I didn't ignore it, but I don't think it comes anywhere near exonerating Apple.
The problem was that itunes was sending some personal data outside my machine without my explicit knowledge and consent. Even if Apple only uses that data transiently and then destroys it, it was still published against my will.
To make matters worse, they were sending it in plaintext. So my personal information was exposed not just to Apple, but to any part of the net that's logically between me and them. Even if you consider Apple's lack of permanent storage of data to let them off the hook, they were still exposing my information to many other entities who may not be so kind.
All of that's fine... if I explicitly chose for it to happen. I'm actually a big fan of recommendation services, and might even choose to use this function at some time in the future. But the important disctinction is whether *I* chose that exposing my personal information was a worthwhile price for the service I was getting.
I'm very fond of Apple, but I was incensed by the disregard for privacy that itunes 6.0.2 seemed to indicate. I used their feedback web form to convey my alarm, made some grumpy posts to their discussion forum, and generally tried to express to them that this was a serious transgression.
Apparently they heard and reacted to me and the presumed lots of other people saying the same thing, and reacted in precisely the right way. I never much cared about the mini-store one way or the other, I was only bothered by the transmission of personal data without my very explicit knowledge and consent. Defaulting to off with a prominent opt-in dialog is a perfectly good solution to this.
So it appears that it was just an oversight on their part, a concern that never crossed their minds, and that they were willing to make corrections as soon as the issue was brought to their attention. That seems quite forgivable, and indeed I'm proud of Apple for reacting so quickly and correctly.
I'd guess that between 10-20 percent of iPods are defective.
Refresh my memory, was your title at Apple "Vice President of Product Design", or "Director of Warranty Services"? Of course I'm certain that you are in some such position at Apple in order to be able to make these claims with such confidence, rather than just pulling completely laughable and unsubstantiated numbers out of your ass. That would just be embarrassing.
So you're suggesting that there are three million defective ipods out there? That Apple ships more defective mp3 players than everyone else in the world put together ships mp3 players at all? And you're the only one to have noticed or commented on this?
... not to mention the number that come in for service where I work.
Oh. Or you're basing this on the fact that you work at Best Buy or something, and have noticed that nearly a hundred percent of the ones people bring in for service have problems. And seem to have difficulty with the idea that maybe the ones that are working perfectly don't get brought in for repairs.
Well, allow me to counter your silly anecdotal claims with some of my own. I've purchased five ipods myself over the years, going back to the original 5G. And I haven't bought new ones because the old ones had problems, but because I wanted to upgrade to newer models. I've given all the previous ones away to friends, all of whom are still using them to this day without issues.
So I'd guess that exactly 0% of all ipods are defective. And I'd say my guess is, quite literally, as good as yours.
I've been an admin of a mud for well over a decade now, and I can tell you that no method of discipline will backfire faster or harder than this.
"Griefers" are mostly people who've gotten bored by the real game, and are trying to make their own game to entertain themselves. Usually that's trying to make themselves as annoying as possible, and creating as much misery and unhappiness as they can.
But note that this new game isn't about winning, or accomplishing anything in the context of the original game. Like any other troll, they just want attention, and attention from an admin is the best kind. So sure, an admin can easily make sure they they can't progress in the real game, but as long as the admin is involved and annoyed, the griefer is still winning his new game.
The only way around this seems to be to make the consequences for misbehaviour as impersonal, anonymous, and automated as possible. Only hobbling the griefer _without_ giving him the attention of a human can make it feel like not winning.
Dell's stated business model is to never develop, innovate, design, pioneer, or create anything new, but rather to execute the assembly, sales, delivery, and maintenance of other people's technology more efficiently than their competitors. They are open and unapologetic about this.
As business models go, it's not a terrible one. It does engender the "race to the bottom" phenomenon, but so far other people's technology has continued to advance rapidly enough to mostly offset that.
But regardless of whether it's a prudent business plan, it's not exactly the type of thing that bates breath. You also don't see many people all atwitter at product announcements from Walmart, either.
