MS SQL does a pretty good job optimizing common queries, but at a tremendous cost in orthogonality of T-SQL. I've also found limitations in MS SQL handling of very complex queries, but there is no question that on the kinds of queries that dominate in the vast majority of applications, MS SQL provides reliably good performance out of the box.
That's an engineering trade-off that works for lots of people.
That said, you're going about this the wrong way. The solution to generally inconsistent query performance is database administration, not tweaking. That's "user unfriendly" because it's a job for a DBA, not a user. Oracle gives you much, much more access to the innards of the system, and its stuff that even most tech savvy developers aren't really competent to play with.
Oracle should give comparable performance to MS SQL in most instances without tweaking. Certainly you shouldn't be seeing a difference of 10x in performance that you have to correct by tweaking. My guess is something is really really screwed up on the Oracle installation you were working with.
Finally you also have to evaluate the performance of the query under production conditions, not developer conditions: many large tables simultaneously handling heavy update loads with lots of concurrency issues. The results you are talking about are so screwy, though, it's clear that you've got a really mis-configured system.
In certain contexts, granted. And where you have such a context, by all means go for it if you like MySQL and are comfortable with it. I haven't used MySQL Cluster, but what I've read about it makes it seem pretty nifty. But I've also seen situations where MySQL even with clustering wouldn't work, particularly as transactions scale in complexity, not just volume.
For what a lot of people use databases for (backing store for form entry) it really doesn't matter because you only use generic capabilities and work mostly in your IDE.
When it gets to really challenging database problems, it's a question of which fail comes first: the failure of the developer or admin using Oracle or the failure of MySQL to keep up with the application's needs. For example, if you need just a bit more performance, with MySQL your response is simple: get bigger iron. If it's not worth the price, you live with it. With Oracle you start looking into the manuals and contemplating playing with things only an expert Oracle DBA ought to mess with. Then if you get it wrong, it's *your* fail.
I think Oracle's a great product. If I was looking at a project where I had to choose between SQL Server and Oracle, I'd definitely go Oracle even if I had to pay twice the license fee. Oracle's transaction log management capabilities would be worth the price alone. Nobody does transaction isolation better than Oracle, either. But ye gods you can screw yourself messing around on one hand, or not paying enough attention on the other.
I've used both MySQL and Oracle, and I'm comfortable with Oracle, except I don't much like the company or its corporate culture (not that that matters if the question is MySQL vs. Oracle). I might be more comfortable handing off a MySQL project to another developer or manager.
Just to clarify for folks with poor reading comprehension: this just applies to the tarballs washing up on Florida beaches, which happens at a low rate all the time. It doesn't apply to the giant plumes of emulsified oil deep in the Gulf, which could not have come from ships.
We'll be dealing with the consequences of the DWH spill for a long time, and most of them won't be visible on the beaches. We might never see the kind of obvious to the media disaster in FL that we've seen in LA.
A trend? What trend? Are you seeing these stickers on copies of the Bill of Rights all over the place?
Who ever heard of this isn't some kind of publicity stunt? Or even a political stunt? Or an employee getting at the boss by some ham-handed literal interpretation of a company policy. Or (most likely) an isolated instance of idiocy.
Are people so darned addicted to outrage that they have to turn every isolated event into some kind of movement? Do we have to get hysterical every time somebody says or does something stupid? Because if we do we aren't going to have time for anything else.
No, they're arguing over the right to make it possible for app developers to offer you the choice of paying cash up front for the app, or to pay by living with ads in the app.
I usually opt for the ad supported app. In cases where the ads are done in an intrusive and annoying fashion, I usually drop the app because its garbage. In the majority of cases I don't consciously see the ads after a day or so, but in the few apps I use regularly I opt to go for the pay option so that I won't be influenced subconsciously.
I once proposed this at an environmental organization I worked in. The parking lot was always overcrowded. My idea was that we should charge everyone who lived within reasonable public transit ride or biking distances of the office should pay five dollars every time they parked, and that we use the revenue to subsidize transit passes and a bike lock up.
Everyone listened and then continued on as if they were politely ignoring my brief outburst of insanity.
If you have nothing to add from any actual first hand experience, you'd do everyone including yourself a favor by fitting the amount you say to the volume of knowledge you possess.
I cannot help wondering when I read stuff like that who *really need* atomic, and who just like it because it sounds cool...
