Must be nice to work for a fortune 500 company to have the resources available...
You don't need to be a Fortune 500 company to apply this level of rigor. I'm quite sure we're not one.
Yes, you need resources to do it. Yes, you need corporate will to do it. And you also need to have a company whose culture includes actively assessing risk against their needs, as well as understanding how the risks translate into business risk. If the systems affect the actual production of your business, you need to treat it as Very Important.
If you stand to lose millions of dollars per hour in the event of an outage, the cost of screwing up gets pretty high. Which means the expense is absorbed. If you have much less exposure due to an outage, your tolerance to risk is going to be much higher.
My wife does outsourced/leveraged IT... and some of her clients, if some environments are down, basically have to halt all production, shut down equipment, and go through an expensive restart process.
Even at the SMB scale, you need to understand your risks, and have management be partly responsible for the decision making process, as well as having people who can provide the information needed to make decisions. These shops may not have the resources to test and deploy everything to a lab, which means, if anything, they should be staying away from applying a brand new patch as soon as it's released.
Your advice isn't really a general solution if, in order for it to work for anyone, some people must not follow it.
And companies which choose to make themselves test subjects to allow the rest of us to wait for the dust to settle must live with the consequences.
In some organizations, they are willing to assume the risk. In other organizations, not so much.
There will always be companies who fall on the side of bleeding edge, and companies who fall on the side of a lot more caution.
And for those of us who fall on the side of caution, to the ones on the bleeding edge, we say good luck, and thanks.;-)
I've known (of) people who will patch a production system in the middle of the day with very little notice. I figure those people are either small and open to risk. Me, if I have a patch for production, it's going to take me better part of a month to go through the process.
And, having worked on systems where lives could be at stake, I will stick with a more conservative approach.
What's really terrifying is when someone who is risk friendly ends up in a shop which is risk averse, and has to be reined in so they understand "no, that's not one of our options, and if you do it you'll likely be sacked". For some of us, the cowboy is someone who needs to be retrained, and who doesn't understand the stakes involved. Because they stand a good chance of doing a fair bit of damage if they can't be made to understand the severity of the issue.
You know, if that's how your company is being ran, you should already be looking for another job.
Where I work, we've got proper test equipment, a CAB to review the proposed changes, and an expectation that you will test before deploying. When we schedule outages, we have to have a backout plan, and we're expected to have applied the updates in either the lab or a test environment.
The admins aren't considered sacrificial lambs, but they are expected to apply due diligence, test, and identify any risks. But once you've done that and made sure people know what you're doing and why, what the results of your testing is, and what you've done to mitigate any risks... a bunch of senior people in IT have signed off on it and people have had a chance to voice their concerns. The people overseeing this tend to be department heads with a lot of industry experience, so they understand there is always risk, but they also understand what you need to do to minimize it.
If your company refuses to give you what you need to do your job without being able to do these things, your company is sailing straight towards a major disaster with or without you.
If your company is treating it as "stop talking and do it" combined with "but if you do it wrong you're SOL"... your company is being managed by people who don't understand what is involved in your job, and will always have unrealistic expectations.
Companies which don't plan for these things, don't build a proper process around it, and don't fund being able to ensure things get tested are just being penny wise and pound foolish.
And, from a certain perspective... I would never even consider applying a patch to a production environment which had only just been released by the vendor. At least a month, maybe as much as two. If someone wanted to put a firmware update on my production systems which was only just released from the vendor, the answer would be a firm "no bloody way". And my manager, and his manager, and all of the other people at that level would also be saying the same thing and back me on that position.
You have to have a company culture which owns the process, takes responsibility for it, and actually takes the time to understand the impact of it and plan for it.
Now, if a system admin does any of these things without going through all of the process, and things go wrong... then you likely will be neck deep in crap pretty quickly. But if you have followed the process, and something goes wrong, the process shifts to remediating what went wrong, and understanding what can be done better next time. It has to be a continuous process, and it has to actually have some institutional memory, and companies have to take the process seriously.
To be fair, the abstract doesn't say anything about a new shape, nor do I see anything in the introduction.
Kinda yes, kinda no:
More generally, we introduce the term hemihelix to describe multiple reversals in chirality connected by perversions.
So, they've come up with a term to describe this.
