You act as if Apple didn't factor that into their original agreement with AT&T, and the exclusive deal has no upside for Apple. Given the success of the iPhone it's just really hard for me to see this as a big problem for Apple.
No doubt the kickbacks from AT&T are sweet, given the market position they were in a couple years ago... Verizon turned down a deal because they didn't believe Apple could make a smartphone... Apple went exclusive because they knew the product would be good enough to make many people switch. All in all it makes perfect business sense.
Yes, more often than not Apple finds a way to screw the customer, but that doesn't mean they are making a mistake...
You're probably just prejudiced against fat people.
Look, even assuming that every fat person wants to be skinny (I agree most would), the fact that they are unable to accomplish that doesn't have anything to do with intelligence. Lack of will power? Addictive behavior? Plain laziness? Those are all possible reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence.
It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to figure out how to lose weight. Hell, even if you are too stupid to understand the connection between food, exercise and fat, someone can still tell you what to do.
Okay some people were affected by a handful of real nasties, but I bought it the day it came out, was working 18 hours a day at the time on a product release on both a G4 and and Intel machine, and only noticed very minor issues.
Maybe "too early for their time" is true, but too early in the sense that at that time the Internet had just emerged from a very geek world and everyone was just settling into the concept of using it for something else.
Or too early in the sense that the technology wasn't quite there yet. Boo.com for instance was too buggy. So not only did you have to spend 10 times as much on development, you may end up with something brittle or that required too much bandwidth/cpu. Things don't have to go very wrong before customers get fed up and you lose 80% of your customer base overnight.
"We know the new iPhone is coming and it will have new features but we don't know what they are beyond 3G but we'll speculate to expand our word count so this is an actual article rather than a short sentence."
Given the ways Apple has crippled the iPhone it seems to me that a well designed open platform has the potential to blow them out of the water.
It amazes me that this opinion keeps coming up over and over. If people wanted more features they never would have bought an iPhone in the first place. They would have gotten a Blackberry or Treo a long long time ago.
Of course if someone succeeds in realizing the oxymoron "well-designed open platform" then they may well blow the iPhone out of the water. However unless the project is led by a nazi of Jobsesque proportions (with talent to match) then it will be "design-by-committee" all the way.
When you visit a website, the site owner is well within their rights to record that visit. To assert otherwise is an extremist view that needs popular and legislative buy-in before it can in any way be validated. The negotiation is between Google and website owners.
If you want to think of your HTTP requests as your data, then you'd probably best get off the Internet entirely. No one is every going to pay you for it.
Also:
To the folks who say "well how else are they supposed to make money"
Red herring. No one says that. No one even thinks about that. Frankly there are far more important privacy concerns out there than the collection of HTTP data.
I take those claims with a grain of salt as you can serve an awful lot of static content on very little CPU. How do I know the people making those claims aren't also running WordPress?
If the claims are true than Dreamhost is in the wrong on that one, but I've yet to see any really credible evidence.
(There's many websites dedicated to how terrible DH is. Many, many websites.)
The vast majority of which are written by ignorant script kiddies who think that for $10/month they should be allowed to utilize unlimited resources and slow down the server for everyone else on it. So they make a big stink about it publicly then go to some other shared host where they inevitably make life miserable for 50 other customers on whatever server they get assigned to (I've been on the receiving end of this and it's not cool).
I've had an account with Dreamhost for 8 years, and during that time I've also had accounts or worked with companies hosted on dozens of other hosts. My anecdotal evidence is strong. As far as cheaped shared web hosts go, Dreamhost is one of the best. Certainly many people get lucky with other hosts, but most hosting companies have not had to deal with the technical issues that Dreamhost has overcome over the years.
That said, I never recommend shared hosting anyway. VPS technology (especially Xen) is the only way to guarantee good QoS as websites become increasingly dynamic.
I sort of agree except that what made Doom great was the gameplay, and Doom3 shares absolutely nothing of the gameplay of Doom.
Doom 3 had its moments (the Hellknights were awesome), but dammit, I wanted vast rooms with improbable ledges, high speed lifts opening to precarious walkways over lava-filled pits. I wanted to turn to leave an empty room only to hear the sound of a vast door slowly opening behind revealing 100 chaingun dudes.