I'll infer that you consider the existence of God to be the primary illogical or unfounded assumption. After all, a "rational" person should never believe in anything until it is proven, right? Except rational people believe in plenty of things that are not proven, foremost being Reason itself. Another example would be the existence of the universe. Oh, does that sound silly? Let me rephrase it, then: the belief that we are not living in the Matrix. These beliefs cannot be proven. They are axioms. You can accept or reject an axiom, but not through pure reasoning.
Hint: any time you find yourself inferring or rephrasing someone else's argument, you're most likely just creating a strawman, whether intentionally or not. That certainly appears to be the case here.
If one wishes to be pedantic, very close to nothing whatsoever is provable. Your Matrix reference is indeed the modern-day pop culture example thereof. A closer to canonical example would be Descartes contemplating whether it was possible to prove that anything--the world, his existence, his memories, other people--actually existed, or whether it was possible for them to all be artifacts of a malevolent demon that was intending to deceive him. (Hence the "I think, therefore I am" line that everyone loves to misunderstand. He wasn't asserting his purpose in life, he was listing the sum total of everything in the universe that could ever actually be proven to be true.)
But while this is all a fun philosophical and semantic game, it's disingenuous to suggest that because nothing can be absolutely proven, all things are at equal levels of non-proof. I absolutely cannot prove that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I can present some historical data and an astronomic theory that make it a far more reasonable assumption than the converse. "The sun will rise tomorrow" and "the sun will not rise tomorrow" are both assumptions, but that doesn't mean that they're on equal footing, or that we should just throw up our hands and refrain from predicting either one.
So no, I do not expect a rational person to refute gods because they cannot be absolutely proven to be true. I expect a rational person to refute gods because their existence would be contrary to a larger and more consistent set of evidence about the cosmos.
As some bloke name John McCarthy appears to have put it:
"An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a God. He has only to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question."
And it's good to see that the current sitting president has taken your optimization so much to hear that he has in fact never vetoed anything, ever.
But on the contrary, I'd say that continuing to veto every single bill for as long as it takes to convince the legislature to confine them to one issue each sounds like exactly the correct choice.
Uh, perhaps it would run the same version of 10.4 that the current Intel mac developer machines run? Y'know, the one that's based on the version of osx that's been kept ported to x86 since the product was first released five years ago?
Your post is long on confidence, but short on support for your very strange assertions.
You keep bringing up the Russian mafia thing. Even if we grant for the sake of argument that a Russian mafia does indeed take a substantial cut of this company's money... so? Wouldn't that make the company in question a victim, and not really appropriate to hold accountable for what its assailants may do with the money they steal from it?
If we're into that level of indirect responsibility, I'd be much more inclined to hold every tax-paying American company responsible for the few hundred thousand people that the US government has murdered in the last few years. I rather suspect that anything the Russian mafia has undertaken pales in comparison to that atrocity.
Recall that Intuit is one of the very small set of companies on whom Microsoft has focused their sights, expended years of effort trying to defeat--and failed utterly. Anyone remember Microsoft Money?
To say that Quicken is entrenched is to give short shrift to trenches the world over. I don't think that's a fight Apple wold pick while there are so many still-open markets available.
Oh, I love apple, but I wouldn't exempt them from this fine. The i was already tacky and cliche even when they released the imac in 1998, and it hasn't gotten any less so since then.
In fact, it's only gotten more absurd as it gets slapped on things less and less related to the internet. Can someone explain to me exactly what's internet-related about iDVD?
The use of itunes was the one good thing about the previous piece of crap. I guess that replacing it with their own proprietary subscription service will at least hasten the complete demise of this thing.
I'm sure that users will be _thrilled_ with the notion of needing to pay for their music twice in order to listen to it on their phones and on anything else.
I certainly think that Apple is the world's only current player with a serious chance of denting Microsoft's position. However, I don't think that cloning or emulation are ever likely to play a role in that attempt.
