You've been tossing softballs from this account for years, biding your time and waiting for your on-topic moment to shine. For your patience and foresight, sir, I salute you.
You could not have picked a worse business model, and Apple has nothing to do with it. First, you entered a crowded app market. Book readers for iOS are a dime (or less) a dozen, and nothing about yours particularly stood out from the crowd. Second, forget Apple; you're competing with Barnes & Noble and Amazon on their home turf. Are you insane? I could buy a book from you and read it on an iOS device, or jump through hoops involving Adobe (shudder) and read it on a desktop. Alternatively, I can buy a book through bn.com or from their Nook app and seamlessly read it on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, or BlackBerry. I'm hard pressed to think of a single reason why I'd want to use an unknown developer instead of one of the enormous, well-established booksellers.
It's easy to blame Apple for your failures. Realistically, though, you never had a chance against the other major players who are in a cut-throat competition right now.
And what's wrong with that? There's the "It Gets Better Project" for gay kids, so why not something similar for outcast geek kids? I had a relatively easy time of high school because I was fairly athletic and got along well with most of the "in" crowd, but we all know plenty of geeks who were picked on and belittled to the point of near-suicide. So back to my question: what's wrong with telling those kids that lots of young geeks do pretty damn well for themselves and that the rough years will pass?
Because a lot of sysadmins didn't think to install an unRAR plugin for ClamAV on the mailserver. If you can put lindsaynaked.jpg.exe inside a RAR file so that it doesn't get scanned, then there's a better chance of getting it onto the corporate LAN.
I don't directly connect to anything Sony unless I absolutely have to. While I'm running Linux behind an OpenBSD firewall/IDS, there's no point playing with fire.
If I were the movie music industry I'd be supporting the transition to IP v6, as it reduces the ambiguity.
It doesn't have to, and nothing prevents you from manually assigning your own made-up IPv6 address to hosts on your network. I have a lot of FreeBSD machines, each running a lot of jails. The main interface gets its address from autoconfig but each of the aliases for the virtual machines comes from piping/dev/random into md5sum and inserting a colon after every 4 nibbles.
For that matter, there's nothing stopping you from putting an address-randomizing NAT on your gateway so that outgoing connections seem to come from a random distribution of your home/64 block. What subset of those 18*10^18 fictional hosts corresponded to your laptop at 2:43 AM yesterday morning?
Because law is a complex field with its own jargon, much of which sounds like plain English but isn't.
In other words, it's exactly like math. In everyday usage, for example, "A implies B" means something like "A hints at B" or "A suggests B". In math, "A implies B" means "if A is true, then B is true".
And it's exactly like science. Think of the trouble caused by people thinking that a scientific "theory" (something generally recognized as a reasonable model of reality within its operating parameters) is the same thing as a colloquial theory (which varies from "a pretty likely idea" to "wild-assed guess").
And it's exactly like computers. Upon inspection by the casual observer, a "hard drive" isn't any harder than any other component in a computer, and it doesn't seem to be driving anything. A bus doesn't tote children around. A card looks nothing like a playing card or something you'll send your mom this Sunday. A mouse isn't a mouse. A cursor doesn't.
Jargon is jargon and for a very good reason: without it, it's almost impossible to communicate clearly and succinctly with other practitioners in a field.
why can't the courts write things in a way that regular laypeople can understand in the way in which the court intends? Having a secret 'alternate' meaning to the English language is elitist, exclusionary, and just propagates the idea that the legal profession is a special guild in which we plebes aren't allowed to participate.
It is a special guild, exactly like mathematicians, scientists, and computer scientists are their own guilds with "elitist and exclusionary" languages of their own. Do you want to refer to a "device which makes connections between different wire-and-socket combinations in a collection of high-speed mathematical processing systems within close proximity to each other" or a "switch" when talking to the guy in the next cubicle?
No, but you should at least have some idea what you're talking about before you belly up to the table. This could be anything from "took a [...] class" to "studied material independently" to "read [a subject-matter website] for 8 years" but you should have *some* modicum of knowledge about [the field's] quirks before you lambaste [an expert's] ruling.
