Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte
Of course that's not what is for sale. What is sold is the information stored on the EQ servers that defines the character. The username/password are just what let you get at the character data. When I bought my house the transaction resulted in a key, but I can assure you that's not what I paid more than half a million dollars for...
This doesn't negate the basic point though. I don't know how much space an EQ character takes up, but it will still probably result in a fairly impressive dollar/byte sum.
I've been at a keyboard since 1978, with no thought about ergonomics until the early 90's after I first noticed problems. So, that was about 14 years with no problems. Now I have no choice but to be careful about my setup, take stretch breaks, etc. which generally keeps things ok
I've been typing since 1981, so not quite as long. But I've had basically no problems in more than 20 years of reasonably heavy keyboard use. Either I'm lucky or its because I've never learnt to touch type. I still do "advanced hunt and peck" which means my hands and wrists are constantly changing positions and don't come under the same sort of repetative strain as a good touch typist's do.
Of course this is a sample size of exactly one, so I don't claim it means anything. But have studies been done to examine a possible correlation between touch typing and RSI/CTS?
Actually, the award results were widely reported several days ago, for example see SFGate.com which mirrored the Associated Press feed.
MTV themselves provided the information to the AP, so this is hardly a slip up. They clearly want the results known several days ahead of the air date. My guess is they figure this is good publicity to draw people in to watch the show.
1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious
taking and removing of personal property, with an intent
to deprive the rightful owner of the same
While I agree with much of what you say, what about this situation:
I take a $100 note out of your wallet. I copy it with my color photocopier. I put the original back. I buy $100 of goods with it.
Of course I have broken the specific forgery laws, but have I also committed theft?
What if my photocopier was so good it could reproduce the $100 bill perfectly? I have evaded the forgery laws and made them irrelevant.
What if I produced that perfect copy and gave that back to you and spent the original $100 note myself?
In this example "forgery" serves the same purpose as "copyright violation". It is there to prevent the act of copying because you are not committing a theft. If we get rid of copyright laws (information wants to be free, right?) shouldn't was also get rid of forgery laws? What would happen then?
Does it matter? I know I wouldn't care why the system crashed if I was in the plane. I'd just want to get home alive. If the system crashes because of user error, then that is a serious flaw.
I'd say it matters a great deal. If the problems are user errors then the solution is training, not software fixes - or at least UI programming changes, not changes to the core software. My point is that the nature of the problems tells us what to fix.
More to the point, because the original article doesn't give a single example of the sort of problems being reported it is very hard to evaluate the competing claims that the system is "seriously flawed" or "okay". Is this a union worried for its members' jobs crying wolf? Or is this a management team riding roughshod over the legitimate safety concerns of the people who know?
We can't tell from an article that merely rehashes the claims of both sides without presenting any supporting evidence.
What they don't seem to understand is that as long is it can be viewed it can be copied into a format that can be distributed online. Maybe the copy won't be as clean, but if it can be viewed it can be copied, and if it can be copied, it can be distributed.
Of course the critical bit is "the copy won't be as clean". What the studios are really afraid of is precise digital copying. If the copies degrade with each duplication, as analog video does, then a peer-to-peer network isn't nearly as useful: you can only copy the show out to limited number of people before it degrades to grey noise. So a lot of folks still have to buy the product.
If you have pristine digital copying then everyone can (in theory) have easy access to that show after just one person has bought it.
That's what the studio (IMHO) are trying to block. They accept that copying and limited distribution already takes place through VHS tapes. They don't really care about that as its a marginal losss. They fear digital copying because it could put a huge hole in their business model.
By far the best manuals, in my not so humble opinion, are Unix man pages. They tell you EVERYTHING you need to know without fluff.
I'd have to disagree. The UNIX man pages are awful for many if not most tasks.
To start with, "man" is an awful command to access the help system with. Even if you know you want to access the manual, man is a poor choice of command name - why not manual? Why not help?
Leaving that aside, look at the contents. Yes, you're right man lists EVERYTHING about a command. Everything. Its like asking someone the directions to a bar and getting an inch-by-inch description of every steps of the way. There will be the one in a million time when that's what you want. For the rest of humanity its totally inappropriate.
