used to altered reality where > their design choices are fawned over and lauded as innovative and amazing.
Or maybe, just maybe, the people who run one of the the most profitable companies in the world figured out that if they make products that are more shiny and less environmentally sound* that the sales they gain from the consumer space will offset the small loss of government sales?
* and, to play Apple's Advocate here, we're talking about one particular metric, which a) might not actually be the One True Way to good environmentalism and b) is almost certainly gamed by other companies who make higher-rated-but-actually-worse products. Kind of a letter-of-the-law/spirit-of-the-law thing. Corporations are masters at gaming regs like this. At least Apple is honest enough to say "Fuck it, we're not going to follow that", for whatever reason. Or would you rather they just make products that just barely squeak past those particular measurements so everyone feels better? It's like the environmental version of the "security theater" that we always deride here.
And, before you complain that I'm just an Apple shill, consider this example: on the one hand, an iPad might be less recyclable that a regular computer; on the other hand, a desktop computer requires about 20x more electricity to run. You can run an iPad for a whole year for about a dollar's worth of electricity. So which is the better side of that tradeoff?
"Will they be the first of many, or will cheaper products override people's conscience?"
Apple's argument was that they could make computers cheaper by not following this set of guidelines. The author was a bit sloppy and didn't make that clear. (And it would only be a slight difference in price anyway. Would it change your mind if the price of a 15" MacBook went down $50, or if they added one more port, or shaved off 10 more grams?)
Q: If you didn't work for RIM--say you worked for another technology company--do you think you'd still be using a BlackBerry?
A: Yes, I think I would absolutely be on a BlackBerry. I'm really not saying this because I run BlackBerry. I belong to the tribe that BlackBerry speaks to. These productivity people, people that are always on their tippy toes, that need to keep moving.
OK then, BlackBerry can have the "pretentious CxO" market, and Apple and Android will split up the whole rest of the world.
I'm more concerned with his use of a comma between the subject and predicate in "Perfection isn't the point; clarity of communications and the perception of competency, are."
> Apple thinks they're winning, when in reality they're losing.
Well, I guess I can be glad this got modded "Interesting" and not "Informative." This post is such the perfect evidence of the saying "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'."
Apple IS winning. They have the highest market cap of any company on the planet. They recently had one of the most profitable quarters in world economic history. It is going to be a LONG time before they start "losing" in any meaningful way. Your PC-buying friend is NOT the canary in Apple's coalmine.
During the 90s (yes, I was there) Microsoft was the scourge of Slashdot. Everyone here hated them and everyone predicted their downfall. But look how they did from 1995-2000. They antitrust case started in 1998 and their stock just kept going up and up. It didn't go down until the whole market imploded in 2000.
But not one of the major "domestic" auto manufacturers currently says their cars are made in the USA. Google, on the other hand, loudly trumpeted this during I/O.
I'm sorry, but you're just inexperienced with/ignorant of what a CLI does. Everything you complain about it does BY DESIGN.
OF COURSE you have to be precise with it. That's the whole point. Each letter is a different option. You want to eXtract or Create archives (that's the 'c' and 'v'). How is the computer supposed to know which you want? YOU TELL IT. Why should it use more that one letter? People who know what they want to do shouldn't have to type "please extract this tar archive, thanks so much."
> When I do a basic Google search, Google even tries to correct my typos.
And sometimes--nay, OFTEN--when I'm searching for something that is uncommon, google UNhelpfully says "did you mean to search for this more common thing? well, we ran this other search for you anyway, and we'll include non-related results because you made the mistake of searching for something that isn't popular."
Ironically, the solution to your problem is MORE COMMAND LINE. Next time you google how to use a certain command for the Nth time, take another minute and google the 'alias' command. If you find yourself typing 'tar zxvf whatever.tgz' often, use 'alias' to make a new command called 'extract-tar' that does the 'tar zxvf' for you.
The CLI isn't perfect, nor is it the solution to everything, but it is both powerful and configurable. Take some time to work WITH it, not AGAINST it, and it will be a very useful helper.
