They manage things like IT by looking elsewhere and saying, hey see what they are bragging about, why are we not like that? Kind of like all those *investment* bankers who collapsed the economy on bad loans and derivatives. Many said, "Not smart", but their bosses ignored them, saying, "Look others are doing it and profiting , we need that profit as well."
If that's most of what they do then why are they paid so well? I'll bet that there are many IT people who could do managements' jobs, but how many of them could do ours?
Considering how much the U.S. is loved by the rest of the World, it will probably help promote a non-U.S. based credit card company that is backed by the E.U. over Visa/Mastercard.
Europe already has a fully functioning credit market. In fact, the European credit and banking system is more sophisticated in many ways than that which is run by the United States. However, the problem is one of scale. There aren't enough Euros or Euro backed debts in circulation to serve as collateral in the quantities that would be necessary to support serious competition to the US Dollar hegemony and neither the Europeans nor anyone else is particularly interested in trying. Reserve currency status and control of world credit and banking systems has its advantages, but it also has rather substantial downsides; not the least of which is a crushing 14 trillion dollars in long term liability for the United States. What you say you want will never happen because the Europeans are neither able nor willing to expand credit enough to compete with the US Dollar for reserve status.
They should settle out of court, ASAP! It's a win/win for Wikileaks.
Governments do indeed settle out of court, but that's probably not the sort of "settlement" you had in mind.
The more they fight it, the more people are going to hate us.
The people who matter don't hate us and the people who hate us don't matter; that's what's important.
If it was pressure from the U.S. government, then they shouldn't be used internationally, they should be U.S. only!
The dollar is the reserve currency of this world and the United States essentially controls the global financial system, or the parts that matter anyway. When The US government says "jump", everyone connected to that system responds with, "how high"? Nobody wants to be taken out of the financial loop for refusing to cooperate.
I can't see how Visa and Mastercard can possibly be allowed to continue these shenanigans.
Then you aren't looking hard enough. Visa and Mastercard are American financial institutions and they require access to the American, and therefore international, banking system to do their buisness. The US government has warned them not to process payments on behalf of Wikileaks. Corporations, especially financial institutions, have little choice but to aquiesse to the demands of the US government because if they refuse, the corporate death penalty (i.e. no more access to the financial system) is imposed. Governments are all about threats of "consequences" if you don't do what they want. Their power is derived from violence and violence, if organized on a large enough scale, trumps legal commerce every time. The only alternative is to deal in guns, cash, drugs or precious metals/stones while waging open warfare with the government and its agents. This is what the drug cartels, gun runners and mafias around the world do, but their business is small potatoes compared to what the legal multinational corporations earn. So, if you want to understand why Visa and Mastercard refuse to deal with Wikileaks, look no further than their government masters; the ones with the real power. Did wikileaks expect the powerful governments of this world to simply bend over and take it in the ass? Please, Assange is lucky that he hasn't met with any unfortunate "accidents" yet; never mind the money.
Many companies are leaving wide open, simple holes, like failing to escape their SQL, or parse out javascript
This is less the result of a conscious decision on their part to trade off security and more often the consequence of hiring out any IT or development work to the cheapest possible bidder. Companies, like people, must sometimes learn the hard way that one gets what one pays for. For what it's worth, I've noticed that offshore outsourcing shops are especially negligent when it comes to SQL injection, script entered into forms, careless query string handling and many other common attacks. It's too bad that LulzSec disbanded, they were bringing attention to problems that have long been ignored by corporate America.
They were not asleep. They did not believe in security through obscurity. They trusted the industry.
It has often been said, by Bruce Schneier and others, that security is not a product that can be purchased, installed after the fact and forgotten, but rather an attitude and culture that must be cultivated and maintained. Knowledge and tools are important, but without the right attitudes and culture they will be of limited use. Remember that nobody cares more about your security than you do. If you don't care then nobody else will either, despite what they may tell you.
I think that we're sort of talking past each other here. I didn't mean to suggest the only reason people choose Apple is to "be cool". On the other hand, as I have already mentioned, the notion of Apple being cool has currency in the popular culture, is encouraged by Apple and is therefore relevant in any discussion of Apple vs the alternatives. It is not automatically a straw man to make the point that Apple is perceived as being "cool" and that "cool" might influence someone's decision to use or not use Apple products. It's a legitimate point of argument.