Look at the start of the man entry for rm:
"The rm utility removes the directory entry specified by each file argument. If a file has no write permission and the standard input is a terminal, the full set of permissions (in octal) for the file are printed followed by a question mark. This is a prompt for confirmation. If the answer begins with y (for yes), the file is deleted, otherwise the file remains.
If file is a symbolic link, the link will be removed, but the file or directory to which it refers will not be deleted. Users do not need write permission to remove a symbolic link, provided they have write permissions in the directory."
These are the first two paragraphs of 10 pages of manual. 99.9% of the time I want to remove a file and have it gone. I do not want to know about symbolic links and file permissions set in octal.
The problem with man is that it is totally comprehensive, which means it covers every option no matter how irrelevant. Too much information is just as bad as too little because you won't be able to find the relevant nugget in the sea of obtuse and incomprehensible chatter.
What is needed are task-oriented manuals not reference books. That will cut down the signal-to-noise ratio so that you can actually find the help you need.
The next big thing I think would be a "smart" translator that can do pattern recognition and "learn" as it gets more of the language. IIRC This is how the star trek translators work.
Not to nit-pick or anything, but Stra Trek translators do not work. They are fictional devices.
The languages that will be translated are Farsi, Dari, Arabic, Pashto, Mandarin, and Uzbeki.
Does this set off alarm bells for anyone? Those are complicated languages, and I believe Mandarin in particular is EXTREMELY tonal (i.e., doesn't work well in speech recognition).
It is an interesting choice of languages for two reasons
As you note these are difficult languages to tackle. However this is the defense advanced research project agency. Their mission is to push the edge of what is technically possible and encourage new research. You do this by picking hard problems that haven't yet been solved.
Look at the countries involved. Twenty years ago this list would have been headed by Russian. For better or worse, it very much reflects (IMHO) the countries currently posing a threat or potential threat to the US.
I took a quick look at the Transitive site, and it seems like they have some interesting technology. Essentially what they do is transcode binary executables from one CPU architecture to another. So you take an x86 binary, run it through their "Dynamite" product and out pops a PowerPC binary.
This is all well and good, but I would have thought this is only a tiny step for most games. Many games make extensive use of platform-specific libraries to provide graphics, sound and IO support. I would imagine that running (for example) the DirectX libraries through Transitive Dynamite would be a technically interesting but legally difficult exercise. Are Microsoft really going to allow Transgaming to port their libraries to PS2?
And this doesn't even touch on the hardware specification problems. How would a game that expects at least an SVGA screen really cope with trying to run on a Palm? Isn't the PS2 architecture sufficiently different from the PC architecture to cause major problems?
These issues can be addressed (presumably that's whay the Transgaming press release says it reduces porting time from "2 years" down to "2 months") but it seems that binary porting is actually only a small aprt of the problem. You would have to heavily rebuild the source code anyway, so why not just cross-compile it straight to the target platform?
Perhaps I am missing something. Can anyone enlighten me?
Innovation may be tolerated, depending on circumstances. Disruptive technology will be eliminated at all costs.
Two counter-examples:
The PC - essentially destroyed the existing computer industry. It won despite opposition because it was so compelling.
The Internet - highly disruptive to a number of industries. It won because it hit several existing industries hard and didn't compete wholly with one, so the opposition was split.
If it doesn't disrupt someone's revenue stream, it can hardly be considered innovative.
What about PDAs? They are innovative without disrupting existing revenue streams. They might have had some marginal impact on a few laptop makers, but they essentially created a new market rather than disrupting an existing one.
There are also technologies that are initially not disruptive, but later become so. The cell phone is a good example of this. We may eventually only have cell phones and land line will become obsolete, but this will happen so slowly that the disrupted industry doesn't notice.
My limited experience of this makes me suggest the following guidelines:
Choose the work you farm out carefully. Because of the communications issues you can't expect the offshore team to work well on innovative software. If what you are doing involves building new technology or using known technology is an innovative way, you need to have onsite people. If the work is well understood and predictable, offshore can work well.
