...but it's not the company that suffers (directly, at least) because of the bug, it's their poor customers. The company is the only organization that can truly protect their customers (by removing the design flaw), therefore the best way to help the innocent victims of the design flaw is to help - if only in letting them know what you know - the company fix the problem.
If you're party to knowledge that if left unsaid will allow harm to come to innocent bystanders, generally the right thing to do is to pass on that knowledge.
Why Slashdot decided to present the 2004 article as the key message of the article,
Well, just an idea, but maybe it's because the Redrum sock-puppet account that you frequently use to submit your articles to the front page actually wrote the summary that way?
Your credibility has always been questionable, but you're now being disingenuous, if not completely dishonest, in pretending that your original article, unambiguously titled Those OS X iPods? They're Already Here! Pixo, ARM, and the Mac OS, was trying to claim anything other than that current iPods already run OS X, with the Pixo system running over the top of a "Mach/BSD" (I assume you mean XNU) based system.
Everyone gets fooled from time to time. Those with credibility own up to it, they don't pretend that they were never fooled and then have the gall to accuse their readers of being unable to read.
The iPhone does have XNU (which is Mach based), but it most certainly does not have the BSD userland.
Isn't it time roughlydrafted.com links were banned from Slashdot?
Re:I was hooked until the guy showed his ls skills
on
iPods Don't Run OS X
·
· Score: 1
Actually the fact it was Roughly Drafted, one of the worst fanboi sites I've ever seen (yet one that manages to get almost every frickin' article linked to from Slashdot) should have been enough to raise a large number of flags.
But in this case the language is appropriate. Torvalds is only promoting the "freedom" of people who want to restrict the freedom of everyone else. This is not remotely like our President's attempts to oversimplify the motives of those who have attacked America by raising issues of little or no relevance.
There's little different in the approach to freedom taken by GPLv3 than that of GPLv2, so Torvalds's stance is self-evidently hypocritical. Meanwhile, he's attacking the GPLv3 authors as "hypocrites" for putting up restrictions against those who'd restrict others, a position that strikes me as similar to protesting that laws mandating imprisonment for crimes of kidnapping and hostage taking are "hypocritical". It's a weird, juvenile, position, of the type most of us grew out of as teenagers.
It's not even a price cut, so much as a spec bump. The original PS3 prices were $500 for the low-end model, and $600 for the high end model. This announcement is that the new prices are, ah, $500 for the low-end model and $600 for the high-end. All that's changed is that both models have been bumped a little such that the new low end model has the same spec as the old high end model.
Anyone who was saying "No, I will not buy a PS3 because of the price" is unlikely to be satisfied by this move.
RIAA Invades Poland Posted by Zonk on 1939-09-01 19:51
from the 45rpm piracy dept
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes:
"The BBC Home Service is reporting that the jackbooted thugs of teh RIAA have just crossed the border into Poland, having already annexed Czechoslovakia and closed down hundreds of independent labels in Germany. Is this yet another arm of their campaign against innocent 12 year old grandmothers? Are you being sued? Call 1-800-SLASHDOTAMBULANCECHASER now!"
Update: 09/01 23:53 GMT by CT: Lots of readers have asked us to correct a slight error in the above, it's Nazi Germany that's invaded Poland, not the RIAA.
Jobs has also said that the iPhone isn't programmable (except Web2.0) because a programmable phone would, upon crashing, take down Cingular/AT&T's network.
Jobs isn't above lying occasionally. The power consumption of CDMA (including the W-CDMA needed for UMTS support) chipsets, while higher than the relatively power-efficient GSM, isn't so high that 3G phones aren't being made by every other manufacturer that have perfectly adequate battery lives. Indeed, proportionally, the additional overhead of introducing UMTS to the iPhone, the rest of whose electronics are probably quite hungry compared to an average flip phone, is probably quite small.
I don't know what the true reason for the iPhone's lack of 3G is. But, on the face of it, the power consumption argument is clearly false. This is Steve Jobs buying time. Perhaps it's patent licensing issues that are still in negotiation. Perhaps Apple can't find a chipset reliable enough. Perhaps they want to hold off until UMTS chipsets that support the 1700/2100MHz spectrum (just licensed in the US and not yet rolled out) are widely available.
Only read "Round 1" so far, but the article is, dubious quotes that really don't give a fair impression of the article aside, pretty much one of the most interesting things I've read in a while. I do recommend RTFAing.
Not sure if it is or not, but it is perfectly possible for copyright holders to bypass SoundExchange and negotiate (lower) royalty rates directly with the Internet Radio stations.
