Probably I'll be slammed by some Steve fanboi, but this remark is just plain rubbish:
'These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them.
So why is it exactly that I can load each and every Symbian software on to my Nokia 9300 with no restrictions and neither crashing the entire network nor my phone? (A very poorly written app may crash the phone, but this is extremely rare).
My gut feel here is that Mr. Jobs is trying to cover the fact that OSX is an operating system not designed for mobile devices, let alone phones. As opposed to Symbian you may be able to wreck all sorts of havoc on the phone and the network if you get access to the phones OS, or it may be some slimy deal with Cingular.
This is pure speculation of course, but Mr. Jobs argument is totally bogus.
The very reason why I refrain from currently travelling to the US after having visited ~20 times in the 90s (and the last time in 2002). It's not so much the fingerprinting / mug shot procedure, which I resent, but the fact that potentially any slimeball marketing sleazoid may be able to get hold of my private data.
Sorry dudes in the US; you really, really need to clean up your privacy laws to actually protect the individual and not to favor major business (and making identity theft darn easy in the bargain).
The one that gets me is that here in the UK (and probably many other places too), you can have sex at 16, but you have to be 18 to rent a video of OTHER PEOPLE having sex.
You know; what bugs me even more is the fact that you need to be 18 to watch people loving each other, while it's no problem at all for a 12 year old to watch how people blast each other into smithereens.
I just wanted to thank you for this really interesting analysis. Although I visited the US on multiple occasions and believe to have some insight about how the huge diversity calling itself the US of A works, this was incredibly interesting.
Instead of teaching that alcohol needs to be consumed responsibly, they preached that all alcohol is bad and will make you into some kind of monster if you come within 5 feet of it.
Shit! They must have ripped that off from the federal drug "education" programs.
The problem of course is that fear is not a sustainable model. Everybody remeber this innane "this is your brain on ecstasy" campaign, where they fiddled around with some thresholds in the CT scans until those darn images would match their agenda?
I totally agree that Postgresql is very close to (if not very much in) the enterprise realm. May I suggest table partitioning on various levels? Oh yeah! Better replication would be nice too.
Else then that I have my dream come true enterprise database with the added bones of a size, which is 5% from a Sybase installation. Let alone Oracle:)
The truth of the matter is that postgres is a rapidly fluxuating target.
What amazes me about the speed of evolvment is the fact that they don't seem to sacrifice quality in the bargain. (yes shit happened if I recall correctly, but rarely and under quite esotheric circumstances)
Microsoft expressed little concern about the sales. Jason Reindorp, director of product marketing for Zune, said, ``We are happy with the position Zune currently holds in the market, and are on track to meet our sales projection of 1 million units by end of the fiscal year.''
Well, what else would you expect a marketing flack to say? Something around the lines:
"For having invested a bazillion into the marketing hype and even rid a massive astrot^H^H^H^H^H^Hgrassroots campaign to sensibilize the customers for a good squirt sales really suck! Especially when you consider that we have this fashionable turd brown model."
Sure if only one application is touching your data you can forget about all the nice things that databases do
Not even then do I believe that data integrity and - consistency should be up to the application. It's just a matter of Murphys law. Someday something will go wrong with application level consistency enforcement. I would outright refuse to take a job as a DBA if I can't implement constraints in databases which are under my responsibility. As a matter of fact I deem application level constraints an unprofessional approach to good database culture, to put it mildly.
It is too bad PostgreSQL didn't have Windows support in prior versions.
Alas it's understandable looking at the history and roots of Postgresql that it lacked native Windows support until version 8 I agree with your sentiments.
I'm definitely not a Windows fanboi, but I agree that implementing native support for projects like Postgresql or Apache (which has it since version 2) is paramount if you want to see your product succeed.
Just not providing a version for the widest available platform because uhh, you know it's Microsoft and uhh therefore it sucks! is immature and stupid.
I like the fact, though, that at least with some software Windows is not the primary platform:)
Foreign keys are more than nice, they are essential.