Over-communicate and formalize communication. The time shift makes it hard to make sure that you get back what you wanted. So write detailed formal specs. and make sure you keep them updated as the project progresses.
Build a trust relationship with the team manager. If the guy leading the offshore team is on your side you have a much better chance of success. Ideally travel out to the offshore location before the project starts to meet and shmooze him and the team. This is only possible if those pockets are really deep...
QA at home. The offshore team should be doing their own QA of course, but you need to run your own QA operation on all offshore code. Don't skimp this, or you will never have confidence in your product.
In general I wouldn't recommend offshore development for a small company. The overheads of managing the operation will kill you, and you will typically be doing exactly the sort of work an offshore team is less suitable for. It is much more suited to a large company that can build a long-term relationship with the offshore team and use them to help out several different projects. This allows you to amortize the overhead costs over a number of teams and projects.
I was also lucky enough to meet Robin Gandy [turing.org.uk] who was one of Turning's students and a major mathematician in his own right.
And let me guess you knew Penrose too.
I only met Penrose once, and it was brief. I happen to take issue with the fundamental thesis that underlies his work, and I think its antithetical to Turing's work. So, its probably a good thing that I've never had a chance to really tell him what I think:-)
I have met Douglas Hofstader too, while I'm in name-dropping mode. His work is brilliant.
Enigma broken without him? That might be a bit of a stretch. You can thank the Poles for doing most of the tough work. They spent a lot of time breaking Enigma codes before they were invaded, while France and Britian sat on their thumbs and looked worried.
I don't think so. The mathematical analysis to break the code was largely a joint effort of which Turning was a part. But the important part was the ability to reproduce the crack in a mechanical way, given that the code rotated every 24 hours and effectively had to be rebroken each time. Even once you know the algorithm to break a code, it couldn't in practice be done in anywhere near real time without a computer. So Turing effectively built a computer to very quickly do the math and break a code.
Without the machine, codes would have taken months to break, making the unencoded information essentially useless. I think Turing's achievement, which also laid the foundation for most of modern computation, was indeed essential to the war effort. Without it the breaking of the Enigma code would have been an interesting academic exercise only.
I agree; and the fact that he way gay probably had somthing to do with that. I think thats a shame, romance and gay still don't mix in Hollywood's minds.
I agree - the film makers were looking for a way to turn the story of the Bletchley Park codebreakers into a romance, so "obviously" the leading man had to go after the girl. It is a shame.
There was a play on Turing though.BREAKING THE CODE [turing.org.uk] I allways wanted to see it. Derek Jacobi rocks!
I was lucky enough to see Jacobi in Breaking the Code when I lived in the UK. He was, indeed, excellent as AMT. I was also lucky enough to meet Robin Gandy who was one of Turning's students and a major mathematician in his own right. Its a crime that Turing was harried into an early suicide; we can only wonder what he might have achieved if he had lived.
My biggest concern about the movie, which I haven't yet had the chance to see, is that it seems to miss out the role of Alan Turing. Turing, for those who don't know, was one of the founders of computing. He lead the team that built one of the first digital computers and developed the theoretical foundation for all of modern computing. He is an absolutely key figure in 20th. century science, perhaps as important as Einstein.
He was also a leading figure at Bletchely Park and it is highly doubtful that Enigma would have been broken without him. If you were to single out one figure as the key to breaking the code it has to be Turing.
So its worrying that a film of this critical moment in world history seems to muddy the role of Turing. Andrew Hodges who wrote the review I link to, wrote an excellentbiography of Turing that should be required reading for anyone who considers themselves even remotely a geek. Turing achieved more in his sadly shortened life than most of us could dream of. The fact that the story of Bletchley Park has been turned into a film that excludes Turing is truly sad.
we are deferring (not cancelling) the productization of x86 for Solaris 9
as:
we are deferring (not cancelling) the release of x86 for Solaris 9
Not necessarily so. "Release" means to make a product available to your users. "Productize" means to turn a product into one suitable for release: this usually involves QA-ing, packaging up installers, writing documentation etc. This is not the same thing as releasing.