And that, friends, is ultimately the solution. If Internet Radio stations would just drop music that hasn't been made available to them at reasonable, practical, rates then (a) they'll continue to survive and (b) SoundExchange will need to review its rates or face oblivion. The only way it would benefit SoundExchange and its members to continue to charge high rates is if they don't want their music played on Internet Radio stations at all.
The real question here is why the various groups representing Internet Radio aren't doing this.
Given that in a sizable number of cases, probably even the majority, the artists actually own the copyrights (with the publishers the owners of the exclusive distribution rights, licensed from the artists), it strikes me as still ludicrous even if it was that easy to forfeit copyrights over a supposedly filed in bad faith lawsuit (which will be hard to show.)
Well, kinda, I mean, by definition that's true, as iPhone uses Safari, so it's effectively saying "anything that works on iPhone works on iPhone"
But if people are more specific, and say things like "Yes, but my page renders ok on the Mac version of Safari, will it work on iPhone?", I would imagine the answer may differ.
Most obvious thing I can see failing? UIs that rely upon mouseovers to trigger drop down menus. Seems to be very common, obviously these things will work fine on the Windows and Mac versions of Safari. But with no "mouseover" concept on iPhone, I would imagine these UIs will fail miserably there unless the web designer has been smart enough to ensure that simple clicking also triggers menu displays.
Interestingly, there's an example of such a UI at www.wireless.att.com, hovering over the "Learn", "Shop", and "Support" links brings up the appropriate submenus. That said, AT&T has been sane enough to ensure buttons themselves are clickable, jumping to intermediate pages with the submenus brought up by default.
Right now it's the OSI fanboys modding me down for pointing out that Perens' claim to invent the idea of "open" source is false and that "open" meant something before he opened his mouth on the subject
Not sure what this off-topic rant has to do with anything, but I've never seen Perens claim he "invented" open source. Far from it, he's always claimed its the same thing as Free Software and given appropriate credit to RMS et al.
That, however, he was a part of the original group that promoted the term as an alternative/replacement for the phrase "Free software" is beyond question. It is also beyond question that he created the "Open Source Definition", a commonly accepted definition for what open source is.
If you're being modded down, it's because you're lying about what people are claiming.
Higher quality codec can mean, as the article assumes, higher quality/same bitrate. But it can also mean same quality/lower bitrate.
I've used EDGE a great deal on T-Mobile's network, and I can tell you that while it works, it's not exactly speedy. While much of the problem is with latency, the bandwidth isn't great either, with 64kbps being a typical top speed. Supposedly AT&T are upgrading their network to make sure that EDGE's higher, theoretical, speeds are attainable, but I'd be surprised if users get to experience anything better than 128kbps, and then only when the network isn't congested.
My assumption is that the use of H.264 is to reduce bandwidth requirements, making YouTube on iPhone a practical proposition, without compromising too much on quality, not to actually improve the quality.
The major difference between free software and open source is the difference between "scent" and "odor" (apologies for the example, I don't mean that pejoratively against either term.) Nominally, the two are synonyms, but the promoters of each are careful to emphasize the subtexts and nuances of their preferred term.
Free software is, effectively, a shoring up of intellectual freedom based upon the right and duty to freely share information. Open Source is a cool software development model that's way better than traditional proprietary development because it makes use of cooperation between otherwise competing developers, and it is only possible through the the right and duty to freely share information.
The right and duty to freely share information are constants, but the nuances are different.
I've heard people re-invent the terms believing pseudo-pragmatism is at the heart of Open Source, but usually they seriously misunderstand the mindsets of the people they talk about. For example, use of copyleft licenses is often seen as a "Free Software" thing, because the FSF (and RMS in particular) invented the GPL. However, the GPL is more likely to be useful to a project whose founders are supporters of an open source development model mindset, as it acts as an equalizer and encourages the creation of a development community. Some free software advocates, notably Theo DeRaadt, are strongly anti-GPL, believing it undermines intellectual freedom.
It's nuances, not technical definitions, that make up the differences between the two terms.
Yes, because of Safari's excellent CSS and Javascript debuggers, HTML/Javascript editors, and its ability to resize itself automatically to the iPhone's screen size, providing only UI elements available to iPhone users.
Oh wait, it doesn't do any of those things. It really is Yet Another Web Browser for Windows. You know, Dave Schroeder, who was the first person I read to really popularize the idea that Safari is somehow an IDE has a lot to answer for.
If the US government didn't give free and good healthcare to people detained indefinitely at gitmo, the public would complain. Quite rightly in my opinion.