Oy. I agree very few personal computers need this, but when you are talking about servers it's quite common. Really any time restoring the version of file A that goes with a different version of file B would be a bad thing. Datasets where debits and credits wouldn't, indexes that might end up pointing to the wrong records, virtual machine disks and other huge data objects that live in multiple files files... it isn't hard to think of scenarios where a snapshot is really important.
I think it's very likely you've never worked in an environmental organization. I have. Let me tell you what the single thing they spend the most time obsessing about: the impact of degraded environmental quality on the quality of human life.
Yes, it is true environmentalists value the environment for itself more than the general population does. There's a simple explanation for that. If you study something, you care more about it. Birders care more about bird conservation. Hunters care more about game conservation. Wildflower photographers care more about plant conservation. It's as simple as that. Of course, to outsiders, birders, hunters and nature photographers seem a little like crackpots.
Caring about things is not a zero sum game. Just because you care *more* about the forests, or the bottom of the ocean, doesn't mean you care less about people. In fact it works the other way around. Caring isn't a resource, it's a habit of thought. The more you practice it, the better you get at it.
I'll just leave you with a few quotes from a report I participated in developing:
*A sustainable economy should provide for basic material requirements and a healthy quality of life.
* Economic "progress" must be encouraged, measured and gauged in terms of quality of life and development of human potential...
* The behavior of economic systems today should not diminish the potential enjoyment of life for future generations.
* Appropriate market incentives (e.g., full cost accounting) are essential to achieve biophysical and economic sustainability, and subsidies for unsustainable practices should be eliminated.
* The natural and physical environment is the platform which supports all communities and institutions.
In my personal experience, this is mainstream consensus opinion in the environmental movement, although how such ideas apply to specific policies such as trading pollution credits is often a matter of debate. That's because details matter. It might seem like a minority position among environmentalists to you if your knowledge of environmentalists is second hand, through sources that are interested in playing up controversy or equating environmentalism with extremism.
"Anti-nuclear environmentalist organizations" is just hand waving propaganda. *Which* organizations took *what* positions?
Insofar as fusion power is concerned, its certainly a myth that environmental organizations are holding us back. Nobody knows what a commercially viable fusion plant would look like, so how could those mean old environmentalists be spoiling everything again?
Now as an environmentalist myself, when we get to the point of building the first fusion power plant, I'd like to see a proper environmental impact analysis done, just because we've never built one. Surely we'll have to deal with the issue of plant decommissioning. Also, before we decide that fusion power is going to replace everything, we should think through the consequences to see if we've missed anything. But insofar as fusion will be replacing fossil fuels, the bar for "do no harm" is pretty low.
Insofar as fission is concerned, I'm not against further research and a conservative program of new plant building. What I'm against is jumping to the conclusion that a crash program building the kind of plants we built thirty years ago is going to magically solve all our problems. There's be a lot of problems with uranium dependency, and we'd be storing up problems for the future.
What I'd really like to see if more investments in the electricity distribution grid. This will prepare us for a future in which we have more diverse energy sources. That would be good for the country, good for humanity and good for the environment. Combined with greater energy efficiency and conservation, that would help us face declining global oil production without resorting to rash and desperate measures.
Apple is tying its products to another vendor. It can't stand behind its products without policing the actions of its partner as far as customers for Apple products are concerned.
It'd be different if it were just AT&T being sloppy with its email users, and *some* iPad users used AT&T mail. That'd be AT&T's problem. But the deal Apple is offering is "use AT&T's network services or don't use an iPad."
It'd be different if Apple gave you a choice of providers, and you chose wrong.
Like it or not, AT&T service is part of the iPad, just like Foxconn circuit boards.
I'm not so sure about that. Apple *requires* customers provide their email address in order to activate their iPad, then they turn the email address over to AT&T.
Under the circumstances, Apple is morally (although probably not legally) responsible for ensuring that AT&T only use that information for appropriate purposes and take reasonable security precautions with it.
Apple has a very simple recourse if it doesn't want to do that. It could provide every iPad with its own email address. Users could then forward email from that address to their real email, or not if they prefer to remain anonymous.
It depends on the nature of Microsoft's response. Consider the following:
(a)"Thanks, this looks serious. We've got a team looking into it now, but we've found some difficulties with your suggested fix. If you don't see a security patch in the next several days, don't be alarmed. A patch is coming soon, but we don't want to release a fix that creates more problems. We'd appreciate it if you kept this under your hat while we're working on this. We'll be sure to credit you with finding this problem when the patch comes out. Feel free to call my cell at xxx-xxx-xxxx if you have any questions."