Bingo!
It doesn't cease to amaze me, when the Mysql croud argues that "you don't really need those pesky integrity stuff, it just slows down the database."
Guess what guys; You're dead wrong!
Any DBA worth his salary will enforce data integrity on the lowest possible level, which means constraints (however implemented) on the object level.
Sure, you can let your coders in Bengaluru ensure that the primary key is unique instead of just applying a unique index and the same goes for referential constraints between tables. You can implement them in the application just fine until somebody overlooks some minor detail in the code and you're royally fucked!
Again! Foreign keys or triggers are not "niceties". They are essential in implementing an industry strength database; period!
However, given the nature of the business, it's not doing anything that any other corporation would not do.
I strongly doubt that Ken Olsen, co-founder of DEC (which was arguably the most innovative IT company in the 70s and 80s) would have ever dreamed of applying such dodgy tactics. There are other examples in the industry which would have balked at such behavior (Mssrs Hewlett and Packard come to mind)
Aren't we a wee bit generalising here in order to excuse rotten behavior?
Don't expect a corrected bill. Even if they painstakingly correct every problem with your bill, the best you will get is a credited amount. Their systems cannot actually handle giving you an updated bill, only a credit-after-the-fact
I certainly don't want to defend a crappy company. Just a remark regarding a corrected invoice.
When I was working for the database end of the billing system for a Telco (and their size was a fraction from Verizon) they ran into the following problem:
The month has only 30 days!
I kid you not. See, the problem with telco billing systems is not necessarily their complexity (it has a fair amount of this, but after all is said and done it's an accounting system), but the massive amount of data those systems need to process.
Every damn call generates a CDR (call data record), which is fed into the billing system and a hickup of the system for only a couple hours, or to deal with non-streamlined issues (like retrieving and actually correcting an old invoice) is a severe disruption of the whole system. Here's a hopefully not too crappy analogy:
You miss your train at London Paddington Station for Cardiff. It's not your fault, you where there in time, but the automatic gate didn't recognize your valid ticket and you thus missed the train.
The train operator will not stop the train at Swindon and have it return to Paddington just because they fucked up. They will cheerfully honour your ticket and let you board the next available train to Cardiff.
Anything else would be just too much a disruption of the flow how a train network works.
This certainly shouldn't justify rotten customer service, or a guy with a strange accent in a call center in Bangalore who actually doesn't know what he's talking about. Just some perspective on why it may just not be possible to actually correct an invoice already generated. (You can argue that the bone heads designing the system should have thought of it. But since they probably didn't your second best choice is a credit on the next invoice).
Ken Starr dies and goes to hell. As a prominent, public figure he's greated by Lucifer himself. Lucifer explains the options, which Mr. Starr can chose from.
He opens a door and you see a ton of people, all chest high in pig manure.
"No!" Yells, Mr. Starr; "I'm devastatitngly paranoid to germs! I could never stay in that room."
So Lucifer opens the next door. Where Mr. Starr sees people shackled to glowing hot metal frames, tortured by little devils with white hot pitchforks.
"Naaaaooouuu!", yells Mr. Starr; "I can never, ever stand this for the rest of eternity!"
"OK", says Lucifer, "I introduce you to your final option." He opens another door and there he sees Bill Clinton shackled to a wall with irons and Monica Levinsky on her knees in front of him, supplying Mr. Clinton with a blowjob.
Starrs eyes start to glow and he says: "Yes! This is where I want to spend eternity!"
"OK!" says Lucifer, kicks Levisnky in the butt and proclaims:
Companies have their employees delete copies of source code all the time, particularly when they change projects or switch departments.
I'd wager that only unbelievably dumb companies destroy their source code, since any company with a quarter of a clue and above enforces the use of a source code management system.
It's part of the nature of those thingies that you can pull the code for just about any version of a specific, version controleed software.
I'd be absolutely stunned if this wouldn't be the case for AIX, given that it's IBM maintaining the code.