Generalized that for you. Think about how many things you learned in comp sci that either seemed obviously correct (but turned out to be true for completely unexpected reasons) or obviously incorrect (but follow as the logical offshoot of earlier results). Any field seems easy until you learn enough about it to realize how complex some of its issues really are.
Not that you were wrong at all. I just wanted to extend your statement a little.
As someone who shipped a lot of packages through USPS, the solution is very simple. Get a real time tracking system in par with UPS and FedEx (not bullshit overnight updates) and make the insurance for package claims less of a joke than UPS and FedEx.
Overnight updates? What magical Good Luck Fairy is blessing you with so much information? My USPS experiences are more along the lines of:
Monday morning: Order a part online and pay for 3-day delivery. Get an email an hour later saying that my package has been mailed.
Tuesday:Shipping information received from customer Wednesday:Shipping information received from customer Thursday:Shipping information received from customer Friday:Departure scan: Des Moines Saturday:Arrival scan: Vladivostok Sunday:Departure scan: Istanbul [customs note: not Constantinople] Monday:Departure scan: Omaha Tuesday:OUT FOR DELIVERY Wednesday:Unattended delivery address: reprocessing Thursday:Arrival scan: Fresno Friday:OUT FOR DELIVERY
As far as I can tell, "3 Day Delivery" means 1) the day you ordered, 2) the day the Post Office picks it up, and 3) the day they deliver it, are guaranteed to be three separate days.
It means that the attempts people made for "communism" wasn't actually communism but their interpretation of it
As opposed to your interpretation of "communism", which is clearly truer to the original intent. I would like to introduce you to my friend, the True Scotsman.
He said he uses massive sub-SELECTS. PostgreSQL has massive problems with them, assuming you expect the DB to return results the same day.
My database is tiny with only a few hundred million tuples and might not be the best counterexample, but I've only logged a couple dozen slow queries (defined here as taking 1.000s or longer) in the last day. I guess I've never seen any problems with subselects that wouldn't have been issues if they were top-level queries, eg huge joins on unindexed tables and other things like that.
I could tweet that Obama had a major heart attack and Biden is now running things, even though it didn't happen. Are people going to spend time verifying that?
You usually don't have to because someone else will follow up to real stories with linked articles from more mainstream sources. I went from seeing "Osama is dead!" to "Here's a link to CNN:..." in about 2 minutes.
If you're getting tweets from Washington Post or a creditable news source, then Twitter isn't doing anything that a smart phone or the tv doesn't already do.
I don't want to check a bunch of news sites or watch TV constantly, for much the same reason that I'd rather chat around the office water cooler than do either of those things. There are other considerations, like the fact that I heard from several friends (none of whom knew each other) about a minor earthquake in their city well before it was reported.
I think if it's not meeting the criteria you just mentioned, it makes Twitter useless as a news source.
Not in the slightest. I first read about OBL's death on Twitter. I didn't take that as authoritative information, but it brought the news to my attention so I could learn more about it elsewhere.
Twitter is useless as a news source in exactly the same way Wikipedia is useless as an information source. You don't want to cite either one in a formal article, but both can give you good pointers to primary sources you can pursue further.
wow man that's harsh. you're saying that if a company doesn't give you good customer service, then somebody will hack the company, steal millions of account records, and cause millions if not more in damages and lost business?
If he's not, I will: yes, that's exactly correct. When companies piss enough people off, someone goes gunning for their servers. Neither erroneus nor I are claiming that this is the correct, moral, or legitimate response, just that it's a likely outcome. Sony and their peers have worked hard to remove all legitimate means of redress, and now people are pursuing the only avenues left open to the average guy without a few megadollars to futilely pursue them in court. What else would you expect to happen, really?
A comet doing exactly what everybody knows it would do is not exactly news.
How gloriously incurious you seem to be. I thought it was interesting: "Hey, remember that cool comet you watched from a rooftop with a bunch of your friends? It's gone back to sleep for about as long as modern civilization has been around." I feel kind of bad for you that you don't see the wonder in that.
Couldn't have been that it was your own unfocused elementary school mind that confused them.