Wow. So wrong in so many ways. I'll just pick one because I'm bored enough to respond to an AC.
> First, redo the Mac Pro. Make a chassis that works like a tower, but > can have a rack drawer attached so it can be slammed into a standard > enclosure. Offer not just 8Gbs FC cards, but NICs with enough packet > offloading power so FCoE is workable.
You realize that Apple has access to Apple's sales data, right? They know what is selling and what isn't. The Mac Pro is a sliver of their sales compared to iMacs and MacBooks, and making it better has the potential to make it grow to... a slightly larger sliver. Oh, and did I mention that all Mac sales are only a small portion of their income in the first place? They hardly need to listen to any of your suggestions at all.
I just pasted the URL of your comment into an Outlook reminder. We'll revisit this statement in one year.
I don't know what metric you're using--market cap? cash in the bank?--but Apple in 1997 was near death because they were slowly going from tiny to very tiny. RIM, at the moment, is in a total nosedive. Different velocities = different results. I also don't know what you mean by "the #1 smartphone vendor"--maybe they had the most units out there at some moment last year, but Apple has had great sales--and, more importantly, HUGE profits--for quite a while. Meanwhile there's just one story after another about how badly RIM is doing right now. As someone pointed out today, "Since release of iPhone 5 years ago, market caps of companies most affected: $AAPL +376%; $GOOG +9%; $RIMM -85%; $NOK -89%"
I agree that there is a market (smaller than all of consumerdom, but not negligible) of people who want the security that BB offers, but I don't know if RIM will continue to be the company that offers it. Besides, the people that need security the most can roll their own--they always have--if there's not a vendor handy to supply it.
I know Slashdot editors are famously lazy ('sup, guys!) but why does the summary they posted say "The attachment tricks the Mac user into installing..." when TFA* clearly says "the [attack] described here relies on social engineering to get the user to run the backdoor"? You know, just like every single other Trojan out there?!?** The attachment itself is totally benign until someone clicks on it several times. (Even if you view the message with webmail with Safari's "Open 'safe' files after downloading" in its (admittedly brain-dead) default "checked" position***, you still have to click on the attachment link in your webmail and then double-click the visible file to run it.) The only way this actually happens is if someone reads the email and takes a few steps on their own. As always, the attachment itself does nothing.****
Slashdot has been a techy news site for a decade and a half now. You'd think errors as blatant as this would get caught by the editors, even with their usual lack of checking.
You know what would be an awesome site? Exactly what Slashdot is, but with better editors. (And maybe lay off the JavaScript some.)
Anyway: sky is blue, water is wet, sun rises in the east, and all computers--by definition--are vulnerable to trojans. Film at 11.
And by the way, WTF is "point-and-grunt"? Does that imply that users are dumbly clicking on things? If so, doesn't that also imply that the users just might be the problem? Trojans are trivially easy to write. Here's one in one line:
Voila. Type that into Terminal, email it to all of Slashdot, and wait for a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of home directories suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
* I know no one here reads them, but I think the submitter should, right? Even if they don't, they should just submit the URL and not make up shit for the summary.
** Which is to say, like every single Mac "virus" of the last decade as well.
*** Apple even puts "Safe" in quotes, so they obviously know that's not an ideal term. They should set it to "off" by default--and then remove the option.
**** Unlike the bad old days with Outlook Express' infinitely more brain-dead "Hey, let me run that executable attachment for you!" setting.
> Despite Slashdot's popular opinion, most police officers are decent > people. Treat them as such, with respect for the fact that they're > trying to do their job, and they'll usually treat you decently as well.
Until you become a suspect, then you're totally fucked. Or if you challenge their authority. Or, basically, if you want to do anything they don't want you to do. Like "I finished giving my 30-second statement about the accident I barely witnessed an hour ago, can I leave now?"
