in our society we glorify sociopathic assholes who only care about making money and enforcing their narcissistic vision.
In Isaacson's book, there's a chapter on how Jobs told Larry Ellison to stop caring so much about making money, and thinking more about the products. I don't think making money was his driving force. I definitely won't argue about the other two characteristics you've described, though:)
So the cops can't find this guy, they're wringing their hands in helplessness. Along comes "An IT Genius" that traces the house by IP... and the cops couldn't call any of their guys on the entire force to do that?
As far as I've heard from friends and experienced myself, the cops don't give much of a shit unless child porn or something similar is involved, or you lead them at the person who did it yourself.
Apple's defining property is "they're not Microsoft."
That aspect has become less and less important over the last few years. Microsoft is now a blip on the radar of the multimedia product company. The Mac has become irrelevant, and Windows Phone is at around 2% market share in the mobile area, where Apple really matters now.
If you're buying Apple products in 2012, then inter-company politics is probably the only thing you do care about. It sure as hell ain't the products themselves.
I don't think so (it's definitely not true for me, and I have an MacBook, iMac, iPhone and iPad). It's more about the app infrastructure on the mobile devices. There's nothing where there is no app for that.
I agree that that map app is flawed, but first releases of anything usually is.
The problem is, this is iOS version 6, not version 1. The customers don't care about inter-company politics. If they would, they wouldn't buy Apple products in the first place, being the kind of company it is.
I think they're also bred for longer shelf life. The bananas you can get in the tropics would arrive in the US as a brown goo after being on a ship for one or two months.
Taste has very little to do with organic vs. inorganic and an awful lot to do with how it spent its last few hours. Stuff which ripens fast then goes mushy (bananas, tomatoes, strawberries...) is very susceptible to this.
As far as I know, bananas actually do get sweeter when they're cut off, but that's the only exception.
The huge buzz caught the attention of executives and they decided to take their high-concept property and rape it's corpse for all it was worth, even before it launched.
Pencil dick middle managers smelled another sims, and with dreams of endless expansions, tried as hard as they could to turn spore in to a product they could sell the public incrementally over many years.
FYI, there's a game now that's using the stuff from Spore (Spore Engine?). It's called Darkspore, and it's actually fun to play (for me at least, and unlike the original game). However, it has nothing to do with the concept behind Spore itself, it's just apparent from the unique creature style (and the creature editor for upgrades).
The only problem I have with it is that even though I bought it on Steam (when it was on sale), I have to sign into my EA account every time I want to play it, even when I only want to play single player, entering my ~20 character randomly generated password. This DRM is probably also the reason for this online-only push.
The hint was that it was a bunch of nobodies with no track record asking for money before they'd delivered anything beyond an hilariously badly written "Hello, world".
Another one is that they offered physically mailing a CD at the $5 pledge level. From the comments on the project I see that they wisely simply ignored this part of the deal, I guess it'd have costed them more than $5 per CD to do that (from what I've gathered from other Kickstarter projects).
I guess I must have gone to a fundamentally different kind of college. Nearly every single professor I encountered wasn't excited about what was already known in their respective field but got disturbingly excited about untestable theories, suspected areas of interest and tantalizingly unknowable facts. My computer science professors would treat P=NP in an almost religious fashion -- treating that solution like the face of god. Sometimes it was just a numbers game like natural language parsing and parts of speech tagging. Here's the best-to-date accuracy, can you beat it? Ask my physics professors about entropy in space or, worse, string theory and they'd shortly be speaking in tongues. My philosophy instructors, even, loved to ask questions that had no clear answer: would you murder one person to save thousands? Why did Charles-Henri Sanson, the executioner of 3,000 lives in Paris, survive the revolution and what moral implications entailed him executing his former boss the king?
The tasks of most professors I met were reduced to management stuff. They only appear as authors on papers because of things they did while being a postdoc, or because they want to be added to a student's paper (in order to get their references up). They had more up-to-date knowledge about the issues of the faculty's politics and the mechanical problems of the coffee machine than their (former) field.
