Unlike Blackberry, Apple is actually reaching out into other fields, taking on new competencies, and making new products (or finding promising products and buying them, cleaning them to the Apple ecosystem and UX, bring up the hardware to snuff, then selling the result.)
I think it's this never-ending search for new markets and products that will keep Apple a going concern for a very, very long time - barring any massive strings of bad luck, naturally.
Blackberry's problems are self-caused - they preferred to stick with what they had, and refused to innovate (or even look) until the iPhone arrived, beat them up, took their lunch money, and started bedding down their girlfriend in front of them. Even then they kept sticking to the mantra that BES would save them from perdition...
PS: why did she not simply respond, affirming her claim of original material? It would have put her post back up, and it would have required BuildTeam to take legal action to remove it.
Funny thing is, the Streisand Effect will most likely kick-in hard for them, especially once it made the papers there.
Seriously - a multinational corporation can put up with bad press and survive, but most smaller businesses cannot.
Given that this is a UK company, I'm rather surprised that they didn't reach for the libel laws - even if the lady was absolutely correct and true, the legal costs would have likely ruined her faster than a DMCA takedown would have.
I notice you didn't include things like servers, routers, automobiles, industrial machinery, televisions (esp. the "smart" TVs), all the IoT shit (e.g. thermostats), avionics systems, and etc.
The embedded stuff outnumbers smartphones and 'PCs' by at least a factor or two... and nearly 50-60% of those run some embedded variant of Linux... embedded Windows ekes out maybe a sliver of that market.
So... Get ready to keep all your old electronics as it suddenly becomes VERY expensive to have it removed.
...not if you have a shovel and enough property to hide the results on.
On a more serious note, such a rise in disposal costs will create a legal black market of sorts where questions aren't asked, loopholes are exploited heavily, and the price of their service is only nominally higher. You know, like they do with ships nowadays.
I mean, if you can dump a zillion tons of outdated naval vessel, ditching a truckload of cast-off smartphones is child's play.
Was wondering about that... HK's population density is astounding - I doubt you could find a beehive with a density that high.
Perhaps they meant some industrial district far enough outside of HK to have some space to dump/recycle/whatever, but close enough to still (sorta) count? Like "the outskirts of the Hong Kong metro area" or suchlike.
It isn't just religious "superstition". Religious objections and actual humanist objections are one and the same - that each individual human being has a basic right to dignity and life, and to not be used as disposable lab rats.
On a strictly objective level, fetal experiments and (yes, Godwin) Dr. Mengele's experiments are based on the premise that the subjects were not considered to be human, in spite of having human DNA and the fact that they are individual distinct beings.
Prove otherwise if you can.
To be honest, I find it to be rather barbaric, even when covered with a huge banner that says 'science!'
Understand what you are saying when you say corporations need rights because they don't! every person should have the same rights, from the janitor to the investor.
So if some entity renegs on a contract with a corporation, who sues the guy? Does he pay it all out-of-pocket and get reimbursed by the company later? What about if a company itself does something lawsuit-worthy - who do *you* sue... the CEO personally?
What is the reason you think corporations should have any rights at all? Is it not sufficient that the persons involved have their rights. Why do corporations need extra rights on top of that?
Well, to be fair there are a few rights that a corporation needs:
* the right to construct and enforce contracts (the latter meaning enforcement via civil tort). * the right to some basic protection from crime by way of access to the police and recognition as a victim (e.g. burglaries, embezzlement, fraud, etc).
There are of course others, but these two immediately came to mind.
To be fair, Icahn sold off his Apple stock only partially because of the last quarterly report. The rest of the reason involves the fact that he was not getting his way with the Board.
Depends - is the electricity delivered via blunt contact points, or by way of darts (or otherwise piercing) contact points (the latter is how the Taser product works).
It wouldn't take much to bolster those darts into something that does more than partially penetrate skin.
I'm saying that properly grounded plate mail may be the order of the day if you want proof against either one, but even that won't stop CS Tear Gas... and it wouldn't take much to bolt on a directional ear-splitting speaker that emits noises which would incapacitate.