What Tim Lee invented back then was a protocol and a markup language. The sorts of dynamic data driven websites that you see today where AJAX is used heavily and HTTP requests may be responded to with JSON or XML or some other form entirely (not necessarily HTML) using a sophisticated stack of custom server side handlers and client side scripted template rendering or even entirely new formats handled by the browser (ala SVG) is a completely different proposition. You act is if nothing has changed or needs to change since Tim wrote the first web pages at CERN twenty three years ago. If you aren't viewing the modern web as more of an application platform and less of a "web server ala 1989" then frankly you are living in the past. Any new scientific journal/paper archive app should embrace and take advantage of new web technologies and techniques. The web is not a "solved problem" that was finished in 1989 and never needs updating, but your comment suggests that you view it as such and I'm saying that such a view is backwards and outmoded.
I shudder to think what would be lost if publishing to web sites became the norm.
What the parent likely mean was some sort of website backed by a database which properly indexes, links and cross references the paper in such a way that it can be queried, referenced and excerpted as needed. Care should be taken not to confuse the data storage model with the view(s) of that data when discussing such concepts.
"being cool because I use Apple" is such a useless straw man, I don't understand why you bother to throw it around.
Apple has long cultivated the "cool" factor in their products, marketing and advertising. At the very least, they have done nothing to dissuade the notion, and rightly so, that Apple is "cool"; even though they never explicitly say, "we're cool". Steve Jobs is a master of coy secrecy in marketing, so this angle is surely not lost on him. Therefore, the notion of "being cool because I use Apple" is not a straw man; the concept has currency because the marketing perceptions become the purchasing realities, especially with Apple.
without an utterly ironclad shareholders agreement are worth exactly zero.
Which would require attorneys both to interpret and, if necessary, enforce via lawsuit. The sunk costs of involving attorneys is very rarely worth the risk for average employees. So yes, your stock option agreement is worthless and should be treated as such by you in any salary negotiations.
Even with one they're barely worth more.
Couldn't agree more. If you want to compete with well funded VCs and private equity guys when the spoils are divided then you had better have a similar bankroll and army of attorneys or you're going to be squeezed out. It's best not to play their games in the first place. Demand cash up front and say, "no" if they aren't willing to pay what you know you're worth. If they offer you options instead of paying up front, they're trying to screw you with a come on to a sucker bet. Don't play their three card monty, you will lose every time.
True story. I opt for cash now, and will take options if they give them but do not consider them as part of my compensation no matter how much my bosses try to give them to me in lieu of increases.
Experience is often the best (and harshest) teacher isn't it? We could all learn from your experience when negotiating our compensation. Cash is king. Accept options if they are offered, but never in lieu of what you believe is fair "cash on the barrelhead" compensation for your valuable and skilled labor. Assume that options are going to be worthless, or nearly so, and discount their value appropriately. Thank you for sharing your experience.
If you're working for stock options you're going to get screwed.
YES! Let this be a warning to all techs and other employees who are offered shares in lieu of pay or other benefits. The lawyers and private equity guys will screw you over. Actually, its worse now than in the past because fewer deals ever go fully public due to the Sarbanes Oxley reporting regulations and bullcrap; who needs it? What VC would want to deal with all of that when the company can instead be sold to a private equity firm, a hedge fund perhaps, with most of the profit still intact? If nothing else, remember what they say in Hollywood: "a share of the net profits is a share of nothing." cash money on the barrelhead...accept no substitutes.
They almost had a viable solution for the SMB market
With the exception of boutique and creative business, such as advertising, Apple is mostly absent from the small business market. There is very little business case to be made for paying twice or even three times more for the same software and hardware (i.e. Microsoft Office + Quickbooks) to run a small business. Microsoft has always offered the best value proposition for small business and the use of PCs by most of them reflects that.
and a ease of use so far missing in other offerings
The two most commonly used software products in small business are Microsoft Office and Quickbooks. Whether these programs are used on a Mac or a PC makes little difference, so "ease of use" isn't a factor here.