I've frequently seen the assumption that "corporatespeak" is either a trivial translation of some other term a wooly and empty phrase. Terms like "productizing" have very clear and specific meanings that are not well captured by existing terms.
No it isn't. Just because some guy at Turner Movies would like it to be, doesn't in fact make it so.
Copying one of your CDs to keep in your car is theft.
Can you cite a single case where anyone has been prosecuted for this, let alone found guilty?
Again, some misguided people may want to make that illegal, so far it is not theft.
Extracting the text from an ebook and feeding it through a text-to-speech converter is theft.
The Sklyarov case is still being argued, isn't it? Even if he looses this isn't theft, it illegally breaking Adobe's encryption, which is very different.
But when you're a multi-billion dollar company and you keep using software after your licence has been revoked, that's not theft.
Actually this is the only one of the four examples you quote that has been found to be an illegal act. Microsoft were fined for this.
This article reminds me of the headline from the Times newspaper (London, not New York) that is said to have won a most boring headline competition: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead".
I can see tomorrow's Slashdot headlines now:
CmdrTaco not dead. JohnKatz (sadly) not dead. Dick Cheney: is he dead yet?
Man, he's gonna be mighty sore when They come down on him for having leaked news about iChat (to you) before the announcement. It might not have been so bad if you didn't mention it on Slashdot.:)
Grins, but just to set the record straight, he did not leak anything to me, and I didn't mention it on Slashdot until after the news had been made public by Steve. So a big shout out to Mr. RCG - I'm itching to see what you made of it.
As a fun experiment I replaced "Apple" with "Microsoft" and "OS X" with ".Net". The result shows just how hypocritical slashdot visitors are when it comes to Microsoft vs how much they praise Apple/Linux/Whoever for the same thing...
Ignorning the flamebait for a moment ("hypocritical" indeed:-)
Actually I agree with you. I think.NET is the first example of Microsoft trying to be really innovative and leading the pack. Take a look at.NET: its built on open standards, it requires radical new software and business models, it acknowledges the supremacy of the Internet. In many ways its exactly the sort innovation and pushing of the envelope that I usually associate with Apple. Praise where its due:.NET is a gutsey move by Microsoft.
For good minute-by-minute coverage of the keynote, commit HTTP to Apple Confidential. The latest news (as I post this) is iChat a new Apple IM client built into the 10.2 release of Mac OS X. I know the lead engineer on that project and I expect it will be pretty sweet.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte
Of course that's not what is for sale. What is sold is the information stored on the EQ servers that defines the character. The username/password are just what let you get at the character data. When I bought my house the transaction resulted in a key, but I can assure you that's not what I paid more than half a million dollars for...
This doesn't negate the basic point though. I don't know how much space an EQ character takes up, but it will still probably result in a fairly impressive dollar/byte sum.
I've been at a keyboard since 1978, with no thought about ergonomics until the early 90's after I first noticed problems. So, that was about 14 years with no problems. Now I have no choice but to be careful about my setup, take stretch breaks, etc. which generally keeps things ok
I've been typing since 1981, so not quite as long. But I've had basically no problems in more than 20 years of reasonably heavy keyboard use. Either I'm lucky or its because I've never learnt to touch type. I still do "advanced hunt and peck" which means my hands and wrists are constantly changing positions and don't come under the same sort of repetative strain as a good touch typist's do.
Of course this is a sample size of exactly one, so I don't claim it means anything. But have studies been done to examine a possible correlation between touch typing and RSI/CTS?
Actually, the award results were widely reported several days ago, for example see SFGate.com which mirrored the Associated Press feed.
MTV themselves provided the information to the AP, so this is hardly a slip up. They clearly want the results known several days ahead of the air date. My guess is they figure this is good publicity to draw people in to watch the show.
1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious
taking and removing of personal property, with an intent
to deprive the rightful owner of the same
While I agree with much of what you say, what about this situation:
I take a $100 note out of your wallet. I copy it with my color photocopier. I put the original back. I buy $100 of goods with it.
