Sort of. Unlike governments, Wikipedia is not even theoretically run by rules. It's run by individuals acting collectively. Sure, they come up with a lot of rules, but one of those rules is "ignore all rules".
I think that's great, as it lets passionate people go get a lot done, and has kept bureaucracy from strangling the site dead, as it did with its predecessor, Nupedia, and as is apparently happening with Citizendium, a competitor launched by one of its founders.
But I think this only works because Wikipedia has exactly one purpose: to make an encyclopedia. Once it has two purposes (adding "support a bunch of full-time staff"), I think the conflicts of interest would, at best, tear it apart.
Newspapers do this by having a separate ad/biz department and news department... even the Editor In Chief at a newspaper has no say on the ads content. Wikipedia could produce a similar policy.
You say this like somebody who has never worked for a magazine or a newspaper. In practice, the effectiveness of keeping ads as a separate department varies from place to place.
Even in the places where it's strongest, the advertising is still a consideration. A journalist writing a major negative story on a major advertiser will know it. Their editor will know it too. Even if nobody says a word about it, there is still a conflict of interest, and conflicts of interest are incredibly hard to manage.
Or am I misunderstanding what FOSS really is about?
If your first instinct is to build it yourself, then yes, you are kind of missing what FOSS is really about. To jointly improve shared solutions, you first have to find the solutions that are already out there.
Nearly every paragraph in the "article" begins with a disclaimer that the data (and/or the analysis) are flawed/biased/incomplete/not useful/meaningless!
Honestly, that's usually a plus to me. It means the author actually understands what good data is, and how one extracts meaning from data. 98% of humanity would have run reports like that, called it definitive, and you probably would have never noticed the difference.
Never confuse confidence with competence, or frankness with weakness. Imperfect data, honestly presented, is much better than no data.
As rough as his numbers are, they are reasonable support to his conclusions. If somebody disagrees with his conclusions, the burden is now on them to come up with better numbers, and Meeks has even shown them several opportunities to do that.
Also, in other countries, they have different customs, laws, and even languages! This is obvious waste, and as an American, I demand that you foreigners tidy things up pronto.
Also, I think programmers should standardize on one language, and while we're at it, one operating system should be enough.
After that, we can get rid of all of those extra planets in the solar system.
I replied elsewhere to your other points, but let me get the unique ones here.
Psystar does not sound remotely like Apple. They are not calling their computers "Mcaintoshes", they've got names like "OpenGamer" and "Open7". Their logo does not look like Apple, their brand identity is not like Apple's.
As far as I have seen, the only use of an Apple trademark is to correctly say what OS they are installing on the boxes. If you sell a Volkswagen Beetle with a Ferrari engine in it, you can do that and use both names, just as long as you're clear about what you're actually doing. Especially if you're doing it in a market where the vast majority of people drive cars where the engines have been purchased separately from the rest of the car.
And by the way, but it's always a pleasure to slip a technically correct car analogy into a serious Slashdot discussion, so thanks for the opportunity.
Brand reputation is not only legally protectable, it's one of the most valuable parts of intellectual property out there.
You are incorrect. Brand reputation is not protectable on its own. Otherwise, we would not have sites like FordReallySucks.com and IHateStarbucks.com. They are undeniably harmful to the brands to which they are related, and they are using the words "Ford" and "Starbucks" liberally. As another example, Consumer Reports is harmful to brand after brand when they report negatively. Companies continually compare their products to those of competitors while using their trademarked names, and the whole point of that is to harm competitor reputations and brands.
As far as I as a layman understand it, the basic point of trademarks, both with infringement and dilution, is to prevent consumer confusion. I understand that Apple is claiming that consumers might somehow be confused. But I think that's bogus: Psystar is just saying they are selling machines with Apple's MacOS X, which they are.
Equally, they are selling machines with Microsoft Windows, and with Linux. Unless you're asserting that Psystar's customers also think that they are buying a Microsoft computer or a Linus Torvalds computer, then it would seem to me that the average consumer understands the difference between the OS and the model of computer, and that any confusion going on is the normal consumer confusion, and not biased in any particular direction by Psystar's claims. Ergo, no trademark violation.