I'm willing to bet both arms and both legs that Microsoft has this one covered legally.
This may be all well and true, but lest we forget: Microsoft ships worldwide and not every country sucks up to its corporations as this seems to happen in the US.
I can't speak for other countries, but the fundamental issue of contract law at where I live is referred to as "treu und glaube" in German (which translates badly verbatim, but "good faith" is probably an apt English description).
If they fuxor you despite the fact that you purchased a legal license then those parts of the EULA will be rendered illegal in court. Another question of course, is if an EULA is a contract at all.
I don't think that a court will look kindly at them and uphold the "maximum damage is the purchase price" stint in the EULA if severe damage occured due to this little charade.
Personally I used Linux from the start in '99 when I founded my small consultancy. I do have (and to a certain degree need) a smaller and legally licensed W2K or XP partition on all my systems. You bet that I will never touch Vista with a ten foot pole. The same applies to Suse Linux, but I digress.
But the amount of people willing to pay more than $1,000 is very small. So a handful of people will make money, but since Ebay is being flooded with PS3s there is a high chance that many of these Ebayers are going to be sorely disappointed.
Reminds me of a Rolling Stones gig in '82.
A couple weeks in advance tickets where sold for the equivalent of ~ EUR 200 (that was a sizeable sum in 1982 for a concert ticket).
At the entrance of the actual venue however, scalpers could be glad to be compensated with a pack of cigarettes for a Stones ticket.
they sold because you got everything in the basic package whereas with a British car you would pay a Pony just to have a passenger side door mirror and a hundred sovs to have a car radio.
This was born out of sheer necessity.
See, when I order a Volkswagen the car goes into manufacturing after I placed my order. It takes about 12 weeks and a couple of days to ship from Wolfsburg to a car dealership in Zurich. It has the advantage that I can pretty much specify what and how I want it (for a price) and the time to ship it is negligeable.
Japanese car makers don't have that luxury when shipping overseaes. Since planes are too expensive the shipmant alone would probably take over a couple of month. Add that to the manufacturing time and the wait gets untolerable.
They turned this problem into a virtue by just about adding anything that could be required. Maybe you could upgrade your car with a standardized "sport-package" that they could just tuck on.
That also means that I can pick up my car three days after ordering it, since the standardized version was here already, cleared customs and only the paperwork hat to be gotten in order.
It also has the advantage that extras where a hell of a lot cheaper, due to amounts ordered by the suppliers.
It may be that they copied at the beginning; but Japanese brands wouldn't have turned out to be world class if they where just copiers and not innovaters at a later stage.
Diclaimer: I drive a slightly dented '96 Mazda, which is techologically rather straight forward, but never ever let me down.
Slashdot Mirror
So why is it exactly that I can load each and every Symbian software on to my Nokia 9300 with no restrictions and neither crashing the entire network nor my phone? (A very poorly written app may crash the phone, but this is extremely rare).
My gut feel here is that Mr. Jobs is trying to cover the fact that OSX is an operating system not designed for mobile devices, let alone phones. As opposed to Symbian you may be able to wreck all sorts of havoc on the phone and the network if you get access to the phones OS, or it may be some slimy deal with Cingular.
This is pure speculation of course, but Mr. Jobs argument is totally bogus.
"Nice kebob stand you have here. Would be a shame if it burns down."
You don't give in to blackmail. No matter what...
Sorry dudes in the US; you really, really need to clean up your privacy laws to actually protect the individual and not to favor major business (and making identity theft darn easy in the bargain).
You know; what bugs me even more is the fact that you need to be 18 to watch people loving each other, while it's no problem at all for a 12 year old to watch how people blast each other into smithereens.
I just wanted to thank you for this really interesting analysis. Although I visited the US on multiple occasions and believe to have some insight about how the huge diversity calling itself the US of A works, this was incredibly interesting.
Shit! They must have ripped that off from the federal drug "education" programs.