And, lest anybody think they were unaware of the phone cord thing:
Although perversions can also be introduced manually, for instance, by the simple operation of holding one end of a helical telephone cord fixed and twisting the other in a direction counter to its initial chirality
So, they know that people have seen this. They seem to be the ones introducing the term they've applied to describe it.
A new name to an old shape, but mostly they've figured out how to predict it, and then hopefully how to plan for it to build specific shapes.
So, I was doing this myself when I spent hours and hours trying to be caller #3 to the radio station tangling up my parents phone cord?
Unfortunately, TFA looks slashdotted. I assume 'new shape' means a new geometry nobody has cataloged before? Maybe it never occurred to someone that it was a distinct shape? That or the phone cord analogy I'm seeing here isn't quite accurate.
Next somebody is going to tell me I was making graphene when I first used the big boy pottie.
As we understand galaxy formation better, galaxy mergers are an increasingly important topic.
Unfortunately, as always happens in such things, after the merger many stars will lose their jobs as the galaxies try to cut costs. They may also decide to outsource some of the jobs of the current stars to neighboring galaxies, and some existing customers might get screwed over as they decide to get rid of product lines the larger galaxy isn't interested in.
Mostly these things benefit the big giant holes running things.
So why would I want to use a new one yet? Apple has set a new standard in lifespan & reliability.
Funny, I've found that since they stopped giving me updates my usage of my iPad has been reduced purely to watch films I got from iTunes.
I've actually reached the point where my iPad 1 might get traded in at Best Buy while it still has value. Might as well have an iPod touch instead of an old and creaky iPad 1.
he idea of an iPod that ONLY plays music is sort of a dated concept.
FWIW, many iPods can also play videos. I've got a cable which allows my 160GB iPod Classic to play movies through to a TV -- that's come in handy in hotel rooms for me several times.
And, for me, there's little else that occupies the niche of an iPod which has 160GB of storage... put my whole music collection and a bunch of movies on it, and I'm good to go.
Frankly, as a fan of the humanities, I find the summary and this sort of response to be offensive.
That's OK. You're allowed.
If I were looking to fill a random position in an area that didn't require STEM background, I'd much rather find someone with a history or political science degree than someone with a "business" degree.
These are my only options? At a certain point, if you need someone who has proven critical thinking skills, you need some way for them to prove it to you. If this "random position" requires skills which are taught in a specific discipline, hire someone who took that. If they're things you can absorb through doing other things, why hire someone with a degree at all?
When I was in university I knew a few English majors. One was on an extended debt accumulation plan, with no real clear goals, and a penchant for writing bad short stories. I didn't see any evidence of critical thinking, just someone who was going for the sake of a degree. Several others were so deeply mired in post-modernism that it would be impossible for anybody else to evaluate their critical thinking, because, quite frankly, most studies of post-modernism devolve into using buzz-words and gobbledegook which nobody can comprehend.
When a computer program can spout off gibberish on post modernism and get published, I distrust even the people who say it's such a specialized field of study that they don't even know what it means.
But my point is that nobody is going to be advertising for jobs for some of these degrees, and anybody who doesn't have one of these degrees has no way of telling if what you're saying is meaningful or not. So your evidence for your skills come down to "trust me, I totally got this".
I'm not saying smart people don't take these disciplines. I am saying that I don't think a lot of hiring managers will look at your degree in medieval poetry as being particularly applicable to anything they need, and that a disproportionate number of these end up working as baristas or fast food servers.
But the people who do don't usually end up choosing a history or polysci major because they're the dumbest ones at college.
Wait, what? When I say it or the summary says it, it's deeply offensive. And then you close out your post by saying the exact same thing as I did?
So, from this I conclude you lack critical thinking skills, make circular arguments, and essentially proved my point.
Look, deal with it. Slashdot is a site geared towards people who are in STEM fields. And, until we start seeing job postings for someone who can do a deep analysis of Chaucer and relate that to, well, anything really... we appreciate that's what you studied in school, but we have no idea of how that helps us. We just have no idea of who is looking to hire that specific skillset or for what purposes.
How many young people should be training for skilled manufacturing and service jobs rather than getting history or political science degrees?
As many as possible. I've said for years the real money lies in being a welder, plumber, or an electrician.