The problem with running Windows software (via Wine or whatever) is the same one that doomed OS/2: no companies will bother actually writing software for your real platform. How long do you think Adobe would continue writing mac-specific versions of their products if they could just write a single version for Windows and let the emulation be Apple's problem?
(And yes, this would be a damning situation for the mac; even if the code runs perfectly and speedily, the fundamental behaviours of foreign applications will always feel, well, foreign. It would never feel like anything but a Windows knockoff.)
And I think you're only partially correct that Apple's move to Intel wasn't occasioned by heat and performance issues; the ppc and x86 platforms have been leapfrogging one another forever. So the point of the move wasn't necessarily that Intel macs would be better than ppc macs, it's that they'd be _exactly_the_same_ as the Dell/HP/Lenovo offerings. Which means that Apple gets to compete solely on the OS (which they control, and which shines) rather than also on the cpu (which they don't, and which shines some years and not some others).
Hm. While the intent is good, I'm afraid that I have to take issue with this methodology. A couple of reasons:
Server software should certainly run as not-root. But it also needs to run as a different user than the one that owns its binaries and config files. (Or, indeed, anything on the filesystem other than the very specific files it needs to handle for its normal operation. Even logfiles should be opened first and then have privileges dropped.)
All package management systems of which I'm aware tend to operate on a per-system basis, not a per-user basis. And, all else being equal, package management is a great boon to system consistency.
The idea of allowing non-privileged users to admin applications can be a tricky one. For example, if the machine in question is a mail relay, and a "non-privileged" user has the ability to break that service, or accidentally turn it into a spam-friendly open relay, or expose all users' mail... that's not substantially less bad than the set of things that root could do. I'm not saying that there's never a place for application admins, but when the application is the machine's only raison d'être, separating admin access tends to be less meaningful.
If you're messing around the the date and compilers on live production servers, you've got bigger problems.
If you're doing these things on a development system that's hermetically sealed from the production environment, that's only medium bad--but it's also a separate issue from what the original submitter seemed to be asking.
The next time that server blows up and needs to be replaced, or we simply decide we need to add another one, building it is my problem, not those developers'. And it's a whole lot more problematic if I don't know all of what was done to get it into its current state.
Of course, that really just goes back to the fact that you should never do anything adminnish directly on a single server, ever. Your configuration management tool should do it for you, so it will also know to do it to the next one.
Removing all vestiges of Christianity from the government actually establishes atheism, or humanism, as the state religion.
Many of your arguments seem to be based upon the evaluation of atheism as a religion. Humanism is a philosophy which is orthogonal to atheism; neither are they the same thing, nor is either one of them a religion.
As the man said, "If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby."
If you doubt me, just look at the background of those who fled to this country to avoid religious repression.
Uh, and what exactly would looking at the pilgrims tell me about the structure of the united states? They lived in the same place a few hundred years earlier, and they were brutal religious zealots; what exactly is looking at them supposed to show me? Just a reminder of how glad I should be that such dogmatic savages had nothing to do with the forming of my nation?
All that the government must do is maintain neutrality, not favoring one view over another. Thus, if both evolution and ID are taught, neutrality is maintained. If ID is banned simply because it is religious, neutrality has been violated.
Much like Pascal's flawed wager, that argument might hold water if evolution and intelligent design were the only possible answers.
The government can maintain neutrality in one of two ways: either teach every single religious faith that is or has ever been held by any group of people, or teach none of them at all. Given that the former would require a standard education to take about nine hundred years, there really only seems to be one viable approach.
Remember, that neutrality for which you ask means that the pink bunny in your head doesn't get treated any differently than the green bunny in the head of some splinter Incan sect.
...we're the ones who are trying to open people's minds to a theory that more reliably accounts for the evidence we see than evolution does.
Uh, theistic creationism doesn't "account for" anything. It simply pushes all the questions off onto a scapegoat which it then completely declines to explain.
Literal Creationism has at least four main tenets:...
Did you maybe miss the part where the Bible starts off with two completely different and mutually exclusive stories of creation? The seven-days story and the garden-of-eden story are both very specific about the order in which events happened, and they are not compatible.