(Too many #4 here already, so I'll skip the numbering)
What about clustering all Linux enthusiasts' computers together and cracking Microsoft's signing key, SETI-style? I'm not sure about the mathematics there (taking longer than the galaxy will exist, etc.), but maybe it's possible. Or maybe somebody made a mistake and the key is much weaker than it is thought at the moment (see PS3).
However, as the GP correctly stated, The Hobbit is very different to LotR, and might need a different angle. For one, there's no epic battle with thousands of orcs in this book. The Battle of Five Armies at the end doesn't even come close to what's in LotR.
A 300 page novel requires substantial cutting to fit into a movie. A short story makes a good two hour movie. Most novels can't fit in under 10 hours of screen time without leaving out large parts...
That's why I like storytelling via games so much (when done in a good manner) It's much more immersive than books, but has a lot of time for getting across the story, since a 10 hours game is generally considered to be one of the shorter ones.
The point is not learning how to do complex calculation, the point is by learning these mathematical subjects you develop certain skills in logic, problem solving , and in critical thinking.
I don't know where you're from, but here none of this is taught in the subject that's declared as being "Mathematics" in school. What we learn here is akin to a cooking course where you learn to cook instant meals.
Compare and contrast with Apple, which spent far, far less developing and launching both the iPhone and iPad, products which turned a profit almost immediately.
Don't be so sure about that... the iPad was in development for about a decade before it launched. Being so secretive, we'll probably never know what the total R&D costs were, but they sure weren't low.
Another peeve is how their delivery method makes it difficult to back up the installation files.
Uh, just copy the applications from/Applications to somewhere else? Mac App Store apps aren't allowed to ship with anything else than what's lying there.
With Apple's huge pile of cash they could shell out a few bucks to improve their file manager. It's a child's toy compared to what it should have evolved into by now.
The file cabinet metaphor is on its way out on the Apple platforms, and Apple isn't know for investing a lot of money into legacy tools.
The dock is nasty, too.
Not much to go by here for me...
And they could add some preference options for people who come from normal computing backgrounds -i.e., ones where the Home and End keys actually move to the beginning and end of the current line. Gee, that'd be awesome, wouldn't it?
No, Mac users are used to them moving to the start and end of the document. If Apple would change that, all Mac users would cry bloody murder. Cmd-left/right work just fine.
But will Apple lift so much as a finger to even consider improving what they already have in lieu of dreaming up more shiny to distract users from the fact that some aspects of their OS have been crappy from day one???
That's probably harder to sell than some shiny new features.
No, source code has no value except as A METHOD of explaining the idea. It is not the idea.
Well, that was my point. A patent is supposed to protect not an idea, but a concrete implementation, like a steam engine. You can't patent the concept of accelerating a car by heating some gas, you have to actually show how it is supposed to work (by using diagrams and text). However, you can patent the idea of clicking on a button to buy something in an online store, or using a shopping cart to represent the items you're about to buy there.
The only way to perfectly specify how a software idea is supposed to work is by showing the code. Everything else is vague and could be written by just about anyone. Patents were supposed to protect the inventor, not somebody with a typewriter/word processor and some vague idea. Originally, patents were required to include a working physical model of the implementation. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.
In addition to that, actually implementing software is the hard part, not coming up with ideas for software. However, that's a holly different topic and not covered by current IP laws at all.
IF and THEN are common English, I didn't have to think about those.
Still, you can't use WHEN or UNLESS (in some languages at least).
PRINT was a common word for newspaper or magazine text, so it clearly had to do something with text.
All that does is helping you remember the word itself, not what it does. What you did is just a mnemonic trick to learn faster.
A computer language using native language terms really is easier to learn.
If you are having trouble remembering pronounceable four-letter character combinations, you shouldn't try to program anyways, since there you have to juggle around hundreds of variables at the same time in your mind. Better learn memorizing first (by using the technique you described, for example).
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in our society we glorify sociopathic assholes who only care about making money and enforcing their narcissistic vision.
In Isaacson's book, there's a chapter on how Jobs told Larry Ellison to stop caring so much about making money, and thinking more about the products. I don't think making money was his driving force. I definitely won't argue about the other two characteristics you've described, though :)
Everybody has to learn this stuff eventually.