If they had offered a really good way of syncing iPhones to their Calendaring/Email system, something on par with Active Sync, it could have been a killer.
If it didn't sync with Microsoft Exchange, the most common choice in small business email servers, then it wouldn't add much value. If it did sync with Exchange then it wouldn't generate any additional Mac sales, people would just sync their iPhones with the Exchange Server or Outlook running on their PCs. Even if the syncing support had been better it wouldn't have been "killer". No small business owner would ever say, "You know, the Mac Calendering and Email syncing with iPhone works so well that I'm going to ditch the PC and the Exchange server and replace them with Macs!".
They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.
Which will never happen on a large scale. The IT department supports Macs and iPhone in the corporate infrastructure when C-Level executives or the people who sign the checks ask them to, but everyone else will continue to use the company issued PCs and standard desktop software installs and they will like it that way. If they disagree, they can find another job. Businesses care about making money, first and foremost. If being "cool" helps to make money then maybe, but for most businesses Apple offers less effective or at least no better business performance for a much higher price; that's a non-starter for official corporate IT support, especially in these economic times when IT support budgets have been cut to the bone.
You are completely wrong, but that is because you do not know the market.
I did indeed acknowledge that I neither work in nor know the film, television and advertising businesses. However, I can see how tools like FCP would be popular in television, especially advertising, where schedules are tighter and budgets are smaller than they are in feature films. Are you certain that FCP gets lots of use in the films business? I thought that Avid had most of the big movie studio business these days. Who uses FCP in film? Independent films or perhaps porn producers (that would be ironic given Steve Job's well known opinions on that subject matter)?
just to show that Apple is in no way interested in the business market
Apple has seemingly never been interested in the business market, always treating it as a side show or icing on the cake compared to their consumer product lines. By all accounts, they never seriously attempted to compete head to head in the business and professional markets with IBM, Sun, Oracle and yes Microsoft. It should come as no surprise then that Apple once again chooses to move in the consumer direction. Now I'm not a professional in the film, television or video editing business,but from what I understand the Avid tools, which include specialized hardware, are what the real professionals use (with prices to match). Is it not the case that products such as Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro served an intermediate audience, somewhere between the fully professional avid users and the consumer/hobbyist?
It's a certainty. If you are a.NET developer, your skills will be obsolete.
I disagree. Having been in development for some time now, I've had ample opportunity to observe the various trends in programming and software development. The churn that was more characteristic of many previous technologies, going all the way back to the early mainframes from IBM and others, stemmed in large part from the close association between software and the hardware on which it ran. However, beginning with the rise and popularity of Java and continuing with.NET we see the increasing virtualization of the hardware; especially for main stream business and other large scale commodity software development. This ties in with the increasing use of server virtualization technologies, mobile and cloud (yes I hate that word too, but like it or not it has gained currency) computing. Indeed it's an understatement to say that the.NET framework is expansive; it's gigantic. It makes sense, therefore, for Microsoft to continue developing and adding to.NET, especially given its expansive and abstract nature, well into the foreseeable future. The technologies that you mention as predecessors of.NET were of a much more limited scope by way of comparison. Another interesting property of the.NET platform is that it's extremely promiscuous, borrowing and incorporating the best ideas from the languages and frameworks that preceded it and to which it certainly owes a debt. Why would Microsoft need or want to replace.NET when it easily incorporates anything and everything that has and is coming along?
crappy bits of toilet paper that feel like they been stuck to some homeless guy's arse since 1973.
In many cases, that's probably not too far off the mark. Paper money is really quite disgusting, especially the singles. At the very least they ought to switch anything less than $5 over to coinage, as the Europeans have done. It would be preferable to use some sort of copper alloy for this application, brass for example, so that coins so made would disinfect themselves over time.
Even lawyers must choose their targets with some care. Filing a lawsuit against the "wrong" people can result in an "out of court settlement". You can use your own imagination as to what constitutes an "out of court settlement" in that context...
