Yes, credit card fraud when he was 17 (three months' sentence), thirty-five years ago. Then he went to Cambridge, joined the Footlights, and began a brilliant career. (This was all covered in the BBC's celebration of Fry and Hugh Laurie's work just last Wednesday.)
From Wikipedia: "In December 2006 he was ranked sixth for the BBC's Top Living Icon Award, was featured on The Culture Show, and was voted most intelligent man on television by readers of Radio Times. [...] BBC Four dedicated two nights of programming to Fry on 17 and 18 August 2007, in celebration of his 50th birthday. The first night, comprising programs featuring Fry, began with a sixty-minute documentary entitled Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out. The second night was composed of programs selected by Fry, as well as a 60-minute interview with Mark Lawson and a half-hour special, Stephen Fry: Guilty Pleasures. Stephen Fry Weekend proved such a ratings hit for BBC Four that it was repeated on BBC Two on 16 and 17 of that September."
So if anything you're implying an early conviction is a good career move. But I'm sure you've never done anything illegal in your famously-productive life. What kind of example does that set for the kids? Go out and get convicted today!
This is more or less their philosophy. Look at their attempts to squash scripting languages, runtimes & browsers on iOS. There is absolutely zero technical reason for this, it's all to force developers to code to Apple's APIs.
I really doubt you are correct in this. Though the hardware resources available to iDevices are orders of magnitude greater than, say, the original Mac, it's still very easy to bring the CPU to its knees with an ill-chosen line or two of code, and the introduction of even limited multitasking just makes it easier.
I'm not saying there are "absolutely zero" politico-corporate reasons for Apple's decisions in this area, and I can empathize about disliking the tradeoffs in autonomy for iOS developers (the Mac is much less restrictive, and free once you have the hardware), but Apple's had to do a lot of software optimization to assure a reasonable user experience (responsiveness, battery life, etc), and "bare-metal" runtimes that don't work through the public APIs aren't likely to benefit.
You may well be right about Android. Otoh Apple will probably be happy just to skim most of the profits from the smartphone/tablet market as they do now. Both approaches are useful, pick the one that meets your needs.
A pretty poor showing for somebody who thinks other people are too dumb to know what democracy is if they disagree with you.
Wow! You're a real fucking idiot!
Ah, I see. If people disagree with you they're idiots. That's entirely different, isn't it?
I may be a fucking idiot, but I hope you're not, as it's probably best for all of us if you don't reproduce. (I can explain that for you if we've exceeded your attention span again. Don't hesitate to ask!)
I take it you found my questions too difficult to answer, since you ignored them while contradicting yourself -- unless those gun laws were voted in by a minority. Was that it, or are you just up in arms because you're a minority yourself wrt the Second Amendment? Are you in a well-regulated militia?
A pretty poor showing for somebody who thinks other people are too dumb to know what democracy is if they disagree with you. Plus your little disquisition on how the country is actually run by lawyers means you don't think this is really a democracy at all, so your sneering disregard (complete with Wikipedia links) was pointless, too.
Come back when you can assemble your prejudices into a coherent form and actually defend them with logic instead of what appears to be a head full of snot.
In my country we have a thing called the Constitution that we use as a rulebook for the laws we pass. Does a majority passing a law that's unconstitutional (like the CDA) get a free pass because they're a majority, or should the law be struck down?
You'd be in favor of imposing Sharia law (or Halakhah, the Jewish religious law) if a city or county duly voted for it?
Proposition 8 was approved by a (small) majority of voters in California; does that mean you approve of taking away minority civil rights at the ballot box as well?
You don't know about tap-and-slide for shifting? That gets it down to four moves. On a regular physical keyboard it's five moves because the delimiters are symbols accessed by the shift key, which must also be pressed.
Still, the larger point is valid: the standard keyboard is lousy for HTML. (Why this is proof of some evil twisted conspiracy aimed to neuter you and fill Apple's coffers with fanboi cash has I guess been left as an exercise for the reader.) If you can suggest a better arrangement it can be coded into a custom keyboard layout by any programmer or even added to the SDK by Apple.
I feel your frustrations with what in the case of the iPad is a 1.0 product and in iOS' case 4.x. The file sharing is awkward, iTunes is beginning to look as though one wafer-thin mint would make it explode, iCal apparently sets monthly events by counting from the beginning of the week containing the first of the month (so that "second Monday" is actually the first one unless the month begins on Sunday or Monday), and syncing basically requires a wire. Yeah, it could all be lots better, and weigh half a pound less too.