Whether Apple should be able to control who sells their software and how it gets installed seems like the actual interesting question here. The trademark claims strike me as the usual lawyerly sticks to beat people with until they run out of money.
First, I'm not bitter about this at all. Apple and Jobs are welcome to do whatever they want. I occasionally buy Apple gear, like a recent iPod purchase for my girlfriend. But the stuff's not really to my taste, especially given the Apple markup compared to other gear of equivalent utility for me. Really, I find Apple fascinating, and count several current and former Apple employees among my friends. But that doesn't mean I have to pretend that when Jobs shits all over people that it's chocolate ice cream.
What I'm am claiming here is that their behavior and statements are inconsistent with known facts, like the fact that previous versions of OS X ran just fine on non-Apple hardware. So that's more than just an opinion. Is a fact-based deduction.
Apple haven't claimed that it's too difficult for their engineers, so this is a straw man.
Jobs, et al, have strongly suggested they just can't give the same user experience on non-Apple hardware. Unless he's claiming it's a scientific impossibility proved at Fermilab, then it's just a claim that it's too hard to be worth doing. And he says that in the same interviews where he talks up the general awesomeness of the Apple engineers and their development prowess. That's bullshit. They have done it before, with some of the same people involved. They could do it if they chose.
They're keeping it exclusive because _they are already_ making lots of money by doing so, and as is the case with all companies, making money is their main reason for existing.
Incorrect, for the same reason that eating and shitting is not the main reason for humans existing.
Apple is a publicly traded corporation that is owned by its shareholders, it's not "his company".
You are technically correct and effectively wrong. Internally, he owns it like a pimp owns a whore: through obsessive domination and screaming fits of abuse. That's widely observed.
Even the shareholders see it as effectively company, which is why the share price wobbles every time people get worried about his health. If you follow the business press, the concern that none of his lieutenants are likely to be able to fill his shoes is the number one problem Apple has from an investor perspective. But given The Steve's titanic ego, volcanic narcissism, and general management style, he may not believe he can be effectively replaced, or be able to work with the person who could come after him.
Note that although from a personal perspective I find his treatment of people odious and his mental issues sad, from a business perspective they may be both typical and useful. Narcissism is endemic to Silicon Valley, and from Apple's string of high-quality products, he definitely makes it work. And certainly, Jobs is much more productively employed than that other famous Bay Area cult leader, Jim Jones.
They are essentially buying a Toyota slapping Ford badges on it and calling it a Ford.
That's your view, but I disagree. If they're calling some of their system Apples, they're they're also calling some of their systems Microsofts and some Linuxes. If you go to their web pages and look at how they're marketing the stuff, the treatment is identical, and identical to how every other company in the world markets system+OS combinations.
but eventually, Joe the Plumber is going to hear that he can get an APPLE computer for 400 bucks.
They're not calling them Apple computers. They're just saying the computers are running MacOS X. Which they are. Ergo, no trademark violation.
You have to be authorized by a trademark owner to use its trademarks
Under some circumstances, but it's not clear to me that these are those circumstances.
As far as I know, Psystar has legally bought copies of Apple's MacOS, and is legally reselling it. If I sell my Ford car in the paper, I don't have to be authorized to say it's a Ford, and Ford can't stop me from saying it is. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that they could only stop me if I said that I was Ford, or if I sold a non-Ford product after putting Ford labels on them.
The only problem seems to be that they are also installing it on non-Apple hardware, and as far as I can tell, that's the only thing that has Apple's knickers in a twist.
Whether or not that's legal is an interesting question. Could they sell the two together and let you install it? If I buy the two separately and install them myself, can Apple sue me? Maybe, but in the latter case there's no possibility of a trademark violation, which is part of what makes me think the trademark thing is a lawyerly red herring, a convenient stick to beat Psystar with.
I note that Psystar sells computers with Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. Psystar's customers would have to be particularly dim to think that they are buying from a company that's simultaneously Apple, Microsoft, and Linus Torvalds. They never say they're an authorized Apple reseller, and there's a reason that "authorized reseller" logos exist: because a lot of vendors aren't.