The problem of course is that fear is not a sustainable model. Everybody remeber this innane "this is your brain on ecstasy" campaign, where they fiddled around with some thresholds in the CT scans until those darn images would match their agenda?
Else then that I have my dream come true enterprise database with the added bones of a size, which is 5% from a Sybase installation. Let alone Oracle :)
What amazes me about the speed of evolvment is the fact that they don't seem to sacrifice quality in the bargain. (yes shit happened if I recall correctly, but rarely and under quite esotheric circumstances)
Great job, Postgresql team!
One might argue that in such a situation database level integrity enforcement is even more important. :)
Well, what else would you expect a marketing flack to say? Something around the lines:
"For having invested a bazillion into the marketing hype and even rid a massive astrot^H^H^H^H^H^Hgrassroots campaign to sensibilize the customers for a good squirt sales really suck! Especially when you consider that we have this fashionable turd brown model."
Somehow I think not!
Not even then do I believe that data integrity and - consistency should be up to the application. It's just a matter of Murphys law. Someday something will go wrong with application level consistency enforcement. I would outright refuse to take a job as a DBA if I can't implement constraints in databases which are under my responsibility. As a matter of fact I deem application level constraints an unprofessional approach to good database culture, to put it mildly.
Alas it's understandable looking at the history and roots of Postgresql that it lacked native Windows support until version 8 I agree with your sentiments.
I'm definitely not a Windows fanboi, but I agree that implementing native support for projects like Postgresql or Apache (which has it since version 2) is paramount if you want to see your product succeed.
Just not providing a version for the widest available platform because uhh, you know it's Microsoft and uhh therefore it sucks! is immature and stupid.
I like the fact, though, that at least with some software Windows is not the primary platform :)
Bingo!
It doesn't cease to amaze me, when the Mysql croud argues that "you don't really need those pesky integrity stuff, it just slows down the database."
Guess what guys; You're dead wrong!
Any DBA worth his salary will enforce data integrity on the lowest possible level, which means constraints (however implemented) on the object level.
Sure, you can let your coders in Bengaluru ensure that the primary key is unique instead of just applying a unique index and the same goes for referential constraints between tables. You can implement them in the application just fine until somebody overlooks some minor detail in the code and you're royally fucked!
Again! Foreign keys or triggers are not "niceties". They are essential in implementing an industry strength database; period!
I call pure, unadulterated crap on this one.
One of the major new features in Postgresql 8 was native Windows support. It runs just fine as a service.
This comparision is either very old news, incompetence in action, or, um! strongly biased.
I strongly doubt that Ken Olsen, co-founder of DEC (which was arguably the most innovative IT company in the 70s and 80s) would have ever dreamed of applying such dodgy tactics. There are other examples in the industry which would have balked at such behavior (Mssrs Hewlett and Packard come to mind)
Aren't we a wee bit generalising here in order to excuse rotten behavior?
The Gimp
When I was working for the database end of the billing system for a Telco (and their size was a fraction from Verizon) they ran into the following problem:
The month has only 30 days!
I kid you not. See, the problem with telco billing systems is not necessarily their complexity (it has a fair amount of this, but after all is said and done it's an accounting system), but the massive amount of data those systems need to process.
Every damn call generates a CDR (call data record), which is fed into the billing system and a hickup of the system for only a couple hours, or to deal with non-streamlined issues (like retrieving and actually correcting an old invoice) is a severe disruption of the whole system. Here's a hopefully not too crappy analogy:
You miss your train at London Paddington Station for Cardiff. It's not your fault, you where there in time, but the automatic gate didn't recognize your valid ticket and you thus missed the train.
The train operator will not stop the train at Swindon and have it return to Paddington just because they fucked up. They will cheerfully honour your ticket and let you board the next available train to Cardiff.
Anything else would be just too much a disruption of the flow how a train network works.