... the most trivial events may also register on Google's sensitive cultural seismic meter. The logs team came to work one morning to find that ''carol brady maiden name'' had surged to the top of the charts. Curious, they mapped the searches by time of day and found that they were neatly grouped in five spikes: biggest, small, small, big and finally, after a long wait, another small blip. Each spike started at 48 minutes after the hour...
That night the million-dollar question on the game show ''Who Wants to Be a Millionaire'' had been, ''What was Carol Brady's maiden name?'' Seconds after the show's host, Regis Philbin, posed the question, thousands flocked to Google to search for the answer (Tyler), producing four spikes as the show was broadcast successively in each time zone.
Slashdot Mirror
sed s/Agile/Analyst
'The Analyst movement is designed to sell services. ... Out of over 200 survey participants, we received only four detailed comments describing success with Analysts.' 'Survey participants report that developers use the guise of Analyst to avoid planning...'
I've never head "flatline" mean anything but "dead." (Note: I'm 39. Far have I been and much have I seen.) Yes, it's originally a medical term, but everyone outside of medicine knows it. If it was only used in medicine there wouldn't be 4.3 million matches for it. The term became very well known after the 1990 movie of the same name. The proper (though less exciting) term that should be used here is "leveling off."
>> This table is sold probably at the price it costs to make or even less,
> The teardown suggests Google is making about $15 over hardware cost
Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile at Google, told AllThingsD "When it gets sold through the Play store, there's no margin." The article says "Google is selling the device through its Google Play store, essentially at cost, and also absorbing the marketing costs associated with the device."
I'm responding to a lot of posts here because I see a lot of bad info modded up to +5.
Yes, it may be hard to disassemble Apple products, but it's not impossible. Apple has to be able to repair all those things that come in for warranty repairs at the very least, right? So Apple will recycle your old Apple gear* for you. For free. They'll even send you a free box with prepaid shipping if there's not an Apple store near you.
Not only will they take gear off your hands, they'll pay you for your computer if it's still worth a bit (granted, you could probably do better by reselling it) or you can bring in any old iPod and they'll give you 10% off a new one. It would seem to me that they're trying very, very hard to get people to recycle.
Apple knows how to take care of their products. They'll do it for free. Let them. See also http://www.apple.com/environment/
* they'll also recycle ANY cell phone.
You can get more from gazelle.com or nextworth.com and even more by selling it directly on eBay.
> The reality that their design choices have political consequences, and that
> these consequences should and will have effects on the salability of their
> offerings is not respected, because they are used to altered reality where
> their design choices are fawned over and lauded as innovative and amazing.
Or maybe, just maybe, the people who run one of the the most profitable companies in the world figured out that if they make products that are more shiny and less environmentally sound* that the sales they gain from the consumer space will offset the small loss of government sales?
* and, to play Apple's Advocate here, we're talking about one particular metric, which a) might not actually be the One True Way to good environmentalism and b) is almost certainly gamed by other companies who make higher-rated-but-actually-worse products. Kind of a letter-of-the-law/spirit-of-the-law thing. Corporations are masters at gaming regs like this. At least Apple is honest enough to say "Fuck it, we're not going to follow that", for whatever reason. Or would you rather they just make products that just barely squeak past those particular measurements so everyone feels better? It's like the environmental version of the "security theater" that we always deride here.
And, before you complain that I'm just an Apple shill, consider this example: on the one hand, an iPad might be less recyclable that a regular computer; on the other hand, a desktop computer requires about 20x more electricity to run. You can run an iPad for a whole year for about a dollar's worth of electricity. So which is the better side of that tradeoff?
"Will they be the first of many, or will cheaper products override people's conscience?"
Apple's argument was that they could make computers cheaper by not following this set of guidelines. The author was a bit sloppy and didn't make that clear. (And it would only be a slight difference in price anyway. Would it change your mind if the price of a 15" MacBook went down $50, or if they added one more port, or shaved off 10 more grams?)
Q: If you didn't work for RIM--say you worked for another technology company--do you think you'd still be using a BlackBerry?