One might as well ask the sun not to rise. People are ignorant and know only what they see. The internal workings of the software that runs their daily lives are so far beyond them as to be indistinguishable from magic. Those who know what is available and what they want will continue to use the proper tools, which will always exist, while the masses use their 'browser as an OS' tablets and complain about not being able to work offline or how slow and crappy their tablet is compared to their previous computing devices.
Or the CIA doesn't use the public facing web server for anything important, so they didn't bother securing it very well.
In fact, they probably set it up this way on purpose with an eye towards attracting interesting targets to their honey pot. It's a cheap and effective method when compared to other forms of surveillance and the CIA need only spend minimal effort and resources to promote their honey pot where desirable targets are likely to find it and follow up on any promising leads.
There are countless rules that construct the reality of today, and they can be changed to meet moral expectations of society.
The use of government to force equality, morality and "justice" has been the source of great miseries for the masses throughout human history. People are quick to cite the flaws of a free market system without stopping to consider the even bigger flaws with other systems that have seen rather more extensive trials in the grand scheme of things.
It is foolish to think the system is perfect today, and its obvious the OP's questions were made in this regard.
The system will never be perfect, because it necessarily involves humans and humans are imperfect beings. There is a tendency amongst those on the left to believe that there exists no problem which cannot be solved by a sufficient application of government. Then, when their experiment has clearly failed to produce the intended results, they respond with, "Well, we're sorry that it didn't work, but it really was/is a fine idea (in principle)." Meanwhile, the situation has been made worse than it otherwise would have been due to their misguided meddling.
Did these people learn nothing from the lesson of Pvt Manning? Do they believe that they won't be found by the USSS and the three letter agencies? If these people are US citizens then they are being really dumb. If they aren't US citizens then it will be even worse for them when they are eventually caught. Will they still be laughing after the Feds make examples of them? We shall see.
Show me the stone tablets where this is inscribed.
Reality isn't inscribed anywhere, it just is. If you don't like it then work to change your own situation. If you want to achieve goals or have things then you have to be willing to work for them. Few things worth having come easily or free of charge. That's the world we live in. Going around with a chip on your shoulder harms nobody but yourself. Didn't your parents teach you these things when you were small?
Why should all the money go to shareholders or in bonuses to people who are already very well off ?
It doesn't. The employees had to be paid, the capital acquired (i.e. inventory or equipment), the factors organized and a product produced; all with no guarantee that any of it would earn any money whatsoever. In other words, the owners took substantial risks that the employees did not. It's their right, by virtue of their ownership of the company, to be compensated for taking those risks and bringing new products and services to market. If you think it's easy to be an owner, get some of your friends together and try to start your own company (I hear that's popular in San Francisco anyway), then you will understand why a majority share of the profits go to those who shoulder a majority of the risks.
Why can't a company offer awesome wages and benefits to all its employees when it can afford it like Apple clearly can ?
Apple is free to offer whatever it wishes to its employees and its employees are free to take it or leave it. That is a private arrangement between Apple and its employees. If the employees don't like the terms they are free to quit at any time, it's a free country after all. If you don't like the pay then don't work there, simple isn't it?
So why can't solidarity figure into it ? Why make it impossible for workers to say: "this is not how I want to be treated and all of us are willing to stand up for it together" ?
There is nothing preventing the workers from attempting to do just that. However, Apple is free to refuse their demands or replace them with non-union labor. California is a right to work state, which means that nobody can be forced to join an association, a union for example, as a condition of employment. So, they can all stand up and Apple can terminate all of the employees at the store and hire new ones. There are lots of people in San Francisco right now who are both capable of working at the Apple store and need employment. Supply and demand, it's not just an exam item in Econ 101.
Will you feel that this system is so natural and just when China is the piper, I wonder?
I merely suggested that these sorts of arrangements are representative of the sorts that have existed, at one time or another, throughout recorded human history. After all, Realpolitik concerns itself with the possible and the practical, not the idealistic or the practically impossible. Is it just? No. Is the world a fair place? No. In my experience, winners play the hands they are dealt while losers stand around and whine about the fairness of the game after everyone else has moved on.