(b)"Thank you for your interest in the
[ ] aesthetics
[ ] features
[ ] performance
[x] security of Microsoft Windows, the most
[ ] good looking
[ ] comprehensive
[ ] powerful
[x] safe operating system on the market. We get more suggestions for improving Windows than we can respond to personally, but your input is important to us. With your help, we will make the next release of Windows
[ ] more beautiful
[ ] more useful
[ ] faster
[x] more secure than ever."
If it is (b), I'd release the details too, although I'd wait longer than five days, and I'd give them a heads-up that I was announcing.
Apple only decided that your privacy needed protection from your usage patterns being sold *after* it failed to buy the company that was doing that itself. That was my point.
It may be true that your interest in that needs protection, but Apple as a company doesn't have a leg to stand on when it claims it's looking out for your interests here. It's doing this to deny a competitor any benefit from outbidding it for that company. Since this shows Apple is willing to violate what you see as your privacy rights, and adware is very important to the platform as it competes with Android, I am certain we will see an Apple provided, or at least Apple blessed version of the very thing it claims it is protecting you from.
Personally, I think that analytics is a good thing for the user, provided he understands what the deal is, where it applies, and who can obtain that information. So you pay $9.99 for the "hot women" app so that nobody knows your using that *and* the ad supported Bible concordance program.
Well, if we are going to use "ultimate teleology" as our yardstick, then Microsoft (and everyone else) is in business to increase the net entropy of the universe.
After market installation is what has kept Linux going for over a decade, but tablets are a different matter altogether.
The attraction of tablets lies largely in what they aren't. They aren't PCs. We have enough PCs in our lives, so the marginal value of another PC is nil. The marginal value of an ebook reader or media player is greater for most of us.
PCs are a pain in the ass, even if you are good with them. They have to be administered. What users are looking for in a tablet is an appliance. Sometimes you have to call the repair man to fix the dishwasher, but you don't have to *administer* the damned thing.
That's one of the reasons that Microsoft's tablet efforts failed is that the fundamental pitch was "hey this is *really* a PC. You know all about PCs already." Yep, we do. And most of us don't like 'em.
That approach kind of worked for a while in the PDA market -- at least well enough that they were able to help Palm commit suicide as hardware margins fell. Palm's offerings became much more computer-like, which opened the door for Microsoft to say, "Look, if you are buying a handheld PC, why not stick with the devil you know?" That worked great until Apple gave users something that was much more like the original Palms than Palm's own offerings: an appliance that did some nifty tricks but was definitely not another damned PC.
Of course it helped that Microsoft's implementation of tablet features really sucked. I'm typing this on a Lenovo S-10T -- a convertible tablet. In theory it should be a killer value proposition, and I really do like the hardware, but using the tablet features is like sticking your fingers into a meat grinder. I'd have waited a few months and got an iPad for about the same price, and it would have been a hell of a lot more fun, but really this machine is an alternative to a Kindle DS for me. The Kindle ebook reader does a terrible job at rendering math books. I know its not the book format itself because the same books render fine on an iPod touch. Since I needed those books right away, I followed the usual rule of buying technology: wait until you need it, but when you do need don't wait until something better comes along.
And that sooner or later there's going to be a Linux tablet distro worth trying. VLC on this thing rocks. It especially kills for watching speeches and lectures. I play them back at 2.1x until the person speaking says something that's hard to follow, so I can get through 50 minutes (which inevitably consists of surprising amounts of "um","er", digression and shuffling presentation materials around) in under 30 minutes. If I were a student I'd do all my lectures by video on this thing and save a ton of time.
Oh, developers and advertisers will be allowed to know all that. They'll just have to wait for the brouhaha to die down so Apple can quietly introduce their spiffy "new" advertising service. Then they'll pay Apple, not the people who first developed the technology for the platform.
It's possible, maybe even likely, that Apple will bury the costs of the Apple branded service where it won't show. Then they'll piously tell the credulous world that they're giving away free service out of the goodness of their hearts. Sound familiar? It should.