This strikes me as of a piece with using trademark violations to go after people who publish negative reviews. Bullshit, but bullshit that's often likely to be effective (and profitable) when you have a lot more money for lawyers than your opponents.
Steve Jobs[..] knows (conservatively) several orders of magnitude more [...] than you
Did I say otherwise?
I'm just pointing out that their stated reason for doing it is not their actual reason for doing it.
They are not protecting poor, helpless consumers from a bad experience. They aren't going after clone-makers because getting OS X to run on anything other than Apple hardware is so gosh darned hard that even The Steve's mighty experts can't do it. They are keeping it exclusive because their plan is to make lots of money by appearing cool.
I think that's mildly douchey, and it fits well with The Steve's well-documented narcissistic tendencies, but hey, it's his company.
Yes. The real reason Apple doesn't do it is that they aren't just selling hardware, they're selling cool. But they can't say that, because people will only buy cool if you make it seem like they're buying something else. Thus, their unending stream of bullshit on this topic.
It's just not ready for the rediculous diversity of hardware that Windows is obligated to support by running on commodity hardware. That smooth "just works" will be descend into the same brand tarnishing sludge that is compatibility.
You would think. But actually, what is now OSX was actually running on commodity hardware before, when it was the NeXT operating system. There were approved configurations, and unapproved ones. If you bought an unapproved one, and installed the OS anyhow, you were on your own.
Given that 90% of people buy computers as pre-assembled boxes where vendors have pretty stable hardware configurations, there's no reason that Apple couldn't sell OSX as part of an OEM program where they make everybody test the hell out of things, and use only approved drivers. No reason except greed.
Yes, it could never be as magically splendiferous as a real live Mac on Chairman Steve's exquisite hardware. But most people don't care. You know how I know? Because they've used crap for years and don't mind.
The reason Jobs doesn't do this isn't because it's too gosh darned hard. It's because it would puncture his profitable air of exclusivity. It's the same scam clubs run when they have a line of people standing outside even though there's plenty of room inside.
There are a relatively small number of sorts of information that are legally protected. Brand is not one of them, except insofar as you are boosting somebody's trademarks. But Psystar's whole point is that they aren't Apple, and they aren't using Apple's trademarks to pretend they are.
the equivalent advertising cost of every square inch of newsprint or second of airtime devoted to covering this case in the public view can be treated as damage to Apple
Heh. Normally people just say "I am not a lawyer" rather than proving it dramatically. Maybe you should try that next time?
However, one thing that people might not think of from your advice is to keep things hot, to keep them moving. You can't tell when a bunch of burned DVDs start to go bad. Knowing whether your data is good requires constant integrity checks, to make sure that you can still get your data back.
Personally, the way I handle this is by running two hot servers in different locations with all of my critical data on both, with rsync updating nightly. With continuous checksumming turned on, that forces reads, so I know all the data is still safe.
But for those who aren't quite that geeky, then I think a service like Amazon's S3 is the way to go. You keep one local drive hot, and one set of data in the cloud. And you regularly verify that all the data you want is still there. Yes, this costs more money than another local disk. But S3 data sits in at least two spots in a secure data center on an infrastructure designed by people who really get reliability.
However, Java is not actually OO to a fault. A fair number of its faults are where it breaks the OO model either for convenience or through ignorance. But Java's biggest fault is that it wasn't created for the language creators to program in. It was created so that lesser developers could be kept from doing "dangerous" things.
I'm not quite sure why you have your knickers in a twist, as it sounds like we agree.
Doctors do have to know some science at the beginning, sure. But then I think a lot of them, just as you say, base their practices based on what they read. A lot of that has to be treatment-oriented, how-to stuff. As you say, that's often pretty high-quality material, so it's not surprising that doctors come to rely on it uncritically.
So I'm not particularly upset that 90% of the doctors I've dealt with can't answer the whys and wherefores that I bring to my appointments. (That's also true of most of the mechanics I deal with.) For me personally, I'm going to try hard to find somebody in the 10% that can keep up with my sciencey ways, though.
You seriously couldn't take the time to read all the way to the end of the sentence you quoted? Or, even better, to understand my point?