Yes, and those lessons are best learned with Other People's Money(tm).
No one bothers with the niche anymore and that's too bad.
Kickstarter takes care of a lot of niche projects and projects that turn out to be not-that-niche-after-all now.
So the cops can't find this guy, they're wringing their hands in helplessness. Along comes "An IT Genius" that traces the house by IP ... and the cops couldn't call any of their guys on the entire force to do that?
As far as I've heard from friends and experienced myself, the cops don't give much of a shit unless child porn or something similar is involved, or you lead them at the person who did it yourself.
That's a very picky philosophy. That's like boycotting Wallmart for their work ethics, but only on Tuesdays.
Apple's defining property is "they're not Microsoft."
That aspect has become less and less important over the last few years. Microsoft is now a blip on the radar of the multimedia product company. The Mac has become irrelevant, and Windows Phone is at around 2% market share in the mobile area, where Apple really matters now.
If you're buying Apple products in 2012, then inter-company politics is probably the only thing you do care about. It sure as hell ain't the products themselves.
I don't think so (it's definitely not true for me, and I have an MacBook, iMac, iPhone and iPad). It's more about the app infrastructure on the mobile devices. There's nothing where there is no app for that.
I agree that that map app is flawed, but first releases of anything usually is.
The problem is, this is iOS version 6, not version 1. The customers don't care about inter-company politics. If they would, they wouldn't buy Apple products in the first place, being the kind of company it is.
What about "Help, I've been locked into my car's trunk by some guys with balaclavas!"?
I think they're also bred for longer shelf life. The bananas you can get in the tropics would arrive in the US as a brown goo after being on a ship for one or two months.
Taste has very little to do with organic vs. inorganic and an awful lot to do with how it spent its last few hours. Stuff which ripens fast then goes mushy (bananas, tomatoes, strawberries...) is very susceptible to this.
As far as I know, bananas actually do get sweeter when they're cut off, but that's the only exception.
The huge buzz caught the attention of executives and they decided to take their high-concept property and rape it's corpse for all it was worth, even before it launched. Pencil dick middle managers smelled another sims, and with dreams of endless expansions, tried as hard as they could to turn spore in to a product they could sell the public incrementally over many years.
FYI, there's a game now that's using the stuff from Spore (Spore Engine?). It's called Darkspore, and it's actually fun to play (for me at least, and unlike the original game). However, it has nothing to do with the concept behind Spore itself, it's just apparent from the unique creature style (and the creature editor for upgrades).
The only problem I have with it is that even though I bought it on Steam (when it was on sale), I have to sign into my EA account every time I want to play it, even when I only want to play single player, entering my ~20 character randomly generated password. This DRM is probably also the reason for this online-only push.
The hint was that it was a bunch of nobodies with no track record asking for money before they'd delivered anything beyond an hilariously badly written "Hello, world".
Another one is that they offered physically mailing a CD at the $5 pledge level. From the comments on the project I see that they wisely simply ignored this part of the deal, I guess it'd have costed them more than $5 per CD to do that (from what I've gathered from other Kickstarter projects).
I guess I must have gone to a fundamentally different kind of college. Nearly every single professor I encountered wasn't excited about what was already known in their respective field but got disturbingly excited about untestable theories, suspected areas of interest and tantalizingly unknowable facts. My computer science professors would treat P=NP in an almost religious fashion -- treating that solution like the face of god. Sometimes it was just a numbers game like natural language parsing and parts of speech tagging. Here's the best-to-date accuracy, can you beat it? Ask my physics professors about entropy in space or, worse, string theory and they'd shortly be speaking in tongues. My philosophy instructors, even, loved to ask questions that had no clear answer: would you murder one person to save thousands? Why did Charles-Henri Sanson, the executioner of 3,000 lives in Paris, survive the revolution and what moral implications entailed him executing his former boss the king?
The tasks of most professors I met were reduced to management stuff. They only appear as authors on papers because of things they did while being a postdoc, or because they want to be added to a student's paper (in order to get their references up). They had more up-to-date knowledge about the issues of the faculty's politics and the mechanical problems of the coffee machine than their (former) field.