TL;DR: there's more than one way to skin the cat in this case.
As for the military, has it ever occurred to you that most of us actually don't want there to be a giant hegemonic power (you) throwing around your military weight in the world?
Cool - so when can we expect these nations to build up their own to a number sufficient for self-defense, so that the US military can remove themselves from those places? It might break some national budgets, but...
Also, we'll require a treaty stating that such countries are not to call on the US for help if they run into trouble.
[Apple] never invented shit. They always stole it, refined it, and repacked it.
So a Porsche 911 is the exact same thing as a Ford Fiesta in your estimation, right? After all, Ferdinand Porsche didn't build his first car until long, long after Ford Motor Company was founded...
Tell you what - you buy a brand-new top-end 911, I'll buy a basic Fiesta, and then we'll swap pink slips.
However, the actual respectable papers, from the tiny one-horse-town paper with its sole proprietor, all the way up to the biggest papers in New York City, did have examples among them of integrity, responsibility, and a code of ethics that they strove to live by.
The reason why was simple - back then, the tabloid rags and propaganda-disguised-as-newspapers didn't last very long (W.R. Hearst was an anomaly, not the norm), mostly because getting the story too wrong too often came at a business-killing cost (in circulation, litigation, etc). People meanwhile figured out fairly quickly which papers could be trusted, and which ones were crap. The crap tended to fade away fairly quickly.
Was it perfect? Of course not. But at least they did manage to get it mostly right, and until recently, journalism courses did teach to a strict set of ethics and rules.
As far as story selection? Some of it is obviously due to bias, but mostly it is because the media craves one thing above all others - advertising dollars. In order to get that, they have to attract eyeballs and ears. In order to do that, they amp up the drama. After all, does the typical viewer (not you dammit, but Joe Sixpack) want to see...
* a long, complex, in-depth, non-partisan, and objective analysis of economic effects from some pending legislation in terms that require an IQ well north of room temperature, or...
* loud spasms of anger, fear, and mud-slinging between the President, protestors and Congress, all conveniently compressed into slogans and sound-bites that appeal to ideological bias, and oh yeah - conveniently fits neatly in-between commercials?
I mean c'mon - there's a reason CNN (for example) spews Nancy Grace and her ilk all over their primetime slots. People apparently don't want to be informed about events that may affect them long-term - they want the salacious and gore-filled howling, by vapid talking heads of course, over some little girl who got raped and dismembered just last week out in West Bumfuck, Nebraska!
I think GP is referring to the habit Apple has of taking a great idea with a shit UI (or shit ecosystem, or shit design, or shit quality) and turning it into gold.
Example 1: The iPod
PMPs had been around long before the iPod - I played mp3s off of my Compaq PDA viz. an SD card back in the day, and the Nomad and its ilk were around, etc. Problem is, nearly every solution had either shit battery life, shit interfaces, shit storage, or shit playback quality... Apple saw this, made a device that didn't suck, gave it a few awesome features (e.g. the then-obscene battery life), and suddenly they couldn't manufacture the things fast enough. There were of course the flurry of imitators who wanted to horn in on some of that sales goodness (e.g. the Dell DJ, Microsoft Zune, etc), but those eventually crashed and burned along with all the progenitor devices.
Now, did Apple 'steal' the iPod from someone? Fuck, no - they completely revolutionized it: Among other things, they launched the iTunes Music Store, then levered DRM right out of the music industry's grubby little hands (first by providing a route to un-DRM their own licensed music tracks, then by doing away with DRM altogether). Also, if Apple "stole" the PMP, then why was everyone else so damned eager to imitate the iPod's feature set (and in some cases, even its design) not even six months after it was released?
Same story with the iPhone. Before the iPhone came out, everyone's phone product had a fixed keypad, a tiny screen, and a shitload of buttons. You know -BlackBerry style with maybe a few interesting variations (e.g. SideKick style). Within 6 months of the iPhone, everybody (esp. Samsung) was busy as hell trying to copy as much of it as they could. That still goes on today.