Yes, there are definitely frameworks in PHP. I'm sure they're swell. But Rails was such a departure from existing frameworks in part because of the Ruby language. There are plenty of web frameworks in every language, quite a lot of them inspired by Rails. But there's only so much you can do without certain features of Ruby. Which, as I said, comes at a CPU cost, as they would in any language.
However, my point was that one should pick the right tool for the job. How you can get your panties in a knot about that, I dunno.
And I won't be happy if I have to pay more than I expected because you've estimated your time badly.
That's a reasonable attitude to have. But it turns out 99% of the time, the client will see any change in cost as the result of bad estimates, rather than any other possible factor. Which is why I only work by the hour unless it's on a project and with a client where I have lots of experience.
I think the key to quoting a fixed price for the whole project is to clearly define the project first.
There are three downsides to this.
One is that you have to spend a lot of time and money hammering out the project definition, and unless the project is a very simple one, there will still be surprises. And then you will spend a lot more time arguing over whether or not what is delivered is technically "in spec". Fun!
Another is that canny developers will use this approach to totally screw you. They'll let you define the project, quote you a very attractive price, and then rape you on the overcharges for scope changes that were likely from the beginning.
A third is that as a client you can't evaluate long-term maintainability. For pre-planned, fixed-price jobs, the developer's financial incentive is to reach the finish line and hand you a christmas-paper-wrapped turd. You see the shiny surface and sign off. And now you're the proud owner of a totaled code base, and any significant modifications would be best done with a total rewrite. But you'll object to that, so over time you pay your new devs twice as much to fix your project than a clean rewrite would have cost.
I think a much better approach for any non-technical purchaser of custom software, especially web-based software, is to pay by the hour, but structure things with regular, frequent deliverables. If your dev adds a couple new features a week, then you can quickly tell how good he his, and boot him if he's a fuckup.
Also, if you are spending more than you are comfortable throwing away, then get a professional to check how maintainable the work is. Frequent milestones help mitigate that risk, but they don't eliminate it.
What a load of rubbish - have you ever seen just how slow Ruby sites run with any sort of significant load? Python too. PHP isn't the silver bullet or anything, but saying Ruby/python is "better" is just playing to the fanboy crowd.
Rails definitely uses more CPU time. However, it can make development of some kinds of things much faster, and you can work at higher levels of abstraction in Ruby than PHP.
Whether that matters at all depends on the situation. There is no such thing as the "right tool" except in the context of who's using it and what they're doing with it.
I know this is going to be viewed somewhat as flamebait, but to put it bluntly, doctors are mechanics for the human body.
It's funny you should say that. A friend of mine is toward the end of med school, and at her house I was leafing through one of the professional journals she gets. It reminded me a lot of a car mechanic's guide. Very little on the science or the why. She agreed.
Maybe that's the right thing, as being a family doctor you have to keep up with an awful lot of conditions. But I went through a lot of doctors before I found one who a) had at least a touch of humility, and b) made me feel like she understood the actual science involved.
So you're just talking static sites? Using cheap hosting plans as a dodgy CDN? If so, I've got no issue with that. But $60 a month pays for little sysadmin time, and not much more monkey time.
If people are having that kind of traffic, it's worth starting to think about how to make their project sustainable. Things that are pure cost tend to disappear. Figuring out how to match revenues with costs means the project is much more likely to last.
People should also be a little afraid of hosting companies when doing this. Hosting companies offer their low-end packages with the expectation that most people will use almost nothing. And that those who do will eventually swap up to higher packages. If you balance your traffic so you're fully using a bunch of low-end packages, you will probably cost the hosting company more than they are making on you. Even if their AUP currently allows it, they may find reasons to give you poor service or close your account entirely.
Business relationships are only sustainable when both sides are getting good value.
Slashdot Mirror
True, however wikipedia has a lot more oversight.
Sort of. Unlike governments, Wikipedia is not even theoretically run by rules. It's run by individuals acting collectively. Sure, they come up with a lot of rules, but one of those rules is "ignore all rules".