Of course I have broken the specific forgery laws, but have I also committed theft?
What if my photocopier was so good it could reproduce the $100 bill perfectly? I have evaded the forgery laws and made them irrelevant.
What if I produced that perfect copy and gave that back to you and spent the original $100 note myself?
In this example "forgery" serves the same purpose as "copyright violation". It is there to prevent the act of copying because you are not committing a theft. If we get rid of copyright laws (information wants to be free, right?) shouldn't was also get rid of forgery laws? What would happen then?
I don't have answers, just questions.
Does it matter? I know I wouldn't care why the system crashed if I was in the plane. I'd just want to get home alive. If the system crashes because of user error, then that is a serious flaw.
I'd say it matters a great deal. If the problems are user errors then the solution is training, not software fixes - or at least UI programming changes, not changes to the core software. My point is that the nature of the problems tells us what to fix.
More to the point, because the original article doesn't give a single example of the sort of problems being reported it is very hard to evaluate the competing claims that the system is "seriously flawed" or "okay". Is this a union worried for its members' jobs crying wolf? Or is this a management team riding roughshod over the legitimate safety concerns of the people who know?
We can't tell from an article that merely rehashes the claims of both sides without presenting any supporting evidence.
What they don't seem to understand is that as long is it can be viewed it can be copied into a format that can be distributed online. Maybe the copy won't be as clean, but if it can be viewed it can be copied, and if it can be copied, it can be distributed.
Of course the critical bit is "the copy won't be as clean". What the studios are really afraid of is precise digital copying. If the copies degrade with each duplication, as analog video does, then a peer-to-peer network isn't nearly as useful: you can only copy the show out to limited number of people before it degrades to grey noise. So a lot of folks still have to buy the product.
If you have pristine digital copying then everyone can (in theory) have easy access to that show after just one person has bought it.
That's what the studio (IMHO) are trying to block. They accept that copying and limited distribution already takes place through VHS tapes. They don't really care about that as its a marginal losss. They fear digital copying because it could put a huge hole in their business model.
By far the best manuals, in my not so humble opinion, are Unix man pages. They tell you EVERYTHING you need to know without fluff.
I'd have to disagree. The UNIX man pages are awful for many if not most tasks.
To start with, "man" is an awful command to access the help system with. Even if you know you want to access the manual, man is a poor choice of command name - why not manual? Why not help?
Leaving that aside, look at the contents. Yes, you're right man lists EVERYTHING about a command. Everything. Its like asking someone the directions to a bar and getting an inch-by-inch description of every steps of the way. There will be the one in a million time when that's what you want. For the rest of humanity its totally inappropriate.
Look at the start of the man entry for rm:
"The rm utility removes the directory entry specified by each file argument. If a file has no write permission and the standard input is a terminal, the full set of permissions (in octal) for the file are printed followed by a question mark. This is a prompt for confirmation. If the answer begins with y (for yes), the file is deleted, otherwise the file remains.
If file is a symbolic link, the link will be removed, but the file or directory to which it refers will not be deleted. Users do not need write permission to remove a symbolic link, provided they have write permissions in the directory."
These are the first two paragraphs of 10 pages of manual. 99.9% of the time I want to remove a file and have it gone. I do not want to know about symbolic links and file permissions set in octal.
The problem with man is that it is totally comprehensive, which means it covers every option no matter how irrelevant. Too much information is just as bad as too little because you won't be able to find the relevant nugget in the sea of obtuse and incomprehensible chatter.
What is needed are task-oriented manuals not reference books. That will cut down the signal-to-noise ratio so that you can actually find the help you need.
The next big thing I think would be a "smart" translator that can do pattern recognition and "learn" as it gets more of the language. IIRC This is how the star trek translators work.
Not to nit-pick or anything, but Stra Trek translators do not work. They are fictional devices.
Does this set off alarm bells for anyone? Those are complicated languages, and I believe Mandarin in particular is EXTREMELY tonal (i.e., doesn't work well in speech recognition).