Well, that's unarguably correct, so about two seconds of analysis of Moore's argument should result in something to tell us what he was actually complaining about. Now, let's see. The argument was something like "9/11 first responders got worse healthcare than suspected terrorists at Gitmo." We've eliminated the possibility Moore might be complaining about the standard of healthcare given at Gitmo. So, that just leaves us with the 9/11 first responders.
Now, here's a thought. I realize you have to stop typing for a second to think it, but could it be, maybe, that Moore's problem is with the healthcare of the 9/11 first responders? You know, what he could be complaining about isn't that healthcare given to suspected terrorists is too much, it might be that the healthcare given to genuine heroes is too little?
but aspiring to present both arguments in as equal a light as possible.
There has never been a time in history where a journalist with any self worth has tried to break a discussion of fact into two opposing arguments, and present both the one he knows is wrong and the one he believes is right as "equal".
A journalist's job is to report the truth, not invent debates.
The "iPhone SDK" argument keeps being put forth by Dave Schroeder and other Apple defenders and it really doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Aside from anything else, Jobs himself contradicted this argument when he presented the browser at WWDC, going so far as to predict an intended 25% marketshare at some point in the near future.
Even if the argument was to be taken seriously, as an SDK Safari sucks. The UI is designed to be a close clone of the Mac version, it's not possible to force the browser to work in "iPhone" mode, resizing the window and turning off features unavailable in the iPhone version (from plug-ins to UI features not implemented there), and the developers were so obsessed with speed issues they compiled it to run only on recent CPUs, with features such as SSE required (yet not tested for - users getting crashes with "COREGRAPHICS.DLL" should note this is the reason why.) An "SDK" doesn't need to be fast, especially if the aim is to replicate the environment of a much slower machine.
The reality is that Safari is what it claims to be, an alternative web browser for the PC, almost certainly aimed at driving up Safari's marketshare and forcing developers to take it seriously. It is not an SDK. It is moronic to think a desktop browser with no serious debugger features and no UI emulation environment is intended to be primarily a developer's tool.
And it sucks, it was a dumb move on Apple's part to release the beta without more extensive internal testing, it's highly unpopular and has done Apple no end of damage. They should withdraw the beta immediately, do damage control, and release the "real thing" only after a lot more thought.
Well, yeah, but we also need lawyers to be employed by Slashdot to act as educators and legal experts for any story, not advocating one side or the other, but at least clarifying points like this for people likely to be bamboozled by misleading summaries.
It's a shame legal jargon quoted a little out of context should have an entire community thinking a judge wants someone to pull the RAM cards out of computers and hand them over to the plaintiff.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're party to knowledge that if left unsaid will allow harm to come to innocent bystanders, generally the right thing to do is to pass on that knowledge.
Well, just an idea, but maybe it's because the Redrum sock-puppet account that you frequently use to submit your articles to the front page actually wrote the summary that way?
Your credibility has always been questionable, but you're now being disingenuous, if not completely dishonest, in pretending that your original article, unambiguously titled Those OS X iPods? They're Already Here! Pixo, ARM, and the Mac OS, was trying to claim anything other than that current iPods already run OS X, with the Pixo system running over the top of a "Mach/BSD" (I assume you mean XNU) based system.
Everyone gets fooled from time to time. Those with credibility own up to it, they don't pretend that they were never fooled and then have the gall to accuse their readers of being unable to read.
The iPhone does have XNU (which is Mach based), but it most certainly does not have the BSD userland.
Isn't it time roughlydrafted.com links were banned from Slashdot?
Actually the fact it was Roughly Drafted, one of the worst fanboi sites I've ever seen (yet one that manages to get almost every frickin' article linked to from Slashdot) should have been enough to raise a large number of flags.
This is bad, even by RD's standards.
But in this case the language is appropriate. Torvalds is only promoting the "freedom" of people who want to restrict the freedom of everyone else. This is not remotely like our President's attempts to oversimplify the motives of those who have attacked America by raising issues of little or no relevance.
There's little different in the approach to freedom taken by GPLv3 than that of GPLv2, so Torvalds's stance is self-evidently hypocritical. Meanwhile, he's attacking the GPLv3 authors as "hypocrites" for putting up restrictions against those who'd restrict others, a position that strikes me as similar to protesting that laws mandating imprisonment for crimes of kidnapping and hostage taking are "hypocritical". It's a weird, juvenile, position, of the type most of us grew out of as teenagers.
It's not even a price cut, so much as a spec bump. The original PS3 prices were $500 for the low-end model, and $600 for the high end model. This announcement is that the new prices are, ah, $500 for the low-end model and $600 for the high-end. All that's changed is that both models have been bumped a little such that the new low end model has the same spec as the old high end model.