Slashdot Mirror
They manage things like IT by looking elsewhere and saying, hey see what they are bragging about, why are we not like that? Kind of like all those *investment* bankers who collapsed the economy on bad loans and derivatives. Many said, "Not smart", but their bosses ignored them, saying, "Look others are doing it and profiting , we need that profit as well."
If that's most of what they do then why are they paid so well? I'll bet that there are many IT people who could do managements' jobs, but how many of them could do ours?
Considering how much the U.S. is loved by the rest of the World, it will probably help promote a non-U.S. based credit card company that is backed by the E.U. over Visa/Mastercard.
Europe already has a fully functioning credit market. In fact, the European credit and banking system is more sophisticated in many ways than that which is run by the United States. However, the problem is one of scale. There aren't enough Euros or Euro backed debts in circulation to serve as collateral in the quantities that would be necessary to support serious competition to the US Dollar hegemony and neither the Europeans nor anyone else is particularly interested in trying. Reserve currency status and control of world credit and banking systems has its advantages, but it also has rather substantial downsides; not the least of which is a crushing 14 trillion dollars in long term liability for the United States. What you say you want will never happen because the Europeans are neither able nor willing to expand credit enough to compete with the US Dollar for reserve status.
They should settle out of court, ASAP! It's a win/win for Wikileaks.
Governments do indeed settle out of court, but that's probably not the sort of "settlement" you had in mind.
The more they fight it, the more people are going to hate us.
The people who matter don't hate us and the people who hate us don't matter; that's what's important.
Yes it is societies place to decide how a company can and cannot behave, including with whom they can and can't do business with
How delightfully quaint, do you believe that your vote still matters as well?
If it was pressure from the U.S. government, then they shouldn't be used internationally, they should be U.S. only!
The dollar is the reserve currency of this world and the United States essentially controls the global financial system, or the parts that matter anyway. When The US government says "jump", everyone connected to that system responds with, "how high"? Nobody wants to be taken out of the financial loop for refusing to cooperate.
I can't see how Visa and Mastercard can possibly be allowed to continue these shenanigans.
Then you aren't looking hard enough. Visa and Mastercard are American financial institutions and they require access to the American, and therefore international, banking system to do their buisness. The US government has warned them not to process payments on behalf of Wikileaks. Corporations, especially financial institutions, have little choice but to aquiesse to the demands of the US government because if they refuse, the corporate death penalty (i.e. no more access to the financial system) is imposed. Governments are all about threats of "consequences" if you don't do what they want. Their power is derived from violence and violence, if organized on a large enough scale, trumps legal commerce every time. The only alternative is to deal in guns, cash, drugs or precious metals/stones while waging open warfare with the government and its agents. This is what the drug cartels, gun runners and mafias around the world do, but their business is small potatoes compared to what the legal multinational corporations earn. So, if you want to understand why Visa and Mastercard refuse to deal with Wikileaks, look no further than their government masters; the ones with the real power. Did wikileaks expect the powerful governments of this world to simply bend over and take it in the ass? Please, Assange is lucky that he hasn't met with any unfortunate "accidents" yet; never mind the money.
Many companies are leaving wide open, simple holes, like failing to escape their SQL, or parse out javascript
This is less the result of a conscious decision on their part to trade off security and more often the consequence of hiring out any IT or development work to the cheapest possible bidder. Companies, like people, must sometimes learn the hard way that one gets what one pays for. For what it's worth, I've noticed that offshore outsourcing shops are especially negligent when it comes to SQL injection, script entered into forms, careless query string handling and many other common attacks. It's too bad that LulzSec disbanded, they were bringing attention to problems that have long been ignored by corporate America.
They were not asleep. They did not believe in security through obscurity. They trusted the industry.
It has often been said, by Bruce Schneier and others, that security is not a product that can be purchased, installed after the fact and forgotten, but rather an attitude and culture that must be cultivated and maintained. Knowledge and tools are important, but without the right attitudes and culture they will be of limited use. Remember that nobody cares more about your security than you do. If you don't care then nobody else will either, despite what they may tell you.