But anyway, the trope would be like saying that Ferdinand Porsche somehow stole the automobile from Henry Ford, so Porsches will always suck when compared to a Ford (we all know better, no?)
1) make a super-wrapper app of sorts where individual apps become mere features within his wrapper. 2) get a lot of attention by yapping about how the industry leader is "outdated" and that his naked money-grab is actually the new-shiny. 3) sell API access to his wrapper. 4) sucker some phone maker/carrier/etc into using his wrapper exclusively. 5) ??? 6) Profit!
Of course, no mention is made as to what happens when his baby gets a security vuln , crashes (taking everything else with it), or otherwise isn't regularly updated by the carrier or maker (because seriously, outside of a few corner cases involving flagship phones, when was the last time a carrier or maker ever bothered posting/pushing updates to an Android device?)
Okay, idiot parent troll/spite/whatever aside, there is a small kernel of something that did strike my mind.
Hawking was once incredibly brilliant, in spite of the massive debilitation from ALS, a normally fatal disease that he's (so far) outlived by at least a factor or four.
That said, insofar as his brilliance, I think that time has sadly passed, or has slipped enough that seriously, unless there's solid math or observation backing it up, maybe the press should stop breathlessly reporting everything he says.
Like in this case, for instance. Where is the math for it? Seriously?
It doesn't help that my skills are dependant on hands-on interaction with the data, code etc, and when it comes to a tag-team of interviewers quizzing me with stupid questions I go semi-autistic like a possum in headlights.
I can help a bit in this department...
The good news is, at least in Portland they *do* usually have a hands-on portion of the interview process (mostly because most employers are sick of being burned by fresh-out-of-college kids who talk a good game, but cannot code their way out of a paper sack.)
But, when it comes to the tag-team interview, if I get hit with a stupid question, I usually answer it with a question expressly designed to show them how stupid their question was. Handle it the same way you'd handle a design session, and use it as a springboard to show them that you not only know the stupid stuff, but also know better ways to solve the stupid problem behind that stupid question.
Note that the point isn't to one-up them, but to show them that not only is there more than one way to, say, skin a cat, but that the other ways are more efficient and less messy when it comes to the art and techniques of cat-skinning.
It doesn't always work (I recall one company rejection that was, shall we say, rather hostile, but they don't exist any longer, so...), but in most cases if you handle it with humor and grace, it works exceedingly well, and even tends to impress them in a lot of instances.
PS: I'm halfway through my 40's, and have only seen 1 instance of ageism, period. Nothing openly hostile or actionable, but enough to give me pause, and to dump the contract as soon as I could (it was contract-to-hire, but I decided that I didn't feel much like continuing that relationship). I am happy to report though that there are more than enough good companies who don't shy from gray hair that I can (at least at the time being) ignore them.
Tell you what... when you can explain the voting record on the 1965 Civil Rights Act, the continued paternalistic racism of most 'progressive' policies on race, and the well-into-the-21st-century presence of KKK Grand Wizard Richard Byrd in the US Senate (D-WV)? Then we can talk about your myth being more than just a myth.;)
What I'm about to say will be considered heresy, but...
Given that most Android phone OSes do not receive updates of any kind (let alone security fixes), well, what's the problem? I say that mostly in jest, mind you, but the vast majority of Android phones out there, even 4-year-old ancient critters, are most likely going to remain unexploited and untouched for as long as they are capable of running. Most users don't stray from the Play Store, they don't really add anything that they don't already know and trust, and to be honest, they will never see a problem as long as they don't sideload iffy crap off of Russian servers or suchlike.
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That depends, really...
Unlike Blackberry, Apple is actually reaching out into other fields, taking on new competencies, and making new products (or finding promising products and buying them, cleaning them to the Apple ecosystem and UX, bring up the hardware to snuff, then selling the result.)
I think it's this never-ending search for new markets and products that will keep Apple a going concern for a very, very long time - barring any massive strings of bad luck, naturally.
Blackberry's problems are self-caused - they preferred to stick with what they had, and refused to innovate (or even look) until the iPhone arrived, beat them up, took their lunch money, and started bedding down their girlfriend in front of them. Even then they kept sticking to the mantra that BES would save them from perdition...