If the Bible cannot even be reconciled with itself, how can you possibly expect it to be taken seriously as a reference on anything else?
The bible is a lovely collection of folk stories. And I'm grateful to R for putting it together, but in about the same way that I'm grateful to the Brothers Grimm. I don't think either work is particularly well suited to a science classroom.
Um, what conflict of interest would that be? Violation of those laws against covering events in more than one text medium?
It hardly seems unethical--and certainly is not unusual--for a journalist to cover the same topic in both small pieces in periodicals and longer works published as books. Everyone from Ann Coulter to Al Franken seems to do this on a regular basis, and I'm having a hard time finding fault with the practice.
Is your complaint seriously that the New York Times article didn't include a line about "James Risen has also covered these events in an upcoming book!" That I would find slightly problematic, as advertising the book in the article would feel kind of sleazy.
First, they're not allowed to torture people anymore...
Sadly, they appear to have, at least for the moment, found a way around such onerous strictures as that expectation that we behave like human beings. McCain's bill mandates that all US interrogations conform to the methods laid out in the Army field manual.
Given that it appears to be passing unvetoably, the Pentagon has simply changed the manual.
I could give specific examples (I quite frequently select a paragraph or two and drag them into email or chat windows), but the real issue is that text is deeply fundamental to the way computers behave, and altering the consistency and predictability of such a cornerstone of user interaction is a dreadful idea.
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I didn't ignore it, but I don't think it comes anywhere near exonerating Apple.
The problem was that itunes was sending some personal data outside my machine without my explicit knowledge and consent. Even if Apple only uses that data transiently and then destroys it, it was still published against my will.
To make matters worse, they were sending it in plaintext. So my personal information was exposed not just to Apple, but to any part of the net that's logically between me and them. Even if you consider Apple's lack of permanent storage of data to let them off the hook, they were still exposing my information to many other entities who may not be so kind.
All of that's fine... if I explicitly chose for it to happen. I'm actually a big fan of recommendation services, and might even choose to use this function at some time in the future. But the important disctinction is whether *I* chose that exposing my personal information was a worthwhile price for the service I was getting.
I'm very fond of Apple, but I was incensed by the disregard for privacy that itunes 6.0.2 seemed to indicate. I used their feedback web form to convey my alarm, made some grumpy posts to their discussion forum, and generally tried to express to them that this was a serious transgression.
Apparently they heard and reacted to me and the presumed lots of other people saying the same thing, and reacted in precisely the right way. I never much cared about the mini-store one way or the other, I was only bothered by the transmission of personal data without my very explicit knowledge and consent. Defaulting to off with a prominent opt-in dialog is a perfectly good solution to this.
So it appears that it was just an oversight on their part, a concern that never crossed their minds, and that they were willing to make corrections as soon as the issue was brought to their attention. That seems quite forgivable, and indeed I'm proud of Apple for reacting so quickly and correctly.
So you're suggesting that there are three million defective ipods out there? That Apple ships more defective mp3 players than everyone else in the world put together ships mp3 players at all? And you're the only one to have noticed or commented on this?
Oh. Or you're basing this on the fact that you work at Best Buy or something, and have noticed that nearly a hundred percent of the ones people bring in for service have problems. And seem to have difficulty with the idea that maybe the ones that are working perfectly don't get brought in for repairs.Well, allow me to counter your silly anecdotal claims with some of my own. I've purchased five ipods myself over the years, going back to the original 5G. And I haven't bought new ones because the old ones had problems, but because I wanted to upgrade to newer models. I've given all the previous ones away to friends, all of whom are still using them to this day without issues.
So I'd guess that exactly 0% of all ipods are defective. And I'd say my guess is, quite literally, as good as yours.
I've been an admin of a mud for well over a decade now, and I can tell you that no method of discipline will backfire faster or harder than this.
"Griefers" are mostly people who've gotten bored by the real game, and are trying to make their own game to entertain themselves. Usually that's trying to make themselves as annoying as possible, and creating as much misery and unhappiness as they can.