The DMCA only applies when the encryption is trying to protect a copyrightable work, which is not the case here.
(Too many #4 here already, so I'll skip the numbering)
What about clustering all Linux enthusiasts' computers together and cracking Microsoft's signing key, SETI-style? I'm not sure about the mathematics there (taking longer than the galaxy will exist, etc.), but maybe it's possible. Or maybe somebody made a mistake and the key is much weaker than it is thought at the moment (see PS3).
However, as the GP correctly stated, The Hobbit is very different to LotR, and might need a different angle. For one, there's no epic battle with thousands of orcs in this book. The Battle of Five Armies at the end doesn't even come close to what's in LotR.
A 300 page novel requires substantial cutting to fit into a movie. A short story makes a good two hour movie. Most novels can't fit in under 10 hours of screen time without leaving out large parts...
That's why I like storytelling via games so much (when done in a good manner) It's much more immersive than books, but has a lot of time for getting across the story, since a 10 hours game is generally considered to be one of the shorter ones.
The niche between the iPad niche and the ultrabook niche? Must have been a genius who came up with this.
The point is not learning how to do complex calculation, the point is by learning these mathematical subjects you develop certain skills in logic, problem solving , and in critical thinking.
I don't know where you're from, but here none of this is taught in the subject that's declared as being "Mathematics" in school. What we learn here is akin to a cooking course where you learn to cook instant meals.
Compare and contrast with Apple, which spent far, far less developing and launching both the iPhone and iPad, products which turned a profit almost immediately.
Don't be so sure about that... the iPad was in development for about a decade before it launched. Being so secretive, we'll probably never know what the total R&D costs were, but they sure weren't low.
Another peeve is how their delivery method makes it difficult to back up the installation files.
Uh, just copy the applications from /Applications to somewhere else? Mac App Store apps aren't allowed to ship with anything else than what's lying there.
With Apple's huge pile of cash they could shell out a few bucks to improve their file manager. It's a child's toy compared to what it should have evolved into by now.
The file cabinet metaphor is on its way out on the Apple platforms, and Apple isn't know for investing a lot of money into legacy tools.
The dock is nasty, too.
Not much to go by here for me...
And they could add some preference options for people who come from normal computing backgrounds -i.e., ones where the Home and End keys actually move to the beginning and end of the current line. Gee, that'd be awesome, wouldn't it?
No, Mac users are used to them moving to the start and end of the document. If Apple would change that, all Mac users would cry bloody murder. Cmd-left/right work just fine.
But will Apple lift so much as a finger to even consider improving what they already have in lieu of dreaming up more shiny to distract users from the fact that some aspects of their OS have been crappy from day one???
That's probably harder to sell than some shiny new features.
No, source code has no value except as A METHOD of explaining the idea. It is not the idea.
Well, that was my point. A patent is supposed to protect not an idea, but a concrete implementation, like a steam engine. You can't patent the concept of accelerating a car by heating some gas, you have to actually show how it is supposed to work (by using diagrams and text). However, you can patent the idea of clicking on a button to buy something in an online store, or using a shopping cart to represent the items you're about to buy there.
The only way to perfectly specify how a software idea is supposed to work is by showing the code. Everything else is vague and could be written by just about anyone. Patents were supposed to protect the inventor, not somebody with a typewriter/word processor and some vague idea. Originally, patents were required to include a working physical model of the implementation. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.
In addition to that, actually implementing software is the hard part, not coming up with ideas for software. However, that's a holly different topic and not covered by current IP laws at all.
You can't patent an idea.
Now you have to explain how software patents without full source code included are different from an idea.
IF and THEN are common English, I didn't have to think about those.
Still, you can't use WHEN or UNLESS (in some languages at least).
PRINT was a common word for newspaper or magazine text, so it clearly had to do something with text.
All that does is helping you remember the word itself, not what it does. What you did is just a mnemonic trick to learn faster.
A computer language using native language terms really is easier to learn.
If you are having trouble remembering pronounceable four-letter character combinations, you shouldn't try to program anyways, since there you have to juggle around hundreds of variables at the same time in your mind. Better learn memorizing first (by using the technique you described, for example).