Still, afaik nobody made you buy it at gunpoint. (Which would be proof of a conspiracy, come to think of it, so feel free to inform us if that was the case.) You can resell it for a decent price if it doesn't meet your needs sufficiently, and at the same time teach Apple a lesson through the miracle of the free market when you spend that money on whatever device it is that does. Apple, suitably chastened when informed of your actions (as they surely will be), will resolve through bitter bitter tears to do better next time, and if they don't they'll no doubt be buried by their more-nimble competition, as they should be.
In the meantime you'll be just another one of us bloodied first-adopters, victimized by the finite resources of Apple. How dare they not be above complaint! We were promised magic!
Hmmm, I can't say that I've read every word (it's a cookbook, who would use every recipe?) but I haven't come across any use of private APIs, nor have I seen any wacky code.
Not saying you're wrong (a cite would be good), but is there any chance you're referring to the first edition? The second edition, covering iOS 3.x, is twice the size for the first (about 830 pages) and perhaps the earlier SDK needed more hackery to work.
Maybe you're right, but I've found the book useful in my own coding and it doesn't seem to have misled me.
Ditto. Though I see it's Winter 2010. They did it last year, too, though a) I don't know that it's available now, and b) the iOS platform itself evolves quickly enough that capabilities and best practices have changed since then.
If you sign up for the developer program ($100/yr, and necessary to put your code on the device instead of the simulator) you can also get access to videos of sessions from the developer's conference for free and get advice straight from the horse's mouth.
I'd also recommend getting a book or two. I'd recommend O'Reilly's C Pocket Reference if you're rusty in C. Erica Sadun's iPhone Developer's Cookbook, Second Edition covers a lot that you'd need, though the way she organizes her code can make it difficult to reuse if you're just starting out. I can dis-recommend the Sam's "24 hour" iPhone programming book, unless it's been revised and corrected -- it's almost as likely to hinder you as help.
You'd also inevitably be using Apple's own SDK documentation, which can be quite overwhelming to begin with, and web searches both at Apple's developer forums and at large on error messages and class/method names are often fruitful once you get a handle on iOS.
I'd estimate it would take one month of spare time to get your bearings, and 2-3 to really know what you're doing. What can blindside you is that a lot of advanced graphics and sound applications -- games, for example -- require some C++ afaik. (So much for my plans for avoiding it.)
...and leaving the victim's phone number in was just an simple oversight, way too difficult for mere lawyers to grasp or even notice, since web development is so hard.
I'll take your non-answer of my question as indication you don't have any evidence the development was done by an external firm. (Would it make a difference if it was a temp they hired who did it?) But maybe you're right, in which case I'm sure we'll hear about the lawsuit USCG (aka Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver) files against their contractor, and one by the victim, Copyright Enforcement Group, against said contractor for theft.
TFA doesn't mention any developers involved. Why don't you add to our knowledge and name them, since you seem to be better-informed?
A wholesale lifting of code (such as would be implied by their leaving their victim's phone number intact) could as easily have been done by a lazy, recklessly indifferent lawyer or lazy, supervised staff worker as by a lazy third-party web developer.
Moreover I really doubt there's a legally viable argument that USCG, filled with state-licensed members of the bar, doesn't ultimately have responsibility for approving and operating a website that collects evidence for use in court.
A halfway competent programmer would've been able to take one look at the code for this "flashlight app" and seen that it wasn't what it claimed to be.
... So apparently Google doesn't have any halfway competent programmers. Good catch!
Not sure why you got modded down...games are a huge part of why Apple won't allow it. Places like Newgrounds, Kongregate, etc...they would be filled with games that worked on the iPad and iPhone, yet would be free...meaning Apple wouldn't get their cut.
Do you have any idea of how many free games there are in the App Store already? And all but a very few of them were written in Objective-C. Apple's surely not making much money off hosting and distributing those, but they still offer them.
it's a straw argument to not provide the APIs to let Flash use the GPU, and then complain that it doesn't use the GPU. That's the problem... Not that Flash is programmed bad, but that it doesn't take advantage of something that Apple's software does when Apple doesn't make it available.
Then why is VLC able to show the same video without pinning the CPU meters and putting the fans into hovercraft mode? VLC's open source, so why can't Adobe read the friggin' code and figure out how to do it themselves?