This will be the Stacker case all over again. The platform owner is happy to let vendors make a little money if it sells the platform, but if somebody makes a little too much money, the platform owner forces the vendor to sell out on its terms or pay the consequences. It's worse because in the Stacker case you *could* continue to use Stacker on Windows if you liked it better. Many did that. But Microsoft shrunk the market for Stacker's product sufficiently that Stacker was no longer a viable business.
Apple is simply kicking Admob off the iPhone. None of its high minded justifications of user experience and malware protection apply here. *Apple* wanted to by Admob but failed, so obviously they don't think this is something that shouldn't be on their platform. Failing to buy the company themselves, now they want to stick their thumb in the eye of Admob's new owners.
And why not? Developers aren't going to be porting their Objective C apps to Android overnight. Users still have their apps -- they may even get fewer ads until Apple has replaced Admob. That's not sustainable, but since third parties can't provide advertising revenues to developers, Apple is surely going to create its own version of Admob.
In effect, Apple gets to take over revenues from the business Admob created without buying the business itself. How sweet is that?
This is what I've said all long about Apple's TOS. It really amounts to your committing to a Hobson's choice to any future changes Apple dictates: either eat them or close up shop. For the vast majority of small and even semi-hobbyist developers, this is an acceptable deal because you're only talking about making small amounts of money. But you'd be nuts as an entrepreneur to spend years creating the next big thing on the iPhone platform. Admob's backers got under the wire, but the next entrepreneur who sells his business will have to discount the value of that business by the probability of drawing Apple's displeasure.
The problem is that the practical effect of this falls disproportionately on the poor (as do the negative effects of current energy production). The wealthy have to adjust the distribution of their investments -- an inconvenience. The poor have to endure cold, give up that job that's too far to walk to, cut back on food which has become more expensive.
Let's say the price of energy doubled overnight. A lot of us would lose our jobs as investments were shuffled around. But for those of us who didn't lose our jobs, we wouldn't go without. We'd have food, heat, transportation. We wouldn't stay home during vacation. We'd alter our use of energy by changing the kind of car we bought next time around, or keeping our thermostats set differently. We might go to one place instead of taking a driving vacation. In the short term the low inflation caused by lost employment would blunt the impact of the price increases, and in a few years we wouldn't even notice the difference.
I'm all for conservation through tax credits, incentives, even carbon taxes with provisions for blunting the impact on people who will feel it the most. But we've had all our energy eggs in one basket for the last century: cheap oil. Moving some or even most of those eggs to the conservation basket is a good idea, but we can't do it overnight and we certainly can't move all of them.
What's the "right" amount of energy to consume? That's a meaningless question when asked in isolation. You need to ask "for what" and "from what sources" and "with what impact?" Clearly the answer for fossil fuels, given their externalized impacts (pollution) and future availability (dwindling) is that we should be using less of them. But conservation is no more a panacea for our energy problems than nuclear power is.
Re:Gartner is shilling
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I've been in this software business for twenty seven years, and one thing I've learned is timing is everything. You gets tons of people trying to make money doing something, then the person who gets a good enough product out at the right time -- not too early, not too late -- wins the prize.
The same goes for upgrading. Vendors want to you to upgrade ASAP, especially if there's revenue involved. If you listened to them, you'd upgrade too early. But you can also upgrade too late. Here's how you know you've got the timing right: nothing much happens. What? I go through all that pain in the ass for nothing much to happen?
Yes. Exactly so.
The vendors do not have a solution to all your problems. They're peddling software updates. So you're a fool upgrading early to achieve IT Nirvana. But you're equally a fool to wait until your hand is forced, and you have to meet heaven and Earth to do multiple years of updating in a single quarter, disrupting the operation of your employers and leaving users in a world of unfamiliar user interfaces.
Lack of drama is the hallmark of competency. Each quarter looks more or less like the last one, with no notable emergencies or sudden "improvements" that leave people with allegedly powerful but unfamiliar tools. You can't do that if you wait until your hand is forced.
We're coming up on the one year anniversary of Windows 7. For Windows XP shops, this is a good time to start planning a transition that will be done before this time next year.
Hold on, that was one of those rhetorical thingammies, where you pretend to lack information but are actually setting up to make a lame point, wasn't it?
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MS SQL does a pretty good job optimizing common queries, but at a tremendous cost in orthogonality of T-SQL. I've also found limitations in MS SQL handling of very complex queries, but there is no question that on the kinds of queries that dominate in the vast majority of applications, MS SQL provides reliably good performance out of the box.