All those people who have exhaustively studied the post modernism and sexism as exemplified by 17th century Gaelic poets with no left hand but who hadn't gone bald yet... not so much. Because, as far as marketable skills go, some courses of study aren't exactly marketable at all.
If only there were some way to pre-download those files.
Such as DVD's.
Or the iTunes Digital Copy.
I will download the video exactly once. It then lives on my computer, and I can copy it onto my iPod or iPad.
Love or hate Apple, with iTunes they did manage to strike the balance between having some DRM, and actually having it be a usable system.
It also comes with the added benefit you can watch it when you have no network connectivity. And, for me, being able to watch movies on a plane (or other such places) is one of the key selling points.
It seems like the movie studios are going for the model which has the most nuisance, restrictions, and additional costs for the users. Which is why I don't use any of the systems they came up with.
iTunes is nice, provided you use Windows, OS X, or an iDevice. However, it is worthless if one wants to leave those environments. Want to watch on an Android tablet? Apple's DRM says no.
Yup, and it sucks. Which is why I own both an Android tablet, and an Apple tablet+iPods.
But I'm limiting this rant to streaming vs non-streaming and how DRM affects that.
But, streaming is easy. The consumer does not have to pre-decide what they want to watch if they stream.
And expensive if you're being charged for the download.
Which means there is a good chance there are companies who are:
1) getting paid when you 'purchase' it 2) getting paid extortion fees to not throttle the bandwidth from the company that streams it 3) getting paid by the consumer every time they watch it.
The bandwidth savvy consumer would like to download more content and play it back at any time, but do those consumers even exist as the majority anymore?
If they aren't, they should be. When I 'buy' a digital copy of a movie, what I want is the ability to keep it local on my device, watch it whenever I want (including times when I have no connectivity), and not have to ask their permission every time I watch it.
That's what I have in iTunes. When I get a digital copy, it's stored offline in my computer, I can sync it to any device using iTunes, and I can play it back wherever I like.
And, if I can't have that, I will continue to rip my large collection of actual DVDs, and play them when I want. And I will refuse to give companies any money towards a digital copy which I pay for once, stream, pay for the bandwidth of streaming, and then if I ever want to do it again have to go through the whole process.
When streaming bandwidth is infinitely cheap, maybe. But as long as there are situations in which I want to be able to watch content completely offline -- in a plane, in a car, on the beach, at the cottage, in the doctor's office waiting room -- the notion of streaming it every time is absurd.
Because instead of downloading it to my device and keeping it there, it insists that every time I use it it calls home to ask permission. Which means, AFAIK, I could not watch an Ultraviolet movie on a plane. It also means they get to collect information from me when I watch the movie... which I'm sure they love, but I'm not doing. If I play a CD the producer of it doesn't get to know when or how many times, because it's none of their damned business.
I'm also not willing to sign up with every #*%^% studio in order for the privilege of downloading a movie. Which, right now, first you sign up with Ultraviolet, and then you need to personally register your copy with the film studio. Yeah, no, not happening.
Companies make their DRM crap onerous to use, less useful, and more expensive. The alternative is to either not consume the product at all, or to work around their DRM crap. Which, of course, through years of bribing politicians is as serious a crime as if I'd robbed a bank with a gun.
I have a sneaking suspicion that DRM costs consumers billions of dollars every year, all to protect the profits and business model of the content companies.
Ah, yes, the stupid old 'buggy whip makers' argument.
Yawn... ah, yes, the it's stupid because I say so argument.
Do you know the origins of the term? This might help:
Marketing myopia is a term used in marketing as well as the title of an important marketing paper written by Theodore Levitt.[1] This paper was first published in 1960 in the Harvard Business Review, a journal of which he was an editor. Marketing Myopia suggests that businesses will do better in the end if they concentrate on meeting customers' needs rather than on selling products.
The Myopic culture, Levitt postulated, would pave the way for a business to fail, due to the short-sighted mindset and illusion that a firm is in a so-called 'growth industry'. This belief leads to complacency and a loss of sight of what customers want.
[snip]
There is a greater scope of opportunities as the industry changes. It trains managers to look beyond their current business activities and think "outside the box". George Steiner (1979) is one of many in a long line of admirers who cite Levitt's famous example on transportation. If a buggy whip manufacturer in 1910 defined its business as the "transportation starter business," they might have been able to make the creative leap necessary to move into the automobile business when technological change demanded it
So, how about this... you refute the underlying thing meant when most of us say "buggy whips", and I won't tell you how little I care about how you feel about the specifics of the metaphor. Sound fair?