Given the constraints aren't technical but political then the chances that Flash could jump through the requisite hoops are zero.
Yes, that would be true. But merely asserting it's political not technical makes your statement a hypothesis instead of a fact. And it seems an unlikely one at that.
The i-devices, however powerful they may be in comparison to the Apple ][s and TRS-80s of yesteryear, are still severely constrained in terms of memory, battery power and overall processing. There's no automatic garbage collection on them, for example, just retain-release counts, so the programmer is required to deal with memory allocations explicitly. I-devices aren't miniaturized computers so much as enlarged portable game players, firmware in a package like a pocket digital dictionary or book reader, just with wifi/3G, bigger, flashier screens and a touch UI, all competing to suck up all the CPU cycles they can get in order to remain responsive. If designing and manufacturing this stuff under those constraints while maintaining that user-responsiveness was easy there'd surely be more than half a dozen makers of devices like these.
(Hell, if it was easy all the people who complain "I bought this, I should be able to program it in PL/I if I want" -- as though more than 0.1% of them would bother to if they could -- could design and manufacture their own devices and stop annoying the rest of us with their whining. iPhone doesn't do what you want? Get a different phone, with Flash if that's so important, and if your principles are so righteous the market will surely back you up and the iPhone will become a mere asterisk in the annals of Android/Blackberry/whatever history.)
Getting back to the point, because the functional constraints for the i-devices are overwhelming Apple's under a lot of pressure to optimize the use of CPU cycles and RAM while maintaining some degree of coder-friendliness. They optimize the compiler and the OS behind the scenes, so to speak, so the programmer doesn't have to dig into ARM assembler to get a decent frame rate.
Is it not possible that the Flash plug-in (were it available), or the runtimes generated by the Flash-to-iPhone OS converter, interfere with the system optimizations that make the i-devices usable? (Like when Adobe's VM for Photoshop interfered with the Mac OS' VM wayyyyy back when.) I've seen people argue both sides on this technical issue but haven't seen anything that appears definitive.
What I'm saying is we can't tell how much of the Flash ban is political (corporate) until we know how much is technical in nature; it's obviously some of both, to judge from the ongoing PR war, but what proportions? Now that Apple's added a hardware-acceleration API to Snow Leopard that Adobe can use to make Flash on the Mac less of a CPU glutton we may soon have the answer (and hopefully relief) for the desktop, but until real Flash is out for mobile devices like Android I think the question is open.
(The reason, I think, for the banning of interpreters like BASIC may also be about CPU performance, but preventing security breaches a la SQL injections or privilege escalations is surely the major concern. The i-OS isn't terribly secure, if the jailbreaks and exploits reported here are any indication.)
Yes, the righteous paranoia is getting thick. Otoh, I am impressed that posters are attacking Apple rather than the typical ad hominem against Steve Jobs (as though he were the only employee), a la The Register, etc.
...and that's exactly why his parents shouldn't have to. Any system Apple comes up with is going to have to be transparent/intuitive if it isn't going to be a misfeature for the ~90% of the iPhone (etc.) user base that aren't geeks like us.
Requiring the user to keep a table in their head of the closing/backgrounding characteristics of their apps is a cognitive load most would find burdensome. I've already seen people on desktops who couldn't keep track of single-clicking (on a URL link, say) and double-clicking (to open an app), so they just triple-click on everything.
Analogy fail. Unless you know about the magical switch that turned all PPC-based Macs into bricks when 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard, for those who are following at home) was released (or so it seemed from the louder complaints at the time). I salute Microsoft for teaching most people that your computer is fragile and could break down any time a butterfly flaps its wings on Alpha Centauri II, for that is the mindset it would require to believe that. (It also allows me to easily amaze and astonish newbies by showing them I'm running 11 GUI programs simultaneously. And don't get me started on the miracle of multiple windows and tabs in browsers...)
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Remember he's a convicted criminal too, kids.
Yes, credit card fraud when he was 17 (three months' sentence), thirty-five years ago. Then he went to Cambridge, joined the Footlights, and began a brilliant career. (This was all covered in the BBC's celebration of Fry and Hugh Laurie's work just last Wednesday.)