I think that's great, as it lets passionate people go get a lot done, and has kept bureaucracy from strangling the site dead, as it did with its predecessor, Nupedia, and as is apparently happening with Citizendium, a competitor launched by one of its founders.
But I think this only works because Wikipedia has exactly one purpose: to make an encyclopedia. Once it has two purposes (adding "support a bunch of full-time staff"), I think the conflicts of interest would, at best, tear it apart.
Newspapers do this by having a separate ad/biz department and news department... even the Editor In Chief at a newspaper has no say on the ads content. Wikipedia could produce a similar policy.
You say this like somebody who has never worked for a magazine or a newspaper. In practice, the effectiveness of keeping ads as a separate department varies from place to place.
Even in the places where it's strongest, the advertising is still a consideration. A journalist writing a major negative story on a major advertiser will know it. Their editor will know it too. Even if nobody says a word about it, there is still a conflict of interest, and conflicts of interest are incredibly hard to manage.
Or am I misunderstanding what FOSS really is about?
If your first instinct is to build it yourself, then yes, you are kind of missing what FOSS is really about. To jointly improve shared solutions, you first have to find the solutions that are already out there.
Nearly every paragraph in the "article" begins with a disclaimer that the data (and/or the analysis) are flawed/biased/incomplete/not useful/meaningless!
Honestly, that's usually a plus to me. It means the author actually understands what good data is, and how one extracts meaning from data. 98% of humanity would have run reports like that, called it definitive, and you probably would have never noticed the difference.
Never confuse confidence with competence, or frankness with weakness. Imperfect data, honestly presented, is much better than no data.
As rough as his numbers are, they are reasonable support to his conclusions. If somebody disagrees with his conclusions, the burden is now on them to come up with better numbers, and Meeks has even shown them several opportunities to do that.
Also, in other countries, they have different customs, laws, and even languages! This is obvious waste, and as an American, I demand that you foreigners tidy things up pronto.
Also, I think programmers should standardize on one language, and while we're at it, one operating system should be enough.
After that, we can get rid of all of those extra planets in the solar system.
4chan. in fact, the two communities were eerily similar.
Well, I guess that answers the question of why Bruce closed it. Even the Internet doesn't need two lower colons.
You fail.
I replied elsewhere to your other points, but let me get the unique ones here.
Psystar does not sound remotely like Apple. They are not calling their computers "Mcaintoshes", they've got names like "OpenGamer" and "Open7". Their logo does not look like Apple, their brand identity is not like Apple's.
As far as I have seen, the only use of an Apple trademark is to correctly say what OS they are installing on the boxes. If you sell a Volkswagen Beetle with a Ferrari engine in it, you can do that and use both names, just as long as you're clear about what you're actually doing. Especially if you're doing it in a market where the vast majority of people drive cars where the engines have been purchased separately from the rest of the car.
And by the way, but it's always a pleasure to slip a technically correct car analogy into a serious Slashdot discussion, so thanks for the opportunity.
Brand reputation is not only legally protectable, it's one of the most valuable parts of intellectual property out there.
You are incorrect. Brand reputation is not protectable on its own. Otherwise, we would not have sites like FordReallySucks.com and IHateStarbucks.com. They are undeniably harmful to the brands to which they are related, and they are using the words "Ford" and "Starbucks" liberally. As another example, Consumer Reports is harmful to brand after brand when they report negatively. Companies continually compare their products to those of competitors while using their trademarked names, and the whole point of that is to harm competitor reputations and brands.
As far as I as a layman understand it, the basic point of trademarks, both with infringement and dilution, is to prevent consumer confusion. I understand that Apple is claiming that consumers might somehow be confused. But I think that's bogus: Psystar is just saying they are selling machines with Apple's MacOS X, which they are.
Equally, they are selling machines with Microsoft Windows, and with Linux. Unless you're asserting that Psystar's customers also think that they are buying a Microsoft computer or a Linus Torvalds computer, then it would seem to me that the average consumer understands the difference between the OS and the model of computer, and that any confusion going on is the normal consumer confusion, and not biased in any particular direction by Psystar's claims. Ergo, no trademark violation.