The point is, in the face of technological changes and advancement, instead of understanding what it is people actually want and enabling it, these companies are demonstrating short-sightedness, an unwillingness to adapt their business model, and due to lobbying and other crap, exert an undue level of control over industries relating to technology which is both unwarranted, outdated, and has an overall detrimental effect on progress by people who don't have their heads up their asses.
Now, if you have anything intelligent to add, I'm all ears. If you're going to simply dispute the metaphor keep it to yourself.
Just how many industries will we allow the content industry to ruin in its death throes before we finally get wiser?
All of them.
Technology is reaching the point where the content industries more or less have to give permission for everything it gets used for.
And, anything which they interpret as cutting into their revenue stream or otherwise making it possible to copy something, is going to be vigorously fought by them.
This is the buggy whip makers telling us that we need their permission to design highways. And innovation will suffer.
Exactly what the company plans to do with the scratch-resistant crystal - and when - is still the subject of debate. Apple is creating its own supply chain devoted to producing and finishing synthetic sapphire crystal in unprecedented quantities
Gee, maybe they need something transparent and durable?
Modern watches use synthetic sapphire for the crystal because it's durable as hell. My wife has a Citizen watch which is several years old which looks brand new, because that stuff is pretty sturdy. Contrast that with her old watch in which the crystal (actually plastic from the looks of it) got scratched and eventually became tough to see the watch through.
So, synthetic sapphire is useful wherever you need a transparent and durable material.
Nope, can't think of anything Apple would be doing which would require that. Besides... watches, phones, monitors, laptop screens, and darned near anything involving modern technology.
Maybe they can see they are going to need a steady supply of this, and don't want to be beholden to someone else for it?
Apple knows how to market and make people without the ability to decide things for themselves think they want their products.
Oh, horseshit.
You don't choose Apple products. Fine. But don't make the assertion that people aren't capable of consciously choosing what they want and are therefore choosing Apple.
I know people who are Directors and VPs at technical firms who use Apple products. I know people who are software engineers who use Apple. I know little old ladies who have tried alternatives and chose Apple. I own several Apple devices. I also own several Android devices, a couple of Windows machines, a Linux box, and a FreeBSD box. And you know what? I'm going to buy another Apple product soon as well.
Please, don't go around spouting your opinions as if they are facts. It makes you look like an idiot.
And the irony of your sig is hilarious:
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If you want someone to rationally rebut your argument, you first need to make a rational argument. If you are just going to make ad hominem attacks and act as if your opinion is a fact... well, you're the one failing to make a rational case for why Apple is bad.
What you've said is "Apple are doodie heads, and all people who buy Apple products are doodie heads because I say so". Which puts your claims at about the intellectual level of a 5 year old.
Basically you've decided that you hate Apple. You can own that, and that's your choice.
But if you think just making the assertion that Apple is for people who can't pick what they want, you're full of shit.
Maybe, just maybe, people have picked exactly what they want, an what they want is what Apple is selling.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to be a Fortune 500 company to apply this level of rigor. I'm quite sure we're not one.
Yes, you need resources to do it. Yes, you need corporate will to do it. And you also need to have a company whose culture includes actively assessing risk against their needs, as well as understanding how the risks translate into business risk. If the systems affect the actual production of your business, you need to treat it as Very Important.
If you stand to lose millions of dollars per hour in the event of an outage, the cost of screwing up gets pretty high. Which means the expense is absorbed. If you have much less exposure due to an outage, your tolerance to risk is going to be much higher.
My wife does outsourced/leveraged IT ... and some of her clients, if some environments are down, basically have to halt all production, shut down equipment, and go through an expensive restart process.
Even at the SMB scale, you need to understand your risks, and have management be partly responsible for the decision making process, as well as having people who can provide the information needed to make decisions. These shops may not have the resources to test and deploy everything to a lab, which means, if anything, they should be staying away from applying a brand new patch as soon as it's released.
And companies which choose to make themselves test subjects to allow the rest of us to wait for the dust to settle must live with the consequences.
In some organizations, they are willing to assume the risk. In other organizations, not so much.