From Wikipedia: "In December 2006 he was ranked sixth for the BBC's Top Living Icon Award, was featured on The Culture Show, and was voted most intelligent man on television by readers of Radio Times. [...] BBC Four dedicated two nights of programming to Fry on 17 and 18 August 2007, in celebration of his 50th birthday. The first night, comprising programs featuring Fry, began with a sixty-minute documentary entitled Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out. The second night was composed of programs selected by Fry, as well as a 60-minute interview with Mark Lawson and a half-hour special, Stephen Fry: Guilty Pleasures. Stephen Fry Weekend proved such a ratings hit for BBC Four that it was repeated on BBC Two on 16 and 17 of that September."
So if anything you're implying an early conviction is a good career move. But I'm sure you've never done anything illegal in your famously-productive life. What kind of example does that set for the kids? Go out and get convicted today!
This is more or less their philosophy. Look at their attempts to squash scripting languages, runtimes & browsers on iOS. There is absolutely zero technical reason for this, it's all to force developers to code to Apple's APIs.
I really doubt you are correct in this. Though the hardware resources available to iDevices are orders of magnitude greater than, say, the original Mac, it's still very easy to bring the CPU to its knees with an ill-chosen line or two of code, and the introduction of even limited multitasking just makes it easier.
I'm not saying there are "absolutely zero" politico-corporate reasons for Apple's decisions in this area, and I can empathize about disliking the tradeoffs in autonomy for iOS developers (the Mac is much less restrictive, and free once you have the hardware), but Apple's had to do a lot of software optimization to assure a reasonable user experience (responsiveness, battery life, etc), and "bare-metal" runtimes that don't work through the public APIs aren't likely to benefit.
You may well be right about Android. Otoh Apple will probably be happy just to skim most of the profits from the smartphone/tablet market as they do now. Both approaches are useful, pick the one that meets your needs.
It' d be interesting to see if there's an analog to the collective behavior of slime molds in Life.
A pretty poor showing for somebody who thinks other people are too dumb to know what democracy is if they disagree with you.
Wow! You're a real fucking idiot!
Ah, I see. If people disagree with you they're idiots. That's entirely different, isn't it?
I may be a fucking idiot, but I hope you're not, as it's probably best for all of us if you don't reproduce. (I can explain that for you if we've exceeded your attention span again. Don't hesitate to ask!)
Wow, I had completely forgotten about the existence of Techdirt.
Yeah, it's been, like a couple of days?
Even Masnick is tired of writing "Streisand effect".
I take it you found my questions too difficult to answer, since you ignored them while contradicting yourself -- unless those gun laws were voted in by a minority. Was that it, or are you just up in arms because you're a minority yourself wrt the Second Amendment? Are you in a well-regulated militia?
A pretty poor showing for somebody who thinks other people are too dumb to know what democracy is if they disagree with you. Plus your little disquisition on how the country is actually run by lawyers means you don't think this is really a democracy at all, so your sneering disregard (complete with Wikipedia links) was pointless, too.
Come back when you can assemble your prejudices into a coherent form and actually defend them with logic instead of what appears to be a head full of snot.
In my country we have a thing called the Constitution that we use as a rulebook for the laws we pass. Does a majority passing a law that's unconstitutional (like the CDA) get a free pass because they're a majority, or should the law be struck down?
You'd be in favor of imposing Sharia law (or Halakhah, the Jewish religious law) if a city or county duly voted for it?
Proposition 8 was approved by a (small) majority of voters in California; does that mean you approve of taking away minority civil rights at the ballot box as well?
I take it the vote was unanimous. Or do people who disagree just not count?
You'd have no objections to communities in the US that operate under Sharia, I mean, Jewish law?
You don't know about tap-and-slide for shifting? That gets it down to four moves. On a regular physical keyboard it's five moves because the delimiters are symbols accessed by the shift key, which must also be pressed.
Still, the larger point is valid: the standard keyboard is lousy for HTML. (Why this is proof of some evil twisted conspiracy aimed to neuter you and fill Apple's coffers with fanboi cash has I guess been left as an exercise for the reader.) If you can suggest a better arrangement it can be coded into a custom keyboard layout by any programmer or even added to the SDK by Apple.
I feel your frustrations with what in the case of the iPad is a 1.0 product and in iOS' case 4.x. The file sharing is awkward, iTunes is beginning to look as though one wafer-thin mint would make it explode, iCal apparently sets monthly events by counting from the beginning of the week containing the first of the month (so that "second Monday" is actually the first one unless the month begins on Sunday or Monday), and syncing basically requires a wire. Yeah, it could all be lots better, and weigh half a pound less too.