I was taught, point-blank, explicitly, no exceptions, that you can't ever subtract a big number from a smaller number. MrQuacker may very well be right; I know I was told some pretty goofy stuff over the years.
On the other hand, Apple tends to have more expensive hardware and has a smaller market share, so it attracts fewer malware writers.
Frankly, that's a load of shit. First, 10% of an enormous PC market is still a pretty damn big pool to draw from, especially since a hacker would have it to himself and not have to compete with 100 botnets. Second, nothing says "come and get me" like an easily identifiable selection of people who have more available spending money. Whether you're after personal data (a Macbook owner likely has more funding than a netbook owner, on average) or bandwidth for hosting bot stuff (more money in the tech budget likely equates to more money spent on good connectivity), Mac owners present an extremely attractive target. Any advice from "experts" who don't account for socioeconomic motives should be taken with a grain of salt.
Note: there's nothing magical about Macs in this equation, except that they cost more. You could make the exact same case about Mercedes owners, people with houses more than 3,000 square feet, or people who go to Disney World. Those subsets aren't nearly as easy to identify with nmap, though.
Agreed - can't stand the crazy way the Apple US store quotes its prices. The phone does NOT cost $199/$299. It costs significantly more than that, an amount which you pay off over the next 2 years by virtue of the binding service contract you sign with the service provider.
Except that the phone+data plan costs the same whether you're using an iPhone or something else. Presuming you were going to have phone service anyway, the cost of using an iPhone with that service is $199/$299. That's like saying that a car doesn't really cost $X because that amount doesn't account for fuel consumption. That might make more sense for cars where different models cost different amounts to operate, but falls down here where the monthly costs are identical regardless of which phone you buy.
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You've been tossing softballs from this account for years, biding your time and waiting for your on-topic moment to shine. For your patience and foresight, sir, I salute you.
You could not have picked a worse business model, and Apple has nothing to do with it. First, you entered a crowded app market. Book readers for iOS are a dime (or less) a dozen, and nothing about yours particularly stood out from the crowd. Second, forget Apple; you're competing with Barnes & Noble and Amazon on their home turf. Are you insane? I could buy a book from you and read it on an iOS device, or jump through hoops involving Adobe (shudder) and read it on a desktop. Alternatively, I can buy a book through bn.com or from their Nook app and seamlessly read it on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, or BlackBerry. I'm hard pressed to think of a single reason why I'd want to use an unknown developer instead of one of the enormous, well-established booksellers.
It's easy to blame Apple for your failures. Realistically, though, you never had a chance against the other major players who are in a cut-throat competition right now.
And what's wrong with that? There's the "It Gets Better Project" for gay kids, so why not something similar for outcast geek kids? I had a relatively easy time of high school because I was fairly athletic and got along well with most of the "in" crowd, but we all know plenty of geeks who were picked on and belittled to the point of near-suicide. So back to my question: what's wrong with telling those kids that lots of young geeks do pretty damn well for themselves and that the rough years will pass?
Because a lot of sysadmins didn't think to install an unRAR plugin for ClamAV on the mailserver. If you can put lindsaynaked.jpg.exe inside a RAR file so that it doesn't get scanned, then there's a better chance of getting it onto the corporate LAN.
I don't directly connect to anything Sony unless I absolutely have to. While I'm running Linux behind an OpenBSD firewall/IDS, there's no point playing with fire.
Of course they just released a new version of KDE. Ubuntu shipped last month.
How dare they not rush it out the door months earlier to give the Ubuntu guys extra time to screw it up.
If I were the movie music industry I'd be supporting the transition to IP v6, as it reduces the ambiguity.
It doesn't have to, and nothing prevents you from manually assigning your own made-up IPv6 address to hosts on your network. I have a lot of FreeBSD machines, each running a lot of jails. The main interface gets its address from autoconfig but each of the aliases for the virtual machines comes from piping /dev/random into md5sum and inserting a colon after every 4 nibbles.
For that matter, there's nothing stopping you from putting an address-randomizing NAT on your gateway so that outgoing connections seem to come from a random distribution of your home /64 block. What subset of those 18*10^18 fictional hosts corresponded to your laptop at 2:43 AM yesterday morning?