There will always be companies who fall on the side of bleeding edge, and companies who fall on the side of a lot more caution.
And for those of us who fall on the side of caution, to the ones on the bleeding edge, we say good luck, and thanks. ;-)
I've known (of) people who will patch a production system in the middle of the day with very little notice. I figure those people are either small and open to risk. Me, if I have a patch for production, it's going to take me better part of a month to go through the process.
And, having worked on systems where lives could be at stake, I will stick with a more conservative approach.
What's really terrifying is when someone who is risk friendly ends up in a shop which is risk averse, and has to be reined in so they understand "no, that's not one of our options, and if you do it you'll likely be sacked". For some of us, the cowboy is someone who needs to be retrained, and who doesn't understand the stakes involved. Because they stand a good chance of doing a fair bit of damage if they can't be made to understand the severity of the issue.
You know, if that's how your company is being ran, you should already be looking for another job.
Where I work, we've got proper test equipment, a CAB to review the proposed changes, and an expectation that you will test before deploying. When we schedule outages, we have to have a backout plan, and we're expected to have applied the updates in either the lab or a test environment.
The admins aren't considered sacrificial lambs, but they are expected to apply due diligence, test, and identify any risks. But once you've done that and made sure people know what you're doing and why, what the results of your testing is, and what you've done to mitigate any risks ... a bunch of senior people in IT have signed off on it and people have had a chance to voice their concerns. The people overseeing this tend to be department heads with a lot of industry experience, so they understand there is always risk, but they also understand what you need to do to minimize it.
If your company refuses to give you what you need to do your job without being able to do these things, your company is sailing straight towards a major disaster with or without you.
If your company is treating it as "stop talking and do it" combined with "but if you do it wrong you're SOL" ... your company is being managed by people who don't understand what is involved in your job, and will always have unrealistic expectations.
Companies which don't plan for these things, don't build a proper process around it, and don't fund being able to ensure things get tested are just being penny wise and pound foolish.
And, from a certain perspective ... I would never even consider applying a patch to a production environment which had only just been released by the vendor. At least a month, maybe as much as two. If someone wanted to put a firmware update on my production systems which was only just released from the vendor, the answer would be a firm "no bloody way". And my manager, and his manager, and all of the other people at that level would also be saying the same thing and back me on that position.
You have to have a company culture which owns the process, takes responsibility for it, and actually takes the time to understand the impact of it and plan for it.
Now, if a system admin does any of these things without going through all of the process, and things go wrong ... then you likely will be neck deep in crap pretty quickly. But if you have followed the process, and something goes wrong, the process shifts to remediating what went wrong, and understanding what can be done better next time. It has to be a continuous process, and it has to actually have some institutional memory, and companies have to take the process seriously.
My Brother laser printers are anything but crotchety pieces of shit.
Maybe you're just buying crappy printers?
Kinda yes, kinda no:
So, they've come up with a term to describe this.
And, lest anybody think they were unaware of the phone cord thing:
So, they know that people have seen this. They seem to be the ones introducing the term they've applied to describe it.
A new name to an old shape, but mostly they've figured out how to predict it, and then hopefully how to plan for it to build specific shapes.
You mean Cheez Whiz?
We keep getting richer, but we can't get out picture ... ;-)
Unfortunately, TFA looks slashdotted. I assume 'new shape' means a new geometry nobody has cataloged before? Maybe it never occurred to someone that it was a distinct shape? That or the phone cord analogy I'm seeing here isn't quite accurate.
No, more like dark matter. ;-)
Unfortunately, as always happens in such things, after the merger many stars will lose their jobs as the galaxies try to cut costs. They may also decide to outsource some of the jobs of the current stars to neighboring galaxies, and some existing customers might get screwed over as they decide to get rid of product lines the larger galaxy isn't interested in.
Mostly these things benefit the big giant holes running things.
Well, TFA says they've been able to set up encrypted voice chats in low bandwidth,
My guess, if Anonymous is using this, and it's intended to get around surveillance, it's explicitly *not* sending stuff in the clear.
Which makes it different from a CB radio.
If you have to worry about crap like this, you need to install better ad blockers and script blockers.
Funny, I've found that since they stopped giving me updates my usage of my iPad has been reduced purely to watch films I got from iTunes.