I was going to do a top-level reply until I read this. You totally nailed the analysis. The gameplay of Doom is what made it great. The theme and graphics were incidental. At it's core you had an extremely fast paced balls-to-the-wall shooter, which even direct copycat games failed to emulate successfully.
Doom 3 on the other hand is all atmosphere, and that wore thin very quickly. The only part I really enjoyed was the hell level which gives you a short respite from room after room of realistic-looking space station with blood smeared everywhere. Compare that to Doom where you didn't even know whether you were in hell or not because they used the same textures, and each level was significantly different from the last--they didn't build things to be realistic or look cool (except incidentally), it was all about the gameplay.
The problem is that id has always been known to push the graphical envelope, and the current generation of engines is not good for the type of gameplay that id excelled at. Would Carmack be content to develop an engine that was faster rather than cutting-edge graphically? If not I don't think they can pull off another Doom or QuakeWorld.
The preferred method of deployment is Nginx + Mongrel. The whole reason Mongrel exists is because of problems with FastCGI. One of the things Zed is pissed about is that everyone is benefitting from his work, but yet he still gets stonewalled by certain members of core on technical issues where he knows what he's talking about.
So you're suggesting that it's better to use a flaky and inferior solution because the guy who wrote a better solution is an explosive asshole--even though the reason he exploded is because people aren't acknowledging the core technical problems to begin with. That's not an attack against Lighttpd per se, but I've experienced first hand the problems with FastCGI, and any serious Rails deployment should be on Mongrel, no ifs, ands, or buts.
He thinks that if the record labels just give everybody music pre-made in the formats that they want, even if it comes saddled with DRM and even if consumers need to buy the same music over and over, that they will buy it as long as it's easy and convenient enough for them to get it.
I think this might actually be true if they had gotten to market early with sane DRM. Apple's approach, for instance, doesn't actually bother most people (if FairPlay becomes unsupported at some point in the future, that's a different story). Fortunately for us anti-DRM advocates, the RIAA has hamfistedly stumbled through their own market like a retarded giant, destroying value in every nook and cranny, and making the anti-DRM case to the most tech-illiterate consumer.
The bottom line is the music industry is full of self-entitled suits sitting in chairs raking in a million bucks a year for talking fast. They've got a stranglehold on radio, but their control over production and distribution is evaporating before their eyes. If they don't get humble real fast and learn to add some value like they did 50 years ago, musicians will simple reorganize themselves into a new industry. The film industry at least has some breathing room due to the sheer expense of film-making, but the music industry as we know it could be dead and gone in 10 years.
What do you expect from a guy who got rich decades ago off an antiquated system? He's one of the few winners from the traditional music industry structure. It'd be nice if he had the perspective to realize that music is voluntary purchase, and without the good graces of college kids he would have nothing, but he's a musician, not an economist.
I would expect that legally there is some threshold of due diligence they need to take, but that they can't be held infinitely responsible for their user's fraudalent activity. A lot of this probably comes down to how expensive your lawyers are.
The significant fact to my thesis was that they will delete your information. You're free to split hairs over the fact that it is not technically deleted... however the reasonable expectation that users have is that "deleting" information means it then does not appear anywhere. If Facebook violates that, then there is a serious problem, otherwise the technical detail of whether the information is physically expunged from disk is an issue that none but the most pedantic privacy advocate cares about.
I probably shouldn't have commented on how I think tagging works since I didn't know. The key thing there is that a tagged photo of you is not your data. Your friend posted it with your name... frankly this has nothing to do with Facebook. Your friends can post pictures of you with your name in any media ranging from Flickr to a bathroom stall.
"Deactivation will completely remove your profile and all associated content on your account from Facebook."
So they keep the data around except no one can see or do anything with it, so it may as well be deleted. If Facebook then uses that information somehow, then that would be a serious concern, but why would they do that? If this type of thing is of great concern to you, then you probably shouldn't be on Facebook or any other website. In fact, the best thing would be to live off the grid completely and suspiciously eyeball anyone who hands you a paper form.
I don't think they would ever use one photo widely enough for that to be an issue. Are they even using people's photos for that matter? I think it's just in newsfeeds (which don't include photos) and then only to your friends. Not totally sure on this, but I'm sure Facebook has thought carefully about this to avoid any glaring liability. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but they're not idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
Please address the tyranny of the majority problem.