... and why must this be the case?
Because law is a complex field with its own jargon, much of which sounds like plain English but isn't.
In other words, it's exactly like math. In everyday usage, for example, "A implies B" means something like "A hints at B" or "A suggests B". In math, "A implies B" means "if A is true, then B is true".
And it's exactly like science. Think of the trouble caused by people thinking that a scientific "theory" (something generally recognized as a reasonable model of reality within its operating parameters) is the same thing as a colloquial theory (which varies from "a pretty likely idea" to "wild-assed guess").
And it's exactly like computers. Upon inspection by the casual observer, a "hard drive" isn't any harder than any other component in a computer, and it doesn't seem to be driving anything. A bus doesn't tote children around. A card looks nothing like a playing card or something you'll send your mom this Sunday. A mouse isn't a mouse. A cursor doesn't.
Jargon is jargon and for a very good reason: without it, it's almost impossible to communicate clearly and succinctly with other practitioners in a field.
It begs the question
No, it doesn't. <-- jargon
why can't the courts write things in a way that regular laypeople can understand in the way in which the court intends? Having a secret 'alternate' meaning to the English language is elitist, exclusionary, and just propagates the idea that the legal profession is a special guild in which we plebes aren't allowed to participate.
It is a special guild, exactly like mathematicians, scientists, and computer scientists are their own guilds with "elitist and exclusionary" languages of their own. Do you want to refer to a "device which makes connections between different wire-and-socket combinations in a collection of high-speed mathematical processing systems within close proximity to each other" or a "switch" when talking to the guy in the next cubicle?
No, but you should at least have some idea what you're talking about before you belly up to the table. This could be anything from "took a [...] class" to "studied material independently" to "read [a subject-matter website] for 8 years" but you should have *some* modicum of knowledge about [the field's] quirks before you lambaste [an expert's] ruling.
Generalized that for you. Think about how many things you learned in comp sci that either seemed obviously correct (but turned out to be true for completely unexpected reasons) or obviously incorrect (but follow as the logical offshoot of earlier results). Any field seems easy until you learn enough about it to realize how complex some of its issues really are.
Not that you were wrong at all. I just wanted to extend your statement a little.
As someone who shipped a lot of packages through USPS, the solution is very simple. Get a real time tracking system in par with UPS and FedEx (not bullshit overnight updates) and make the insurance for package claims less of a joke than UPS and FedEx.
Overnight updates? What magical Good Luck Fairy is blessing you with so much information? My USPS experiences are more along the lines of:
Monday morning: Order a part online and pay for 3-day delivery. Get an email an hour later saying that my package has been mailed.
Tuesday: Shipping information received from customer
Wednesday: Shipping information received from customer
Thursday: Shipping information received from customer
Friday: Departure scan: Des Moines
Saturday: Arrival scan: Vladivostok
Sunday: Departure scan: Istanbul [customs note: not Constantinople]
Monday: Departure scan: Omaha
Tuesday: OUT FOR DELIVERY
Wednesday: Unattended delivery address: reprocessing
Thursday: Arrival scan: Fresno
Friday: OUT FOR DELIVERY
As far as I can tell, "3 Day Delivery" means 1) the day you ordered, 2) the day the Post Office picks it up, and 3) the day they deliver it, are guaranteed to be three separate days.
It means that the attempts people made for "communism" wasn't actually communism but their interpretation of it
As opposed to your interpretation of "communism", which is clearly truer to the original intent. I would like to introduce you to my friend, the True Scotsman.
Presumably the calculator and gold would both be lighter on the moon.
You got ripped off - gold is around $1475/ounce, your 4 ounce calculator should be worth around $6000.
A 12C would have told him that.
He said he uses massive sub-SELECTS. PostgreSQL has massive problems with them, assuming you expect the DB to return results the same day.
My database is tiny with only a few hundred million tuples and might not be the best counterexample, but I've only logged a couple dozen slow queries (defined here as taking 1.000s or longer) in the last day. I guess I've never seen any problems with subselects that wouldn't have been issues if they were top-level queries, eg huge joins on unindexed tables and other things like that.
mysql is ungood, but it never crash that often... (unless,... you are using stored procedure.)