But note that this new game isn't about winning, or accomplishing anything in the context of the original game. Like any other troll, they just want attention, and attention from an admin is the best kind. So sure, an admin can easily make sure they they can't progress in the real game, but as long as the admin is involved and annoyed, the griefer is still winning his new game.
The only way around this seems to be to make the consequences for misbehaviour as impersonal, anonymous, and automated as possible. Only hobbling the griefer _without_ giving him the attention of a human can make it feel like not winning.
Dell's stated business model is to never develop, innovate, design, pioneer, or create anything new, but rather to execute the assembly, sales, delivery, and maintenance of other people's technology more efficiently than their competitors. They are open and unapologetic about this.
As business models go, it's not a terrible one. It does engender the "race to the bottom" phenomenon, but so far other people's technology has continued to advance rapidly enough to mostly offset that.
But regardless of whether it's a prudent business plan, it's not exactly the type of thing that bates breath. You also don't see many people all atwitter at product announcements from Walmart, either.
The nerve!
Ah. Clearly another follower of the true faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorn (blessed be her holy hooves).
If one wishes to be pedantic, very close to nothing whatsoever is provable. Your Matrix reference is indeed the modern-day pop culture example thereof. A closer to canonical example would be Descartes contemplating whether it was possible to prove that anything--the world, his existence, his memories, other people--actually existed, or whether it was possible for them to all be artifacts of a malevolent demon that was intending to deceive him. (Hence the "I think, therefore I am" line that everyone loves to misunderstand. He wasn't asserting his purpose in life, he was listing the sum total of everything in the universe that could ever actually be proven to be true.)
But while this is all a fun philosophical and semantic game, it's disingenuous to suggest that because nothing can be absolutely proven, all things are at equal levels of non-proof. I absolutely cannot prove that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I can present some historical data and an astronomic theory that make it a far more reasonable assumption than the converse. "The sun will rise tomorrow" and "the sun will not rise tomorrow" are both assumptions, but that doesn't mean that they're on equal footing, or that we should just throw up our hands and refrain from predicting either one.
So no, I do not expect a rational person to refute gods because they cannot be absolutely proven to be true. I expect a rational person to refute gods because their existence would be contrary to a larger and more consistent set of evidence about the cosmos.
As some bloke name John McCarthy appears to have put it: "An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a God. He has only to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question."
And it's good to see that the current sitting president has taken your optimization so much to hear that he has in fact never vetoed anything, ever.
But on the contrary, I'd say that continuing to veto every single bill for as long as it takes to convince the legislature to confine them to one issue each sounds like exactly the correct choice.
Uh, perhaps it would run the same version of 10.4 that the current Intel mac developer machines run? Y'know, the one that's based on the version of osx that's been kept ported to x86 since the product was first released five years ago?
Your post is long on confidence, but short on support for your very strange assertions.
If we're into that level of indirect responsibility, I'd be much more inclined to hold every tax-paying American company responsible for the few hundred thousand people that the US government has murdered in the last few years. I rather suspect that anything the Russian mafia has undertaken pales in comparison to that atrocity.
Recall that Intuit is one of the very small set of companies on whom Microsoft has focused their sights, expended years of effort trying to defeat--and failed utterly. Anyone remember Microsoft Money?
To say that Quicken is entrenched is to give short shrift to trenches the world over. I don't think that's a fight Apple wold pick while there are so many still-open markets available.
Oh, I love apple, but I wouldn't exempt them from this fine. The i was already tacky and cliche even when they released the imac in 1998, and it hasn't gotten any less so since then.
In fact, it's only gotten more absurd as it gets slapped on things less and less related to the internet. Can someone explain to me exactly what's internet-related about iDVD?
The use of itunes was the one good thing about the previous piece of crap. I guess that replacing it with their own proprietary subscription service will at least hasten the complete demise of this thing.
I'm sure that users will be _thrilled_ with the notion of needing to pay for their music twice in order to listen to it on their phones and on anything else.