That's an engineering trade-off that works for lots of people.
That said, you're going about this the wrong way. The solution to generally inconsistent query performance is database administration, not tweaking. That's "user unfriendly" because it's a job for a DBA, not a user. Oracle gives you much, much more access to the innards of the system, and its stuff that even most tech savvy developers aren't really competent to play with.
Oracle should give comparable performance to MS SQL in most instances without tweaking. Certainly you shouldn't be seeing a difference of 10x in performance that you have to correct by tweaking. My guess is something is really really screwed up on the Oracle installation you were working with.
Finally you also have to evaluate the performance of the query under production conditions, not developer conditions: many large tables simultaneously handling heavy update loads with lots of concurrency issues. The results you are talking about are so screwy, though, it's clear that you've got a really mis-configured system.
In certain contexts, granted. And where you have such a context, by all means go for it if you like MySQL and are comfortable with it. I haven't used MySQL Cluster, but what I've read about it makes it seem pretty nifty. But I've also seen situations where MySQL even with clustering wouldn't work, particularly as transactions scale in complexity, not just volume.
For what a lot of people use databases for (backing store for form entry) it really doesn't matter because you only use generic capabilities and work mostly in your IDE.
When it gets to really challenging database problems, it's a question of which fail comes first: the failure of the developer or admin using Oracle or the failure of MySQL to keep up with the application's needs. For example, if you need just a bit more performance, with MySQL your response is simple: get bigger iron. If it's not worth the price, you live with it. With Oracle you start looking into the manuals and contemplating playing with things only an expert Oracle DBA ought to mess with. Then if you get it wrong, it's *your* fail.
I think Oracle's a great product. If I was looking at a project where I had to choose between SQL Server and Oracle, I'd definitely go Oracle even if I had to pay twice the license fee. Oracle's transaction log management capabilities would be worth the price alone. Nobody does transaction isolation better than Oracle, either. But ye gods you can screw yourself messing around on one hand, or not paying enough attention on the other.
I've used both MySQL and Oracle, and I'm comfortable with Oracle, except I don't much like the company or its corporate culture (not that that matters if the question is MySQL vs. Oracle). I might be more comfortable handing off a MySQL project to another developer or manager.
What a non-story.
You use Oracle because you *have to*. Not because it is pretty.
Saying MySQL has pulled ahead of Oracle is like saying that claw hammers have pulled ahead of pneumatic hammers mounted on giant excavators.
Not just any crisis, but an *existential crisis*.
The poor reactor is confronting its mortality; wondering what its existence serves any purpose or its actions have any meaning.
Just to clarify for folks with poor reading comprehension: this just applies to the tarballs washing up on Florida beaches, which happens at a low rate all the time. It doesn't apply to the giant plumes of emulsified oil deep in the Gulf, which could not have come from ships.
We'll be dealing with the consequences of the DWH spill for a long time, and most of them won't be visible on the beaches. We might never see the kind of obvious to the media disaster in FL that we've seen in LA.
A trend? What trend? Are you seeing these stickers on copies of the Bill of Rights all over the place?
Who ever heard of this isn't some kind of publicity stunt? Or even a political stunt? Or an employee getting at the boss by some ham-handed literal interpretation of a company policy. Or (most likely) an isolated instance of idiocy.
Are people so darned addicted to outrage that they have to turn every isolated event into some kind of movement? Do we have to get hysterical every time somebody says or does something stupid? Because if we do we aren't going to have time for anything else.
No, they're arguing over the right to make it possible for app developers to offer you the choice of paying cash up front for the app, or to pay by living with ads in the app.
I usually opt for the ad supported app. In cases where the ads are done in an intrusive and annoying fashion, I usually drop the app because its garbage. In the majority of cases I don't consciously see the ads after a day or so, but in the few apps I use regularly I opt to go for the pay option so that I won't be influenced subconsciously.
I once proposed this at an environmental organization I worked in. The parking lot was always overcrowded. My idea was that we should charge everyone who lived within reasonable public transit ride or biking distances of the office should pay five dollars every time they parked, and that we use the revenue to subsidize transit passes and a bike lock up.
Everyone listened and then continued on as if they were politely ignoring my brief outburst of insanity.
If you have nothing to add from any actual first hand experience, you'd do everyone including yourself a favor by fitting the amount you say to the volume of knowledge you possess.