You act as if Apple didn't factor that into their original agreement with AT&T, and the exclusive deal has no upside for Apple. Given the success of the iPhone it's just really hard for me to see this as a big problem for Apple.
No doubt the kickbacks from AT&T are sweet, given the market position they were in a couple years ago... Verizon turned down a deal because they didn't believe Apple could make a smartphone... Apple went exclusive because they knew the product would be good enough to make many people switch. All in all it makes perfect business sense.
Yes, more often than not Apple finds a way to screw the customer, but that doesn't mean they are making a mistake...
Fair enough, but everyone has problems of differing sizes. Can you guess how big a problem this guy is to Apple?
You're probably just prejudiced against fat people.
Look, even assuming that every fat person wants to be skinny (I agree most would), the fact that they are unable to accomplish that doesn't have anything to do with intelligence. Lack of will power? Addictive behavior? Plain laziness? Those are all possible reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence.
It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to figure out how to lose weight. Hell, even if you are too stupid to understand the connection between food, exercise and fat, someone can still tell you what to do.
I beg to differ. First, Time Machine, a backup system that normal people can actually use is nothing short of a triumph. Spaces was sort of "meh" but it still found it's way into my regular workflow (much more than Exposé FWIW). Beyond that every single corner of the OS seemed to have picked up quite a bit of polish, quickview, dock stacks, preview app (huge improvements here), terminal, unix upgrades, and many other small details I noticed.
Only if you're affected by the issues. I might as well say that Leopard is flawless because I haven't experienced any issues.
Okay some people were affected by a handful of real nasties, but I bought it the day it came out, was working 18 hours a day at the time on a product release on both a G4 and and Intel machine, and only noticed very minor issues.
To compare it to 10.0 is hyperbole.
I know you were trying to be funny, but think about that for a sec...
Or too early in the sense that the technology wasn't quite there yet. Boo.com for instance was too buggy. So not only did you have to spend 10 times as much on development, you may end up with something brittle or that required too much bandwidth/cpu. Things don't have to go very wrong before customers get fed up and you lose 80% of your customer base overnight.
You make it sound like the deal is forever or something.
To be fair that's a pretty long sentence.
It amazes me that this opinion keeps coming up over and over. If people wanted more features they never would have bought an iPhone in the first place. They would have gotten a Blackberry or Treo a long long time ago.
Of course if someone succeeds in realizing the oxymoron "well-designed open platform" then they may well blow the iPhone out of the water. However unless the project is led by a nazi of Jobsesque proportions (with talent to match) then it will be "design-by-committee" all the way.
When you visit a website, the site owner is well within their rights to record that visit. To assert otherwise is an extremist view that needs popular and legislative buy-in before it can in any way be validated. The negotiation is between Google and website owners.
If you want to think of your HTTP requests as your data, then you'd probably best get off the Internet entirely. No one is every going to pay you for it.
Also:
Red herring. No one says that. No one even thinks about that. Frankly there are far more important privacy concerns out there than the collection of HTTP data.
I take those claims with a grain of salt as you can serve an awful lot of static content on very little CPU. How do I know the people making those claims aren't also running WordPress?
If the claims are true than Dreamhost is in the wrong on that one, but I've yet to see any really credible evidence.
The vast majority of which are written by ignorant script kiddies who think that for $10/month they should be allowed to utilize unlimited resources and slow down the server for everyone else on it. So they make a big stink about it publicly then go to some other shared host where they inevitably make life miserable for 50 other customers on whatever server they get assigned to (I've been on the receiving end of this and it's not cool).
I've had an account with Dreamhost for 8 years, and during that time I've also had accounts or worked with companies hosted on dozens of other hosts. My anecdotal evidence is strong. As far as cheaped shared web hosts go, Dreamhost is one of the best. Certainly many people get lucky with other hosts, but most hosting companies have not had to deal with the technical issues that Dreamhost has overcome over the years.
That said, I never recommend shared hosting anyway. VPS technology (especially Xen) is the only way to guarantee good QoS as websites become increasingly dynamic.
Sorry, web browsers are more widely available than ssh terminals, you fail it.
Yeah, good luck running a dictionary attack on that bad boy.
I sort of agree except that what made Doom great was the gameplay, and Doom3 shares absolutely nothing of the gameplay of Doom.