I've actually reached the point where my iPad 1 might get traded in at Best Buy while it still has value. Might as well have an iPod touch instead of an old and creaky iPad 1.
FWIW, many iPods can also play videos. I've got a cable which allows my 160GB iPod Classic to play movies through to a TV -- that's come in handy in hotel rooms for me several times.
And, for me, there's little else that occupies the niche of an iPod which has 160GB of storage ... put my whole music collection and a bunch of movies on it, and I'm good to go.
And it costs far far less than an iPhone.
That's OK. You're allowed.
These are my only options? At a certain point, if you need someone who has proven critical thinking skills, you need some way for them to prove it to you. If this "random position" requires skills which are taught in a specific discipline, hire someone who took that. If they're things you can absorb through doing other things, why hire someone with a degree at all?
When I was in university I knew a few English majors. One was on an extended debt accumulation plan, with no real clear goals, and a penchant for writing bad short stories. I didn't see any evidence of critical thinking, just someone who was going for the sake of a degree. Several others were so deeply mired in post-modernism that it would be impossible for anybody else to evaluate their critical thinking, because, quite frankly, most studies of post-modernism devolve into using buzz-words and gobbledegook which nobody can comprehend.
When a computer program can spout off gibberish on post modernism and get published, I distrust even the people who say it's such a specialized field of study that they don't even know what it means.
But my point is that nobody is going to be advertising for jobs for some of these degrees, and anybody who doesn't have one of these degrees has no way of telling if what you're saying is meaningful or not. So your evidence for your skills come down to "trust me, I totally got this".
I'm not saying smart people don't take these disciplines. I am saying that I don't think a lot of hiring managers will look at your degree in medieval poetry as being particularly applicable to anything they need, and that a disproportionate number of these end up working as baristas or fast food servers.
Wait, what? When I say it or the summary says it, it's deeply offensive. And then you close out your post by saying the exact same thing as I did?
So, from this I conclude you lack critical thinking skills, make circular arguments, and essentially proved my point.
Look, deal with it. Slashdot is a site geared towards people who are in STEM fields. And, until we start seeing job postings for someone who can do a deep analysis of Chaucer and relate that to, well, anything really ... we appreciate that's what you studied in school, but we have no idea of how that helps us. We just have no idea of who is looking to hire that specific skillset or for what purposes.
As many as possible. I've said for years the real money lies in being a welder, plumber, or an electrician.
All those people who have exhaustively studied the post modernism and sexism as exemplified by 17th century Gaelic poets with no left hand but who hadn't gone bald yet ... not so much. Because, as far as marketable skills go, some courses of study aren't exactly marketable at all.
Or the iTunes Digital Copy.
I will download the video exactly once. It then lives on my computer, and I can copy it onto my iPod or iPad.
Love or hate Apple, with iTunes they did manage to strike the balance between having some DRM, and actually having it be a usable system.
It also comes with the added benefit you can watch it when you have no network connectivity. And, for me, being able to watch movies on a plane (or other such places) is one of the key selling points.
It seems like the movie studios are going for the model which has the most nuisance, restrictions, and additional costs for the users. Which is why I don't use any of the systems they came up with.
Yup, and it sucks. Which is why I own both an Android tablet, and an Apple tablet+iPods.
But I'm limiting this rant to streaming vs non-streaming and how DRM affects that.
And expensive if you're being charged for the download.
Which means there is a good chance there are companies who are:
1) getting paid when you 'purchase' it
2) getting paid extortion fees to not throttle the bandwidth from the company that streams it
3) getting paid by the consumer every time they watch it.
If they aren't, they should be. When I 'buy' a digital copy of a movie, what I want is the ability to keep it local on my device, watch it whenever I want (including times when I have no connectivity), and not have to ask their permission every time I watch it.
That's what I have in iTunes. When I get a digital copy, it's stored offline in my computer, I can sync it to any device using iTunes, and I can play it back wherever I like.
And, if I can't have that, I will continue to rip my large collection of actual DVDs, and play them when I want. And I will refuse to give companies any money towards a digital copy which I pay for once, stream, pay for the bandwidth of streaming, and then if I ever want to do it again have to go through the whole process.
When streaming bandwidth is infinitely cheap, maybe. But as long as there are situations in which I want to be able to watch content completely offline -- in a plane, in a car, on the beach, at the cottage, in the doctor's office waiting room -- the notion of streaming it every time is absurd.