I cannot help wondering when I read stuff like that who *really need* atomic, ...
and who just like it because it sounds cool
Oy. I agree very few personal computers need this, but when you are talking about servers it's quite common. Really any time restoring the version of file A that goes with a different version of file B would be a bad thing. Datasets where debits and credits wouldn't, indexes that might end up pointing to the wrong records, virtual machine disks and other huge data objects that live in multiple files files ... it isn't hard to think of scenarios where a snapshot is really important.
Citations?
I think it's very likely you've never worked in an environmental organization. I have. Let me tell you what the single thing they spend the most time obsessing about: the impact of degraded environmental quality on the quality of human life.
Yes, it is true environmentalists value the environment for itself more than the general population does. There's a simple explanation for that. If you study something, you care more about it. Birders care more about bird conservation. Hunters care more about game conservation. Wildflower photographers care more about plant conservation. It's as simple as that. Of course, to outsiders, birders, hunters and nature photographers seem a little like crackpots.
Caring about things is not a zero sum game. Just because you care *more* about the forests, or the bottom of the ocean, doesn't mean you care less about people. In fact it works the other way around. Caring isn't a resource, it's a habit of thought. The more you practice it, the better you get at it.
I'll just leave you with a few quotes from a report I participated in developing:
*A sustainable economy should provide for basic material requirements and a healthy quality of life.
* Economic "progress" must be encouraged, measured and gauged in terms of quality of life and development of human potential...
* The behavior of economic systems today should not diminish the potential enjoyment of life for future generations.
* Appropriate market incentives (e.g., full cost accounting) are essential to achieve biophysical and economic sustainability, and subsidies for unsustainable practices should be eliminated.
* The natural and physical environment is the platform which supports all communities and institutions.
In my personal experience, this is mainstream consensus opinion in the environmental movement, although how such ideas apply to specific policies such as trading pollution credits is often a matter of debate. That's because details matter. It might seem like a minority position among environmentalists to you if your knowledge of environmentalists is second hand, through sources that are interested in playing up controversy or equating environmentalism with extremism.
"Anti-nuclear environmentalist organizations" is just hand waving propaganda. *Which* organizations took *what* positions?
Insofar as fusion power is concerned, its certainly a myth that environmental organizations are holding us back. Nobody knows what a commercially viable fusion plant would look like, so how could those mean old environmentalists be spoiling everything again?
Now as an environmentalist myself, when we get to the point of building the first fusion power plant, I'd like to see a proper environmental impact analysis done, just because we've never built one. Surely we'll have to deal with the issue of plant decommissioning. Also, before we decide that fusion power is going to replace everything, we should think through the consequences to see if we've missed anything. But insofar as fusion will be replacing fossil fuels, the bar for "do no harm" is pretty low.
Insofar as fission is concerned, I'm not against further research and a conservative program of new plant building. What I'm against is jumping to the conclusion that a crash program building the kind of plants we built thirty years ago is going to magically solve all our problems. There's be a lot of problems with uranium dependency, and we'd be storing up problems for the future.
What I'd really like to see if more investments in the electricity distribution grid. This will prepare us for a future in which we have more diverse energy sources. That would be good for the country, good for humanity and good for the environment. Combined with greater energy efficiency and conservation, that would help us face declining global oil production without resorting to rash and desperate measures.
Apple is tying its products to another vendor. It can't stand behind its products without policing the actions of its partner as far as customers for Apple products are concerned.
It'd be different if it were just AT&T being sloppy with its email users, and *some* iPad users used AT&T mail. That'd be AT&T's problem. But the deal Apple is offering is "use AT&T's network services or don't use an iPad."
It'd be different if Apple gave you a choice of providers, and you chose wrong.
Like it or not, AT&T service is part of the iPad, just like Foxconn circuit boards.
Not deserving a beating is not the same as not needing one.
Unfortunately, people remember negative experiences more clearly than positive ones.
I'm not so sure about that. Apple *requires* customers provide their email address in order to activate their iPad, then they turn the email address over to AT&T.
Under the circumstances, Apple is morally (although probably not legally) responsible for ensuring that AT&T only use that information for appropriate purposes and take reasonable security precautions with it.
Apple has a very simple recourse if it doesn't want to do that. It could provide every iPad with its own email address. Users could then forward email from that address to their real email, or not if they prefer to remain anonymous.