A: Yes, I think I would absolutely be on a BlackBerry. I'm really not saying this because I run BlackBerry. I belong to the tribe that BlackBerry speaks to. These productivity people, people that are always on their tippy toes, that need to keep moving.
OK then, BlackBerry can have the "pretentious CxO" market, and Apple and Android will split up the whole rest of the world.
> I wonder why they don't make all Olympic athletes
> use the same exact 'equipment' as their competitors.
That'd be frickin' sweet! Like IROC but with horses!
at what speed do buses start getting seatbelts?
I'm more concerned with his use of a comma between the subject and predicate in "Perfection isn't the point; clarity of communications and the perception of competency, are."
> Whether grammar matters or not depends on the
> recipient of the message, not the originator.
I'll agree with that. This also means you have to know who your audience is (and care about how you're presenting yourself.)
> Apple thinks they're winning, when in reality they're losing.
Well, I guess I can be glad this got modded "Interesting" and not "Informative." This post is such the perfect evidence of the saying "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'."
Apple IS winning. They have the highest market cap of any company on the planet. They recently had one of the most profitable quarters in world economic history. It is going to be a LONG time before they start "losing" in any meaningful way. Your PC-buying friend is NOT the canary in Apple's coalmine.
During the 90s (yes, I was there) Microsoft was the scourge of Slashdot. Everyone here hated them and everyone predicted their downfall. But look how they did from 1995-2000. They antitrust case started in 1998 and their stock just kept going up and up. It didn't go down until the whole market imploded in 2000.
And it's patented. :-)
But not one of the major "domestic" auto manufacturers currently says their cars are made in the USA. Google, on the other hand, loudly trumpeted this during I/O.
Looks great on my phone. Nicely done!
Bah. Like I said, computers are picky. :-)
> You want to eXtract or Create archives (that's the 'c' and 'v')
Typed that wrong. Extract (eXtract) and Create are 'x' (not 'v') and 'c'. The 'v' means 'verbose' (that is, "show all the files involved.")
I'm sorry, but you're just inexperienced with/ignorant of what a CLI does. Everything you complain about it does BY DESIGN.
OF COURSE you have to be precise with it. That's the whole point. Each letter is a different option. You want to eXtract or Create archives (that's the 'c' and 'v'). How is the computer supposed to know which you want? YOU TELL IT. Why should it use more that one letter? People who know what they want to do shouldn't have to type "please extract this tar archive, thanks so much."
> When I do a basic Google search, Google even tries to correct my typos.
And sometimes--nay, OFTEN--when I'm searching for something that is uncommon, google UNhelpfully says "did you mean to search for this more common thing? well, we ran this other search for you anyway, and we'll include non-related results because you made the mistake of searching for something that isn't popular."
Ironically, the solution to your problem is MORE COMMAND LINE. Next time you google how to use a certain command for the Nth time, take another minute and google the 'alias' command. If you find yourself typing 'tar zxvf whatever.tgz' often, use 'alias' to make a new command called 'extract-tar' that does the 'tar zxvf' for you.
The CLI isn't perfect, nor is it the solution to everything, but it is both powerful and configurable. Take some time to work WITH it, not AGAINST it, and it will be a very useful helper.
Wow. So wrong in so many ways. I'll just pick one because I'm bored enough to respond to an AC.
> First, redo the Mac Pro. Make a chassis that works like a tower, but
> can have a rack drawer attached so it can be slammed into a standard
> enclosure. Offer not just 8Gbs FC cards, but NICs with enough packet
> offloading power so FCoE is workable.
You realize that Apple has access to Apple's sales data, right? They know what is selling and what isn't. The Mac Pro is a sliver of their sales compared to iMacs and MacBooks, and making it better has the potential to make it grow to... a slightly larger sliver. Oh, and did I mention that all Mac sales are only a small portion of their income in the first place? They hardly need to listen to any of your suggestions at all.
> RIM is about as far from dead as you can get.
Wow.
I just pasted the URL of your comment into an Outlook reminder. We'll revisit this statement in one year.