I think that we're sort of talking past each other here. I didn't mean to suggest the only reason people choose Apple is to "be cool". On the other hand, as I have already mentioned, the notion of Apple being cool has currency in the popular culture, is encouraged by Apple and is therefore relevant in any discussion of Apple vs the alternatives. It is not automatically a straw man to make the point that Apple is perceived as being "cool" and that "cool" might influence someone's decision to use or not use Apple products. It's a legitimate point of argument.
What Tim Lee invented back then was a protocol and a markup language. The sorts of dynamic data driven websites that you see today where AJAX is used heavily and HTTP requests may be responded to with JSON or XML or some other form entirely (not necessarily HTML) using a sophisticated stack of custom server side handlers and client side scripted template rendering or even entirely new formats handled by the browser (ala SVG) is a completely different proposition. You act is if nothing has changed or needs to change since Tim wrote the first web pages at CERN twenty three years ago. If you aren't viewing the modern web as more of an application platform and less of a "web server ala 1989" then frankly you are living in the past. Any new scientific journal/paper archive app should embrace and take advantage of new web technologies and techniques. The web is not a "solved problem" that was finished in 1989 and never needs updating, but your comment suggests that you view it as such and I'm saying that such a view is backwards and outmoded.
I shudder to think what would be lost if publishing to web sites became the norm.
What the parent likely mean was some sort of website backed by a database which properly indexes, links and cross references the paper in such a way that it can be queried, referenced and excerpted as needed. Care should be taken not to confuse the data storage model with the view(s) of that data when discussing such concepts.
"being cool because I use Apple" is such a useless straw man, I don't understand why you bother to throw it around.
Apple has long cultivated the "cool" factor in their products, marketing and advertising. At the very least, they have done nothing to dissuade the notion, and rightly so, that Apple is "cool"; even though they never explicitly say, "we're cool". Steve Jobs is a master of coy secrecy in marketing, so this angle is surely not lost on him. Therefore, the notion of "being cool because I use Apple" is not a straw man; the concept has currency because the marketing perceptions become the purchasing realities, especially with Apple.
without an utterly ironclad shareholders agreement are worth exactly zero.
Which would require attorneys both to interpret and, if necessary, enforce via lawsuit. The sunk costs of involving attorneys is very rarely worth the risk for average employees. So yes, your stock option agreement is worthless and should be treated as such by you in any salary negotiations.
Even with one they're barely worth more.
Couldn't agree more. If you want to compete with well funded VCs and private equity guys when the spoils are divided then you had better have a similar bankroll and army of attorneys or you're going to be squeezed out. It's best not to play their games in the first place. Demand cash up front and say, "no" if they aren't willing to pay what you know you're worth. If they offer you options instead of paying up front, they're trying to screw you with a come on to a sucker bet. Don't play their three card monty, you will lose every time.
True story. I opt for cash now, and will take options if they give them but do not consider them as part of my compensation no matter how much my bosses try to give them to me in lieu of increases.
Experience is often the best (and harshest) teacher isn't it? We could all learn from your experience when negotiating our compensation. Cash is king. Accept options if they are offered, but never in lieu of what you believe is fair "cash on the barrelhead" compensation for your valuable and skilled labor. Assume that options are going to be worthless, or nearly so, and discount their value appropriately. Thank you for sharing your experience.
If you're working for stock options you're going to get screwed.
YES! Let this be a warning to all techs and other employees who are offered shares in lieu of pay or other benefits. The lawyers and private equity guys will screw you over. Actually, its worse now than in the past because fewer deals ever go fully public due to the Sarbanes Oxley reporting regulations and bullcrap; who needs it? What VC would want to deal with all of that when the company can instead be sold to a private equity firm, a hedge fund perhaps, with most of the profit still intact? If nothing else, remember what they say in Hollywood: "a share of the net profits is a share of nothing." cash money on the barrelhead...accept no substitutes.
They almost had a viable solution for the SMB market
With the exception of boutique and creative business, such as advertising, Apple is mostly absent from the small business market. There is very little business case to be made for paying twice or even three times more for the same software and hardware (i.e. Microsoft Office + Quickbooks) to run a small business. Microsoft has always offered the best value proposition for small business and the use of PCs by most of them reflects that.
and a ease of use so far missing in other offerings
The two most commonly used software products in small business are Microsoft Office and Quickbooks. Whether these programs are used on a Mac or a PC makes little difference, so "ease of use" isn't a factor here.