Still, afaik nobody made you buy it at gunpoint. (Which would be proof of a conspiracy, come to think of it, so feel free to inform us if that was the case.) You can resell it for a decent price if it doesn't meet your needs sufficiently, and at the same time teach Apple a lesson through the miracle of the free market when you spend that money on whatever device it is that does. Apple, suitably chastened when informed of your actions (as they surely will be), will resolve through bitter bitter tears to do better next time, and if they don't they'll no doubt be buried by their more-nimble competition, as they should be.
In the meantime you'll be just another one of us bloodied first-adopters, victimized by the finite resources of Apple. How dare they not be above complaint! We were promised magic!
Hmmm, I can't say that I've read every word (it's a cookbook, who would use every recipe?) but I haven't come across any use of private APIs, nor have I seen any wacky code.
Not saying you're wrong (a cite would be good), but is there any chance you're referring to the first edition? The second edition, covering iOS 3.x, is twice the size for the first (about 830 pages) and perhaps the earlier SDK needed more hackery to work.
Maybe you're right, but I've found the book useful in my own coding and it doesn't seem to have misled me.
Ditto. Though I see it's Winter 2010. They did it last year, too, though a) I don't know that it's available now, and b) the iOS platform itself evolves quickly enough that capabilities and best practices have changed since then.
If you sign up for the developer program ($100/yr, and necessary to put your code on the device instead of the simulator) you can also get access to videos of sessions from the developer's conference for free and get advice straight from the horse's mouth.
I'd also recommend getting a book or two. I'd recommend O'Reilly's C Pocket Reference if you're rusty in C. Erica Sadun's iPhone Developer's Cookbook, Second Edition covers a lot that you'd need, though the way she organizes her code can make it difficult to reuse if you're just starting out. I can dis-recommend the Sam's "24 hour" iPhone programming book, unless it's been revised and corrected -- it's almost as likely to hinder you as help.
You'd also inevitably be using Apple's own SDK documentation, which can be quite overwhelming to begin with, and web searches both at Apple's developer forums and at large on error messages and class/method names are often fruitful once you get a handle on iOS.
I'd estimate it would take one month of spare time to get your bearings, and 2-3 to really know what you're doing. What can blindside you is that a lot of advanced graphics and sound applications -- games, for example -- require some C++ afaik. (So much for my plans for avoiding it.)
Andrew Orlowski really has a nasty attitude about Apple, doesn't he?
...and leaving the victim's phone number in was just an simple oversight, way too difficult for mere lawyers to grasp or even notice, since web development is so hard .
I'll take your non-answer of my question as indication you don't have any evidence the development was done by an external firm. (Would it make a difference if it was a temp they hired who did it?) But maybe you're right, in which case I'm sure we'll hear about the lawsuit USCG (aka Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver) files against their contractor, and one by the victim, Copyright Enforcement Group, against said contractor for theft.
TFA doesn't mention any developers involved. Why don't you add to our knowledge and name them, since you seem to be better-informed?
A wholesale lifting of code (such as would be implied by their leaving their victim's phone number intact) could as easily have been done by a lazy, recklessly indifferent lawyer or lazy, supervised staff worker as by a lazy third-party web developer.
Moreover I really doubt there's a legally viable argument that USCG, filled with state-licensed members of the bar, doesn't ultimately have responsibility for approving and operating a website that collects evidence for use in court.
A halfway competent programmer would've been able to take one look at the code for this "flashlight app" and seen that it wasn't what it claimed to be.
... So apparently Google doesn't have any halfway competent programmers. Good catch!
"First gen iPhones" and "iPhone 3G" are not the same objects. Odd that your whoosh has been judged more informative than its parent.
Ten seconds on Wikipedia indicates the 1G iPhone was introduced three years and a few days ago.
This is funny, 'cause I hear Gates met his wife online.
Not sure why you got modded down...games are a huge part of why Apple won't allow it. Places like Newgrounds, Kongregate, etc...they would be filled with games that worked on the iPad and iPhone, yet would be free...meaning Apple wouldn't get their cut.
Do you have any idea of how many free games there are in the App Store already? And all but a very few of them were written in Objective-C. Apple's surely not making much money off hosting and distributing those, but they still offer them.