I certainly think that Apple is the world's only current player with a serious chance of denting Microsoft's position. However, I don't think that cloning or emulation are ever likely to play a role in that attempt.
The problem with running Windows software (via Wine or whatever) is the same one that doomed OS/2: no companies will bother actually writing software for your real platform. How long do you think Adobe would continue writing mac-specific versions of their products if they could just write a single version for Windows and let the emulation be Apple's problem?
(And yes, this would be a damning situation for the mac; even if the code runs perfectly and speedily, the fundamental behaviours of foreign applications will always feel, well, foreign. It would never feel like anything but a Windows knockoff.)
And I think you're only partially correct that Apple's move to Intel wasn't occasioned by heat and performance issues; the ppc and x86 platforms have been leapfrogging one another forever. So the point of the move wasn't necessarily that Intel macs would be better than ppc macs, it's that they'd be _exactly_the_same_ as the Dell/HP/Lenovo offerings. Which means that Apple gets to compete solely on the OS (which they control, and which shines) rather than also on the cpu (which they don't, and which shines some years and not some others).
If you're messing around the the date and compilers on live production servers, you've got bigger problems.
If you're doing these things on a development system that's hermetically sealed from the production environment, that's only medium bad--but it's also a separate issue from what the original submitter seemed to be asking.
The next time that server blows up and needs to be replaced, or we simply decide we need to add another one, building it is my problem, not those developers'. And it's a whole lot more problematic if I don't know all of what was done to get it into its current state.
Of course, that really just goes back to the fact that you should never do anything adminnish directly on a single server, ever. Your configuration management tool should do it for you, so it will also know to do it to the next one.
As the man said, "If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby."
Uh, and what exactly would looking at the pilgrims tell me about the structure of the united states? They lived in the same place a few hundred years earlier, and they were brutal religious zealots; what exactly is looking at them supposed to show me? Just a reminder of how glad I should be that such dogmatic savages had nothing to do with the forming of my nation?The government can maintain neutrality in one of two ways: either teach every single religious faith that is or has ever been held by any group of people, or teach none of them at all. Given that the former would require a standard education to take about nine hundred years, there really only seems to be one viable approach.
Remember, that neutrality for which you ask means that the pink bunny in your head doesn't get treated any differently than the green bunny in the head of some splinter Incan sect.
Uh, theistic creationism doesn't "account for" anything. It simply pushes all the questions off onto a scapegoat which it then completely declines to explain. Did you maybe miss the part where the Bible starts off with two completely different and mutually exclusive stories of creation? The seven-days story and the garden-of-eden story are both very specific about the order in which events happened, and they are not compatible.If the Bible cannot even be reconciled with itself, how can you possibly expect it to be taken seriously as a reference on anything else?
The bible is a lovely collection of folk stories. And I'm grateful to R for putting it together, but in about the same way that I'm grateful to the Brothers Grimm. I don't think either work is particularly well suited to a science classroom.
Then there are any number of substance abuse programs to help you deal with your crack problem.
It hardly seems unethical--and certainly is not unusual--for a journalist to cover the same topic in both small pieces in periodicals and longer works published as books. Everyone from Ann Coulter to Al Franken seems to do this on a regular basis, and I'm having a hard time finding fault with the practice.
Is your complaint seriously that the New York Times article didn't include a line about "James Risen has also covered these events in an upcoming book!" That I would find slightly problematic, as advertising the book in the article would feel kind of sleazy.
Given that it appears to be passing unvetoably, the Pentagon has simply changed the manual.
And declared the new version classified.
And if that tradeoff of effort for flexibility is a good deal for you, cool; I won't call you a sucker for it.
However, there are those of us who find that to be a less worthwhile deal. I'd imagine we'd appreciate the same courtesy.
I could give specific examples (I quite frequently select a paragraph or two and drag them into email or chat windows), but the real issue is that text is deeply fundamental to the way computers behave, and altering the consistency and predictability of such a cornerstone of user interaction is a dreadful idea.