Anyone who was saying "No, I will not buy a PS3 because of the price" is unlikely to be satisfied by this move.
Flashback to Slashdot back in 1939:
RIAA Invades Poland
Posted by Zonk on 1939-09-01 19:51
from the 45rpm piracy dept
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes:
Update: 09/01 23:53 GMT by CT: Lots of readers have asked us to correct a slight error in the above, it's Nazi Germany that's invaded Poland, not the RIAA.
Jobs has also said that the iPhone isn't programmable (except Web2.0) because a programmable phone would, upon crashing, take down Cingular/AT&T's network.
Jobs isn't above lying occasionally. The power consumption of CDMA (including the W-CDMA needed for UMTS support) chipsets, while higher than the relatively power-efficient GSM, isn't so high that 3G phones aren't being made by every other manufacturer that have perfectly adequate battery lives. Indeed, proportionally, the additional overhead of introducing UMTS to the iPhone, the rest of whose electronics are probably quite hungry compared to an average flip phone, is probably quite small.
I don't know what the true reason for the iPhone's lack of 3G is. But, on the face of it, the power consumption argument is clearly false. This is Steve Jobs buying time. Perhaps it's patent licensing issues that are still in negotiation. Perhaps Apple can't find a chipset reliable enough. Perhaps they want to hold off until UMTS chipsets that support the 1700/2100MHz spectrum (just licensed in the US and not yet rolled out) are widely available.
Power consumption though? Absolute nonsense.
Only read "Round 1" so far, but the article is, dubious quotes that really don't give a fair impression of the article aside, pretty much one of the most interesting things I've read in a while. I do recommend RTFAing.
(Crap: hit submit instead of preview. It's like rain on my wedding day.)
Still wrong. It's We treat Cuba like we do because the CIA's plot to assassinate Castro was stopped by Bobby Kennedy. (Source)
Still wrong. It's We treat Cuba like we do because the CIA's plot to assassinate Castro Kennedy was stopped by Bobby Kennedy.
Not sure if it is or not, but it is perfectly possible for copyright holders to bypass SoundExchange and negotiate (lower) royalty rates directly with the Internet Radio stations.
And that, friends, is ultimately the solution. If Internet Radio stations would just drop music that hasn't been made available to them at reasonable, practical, rates then (a) they'll continue to survive and (b) SoundExchange will need to review its rates or face oblivion. The only way it would benefit SoundExchange and its members to continue to charge high rates is if they don't want their music played on Internet Radio stations at all.
The real question here is why the various groups representing Internet Radio aren't doing this.
Given that in a sizable number of cases, probably even the majority, the artists actually own the copyrights (with the publishers the owners of the exclusive distribution rights, licensed from the artists), it strikes me as still ludicrous even if it was that easy to forfeit copyrights over a supposedly filed in bad faith lawsuit (which will be hard to show.)
This is another publicity stunt.
Well, kinda, I mean, by definition that's true, as iPhone uses Safari, so it's effectively saying "anything that works on iPhone works on iPhone"
But if people are more specific, and say things like "Yes, but my page renders ok on the Mac version of Safari, will it work on iPhone?", I would imagine the answer may differ.
Most obvious thing I can see failing? UIs that rely upon mouseovers to trigger drop down menus. Seems to be very common, obviously these things will work fine on the Windows and Mac versions of Safari. But with no "mouseover" concept on iPhone, I would imagine these UIs will fail miserably there unless the web designer has been smart enough to ensure that simple clicking also triggers menu displays.
Interestingly, there's an example of such a UI at www.wireless.att.com, hovering over the "Learn", "Shop", and "Support" links brings up the appropriate submenus. That said, AT&T has been sane enough to ensure buttons themselves are clickable, jumping to intermediate pages with the submenus brought up by default.
Not sure what this off-topic rant has to do with anything, but I've never seen Perens claim he "invented" open source. Far from it, he's always claimed its the same thing as Free Software and given appropriate credit to RMS et al.
That, however, he was a part of the original group that promoted the term as an alternative/replacement for the phrase "Free software" is beyond question. It is also beyond question that he created the "Open Source Definition", a commonly accepted definition for what open source is.
If you're being modded down, it's because you're lying about what people are claiming.
Higher quality codec can mean, as the article assumes, higher quality/same bitrate. But it can also mean same quality/lower bitrate.
I've used EDGE a great deal on T-Mobile's network, and I can tell you that while it works, it's not exactly speedy. While much of the problem is with latency, the bandwidth isn't great either, with 64kbps being a typical top speed. Supposedly AT&T are upgrading their network to make sure that EDGE's higher, theoretical, speeds are attainable, but I'd be surprised if users get to experience anything better than 128kbps, and then only when the network isn't congested.