This certainly shouldn't justify rotten customer service, or a guy with a strange accent in a call center in Bangalore who actually doesn't know what he's talking about. Just some perspective on why it may just not be possible to actually correct an invoice already generated. (You can argue that the bone heads designing the system should have thought of it. But since they probably didn't your second best choice is a credit on the next invoice).
He opens a door and you see a ton of people, all chest high in pig manure.
"No!" Yells, Mr. Starr; "I'm devastatitngly paranoid to germs! I could never stay in that room."
So Lucifer opens the next door. Where Mr. Starr sees people shackled to glowing hot metal frames, tortured by little devils with white hot pitchforks.
"Naaaaooouuu!", yells Mr. Starr; "I can never, ever stand this for the rest of eternity!"
"OK", says Lucifer, "I introduce you to your final option." He opens another door and there he sees Bill Clinton shackled to a wall with irons and Monica Levinsky on her knees in front of him, supplying Mr. Clinton with a blowjob.
Starrs eyes start to glow and he says: "Yes! This is where I want to spend eternity!"
"OK!" says Lucifer, kicks Levisnky in the butt and proclaims:
"Out Monica; your replacement is here!"
Yep! That's even researched and documented as the Carnival Booth Algorithm
I'd wager that only unbelievably dumb companies destroy their source code, since any company with a quarter of a clue and above enforces the use of a source code management system.
It's part of the nature of those thingies that you can pull the code for just about any version of a specific, version controleed software.
I'd be absolutely stunned if this wouldn't be the case for AIX, given that it's IBM maintaining the code.
This may be all well and true, but lest we forget: Microsoft ships worldwide and not every country sucks up to its corporations as this seems to happen in the US.
I can't speak for other countries, but the fundamental issue of contract law at where I live is referred to as "treu und glaube" in German (which translates badly verbatim, but "good faith" is probably an apt English description).
If they fuxor you despite the fact that you purchased a legal license then those parts of the EULA will be rendered illegal in court. Another question of course, is if an EULA is a contract at all.
I don't think that a court will look kindly at them and uphold the "maximum damage is the purchase price" stint in the EULA if severe damage occured due to this little charade.
Personally I used Linux from the start in '99 when I founded my small consultancy. I do have (and to a certain degree need) a smaller and legally licensed W2K or XP partition on all my systems. You bet that I will never touch Vista with a ten foot pole. The same applies to Suse Linux, but I digress.
Reminds me of a Rolling Stones gig in '82.
A couple weeks in advance tickets where sold for the equivalent of ~ EUR 200 (that was a sizeable sum in 1982 for a concert ticket).
At the entrance of the actual venue however, scalpers could be glad to be compensated with a pack of cigarettes for a Stones ticket.
Serves them right, bloody, greedy bunch.
So what exactly is your business?
Astroturf shill for the Microsoft Corporation?
This was born out of sheer necessity.
See, when I order a Volkswagen the car goes into manufacturing after I placed my order. It takes about 12 weeks and a couple of days to ship from Wolfsburg to a car dealership in Zurich. It has the advantage that I can pretty much specify what and how I want it (for a price) and the time to ship it is negligeable.
Japanese car makers don't have that luxury when shipping overseaes. Since planes are too expensive the shipmant alone would probably take over a couple of month. Add that to the manufacturing time and the wait gets untolerable.
They turned this problem into a virtue by just about adding anything that could be required. Maybe you could upgrade your car with a standardized "sport-package" that they could just tuck on.
That also means that I can pick up my car three days after ordering it, since the standardized version was here already, cleared customs and only the paperwork hat to be gotten in order.
It also has the advantage that extras where a hell of a lot cheaper, due to amounts ordered by the suppliers.
In addition they where the first to implement new management and manufacturing technologies ( Total Quality Management and Lean Production comes to mind).
It may be that they copied at the beginning; but Japanese brands wouldn't have turned out to be world class if they where just copiers and not innovaters at a later stage.
Diclaimer: I drive a slightly dented '96 Mazda, which is techologically rather straight forward, but never ever let me down.