PS: why did she not simply respond, affirming her claim of original material? It would have put her post back up, and it would have required BuildTeam to take legal action to remove it.
Funny thing is, the Streisand Effect will most likely kick-in hard for them, especially once it made the papers there.
Seriously - a multinational corporation can put up with bad press and survive, but most smaller businesses cannot.
Given that this is a UK company, I'm rather surprised that they didn't reach for the libel laws - even if the lady was absolutely correct and true, the legal costs would have likely ruined her faster than a DMCA takedown would have.
I notice you didn't include things like servers, routers, automobiles, industrial machinery, televisions (esp. the "smart" TVs), all the IoT shit (e.g. thermostats), avionics systems, and etc.
The embedded stuff outnumbers smartphones and 'PCs' by at least a factor or two... and nearly 50-60% of those run some embedded variant of Linux... embedded Windows ekes out maybe a sliver of that market.
So... Get ready to keep all your old electronics as it suddenly becomes VERY expensive to have it removed.
...not if you have a shovel and enough property to hide the results on.
On a more serious note, such a rise in disposal costs will create a legal black market of sorts where questions aren't asked, loopholes are exploited heavily, and the price of their service is only nominally higher. You know, like they do with ships nowadays.
I mean, if you can dump a zillion tons of outdated naval vessel, ditching a truckload of cast-off smartphones is child's play.
Figure it would be more accurate to call it a paralegal than a full practicing attorney with a bar that has admitted it.
And yes, pedantry and the legal profession go hand-in-hand, so I figure it's appropriate to do that here.
Was wondering about that... HK's population density is astounding - I doubt you could find a beehive with a density that high.
Perhaps they meant some industrial district far enough outside of HK to have some space to dump/recycle/whatever, but close enough to still (sorta) count? Like "the outskirts of the Hong Kong metro area" or suchlike.
It isn't just religious "superstition". Religious objections and actual humanist objections are one and the same - that each individual human being has a basic right to dignity and life, and to not be used as disposable lab rats.
On a strictly objective level, fetal experiments and (yes, Godwin) Dr. Mengele's experiments are based on the premise that the subjects were not considered to be human, in spite of having human DNA and the fact that they are individual distinct beings.
Prove otherwise if you can.
To be honest, I find it to be rather barbaric, even when covered with a huge banner that says 'science!'
Understand what you are saying when you say corporations need rights because they don't! every person should have the same rights, from the janitor to the investor.
So if some entity renegs on a contract with a corporation, who sues the guy? Does he pay it all out-of-pocket and get reimbursed by the company later? What about if a company itself does something lawsuit-worthy - who do *you* sue... the CEO personally?
What is the reason you think corporations should have any rights at all? Is it not sufficient that the persons involved have their rights.
Why do corporations need extra rights on top of that?
Well, to be fair there are a few rights that a corporation needs:
* the right to construct and enforce contracts (the latter meaning enforcement via civil tort).
* the right to some basic protection from crime by way of access to the police and recognition as a victim (e.g. burglaries, embezzlement, fraud, etc).
There are of course others, but these two immediately came to mind.
To be fair, Icahn sold off his Apple stock only partially because of the last quarterly report. The rest of the reason involves the fact that he was not getting his way with the Board.
Depends - is the electricity delivered via blunt contact points, or by way of darts (or otherwise piercing) contact points (the latter is how the Taser product works).
It wouldn't take much to bolster those darts into something that does more than partially penetrate skin.
I'm saying that properly grounded plate mail may be the order of the day if you want proof against either one, but even that won't stop CS Tear Gas... and it wouldn't take much to bolt on a directional ear-splitting speaker that emits noises which would incapacitate.
TL;DR: there's more than one way to skin the cat in this case.
As for the military, has it ever occurred to you that most of us actually don't want there to be a giant hegemonic power (you) throwing around your military weight in the world?
Cool - so when can we expect these nations to build up their own to a number sufficient for self-defense, so that the US military can remove themselves from those places? It might break some national budgets, but...