Whether Apple should be able to control who sells their software and how it gets installed seems like the actual interesting question here. The trademark claims strike me as the usual lawyerly sticks to beat people with until they run out of money.
Wow! Go, fanboy!
First, I'm not bitter about this at all. Apple and Jobs are welcome to do whatever they want. I occasionally buy Apple gear, like a recent iPod purchase for my girlfriend. But the stuff's not really to my taste, especially given the Apple markup compared to other gear of equivalent utility for me. Really, I find Apple fascinating, and count several current and former Apple employees among my friends. But that doesn't mean I have to pretend that when Jobs shits all over people that it's chocolate ice cream.
What I'm am claiming here is that their behavior and statements are inconsistent with known facts, like the fact that previous versions of OS X ran just fine on non-Apple hardware. So that's more than just an opinion. Is a fact-based deduction.
Apple haven't claimed that it's too difficult for their engineers, so this is a straw man.
Jobs, et al, have strongly suggested they just can't give the same user experience on non-Apple hardware. Unless he's claiming it's a scientific impossibility proved at Fermilab, then it's just a claim that it's too hard to be worth doing. And he says that in the same interviews where he talks up the general awesomeness of the Apple engineers and their development prowess. That's bullshit. They have done it before, with some of the same people involved. They could do it if they chose.
They're keeping it exclusive because _they are already_ making lots of money by doing so, and as is the case with all companies, making money is their main reason for existing.
Incorrect, for the same reason that eating and shitting is not the main reason for humans existing.
Apple is a publicly traded corporation that is owned by its shareholders, it's not "his company".
You are technically correct and effectively wrong. Internally, he owns it like a pimp owns a whore: through obsessive domination and screaming fits of abuse. That's widely observed.
Even the shareholders see it as effectively company, which is why the share price wobbles every time people get worried about his health. If you follow the business press, the concern that none of his lieutenants are likely to be able to fill his shoes is the number one problem Apple has from an investor perspective. But given The Steve's titanic ego, volcanic narcissism, and general management style, he may not believe he can be effectively replaced, or be able to work with the person who could come after him.
Note that although from a personal perspective I find his treatment of people odious and his mental issues sad, from a business perspective they may be both typical and useful. Narcissism is endemic to Silicon Valley, and from Apple's string of high-quality products, he definitely makes it work. And certainly, Jobs is much more productively employed than that other famous Bay Area cult leader, Jim Jones.
They are essentially buying a Toyota slapping Ford badges on it and calling it a Ford.
That's your view, but I disagree. If they're calling some of their system Apples, they're they're also calling some of their systems Microsofts and some Linuxes. If you go to their web pages and look at how they're marketing the stuff, the treatment is identical, and identical to how every other company in the world markets system+OS combinations.
but eventually, Joe the Plumber is going to hear that he can get an APPLE computer for 400 bucks.
They're not calling them Apple computers. They're just saying the computers are running MacOS X. Which they are. Ergo, no trademark violation.
You have to be authorized by a trademark owner to use its trademarks
Under some circumstances, but it's not clear to me that these are those circumstances.
As far as I know, Psystar has legally bought copies of Apple's MacOS, and is legally reselling it. If I sell my Ford car in the paper, I don't have to be authorized to say it's a Ford, and Ford can't stop me from saying it is. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that they could only stop me if I said that I was Ford, or if I sold a non-Ford product after putting Ford labels on them.
The only problem seems to be that they are also installing it on non-Apple hardware, and as far as I can tell, that's the only thing that has Apple's knickers in a twist.
Whether or not that's legal is an interesting question. Could they sell the two together and let you install it? If I buy the two separately and install them myself, can Apple sue me? Maybe, but in the latter case there's no possibility of a trademark violation, which is part of what makes me think the trademark thing is a lawyerly red herring, a convenient stick to beat Psystar with.
I note that Psystar sells computers with Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. Psystar's customers would have to be particularly dim to think that they are buying from a company that's simultaneously Apple, Microsoft, and Linus Torvalds. They never say they're an authorized Apple reseller, and there's a reason that "authorized reseller" logos exist: because a lot of vendors aren't.