Because instead of downloading it to my device and keeping it there, it insists that every time I use it it calls home to ask permission. Which means, AFAIK, I could not watch an Ultraviolet movie on a plane. It also means they get to collect information from me when I watch the movie ... which I'm sure they love, but I'm not doing. If I play a CD the producer of it doesn't get to know when or how many times, because it's none of their damned business.
I'm also not willing to sign up with every #*%^% studio in order for the privilege of downloading a movie. Which, right now, first you sign up with Ultraviolet, and then you need to personally register your copy with the film studio. Yeah, no, not happening.
Companies make their DRM crap onerous to use, less useful, and more expensive. The alternative is to either not consume the product at all, or to work around their DRM crap. Which, of course, through years of bribing politicians is as serious a crime as if I'd robbed a bank with a gun.
I have a sneaking suspicion that DRM costs consumers billions of dollars every year, all to protect the profits and business model of the content companies.
DRM has always been crap.
Yawn ... ah, yes, the it's stupid because I say so argument.
Do you know the origins of the term? This might help:
So, how about this ... you refute the underlying thing meant when most of us say "buggy whips", and I won't tell you how little I care about how you feel about the specifics of the metaphor. Sound fair?
The point is, in the face of technological changes and advancement, instead of understanding what it is people actually want and enabling it, these companies are demonstrating short-sightedness, an unwillingness to adapt their business model, and due to lobbying and other crap, exert an undue level of control over industries relating to technology which is both unwarranted, outdated, and has an overall detrimental effect on progress by people who don't have their heads up their asses.
Now, if you have anything intelligent to add, I'm all ears. If you're going to simply dispute the metaphor keep it to yourself.
All of them.
Technology is reaching the point where the content industries more or less have to give permission for everything it gets used for.
And, anything which they interpret as cutting into their revenue stream or otherwise making it possible to copy something, is going to be vigorously fought by them.
This is the buggy whip makers telling us that we need their permission to design highways. And innovation will suffer.
Deeper.
A little to the left.
Ohhhh.
Gee, maybe they need something transparent and durable?
Modern watches use synthetic sapphire for the crystal because it's durable as hell. My wife has a Citizen watch which is several years old which looks brand new, because that stuff is pretty sturdy. Contrast that with her old watch in which the crystal (actually plastic from the looks of it) got scratched and eventually became tough to see the watch through.
So, synthetic sapphire is useful wherever you need a transparent and durable material.
Nope, can't think of anything Apple would be doing which would require that. Besides ... watches, phones, monitors, laptop screens, and darned near anything involving modern technology.
Maybe they can see they are going to need a steady supply of this, and don't want to be beholden to someone else for it?
Oh, horseshit.
You don't choose Apple products. Fine. But don't make the assertion that people aren't capable of consciously choosing what they want and are therefore choosing Apple.
I know people who are Directors and VPs at technical firms who use Apple products. I know people who are software engineers who use Apple. I know little old ladies who have tried alternatives and chose Apple. I own several Apple devices. I also own several Android devices, a couple of Windows machines, a Linux box, and a FreeBSD box. And you know what? I'm going to buy another Apple product soon as well.
Please, don't go around spouting your opinions as if they are facts. It makes you look like an idiot.
And the irony of your sig is hilarious:
If you want someone to rationally rebut your argument, you first need to make a rational argument. If you are just going to make ad hominem attacks and act as if your opinion is a fact ... well, you're the one failing to make a rational case for why Apple is bad.
What you've said is "Apple are doodie heads, and all people who buy Apple products are doodie heads because I say so". Which puts your claims at about the intellectual level of a 5 year old.
Basically you've decided that you hate Apple. You can own that, and that's your choice.
But if you think just making the assertion that Apple is for people who can't pick what they want, you're full of shit.
Maybe, just maybe, people have picked exactly what they want, an what they want is what Apple is selling.
I know manufacturers are looking for the next big gravy train they can count on to pad out revenues and guarantee executive profits.
But I see this as being niche at best, and completely undesirable at worst.
It's my freaking phone. I don't want to be swapping out video cards and tweaking it.
I, for one, will not be interested in this. And I predict a very tiny amount of people ever will.