It depends on the nature of Microsoft's response. Consider the following:
(a)"Thanks, this looks serious. We've got a team looking into it now, but we've found some difficulties with your suggested fix. If you don't see a security patch in the next several days, don't be alarmed. A patch is coming soon, but we don't want to release a fix that creates more problems. We'd appreciate it if you kept this under your hat while we're working on this. We'll be sure to credit you with finding this problem when the patch comes out. Feel free to call my cell at xxx-xxx-xxxx if you have any questions."
(b)"Thank you for your interest in the
[ ] aesthetics
[ ] features
[ ] performance
[x] security
of Microsoft Windows, the most
[ ] good looking
[ ] comprehensive
[ ] powerful
[x] safe
operating system on the market. We get more suggestions for improving Windows than we can respond to personally, but your input is important to us. With your help, we will make the next release of Windows
[ ] more beautiful
[ ] more useful
[ ] faster
[x] more secure
than ever."
If it is (b), I'd release the details too, although I'd wait longer than five days, and I'd give them a heads-up that I was announcing.
Apple only decided that your privacy needed protection from your usage patterns being sold *after* it failed to buy the company that was doing that itself. That was my point.
It may be true that your interest in that needs protection, but Apple as a company doesn't have a leg to stand on when it claims it's looking out for your interests here. It's doing this to deny a competitor any benefit from outbidding it for that company. Since this shows Apple is willing to violate what you see as your privacy rights, and adware is very important to the platform as it competes with Android, I am certain we will see an Apple provided, or at least Apple blessed version of the very thing it claims it is protecting you from.
Personally, I think that analytics is a good thing for the user, provided he understands what the deal is, where it applies, and who can obtain that information. So you pay $9.99 for the "hot women" app so that nobody knows your using that *and* the ad supported Bible concordance program.
Well, if we are going to use "ultimate teleology" as our yardstick, then Microsoft (and everyone else) is in business to increase the net entropy of the universe.
In most other places I'm known as "grumpynerd". No help to you, I'm afraid.
After market installation is what has kept Linux going for over a decade, but tablets are a different matter altogether.
The attraction of tablets lies largely in what they aren't. They aren't PCs. We have enough PCs in our lives, so the marginal value of another PC is nil. The marginal value of an ebook reader or media player is greater for most of us.
PCs are a pain in the ass, even if you are good with them. They have to be administered. What users are looking for in a tablet is an appliance. Sometimes you have to call the repair man to fix the dishwasher, but you don't have to *administer* the damned thing.
That's one of the reasons that Microsoft's tablet efforts failed is that the fundamental pitch was "hey this is *really* a PC. You know all about PCs already." Yep, we do. And most of us don't like 'em.
That approach kind of worked for a while in the PDA market -- at least well enough that they were able to help Palm commit suicide as hardware margins fell. Palm's offerings became much more computer-like, which opened the door for Microsoft to say, "Look, if you are buying a handheld PC, why not stick with the devil you know?" That worked great until Apple gave users something that was much more like the original Palms than Palm's own offerings: an appliance that did some nifty tricks but was definitely not another damned PC.
Of course it helped that Microsoft's implementation of tablet features really sucked. I'm typing this on a Lenovo S-10T -- a convertible tablet. In theory it should be a killer value proposition, and I really do like the hardware, but using the tablet features is like sticking your fingers into a meat grinder. I'd have waited a few months and got an iPad for about the same price, and it would have been a hell of a lot more fun, but really this machine is an alternative to a Kindle DS for me. The Kindle ebook reader does a terrible job at rendering math books. I know its not the book format itself because the same books render fine on an iPod touch. Since I needed those books right away, I followed the usual rule of buying technology: wait until you need it, but when you do need don't wait until something better comes along.
And that sooner or later there's going to be a Linux tablet distro worth trying. VLC on this thing rocks. It especially kills for watching speeches and lectures. I play them back at 2.1x until the person speaking says something that's hard to follow, so I can get through 50 minutes (which inevitably consists of surprising amounts of "um","er", digression and shuffling presentation materials around) in under 30 minutes. If I were a student I'd do all my lectures by video on this thing and save a ton of time.
Oh, developers and advertisers will be allowed to know all that. They'll just have to wait for the brouhaha to die down so Apple can quietly introduce their spiffy "new" advertising service. Then they'll pay Apple, not the people who first developed the technology for the platform.