And some people wonder why I still don't take MySQL seriously and never use it for new development.
You do know that MACs are hardware IDs and don't get passed around and used by multiple users.
Dude, quit. You are obviously in the wrong line of work if your view of the fundamentals of your career is so obviously, demonstrably wrong.
A netbook.
I could tweet that Obama had a major heart attack and Biden is now running things, even though it didn't happen. Are people going to spend time verifying that?
You usually don't have to because someone else will follow up to real stories with linked articles from more mainstream sources. I went from seeing "Osama is dead!" to "Here's a link to CNN: ..." in about 2 minutes.
If you're getting tweets from Washington Post or a creditable news source, then Twitter isn't doing anything that a smart phone or the tv doesn't already do.
I don't want to check a bunch of news sites or watch TV constantly, for much the same reason that I'd rather chat around the office water cooler than do either of those things. There are other considerations, like the fact that I heard from several friends (none of whom knew each other) about a minor earthquake in their city well before it was reported.
I think if it's not meeting the criteria you just mentioned, it makes Twitter useless as a news source.
Not in the slightest. I first read about OBL's death on Twitter. I didn't take that as authoritative information, but it brought the news to my attention so I could learn more about it elsewhere.
Twitter is useless as a news source in exactly the same way Wikipedia is useless as an information source. You don't want to cite either one in a formal article, but both can give you good pointers to primary sources you can pursue further.
wow man that's harsh. you're saying that if a company doesn't give you good customer service, then somebody will hack the company, steal millions of account records, and cause millions if not more in damages and lost business?
If he's not, I will: yes, that's exactly correct. When companies piss enough people off, someone goes gunning for their servers. Neither erroneus nor I are claiming that this is the correct, moral, or legitimate response, just that it's a likely outcome. Sony and their peers have worked hard to remove all legitimate means of redress, and now people are pursuing the only avenues left open to the average guy without a few megadollars to futilely pursue them in court. What else would you expect to happen, really?
That's what they want you to think.
A comet doing exactly what everybody knows it would do is not exactly news.
How gloriously incurious you seem to be. I thought it was interesting: "Hey, remember that cool comet you watched from a rooftop with a bunch of your friends? It's gone back to sleep for about as long as modern civilization has been around." I feel kind of bad for you that you don't see the wonder in that.
Couldn't have been that it was your own unfocused elementary school mind that confused them.
I was taught, point-blank, explicitly, no exceptions, that you can't ever subtract a big number from a smaller number. MrQuacker may very well be right; I know I was told some pretty goofy stuff over the years.
On the other hand, Apple tends to have more expensive hardware and has a smaller market share, so it attracts fewer malware writers.
Frankly, that's a load of shit. First, 10% of an enormous PC market is still a pretty damn big pool to draw from, especially since a hacker would have it to himself and not have to compete with 100 botnets. Second, nothing says "come and get me" like an easily identifiable selection of people who have more available spending money. Whether you're after personal data (a Macbook owner likely has more funding than a netbook owner, on average) or bandwidth for hosting bot stuff (more money in the tech budget likely equates to more money spent on good connectivity), Mac owners present an extremely attractive target. Any advice from "experts" who don't account for socioeconomic motives should be taken with a grain of salt.
Note: there's nothing magical about Macs in this equation, except that they cost more. You could make the exact same case about Mercedes owners, people with houses more than 3,000 square feet, or people who go to Disney World. Those subsets aren't nearly as easy to identify with nmap, though.
Agreed - can't stand the crazy way the Apple US store quotes its prices. The phone does NOT cost $199/$299. It costs significantly more than that, an amount which you pay off over the next 2 years by virtue of the binding service contract you sign with the service provider.
Except that the phone+data plan costs the same whether you're using an iPhone or something else. Presuming you were going to have phone service anyway, the cost of using an iPhone with that service is $199/$299. That's like saying that a car doesn't really cost $X because that amount doesn't account for fuel consumption. That might make more sense for cars where different models cost different amounts to operate, but falls down here where the monthly costs are identical regardless of which phone you buy.