It is an interesting choice of languages for two reasons
I took a quick look at the Transitive site, and it seems like they have some interesting technology. Essentially what they do is transcode binary executables from one CPU architecture to another. So you take an x86 binary, run it through their "Dynamite" product and out pops a PowerPC binary.
This is all well and good, but I would have thought this is only a tiny step for most games. Many games make extensive use of platform-specific libraries to provide graphics, sound and IO support. I would imagine that running (for example) the DirectX libraries through Transitive Dynamite would be a technically interesting but legally difficult exercise. Are Microsoft really going to allow Transgaming to port their libraries to PS2?
And this doesn't even touch on the hardware specification problems. How would a game that expects at least an SVGA screen really cope with trying to run on a Palm? Isn't the PS2 architecture sufficiently different from the PC architecture to cause major problems?
These issues can be addressed (presumably that's whay the Transgaming press release says it reduces porting time from "2 years" down to "2 months") but it seems that binary porting is actually only a small aprt of the problem. You would have to heavily rebuild the source code anyway, so why not just cross-compile it straight to the target platform?
Perhaps I am missing something. Can anyone enlighten me?
Two counter-examples:
If it doesn't disrupt someone's revenue stream, it can hardly be considered innovative.
What about PDAs? They are innovative without disrupting existing revenue streams. They might have had some marginal impact on a few laptop makers, but they essentially created a new market rather than disrupting an existing one.
There are also technologies that are initially not disruptive, but later become so. The cell phone is a good example of this. We may eventually only have cell phones and land line will become obsolete, but this will happen so slowly that the disrupted industry doesn't notice.
In general I wouldn't recommend offshore development for a small company. The overheads of managing the operation will kill you, and you will typically be doing exactly the sort of work an offshore team is less suitable for. It is much more suited to a large company that can build a long-term relationship with the offshore team and use them to help out several different projects. This allows you to amortize the overhead costs over a number of teams and projects.
Good luck.
You suck!... no realy :>
:-)
I wish I could have seen it.
Grins.
I was also lucky enough to meet Robin Gandy [turing.org.uk] who was one of Turning's students and a major mathematician in his own right.
And let me guess you knew Penrose too.
I only met Penrose once, and it was brief. I happen to take issue with the fundamental thesis that underlies his work, and I think its antithetical to Turing's work. So, its probably a good thing that I've never had a chance to really tell him what I think
I have met Douglas Hofstader too, while I'm in name-dropping mode. His work is brilliant.
Enigma broken without him? That might be a bit of a stretch. You can thank the Poles for doing most of the tough work. They spent a lot of time breaking Enigma codes before they were invaded, while France and Britian sat on their thumbs and looked worried.
I don't think so. The mathematical analysis to break the code was largely a joint effort of which Turning was a part. But the important part was the ability to reproduce the crack in a mechanical way, given that the code rotated every 24 hours and effectively had to be rebroken each time. Even once you know the algorithm to break a code, it couldn't in practice be done in anywhere near real time without a computer. So Turing effectively built a computer to very quickly do the math and break a code.
Without the machine, codes would have taken months to break, making the unencoded information essentially useless. I think Turing's achievement, which also laid the foundation for most of modern computation, was indeed essential to the war effort. Without it the breaking of the Enigma code would have been an interesting academic exercise only.
I agree; and the fact that he way gay probably had somthing to do with that. I think thats a shame, romance and gay still don't mix in Hollywood's minds.
I agree - the film makers were looking for a way to turn the story of the Bletchley Park codebreakers into a romance, so "obviously" the leading man had to go after the girl. It is a shame.
There was a play on Turing though.BREAKING THE CODE [turing.org.uk] I allways wanted to see it. Derek Jacobi rocks!
I was lucky enough to see Jacobi in Breaking the Code when I lived in the UK. He was, indeed, excellent as AMT. I was also lucky enough to meet Robin Gandy who was one of Turning's students and a major mathematician in his own right. Its a crime that Turing was harried into an early suicide; we can only wonder what he might have achieved if he had lived.