It's possible, maybe even likely, that Apple will bury the costs of the Apple branded service where it won't show. Then they'll piously tell the credulous world that they're giving away free service out of the goodness of their hearts. Sound familiar? It should.
This will be the Stacker case all over again. The platform owner is happy to let vendors make a little money if it sells the platform, but if somebody makes a little too much money, the platform owner forces the vendor to sell out on its terms or pay the consequences. It's worse because in the Stacker case you *could* continue to use Stacker on Windows if you liked it better. Many did that. But Microsoft shrunk the market for Stacker's product sufficiently that Stacker was no longer a viable business.
Apple is simply kicking Admob off the iPhone. None of its high minded justifications of user experience and malware protection apply here. *Apple* wanted to by Admob but failed, so obviously they don't think this is something that shouldn't be on their platform. Failing to buy the company themselves, now they want to stick their thumb in the eye of Admob's new owners.
And why not? Developers aren't going to be porting their Objective C apps to Android overnight. Users still have their apps -- they may even get fewer ads until Apple has replaced Admob. That's not sustainable, but since third parties can't provide advertising revenues to developers, Apple is surely going to create its own version of Admob.
In effect, Apple gets to take over revenues from the business Admob created without buying the business itself. How sweet is that?
This is what I've said all long about Apple's TOS. It really amounts to your committing to a Hobson's choice to any future changes Apple dictates: either eat them or close up shop. For the vast majority of small and even semi-hobbyist developers, this is an acceptable deal because you're only talking about making small amounts of money. But you'd be nuts as an entrepreneur to spend years creating the next big thing on the iPhone platform. Admob's backers got under the wire, but the next entrepreneur who sells his business will have to discount the value of that business by the probability of drawing Apple's displeasure.
Then increase the price. That's the only way.
The problem is that the practical effect of this falls disproportionately on the poor (as do the negative effects of current energy production). The wealthy have to adjust the distribution of their investments -- an inconvenience. The poor have to endure cold, give up that job that's too far to walk to, cut back on food which has become more expensive.
Let's say the price of energy doubled overnight. A lot of us would lose our jobs as investments were shuffled around. But for those of us who didn't lose our jobs, we wouldn't go without. We'd have food, heat, transportation. We wouldn't stay home during vacation. We'd alter our use of energy by changing the kind of car we bought next time around, or keeping our thermostats set differently. We might go to one place instead of taking a driving vacation. In the short term the low inflation caused by lost employment would blunt the impact of the price increases, and in a few years we wouldn't even notice the difference.
I'm all for conservation through tax credits, incentives, even carbon taxes with provisions for blunting the impact on people who will feel it the most. But we've had all our energy eggs in one basket for the last century: cheap oil. Moving some or even most of those eggs to the conservation basket is a good idea, but we can't do it overnight and we certainly can't move all of them.
What's the "right" amount of energy to consume? That's a meaningless question when asked in isolation. You need to ask "for what" and "from what sources" and "with what impact?" Clearly the answer for fossil fuels, given their externalized impacts (pollution) and future availability (dwindling) is that we should be using less of them. But conservation is no more a panacea for our energy problems than nuclear power is.
I've been in this software business for twenty seven years, and one thing I've learned is timing is everything. You gets tons of people trying to make money doing something, then the person who gets a good enough product out at the right time -- not too early, not too late -- wins the prize.
The same goes for upgrading. Vendors want to you to upgrade ASAP, especially if there's revenue involved. If you listened to them, you'd upgrade too early. But you can also upgrade too late. Here's how you know you've got the timing right: nothing much happens. What? I go through all that pain in the ass for nothing much to happen?
Yes. Exactly so.
The vendors do not have a solution to all your problems. They're peddling software updates. So you're a fool upgrading early to achieve IT Nirvana. But you're equally a fool to wait until your hand is forced, and you have to meet heaven and Earth to do multiple years of updating in a single quarter, disrupting the operation of your employers and leaving users in a world of unfamiliar user interfaces.
Lack of drama is the hallmark of competency. Each quarter looks more or less like the last one, with no notable emergencies or sudden "improvements" that leave people with allegedly powerful but unfamiliar tools. You can't do that if you wait until your hand is forced.
We're coming up on the one year anniversary of Windows 7. For Windows XP shops, this is a good time to start planning a transition that will be done before this time next year.
Not very sad.
Hold on, that was one of those rhetorical thingammies, where you pretend to lack information but are actually setting up to make a lame point, wasn't it?