Also, we'll require a treaty stating that such countries are not to call on the US for help if they run into trouble.
I mean, really...there is a scary real chance that cunt might actually win!?!?!? :O
Thanks to "superdelegates" and similar shenanigans that the DNC likes to play, she's almost guaranteed to win the nomination for her party.
(...and if *that* doesn't tell you how corrupt the current political parties are, nothing will.)
[Apple] never invented shit. They always stole it, refined it, and repacked it.
So a Porsche 911 is the exact same thing as a Ford Fiesta in your estimation, right? After all, Ferdinand Porsche didn't build his first car until long, long after Ford Motor Company was founded...
Tell you what - you buy a brand-new top-end 911, I'll buy a basic Fiesta, and then we'll swap pink slips.
Oh, you wouldn't want to do that? Gee, why not?
Yellow Journalism has always existed, granted.
However, the actual respectable papers, from the tiny one-horse-town paper with its sole proprietor, all the way up to the biggest papers in New York City, did have examples among them of integrity, responsibility, and a code of ethics that they strove to live by.
The reason why was simple - back then, the tabloid rags and propaganda-disguised-as-newspapers didn't last very long (W.R. Hearst was an anomaly, not the norm), mostly because getting the story too wrong too often came at a business-killing cost (in circulation, litigation, etc). People meanwhile figured out fairly quickly which papers could be trusted, and which ones were crap. The crap tended to fade away fairly quickly.
Was it perfect? Of course not. But at least they did manage to get it mostly right, and until recently, journalism courses did teach to a strict set of ethics and rules.
As far as story selection? Some of it is obviously due to bias, but mostly it is because the media craves one thing above all others - advertising dollars. In order to get that, they have to attract eyeballs and ears. In order to do that, they amp up the drama. After all, does the typical viewer (not you dammit, but Joe Sixpack) want to see...
* a long, complex, in-depth, non-partisan, and objective analysis of economic effects from some pending legislation in terms that require an IQ well north of room temperature, or...
* loud spasms of anger, fear, and mud-slinging between the President, protestors and Congress, all conveniently compressed into slogans and sound-bites that appeal to ideological bias, and oh yeah - conveniently fits neatly in-between commercials?
I mean c'mon - there's a reason CNN (for example) spews Nancy Grace and her ilk all over their primetime slots. People apparently don't want to be informed about events that may affect them long-term - they want the salacious and gore-filled howling, by vapid talking heads of course, over some little girl who got raped and dismembered just last week out in West Bumfuck, Nebraska!
Crawl around in the Cyberpunk genre for a bit... pretty sure there's still a buttload of cool kit to be made from ideas presented in there.
I think GP is referring to the habit Apple has of taking a great idea with a shit UI (or shit ecosystem, or shit design, or shit quality) and turning it into gold.
Example 1: The iPod
PMPs had been around long before the iPod - I played mp3s off of my Compaq PDA viz. an SD card back in the day, and the Nomad and its ilk were around, etc. Problem is, nearly every solution had either shit battery life, shit interfaces, shit storage, or shit playback quality... Apple saw this, made a device that didn't suck, gave it a few awesome features (e.g. the then-obscene battery life), and suddenly they couldn't manufacture the things fast enough. There were of course the flurry of imitators who wanted to horn in on some of that sales goodness (e.g. the Dell DJ, Microsoft Zune, etc), but those eventually crashed and burned along with all the progenitor devices.
Now, did Apple 'steal' the iPod from someone? Fuck, no - they completely revolutionized it: Among other things, they launched the iTunes Music Store, then levered DRM right out of the music industry's grubby little hands (first by providing a route to un-DRM their own licensed music tracks, then by doing away with DRM altogether). Also, if Apple "stole" the PMP, then why was everyone else so damned eager to imitate the iPod's feature set (and in some cases, even its design) not even six months after it was released?
Same story with the iPhone. Before the iPhone came out, everyone's phone product had a fixed keypad, a tiny screen, and a shitload of buttons. You know -BlackBerry style with maybe a few interesting variations (e.g. SideKick style). Within 6 months of the iPhone, everybody (esp. Samsung) was busy as hell trying to copy as much of it as they could. That still goes on today.