-1 for argument from ignorance.
it's a straw argument to not provide the APIs to let Flash use the GPU, and then complain that it doesn't use the GPU. That's the problem... Not that Flash is programmed bad, but that it doesn't take advantage of something that Apple's software does when Apple doesn't make it available.
Then why is VLC able to show the same video without pinning the CPU meters and putting the fans into hovercraft mode? VLC's open source, so why can't Adobe read the friggin' code and figure out how to do it themselves?
Given the constraints aren't technical but political then the chances that Flash could jump through the requisite hoops are zero.
Yes, that would be true. But merely asserting it's political not technical makes your statement a hypothesis instead of a fact. And it seems an unlikely one at that.
The i-devices, however powerful they may be in comparison to the Apple ][s and TRS-80s of yesteryear, are still severely constrained in terms of memory, battery power and overall processing. There's no automatic garbage collection on them, for example, just retain-release counts, so the programmer is required to deal with memory allocations explicitly. I-devices aren't miniaturized computers so much as enlarged portable game players, firmware in a package like a pocket digital dictionary or book reader, just with wifi/3G, bigger, flashier screens and a touch UI, all competing to suck up all the CPU cycles they can get in order to remain responsive. If designing and manufacturing this stuff under those constraints while maintaining that user-responsiveness was easy there'd surely be more than half a dozen makers of devices like these.
(Hell, if it was easy all the people who complain "I bought this, I should be able to program it in PL/I if I want" -- as though more than 0.1% of them would bother to if they could -- could design and manufacture their own devices and stop annoying the rest of us with their whining. iPhone doesn't do what you want? Get a different phone, with Flash if that's so important, and if your principles are so righteous the market will surely back you up and the iPhone will become a mere asterisk in the annals of Android/Blackberry/whatever history.)
Getting back to the point, because the functional constraints for the i-devices are overwhelming Apple's under a lot of pressure to optimize the use of CPU cycles and RAM while maintaining some degree of coder-friendliness. They optimize the compiler and the OS behind the scenes, so to speak, so the programmer doesn't have to dig into ARM assembler to get a decent frame rate.
Is it not possible that the Flash plug-in (were it available), or the runtimes generated by the Flash-to-iPhone OS converter, interfere with the system optimizations that make the i-devices usable? (Like when Adobe's VM for Photoshop interfered with the Mac OS' VM wayyyyy back when.) I've seen people argue both sides on this technical issue but haven't seen anything that appears definitive.
What I'm saying is we can't tell how much of the Flash ban is political (corporate) until we know how much is technical in nature; it's obviously some of both, to judge from the ongoing PR war, but what proportions? Now that Apple's added a hardware-acceleration API to Snow Leopard that Adobe can use to make Flash on the Mac less of a CPU glutton we may soon have the answer (and hopefully relief) for the desktop, but until real Flash is out for mobile devices like Android I think the question is open.
(The reason, I think, for the banning of interpreters like BASIC may also be about CPU performance, but preventing security breaches a la SQL injections or privilege escalations is surely the major concern. The i-OS isn't terribly secure, if the jailbreaks and exploits reported here are any indication.)
Yes, the righteous paranoia is getting thick. Otoh, I am impressed that posters are attacking Apple rather than the typical ad hominem against Steve Jobs (as though he were the only employee), a la The Register, etc.
...and that's exactly why his parents shouldn't have to. Any system Apple comes up with is going to have to be transparent/intuitive if it isn't going to be a misfeature for the ~90% of the iPhone (etc.) user base that aren't geeks like us.
Requiring the user to keep a table in their head of the closing/backgrounding characteristics of their apps is a cognitive load most would find burdensome. I've already seen people on desktops who couldn't keep track of single-clicking (on a URL link, say) and double-clicking (to open an app), so they just triple-click on everything.
Plonk.
I've never said this before, but somebody mod this up, it's useful data even if the speculation isn't (or is) shown to be the case.
Analogy fail. Unless you know about the magical switch that turned all PPC-based Macs into bricks when 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard, for those who are following at home) was released (or so it seemed from the louder complaints at the time). I salute Microsoft for teaching most people that your computer is fragile and could break down any time a butterfly flaps its wings on Alpha Centauri II, for that is the mindset it would require to believe that. (It also allows me to easily amaze and astonish newbies by showing them I'm running 11 GUI programs simultaneously. And don't get me started on the miracle of multiple windows and tabs in browsers...)