Doom 3 had its moments (the Hellknights were awesome), but dammit, I wanted vast rooms with improbable ledges, high speed lifts opening to precarious walkways over lava-filled pits. I wanted to turn to leave an empty room only to hear the sound of a vast door slowly opening behind revealing 100 chaingun dudes.
I was going to do a top-level reply until I read this. You totally nailed the analysis. The gameplay of Doom is what made it great. The theme and graphics were incidental. At it's core you had an extremely fast paced balls-to-the-wall shooter, which even direct copycat games failed to emulate successfully.
Doom 3 on the other hand is all atmosphere, and that wore thin very quickly. The only part I really enjoyed was the hell level which gives you a short respite from room after room of realistic-looking space station with blood smeared everywhere. Compare that to Doom where you didn't even know whether you were in hell or not because they used the same textures, and each level was significantly different from the last--they didn't build things to be realistic or look cool (except incidentally), it was all about the gameplay.
The problem is that id has always been known to push the graphical envelope, and the current generation of engines is not good for the type of gameplay that id excelled at. Would Carmack be content to develop an engine that was faster rather than cutting-edge graphically? If not I don't think they can pull off another Doom or QuakeWorld.
The preferred method of deployment is Nginx + Mongrel. The whole reason Mongrel exists is because of problems with FastCGI. One of the things Zed is pissed about is that everyone is benefitting from his work, but yet he still gets stonewalled by certain members of core on technical issues where he knows what he's talking about.
So you're suggesting that it's better to use a flaky and inferior solution because the guy who wrote a better solution is an explosive asshole--even though the reason he exploded is because people aren't acknowledging the core technical problems to begin with. That's not an attack against Lighttpd per se, but I've experienced first hand the problems with FastCGI, and any serious Rails deployment should be on Mongrel, no ifs, ands, or buts.
I think this might actually be true if they had gotten to market early with sane DRM. Apple's approach, for instance, doesn't actually bother most people (if FairPlay becomes unsupported at some point in the future, that's a different story). Fortunately for us anti-DRM advocates, the RIAA has hamfistedly stumbled through their own market like a retarded giant, destroying value in every nook and cranny, and making the anti-DRM case to the most tech-illiterate consumer.
The bottom line is the music industry is full of self-entitled suits sitting in chairs raking in a million bucks a year for talking fast. They've got a stranglehold on radio, but their control over production and distribution is evaporating before their eyes. If they don't get humble real fast and learn to add some value like they did 50 years ago, musicians will simple reorganize themselves into a new industry. The film industry at least has some breathing room due to the sheer expense of film-making, but the music industry as we know it could be dead and gone in 10 years.
What do you expect from a guy who got rich decades ago off an antiquated system? He's one of the few winners from the traditional music industry structure. It'd be nice if he had the perspective to realize that music is voluntary purchase, and without the good graces of college kids he would have nothing, but he's a musician, not an economist.
I would expect that legally there is some threshold of due diligence they need to take, but that they can't be held infinitely responsible for their user's fraudalent activity. A lot of this probably comes down to how expensive your lawyers are.
The significant fact to my thesis was that they will delete your information. You're free to split hairs over the fact that it is not technically deleted... however the reasonable expectation that users have is that "deleting" information means it then does not appear anywhere. If Facebook violates that, then there is a serious problem, otherwise the technical detail of whether the information is physically expunged from disk is an issue that none but the most pedantic privacy advocate cares about.
I probably shouldn't have commented on how I think tagging works since I didn't know. The key thing there is that a tagged photo of you is not your data. Your friend posted it with your name... frankly this has nothing to do with Facebook. Your friends can post pictures of you with your name in any media ranging from Flickr to a bathroom stall.
Fair enough. However:
"Deactivation will completely remove your profile and all associated content on your account from Facebook."
So they keep the data around except no one can see or do anything with it, so it may as well be deleted. If Facebook then uses that information somehow, then that would be a serious concern, but why would they do that? If this type of thing is of great concern to you, then you probably shouldn't be on Facebook or any other website. In fact, the best thing would be to live off the grid completely and suspiciously eyeball anyone who hands you a paper form.
I don't think they would ever use one photo widely enough for that to be an issue. Are they even using people's photos for that matter? I think it's just in newsfeeds (which don't include photos) and then only to your friends. Not totally sure on this, but I'm sure Facebook has thought carefully about this to avoid any glaring liability. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but they're not idiots.