I don't know what metric you're using--market cap? cash in the bank?--but Apple in 1997 was near death because they were slowly going from tiny to very tiny. RIM, at the moment, is in a total nosedive. Different velocities = different results. I also don't know what you mean by "the #1 smartphone vendor"--maybe they had the most units out there at some moment last year, but Apple has had great sales--and, more importantly, HUGE profits--for quite a while. Meanwhile there's just one story after another about how badly RIM is doing right now. As someone pointed out today, "Since release of iPhone 5 years ago, market caps of companies most affected: $AAPL +376%; $GOOG +9%; $RIMM -85%; $NOK -89%"
Oh, and that brilliant new OS? You'll see it Q1/2013 at the earliest.
I agree that there is a market (smaller than all of consumerdom, but not negligible) of people who want the security that BB offers, but I don't know if RIM will continue to be the company that offers it. Besides, the people that need security the most can roll their own--they always have--if there's not a vendor handy to supply it.
I know Slashdot editors are famously lazy ('sup, guys!) but why does the summary they posted say "The attachment tricks the Mac user into installing..." when TFA* clearly says "the [attack] described here relies on social engineering to get the user to run the backdoor"? You know, just like every single other Trojan out there?!?** The attachment itself is totally benign until someone clicks on it several times. (Even if you view the message with webmail with Safari's "Open 'safe' files after downloading" in its (admittedly brain-dead) default "checked" position***, you still have to click on the attachment link in your webmail and then double-click the visible file to run it.) The only way this actually happens is if someone reads the email and takes a few steps on their own. As always, the attachment itself does nothing.****
Slashdot has been a techy news site for a decade and a half now. You'd think errors as blatant as this would get caught by the editors, even with their usual lack of checking.
You know what would be an awesome site? Exactly what Slashdot is, but with better editors. (And maybe lay off the JavaScript some.)
Anyway: sky is blue, water is wet, sun rises in the east, and all computers--by definition--are vulnerable to trojans. Film at 11.
And by the way, WTF is "point-and-grunt"? Does that imply that users are dumbly clicking on things? If so, doesn't that also imply that the users just might be the problem? Trojans are trivially easy to write. Here's one in one line:
Voila. Type that into Terminal, email it to all of Slashdot, and wait for a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of home directories suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
* I know no one here reads them, but I think the submitter should, right? Even if they don't, they should just submit the URL and not make up shit for the summary.
** Which is to say, like every single Mac "virus" of the last decade as well.
*** Apple even puts "Safe" in quotes, so they obviously know that's not an ideal term. They should set it to "off" by default--and then remove the option.
**** Unlike the bad old days with Outlook Express' infinitely more brain-dead "Hey, let me run that executable attachment for you!" setting.
1) Put a smartphone in your pocket.
2) Get into the van.
The military has a simpler system: 1) bomb it 'till it's flat, 2) don't bother to take pictures.
> Despite Slashdot's popular opinion, most police officers are decent
> people. Treat them as such, with respect for the fact that they're
> trying to do their job, and they'll usually treat you decently as well.
Until you become a suspect, then you're totally fucked. Or if you challenge their authority. Or, basically, if you want to do anything they don't want you to do. Like "I finished giving my 30-second statement about the accident I barely witnessed an hour ago, can I leave now?"
Rats, hit 'submit' before I included my cool link for yes-this-could-really-happen: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/technology/postcards-from-planet-google.html?pagewanted=3
... the most trivial events may also register on Google's sensitive cultural seismic meter. The logs team came to work one morning to find that ''carol brady maiden name'' had surged to the top of the charts. Curious, they mapped the searches by time of day and found that they were neatly grouped in five spikes: biggest, small, small, big and finally, after a long wait, another small blip. Each spike started at 48 minutes after the hour...
That night the million-dollar question on the game show ''Who Wants to Be a Millionaire'' had been, ''What was Carol Brady's maiden name?'' Seconds after the show's host, Regis Philbin, posed the question, thousands flocked to Google to search for the answer (Tyler), producing four spikes as the show was broadcast successively in each time zone.