This strikes me as of a piece with using trademark violations to go after people who publish negative reviews. Bullshit, but bullshit that's often likely to be effective (and profitable) when you have a lot more money for lawyers than your opponents.
Ah, hello fanboy.
Steve Jobs[..] knows (conservatively) several orders of magnitude more [...] than you
Did I say otherwise?
I'm just pointing out that their stated reason for doing it is not their actual reason for doing it.
They are not protecting poor, helpless consumers from a bad experience. They aren't going after clone-makers because getting OS X to run on anything other than Apple hardware is so gosh darned hard that even The Steve's mighty experts can't do it. They are keeping it exclusive because their plan is to make lots of money by appearing cool.
I think that's mildly douchey, and it fits well with The Steve's well-documented narcissistic tendencies, but hey, it's his company.
Yes. The real reason Apple doesn't do it is that they aren't just selling hardware, they're selling cool. But they can't say that, because people will only buy cool if you make it seem like they're buying something else. Thus, their unending stream of bullshit on this topic.
It's just not ready for the rediculous diversity of hardware that Windows is obligated to support by running on commodity hardware. That smooth "just works" will be descend into the same brand tarnishing sludge that is compatibility.
You would think. But actually, what is now OSX was actually running on commodity hardware before, when it was the NeXT operating system. There were approved configurations, and unapproved ones. If you bought an unapproved one, and installed the OS anyhow, you were on your own.
Given that 90% of people buy computers as pre-assembled boxes where vendors have pretty stable hardware configurations, there's no reason that Apple couldn't sell OSX as part of an OEM program where they make everybody test the hell out of things, and use only approved drivers. No reason except greed.
Yes, it could never be as magically splendiferous as a real live Mac on Chairman Steve's exquisite hardware. But most people don't care. You know how I know? Because they've used crap for years and don't mind.
The reason Jobs doesn't do this isn't because it's too gosh darned hard. It's because it would puncture his profitable air of exclusivity. It's the same scam clubs run when they have a line of people standing outside even though there's plenty of room inside.
The big money will be in 'brand dilution'.
There are a relatively small number of sorts of information that are legally protected. Brand is not one of them, except insofar as you are boosting somebody's trademarks. But Psystar's whole point is that they aren't Apple, and they aren't using Apple's trademarks to pretend they are.
the equivalent advertising cost of every square inch of newsprint or second of airtime devoted to covering this case in the public view can be treated as damage to Apple
Heh. Normally people just say "I am not a lawyer" rather than proving it dramatically. Maybe you should try that next time?
That's the value of digital. Copies are perfect. Make lots.
This is similar to the answer that a lot of people interested in data preservation have come to over the years, including archivists and Kevin Kelly, one of the people behind the Long Now Foundation.
However, one thing that people might not think of from your advice is to keep things hot, to keep them moving. You can't tell when a bunch of burned DVDs start to go bad. Knowing whether your data is good requires constant integrity checks, to make sure that you can still get your data back.
Personally, the way I handle this is by running two hot servers in different locations with all of my critical data on both, with rsync updating nightly. With continuous checksumming turned on, that forces reads, so I know all the data is still safe.
But for those who aren't quite that geeky, then I think a service like Amazon's S3 is the way to go. You keep one local drive hot, and one set of data in the cloud. And you regularly verify that all the data you want is still there. Yes, this costs more money than another local disk. But S3 data sits in at least two spots in a secure data center on an infrastructure designed by people who really get reliability.
This is an excellent rant.
However, Java is not actually OO to a fault. A fair number of its faults are where it breaks the OO model either for convenience or through ignorance. But Java's biggest fault is that it wasn't created for the language creators to program in. It was created so that lesser developers could be kept from doing "dangerous" things.
I'm not quite sure why you have your knickers in a twist, as it sounds like we agree.
Doctors do have to know some science at the beginning, sure. But then I think a lot of them, just as you say, base their practices based on what they read. A lot of that has to be treatment-oriented, how-to stuff. As you say, that's often pretty high-quality material, so it's not surprising that doctors come to rely on it uncritically.
So I'm not particularly upset that 90% of the doctors I've dealt with can't answer the whys and wherefores that I bring to my appointments. (That's also true of most of the mechanics I deal with.) For me personally, I'm going to try hard to find somebody in the 10% that can keep up with my sciencey ways, though.