If they had offered a really good way of syncing iPhones to their Calendaring/Email system, something on par with Active Sync, it could have been a killer.
If it didn't sync with Microsoft Exchange, the most common choice in small business email servers, then it wouldn't add much value. If it did sync with Exchange then it wouldn't generate any additional Mac sales , people would just sync their iPhones with the Exchange Server or Outlook running on their PCs. Even if the syncing support had been better it wouldn't have been "killer". No small business owner would ever say, "You know, the Mac Calendering and Email syncing with iPhone works so well that I'm going to ditch the PC and the Exchange server and replace them with Macs!".
They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.
Which will never happen on a large scale. The IT department supports Macs and iPhone in the corporate infrastructure when C-Level executives or the people who sign the checks ask them to, but everyone else will continue to use the company issued PCs and standard desktop software installs and they will like it that way . If they disagree, they can find another job. Businesses care about making money, first and foremost. If being "cool" helps to make money then maybe, but for most businesses Apple offers less effective or at least no better business performance for a much higher price; that's a non-starter for official corporate IT support, especially in these economic times when IT support budgets have been cut to the bone.
You are completely wrong, but that is because you do not know the market.
I did indeed acknowledge that I neither work in nor know the film, television and advertising businesses. However, I can see how tools like FCP would be popular in television, especially advertising, where schedules are tighter and budgets are smaller than they are in feature films. Are you certain that FCP gets lots of use in the films business? I thought that Avid had most of the big movie studio business these days. Who uses FCP in film? Independent films or perhaps porn producers (that would be ironic given Steve Job's well known opinions on that subject matter)?
just to show that Apple is in no way interested in the business market
Apple has seemingly never been interested in the business market, always treating it as a side show or icing on the cake compared to their consumer product lines. By all accounts, they never seriously attempted to compete head to head in the business and professional markets with IBM, Sun, Oracle and yes Microsoft. It should come as no surprise then that Apple once again chooses to move in the consumer direction. Now I'm not a professional in the film, television or video editing business ,but from what I understand the Avid tools, which include specialized hardware, are what the real professionals use (with prices to match). Is it not the case that products such as Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro served an intermediate audience, somewhere between the fully professional avid users and the consumer/hobbyist?
It's a certainty. If you are a .NET developer, your skills will be obsolete.
I disagree. Having been in development for some time now, I've had ample opportunity to observe the various trends in programming and software development. The churn that was more characteristic of many previous technologies, going all the way back to the early mainframes from IBM and others, stemmed in large part from the close association between software and the hardware on which it ran. However, beginning with the rise and popularity of Java and continuing with .NET we see the increasing virtualization of the hardware; especially for main stream business and other large scale commodity software development. This ties in with the increasing use of server virtualization technologies, mobile and cloud (yes I hate that word too, but like it or not it has gained currency) computing. Indeed it's an understatement to say that the .NET framework is expansive; it's gigantic. It makes sense, therefore, for Microsoft to continue developing and adding to .NET, especially given its expansive and abstract nature, well into the foreseeable future. The technologies that you mention as predecessors of .NET were of a much more limited scope by way of comparison. Another interesting property of the .NET platform is that it's extremely promiscuous, borrowing and incorporating the best ideas from the languages and frameworks that preceded it and to which it certainly owes a debt. Why would Microsoft need or want to replace .NET when it easily incorporates anything and everything that has and is coming along?
crappy bits of toilet paper that feel like they been stuck to some homeless guy's arse since 1973.
In many cases, that's probably not too far off the mark. Paper money is really quite disgusting, especially the singles. At the very least they ought to switch anything less than $5 over to coinage, as the Europeans have done. It would be preferable to use some sort of copper alloy for this application, brass for example, so that coins so made would disinfect themselves over time.
The sign of a rube. A target to be fleeced.
Even lawyers must choose their targets with some care. Filing a lawsuit against the "wrong" people can result in an "out of court settlement". You can use your own imagination as to what constitutes an "out of court settlement" in that context...
Please make it stop.