My biggest concern about the movie, which I haven't yet had the chance to see, is that it seems to miss out the role of Alan Turing. Turing, for those who don't know, was one of the founders of computing. He lead the team that built one of the first digital computers and developed the theoretical foundation for all of modern computing. He is an absolutely key figure in 20th. century science, perhaps as important as Einstein.
He was also a leading figure at Bletchely Park and it is highly doubtful that Enigma would have been broken without him. If you were to single out one figure as the key to breaking the code it has to be Turing.
So its worrying that a film of this critical moment in world history seems to muddy the role of Turing. Andrew Hodges who wrote the review I link to, wrote an excellent biography of Turing that should be required reading for anyone who considers themselves even remotely a geek. Turing achieved more in his sadly shortened life than most of us could dream of. The fact that the story of Bletchley Park has been turned into a film that excludes Turing is truly sad.
The poster translates:
we are deferring (not cancelling) the productization of x86 for Solaris 9
as:
we are deferring (not cancelling) the release of x86 for Solaris 9
Not necessarily so. "Release" means to make a product available to your users. "Productize" means to turn a product into one suitable for release: this usually involves QA-ing, packaging up installers, writing documentation etc. This is not the same thing as releasing.
I've frequently seen the assumption that "corporatespeak" is either a trivial translation of some other term a wooly and empty phrase. Terms like "productizing" have very clear and specific meanings that are not well captured by existing terms.
whatcha talking about Edmund? There was a HHGTTG movie.
No, there hasn't been. The closest is the BBC TV series which you can get here in a variety of formats, including DVD.
Skipping commercials is theft.
No it isn't. Just because some guy at Turner Movies would like it to be, doesn't in fact make it so.
Copying one of your CDs to keep in your car is theft.
Can you cite a single case where anyone has been prosecuted for this, let alone found guilty?
Again, some misguided people may want to make that illegal, so far it is not theft.
Extracting the text from an ebook and feeding it through a text-to-speech converter is theft.
The Sklyarov case is still being argued, isn't it? Even if he looses this isn't theft, it illegally breaking Adobe's encryption, which is very different.
But when you're a multi-billion dollar company and you keep using software after your licence has been revoked, that's not theft.
Actually this is the only one of the four examples you quote that has been found to be an illegal act. Microsoft were fined for this.
It's all so clear now!
Or, in this case, obviously it is not...
This article reminds me of the headline from the Times newspaper (London, not New York) that is said to have won a most boring headline competition: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead".
I can see tomorrow's Slashdot headlines now:
CmdrTaco not dead.
JohnKatz (sadly) not dead.
Dick Cheney: is he dead yet?
etc.
Man, he's gonna be mighty sore when They come down on him for having leaked news about iChat (to you) before the announcement. It might not have been so bad if you didn't mention it on Slashdot. :)
Grins, but just to set the record straight, he did not leak anything to me, and I didn't mention it on Slashdot until after the news had been made public by Steve. So a big shout out to Mr. RCG - I'm itching to see what you made of it.
As a fun experiment I replaced "Apple" with "Microsoft" and "OS X" with ".Net". The result shows just how hypocritical slashdot visitors are when it comes to Microsoft vs how much they praise Apple/Linux/Whoever for the same thing...
:-)
.NET is the first example of Microsoft trying to be really innovative and leading the pack. Take a look at .NET: its built on open standards, it requires radical new software and business models, it acknowledges the supremacy of the Internet. In many ways its exactly the sort innovation and pushing of the envelope that I usually associate with Apple. Praise where its due: .NET is a gutsey move by Microsoft.
Ignorning the flamebait for a moment ("hypocritical" indeed
Actually I agree with you. I think
Spymac is NOT a good source for Mac news
I agree and I didn't say there were a good source of news. The rumors they post are highly unreliable.
But they did have good minute-by-minute coverage of the keynote, which is what I posted about.
For good minute-by-minute coverage of the keynote, commit HTTP to Apple Confidential. The latest news (as I post this) is iChat a new Apple IM client built into the 10.2 release of Mac OS X. I know the lead engineer on that project and I expect it will be pretty sweet.