You seriously couldn't take the time to read all the way to the end of the sentence you quoted? Or, even better, to understand my point?
Yes, there are definitely frameworks in PHP. I'm sure they're swell. But Rails was such a departure from existing frameworks in part because of the Ruby language. There are plenty of web frameworks in every language, quite a lot of them inspired by Rails. But there's only so much you can do without certain features of Ruby. Which, as I said, comes at a CPU cost, as they would in any language.
However, my point was that one should pick the right tool for the job. How you can get your panties in a knot about that, I dunno.
And I won't be happy if I have to pay more than I expected because you've estimated your time badly.
That's a reasonable attitude to have. But it turns out 99% of the time, the client will see any change in cost as the result of bad estimates, rather than any other possible factor. Which is why I only work by the hour unless it's on a project and with a client where I have lots of experience.
I think the key to quoting a fixed price for the whole project is to clearly define the project first.
There are three downsides to this.
One is that you have to spend a lot of time and money hammering out the project definition, and unless the project is a very simple one, there will still be surprises. And then you will spend a lot more time arguing over whether or not what is delivered is technically "in spec". Fun!
Another is that canny developers will use this approach to totally screw you. They'll let you define the project, quote you a very attractive price, and then rape you on the overcharges for scope changes that were likely from the beginning.
A third is that as a client you can't evaluate long-term maintainability. For pre-planned, fixed-price jobs, the developer's financial incentive is to reach the finish line and hand you a christmas-paper-wrapped turd. You see the shiny surface and sign off. And now you're the proud owner of a totaled code base, and any significant modifications would be best done with a total rewrite. But you'll object to that, so over time you pay your new devs twice as much to fix your project than a clean rewrite would have cost.
I think a much better approach for any non-technical purchaser of custom software, especially web-based software, is to pay by the hour, but structure things with regular, frequent deliverables. If your dev adds a couple new features a week, then you can quickly tell how good he his, and boot him if he's a fuckup.
Also, if you are spending more than you are comfortable throwing away, then get a professional to check how maintainable the work is. Frequent milestones help mitigate that risk, but they don't eliminate it.
What a load of rubbish - have you ever seen just how slow Ruby sites run with any sort of significant load? Python too. PHP isn't the silver bullet or anything, but saying Ruby/python is "better" is just playing to the fanboy crowd.
Rails definitely uses more CPU time. However, it can make development of some kinds of things much faster, and you can work at higher levels of abstraction in Ruby than PHP.
Whether that matters at all depends on the situation. There is no such thing as the "right tool" except in the context of who's using it and what they're doing with it.
Totally agreed. Indeed, I had only read the sciencey ones before. That's why I was so surprised at the content of the ones aimed at practitioners.
I know this is going to be viewed somewhat as flamebait, but to put it bluntly, doctors are mechanics for the human body.
It's funny you should say that. A friend of mine is toward the end of med school, and at her house I was leafing through one of the professional journals she gets. It reminded me a lot of a car mechanic's guide. Very little on the science or the why. She agreed.
Maybe that's the right thing, as being a family doctor you have to keep up with an awful lot of conditions. But I went through a lot of doctors before I found one who a) had at least a touch of humility, and b) made me feel like she understood the actual science involved.
So you're just talking static sites? Using cheap hosting plans as a dodgy CDN? If so, I've got no issue with that. But $60 a month pays for little sysadmin time, and not much more monkey time.
If people are having that kind of traffic, it's worth starting to think about how to make their project sustainable. Things that are pure cost tend to disappear. Figuring out how to match revenues with costs means the project is much more likely to last.
People should also be a little afraid of hosting companies when doing this. Hosting companies offer their low-end packages with the expectation that most people will use almost nothing. And that those who do will eventually swap up to higher packages. If you balance your traffic so you're fully using a bunch of low-end packages, you will probably cost the hosting company more than they are making on you. Even if their AUP currently allows it, they may find reasons to give you poor service or close your account entirely.
Business relationships are only sustainable when both sides are getting good value.