One might as well ask the sun not to rise. People are ignorant and know only what they see. The internal workings of the software that runs their daily lives are so far beyond them as to be indistinguishable from magic. Those who know what is available and what they want will continue to use the proper tools, which will always exist, while the masses use their 'browser as an OS' tablets and complain about not being able to work offline or how slow and crappy their tablet is compared to their previous computing devices.
Or the CIA doesn't use the public facing web server for anything important, so they didn't bother securing it very well.
In fact, they probably set it up this way on purpose with an eye towards attracting interesting targets to their honey pot. It's a cheap and effective method when compared to other forms of surveillance and the CIA need only spend minimal effort and resources to promote their honey pot where desirable targets are likely to find it and follow up on any promising leads.
There are countless rules that construct the reality of today, and they can be changed to meet moral expectations of society.
The use of government to force equality, morality and "justice" has been the source of great miseries for the masses throughout human history. People are quick to cite the flaws of a free market system without stopping to consider the even bigger flaws with other systems that have seen rather more extensive trials in the grand scheme of things.
It is foolish to think the system is perfect today, and its obvious the OP's questions were made in this regard.
The system will never be perfect, because it necessarily involves humans and humans are imperfect beings. There is a tendency amongst those on the left to believe that there exists no problem which cannot be solved by a sufficient application of government. Then, when their experiment has clearly failed to produce the intended results, they respond with, "Well, we're sorry that it didn't work, but it really was/is a fine idea (in principle)." Meanwhile, the situation has been made worse than it otherwise would have been due to their misguided meddling.
Did these people learn nothing from the lesson of Pvt Manning? Do they believe that they won't be found by the USSS and the three letter agencies? If these people are US citizens then they are being really dumb. If they aren't US citizens then it will be even worse for them when they are eventually caught. Will they still be laughing after the Feds make examples of them? We shall see.
Show me the stone tablets where this is inscribed.
Reality isn't inscribed anywhere, it just is . If you don't like it then work to change your own situation. If you want to achieve goals or have things then you have to be willing to work for them. Few things worth having come easily or free of charge. That's the world we live in. Going around with a chip on your shoulder harms nobody but yourself. Didn't your parents teach you these things when you were small?
Why should all the money go to shareholders or in bonuses to people who are already very well off ?
It doesn't. The employees had to be paid, the capital acquired (i.e. inventory or equipment), the factors organized and a product produced; all with no guarantee that any of it would earn any money whatsoever. In other words, the owners took substantial risks that the employees did not. It's their right, by virtue of their ownership of the company, to be compensated for taking those risks and bringing new products and services to market. If you think it's easy to be an owner, get some of your friends together and try to start your own company (I hear that's popular in San Francisco anyway), then you will understand why a majority share of the profits go to those who shoulder a majority of the risks.
Why can't a company offer awesome wages and benefits to all its employees when it can afford it like Apple clearly can ?
Apple is free to offer whatever it wishes to its employees and its employees are free to take it or leave it. That is a private arrangement between Apple and its employees. If the employees don't like the terms they are free to quit at any time, it's a free country after all. If you don't like the pay then don't work there, simple isn't it?
So why can't solidarity figure into it ? Why make it impossible for workers to say: "this is not how I want to be treated and all of us are willing to stand up for it together" ?
There is nothing preventing the workers from attempting to do just that. However, Apple is free to refuse their demands or replace them with non-union labor. California is a right to work state, which means that nobody can be forced to join an association, a union for example, as a condition of employment. So, they can all stand up and Apple can terminate all of the employees at the store and hire new ones. There are lots of people in San Francisco right now who are both capable of working at the Apple store and need employment. Supply and demand, it's not just an exam item in Econ 101.
Will you feel that this system is so natural and just when China is the piper, I wonder?
I merely suggested that these sorts of arrangements are representative of the sorts that have existed, at one time or another, throughout recorded human history. After all, Realpolitik concerns itself with the possible and the practical, not the idealistic or the practically impossible. Is it just? No. Is the world a fair place? No. In my experience, winners play the hands they are dealt while losers stand around and whine about the fairness of the game after everyone else has moved on.