But anyway, the trope would be like saying that Ferdinand Porsche somehow stole the automobile from Henry Ford, so Porsches will always suck when compared to a Ford (we all know better, no?)
It's simple - he wants to...
1) make a super-wrapper app of sorts where individual apps become mere features within his wrapper.
2) get a lot of attention by yapping about how the industry leader is "outdated" and that his naked money-grab is actually the new-shiny.
3) sell API access to his wrapper.
4) sucker some phone maker/carrier/etc into using his wrapper exclusively.
5) ???
6) Profit!
Of course, no mention is made as to what happens when his baby gets a security vuln , crashes (taking everything else with it), or otherwise isn't regularly updated by the carrier or maker (because seriously, outside of a few corner cases involving flagship phones, when was the last time a carrier or maker ever bothered posting/pushing updates to an Android device?)
But even if it did, the water increase and climate chaotisation would far more offset that.
...wait, what? "Water increase"!?
Dude, seriously, unless the Earth runs into some massive blob of space-water, we're not going to see an increase in the amount of H2O on this planet.
Okay, idiot parent troll/spite/whatever aside, there is a small kernel of something that did strike my mind.
Hawking was once incredibly brilliant, in spite of the massive debilitation from ALS, a normally fatal disease that he's (so far) outlived by at least a factor or four.
That said, insofar as his brilliance, I think that time has sadly passed, or has slipped enough that seriously, unless there's solid math or observation backing it up, maybe the press should stop breathlessly reporting everything he says.
Like in this case, for instance. Where is the math for it? Seriously?
It doesn't help that my skills are dependant on hands-on interaction with the data, code etc, and when it comes to a tag-team of interviewers quizzing me with stupid questions I go semi-autistic like a possum in headlights.
I can help a bit in this department...
The good news is, at least in Portland they *do* usually have a hands-on portion of the interview process (mostly because most employers are sick of being burned by fresh-out-of-college kids who talk a good game, but cannot code their way out of a paper sack.)
But, when it comes to the tag-team interview, if I get hit with a stupid question, I usually answer it with a question expressly designed to show them how stupid their question was. Handle it the same way you'd handle a design session, and use it as a springboard to show them that you not only know the stupid stuff, but also know better ways to solve the stupid problem behind that stupid question.
Note that the point isn't to one-up them, but to show them that not only is there more than one way to, say, skin a cat, but that the other ways are more efficient and less messy when it comes to the art and techniques of cat-skinning.
It doesn't always work (I recall one company rejection that was, shall we say, rather hostile, but they don't exist any longer, so...), but in most cases if you handle it with humor and grace, it works exceedingly well, and even tends to impress them in a lot of instances.
PS: I'm halfway through my 40's, and have only seen 1 instance of ageism, period. Nothing openly hostile or actionable, but enough to give me pause, and to dump the contract as soon as I could (it was contract-to-hire, but I decided that I didn't feel much like continuing that relationship). I am happy to report though that there are more than enough good companies who don't shy from gray hair that I can (at least at the time being) ignore them.
This old trope again? Really?
Tell you what... when you can explain the voting record on the 1965 Civil Rights Act, the continued paternalistic racism of most 'progressive' policies on race, and the well-into-the-21st-century presence of KKK Grand Wizard Richard Byrd in the US Senate (D-WV)? Then we can talk about your myth being more than just a myth. ;)
What about software fixes for security bugs?
What I'm about to say will be considered heresy, but...
Given that most Android phone OSes do not receive updates of any kind (let alone security fixes), well, what's the problem? I say that mostly in jest, mind you, but the vast majority of Android phones out there, even 4-year-old ancient critters, are most likely going to remain unexploited and untouched for as long as they are capable of running. Most users don't stray from the Play Store, they don't really add anything that they don't already know and trust, and to be honest, they will never see a problem as long as they don't sideload iffy crap off of Russian servers or suchlike.
Well, actually, it'll still be three.