My assumption is that the use of H.264 is to reduce bandwidth requirements, making YouTube on iPhone a practical proposition, without compromising too much on quality, not to actually improve the quality.
The major difference between free software and open source is the difference between "scent" and "odor" (apologies for the example, I don't mean that pejoratively against either term.) Nominally, the two are synonyms, but the promoters of each are careful to emphasize the subtexts and nuances of their preferred term.
Free software is, effectively, a shoring up of intellectual freedom based upon the right and duty to freely share information. Open Source is a cool software development model that's way better than traditional proprietary development because it makes use of cooperation between otherwise competing developers, and it is only possible through the the right and duty to freely share information.
The right and duty to freely share information are constants, but the nuances are different.
I've heard people re-invent the terms believing pseudo-pragmatism is at the heart of Open Source, but usually they seriously misunderstand the mindsets of the people they talk about. For example, use of copyleft licenses is often seen as a "Free Software" thing, because the FSF (and RMS in particular) invented the GPL. However, the GPL is more likely to be useful to a project whose founders are supporters of an open source development model mindset, as it acts as an equalizer and encourages the creation of a development community. Some free software advocates, notably Theo DeRaadt, are strongly anti-GPL, believing it undermines intellectual freedom.
It's nuances, not technical definitions, that make up the differences between the two terms.
Yes, because of Safari's excellent CSS and Javascript debuggers, HTML/Javascript editors, and its ability to resize itself automatically to the iPhone's screen size, providing only UI elements available to iPhone users.
Oh wait, it doesn't do any of those things. It really is Yet Another Web Browser for Windows. You know, Dave Schroeder, who was the first person I read to really popularize the idea that Safari is somehow an IDE has a lot to answer for.
I'm not buying a Blue Gene until they port AmigaOS to it, like God intended.
Well, that's unarguably correct, so about two seconds of analysis of Moore's argument should result in something to tell us what he was actually complaining about. Now, let's see. The argument was something like "9/11 first responders got worse healthcare than suspected terrorists at Gitmo." We've eliminated the possibility Moore might be complaining about the standard of healthcare given at Gitmo. So, that just leaves us with the 9/11 first responders.
Now, here's a thought. I realize you have to stop typing for a second to think it, but could it be, maybe, that Moore's problem is with the healthcare of the 9/11 first responders? You know, what he could be complaining about isn't that healthcare given to suspected terrorists is too much, it might be that the healthcare given to genuine heroes is too little?
There has never been a time in history where a journalist with any self worth has tried to break a discussion of fact into two opposing arguments, and present both the one he knows is wrong and the one he believes is right as "equal".
A journalist's job is to report the truth, not invent debates.
The "iPhone SDK" argument keeps being put forth by Dave Schroeder and other Apple defenders and it really doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Aside from anything else, Jobs himself contradicted this argument when he presented the browser at WWDC, going so far as to predict an intended 25% marketshare at some point in the near future.
Even if the argument was to be taken seriously, as an SDK Safari sucks. The UI is designed to be a close clone of the Mac version, it's not possible to force the browser to work in "iPhone" mode, resizing the window and turning off features unavailable in the iPhone version (from plug-ins to UI features not implemented there), and the developers were so obsessed with speed issues they compiled it to run only on recent CPUs, with features such as SSE required (yet not tested for - users getting crashes with "COREGRAPHICS.DLL" should note this is the reason why.) An "SDK" doesn't need to be fast, especially if the aim is to replicate the environment of a much slower machine.
The reality is that Safari is what it claims to be, an alternative web browser for the PC, almost certainly aimed at driving up Safari's marketshare and forcing developers to take it seriously. It is not an SDK. It is moronic to think a desktop browser with no serious debugger features and no UI emulation environment is intended to be primarily a developer's tool.
And it sucks, it was a dumb move on Apple's part to release the beta without more extensive internal testing, it's highly unpopular and has done Apple no end of damage. They should withdraw the beta immediately, do damage control, and release the "real thing" only after a lot more thought.
What, no fruit & vegetable cart to crash through?
Well, yeah, but we also need lawyers to be employed by Slashdot to act as educators and legal experts for any story, not advocating one side or the other, but at least clarifying points like this for people likely to be bamboozled by misleading summaries.
It's a shame legal jargon quoted a little out of context should have an entire community thinking a judge wants someone to pull the RAM cards out of computers and hand them over to the plaintiff.
Try re-reading what I wrote.
Indeed it does. Which is my entire point, is it not?