An affirmative defense to a suit would be that one took all reasonable precautions. As you say, Apple may not be able to do the impossible, such as communicate with a phone that has had its phone-home mechanism killed, but my argument was about minimizing the things a plaintiff's attorney may say to a jury in a civil action.
I'm entirely certain you are capable. But, let's think about this, a rogue program gets on an iPhone because an Apple approved developer writes and pays Apple to distribute and Apple delivers it to the phone. I'm also sure you are not a litigious sob, but they do exist, and in these days it would be foolishly negligent to bet your deep pockets on every coder being pure of heart and competent and/or your ability to cobble together some wildfire extinguishing after the fact.
So there it is, Apple may very well be selling something that has been dumbed down beneath your tolerance. Everyone does what they need to do.
Let's say 500,000 people buy the game, let's say 5,000,000 people pirate it and then play it as much as the people who buy it. Near as I can tell, there 290 million people in the United States who ignored the game. I would be in that latter category. To get 100,000 more sales one needs to convince.2% of pirates or.035% of the population to buy. Which seems easier?
Let's imagine that 50% of piracy is self-help try before buy. Well, there's maybe locking it down harder and hope that that doesn't reduce the 500,000 or increase support costs as honest people stumble into locked down situations. How about a 30 day pay before play policy. Well, some of those 500,000 will second-guess their decision after playing the game for a while. So... can the game beat a 16% conversion rate for the 3,000,000 looky lous? The lower the rate of looky-pirates, the higher the conversion has to be in order to break even.
I gather making a better game is prohibitively expensive?
I kinda smell that this question has the makings of a FreeCiv type of game.
A guy knocks at the door and you ask for ID and they show a picture and a name on a business card. Self-certified is less secure than a certification which calls to an authority. As to preferred method of handling self-certs, I vote for Firefox which calls my attention to non-authoritative certs and gives me a choice of not connecting, connecting once, or storing revocable trust of that cert. I would expect that if that cert changes, I'll find out. Safari, which asks every time, won't notice if a cert changes. This feels like a security hole. Any browser which lets a self-cert pass without comment will burn, some day, its users. I say this because the "Security is hard, let's go shopping" attitude has been a source of much misery, fraud, and loss on the web. It is always a mistake to smooth out the speed bumps that precede an exchange of confidential information.
First of all, my enthusiasm for looking for the interesting points amidst dismissive names, such as fanboys and freetards, is waning. Please, if we must babble our useless cliches, let us return to welcoming our frist posting "In Soviet Union" joke overlords.
The phrase "just works" dates back to the mid-80s and was no more than a relative statement at best. Since then, everyone has made great strides in simplifying usability. Comments about server and embedded space are irrelevant because, as you imply, when people talk about using or not using Apple, they are talking about consumer use. Commercial use (and there are niches where Apple systems have been and are preferred) make higher demands on systems and somebody spends time with the users and back in the server room to keep things going. Word has it that Windows systems require more administration, but I certainly cannot prove those assertions. I have experiences and observations which suggest it's true, but I would imagine this holds no more credence than your claim of dual-booting adequacy, or any other commonly heard testimony which, much like the phrase "This call is important to us," fades in believability with its repetition.
Let me conclude by adding that I want form and function, engineering and aesthetics. Again, though others are rapidly catching up, Apple has been leading the way at delivering a high level of both in a personal computer. People use Macs because people like using Macs. Was that so hard? And Shuttleworth is right in thinking that striving for a higher aesthetic in the gui and making the concomitant library changes will necessitate engineering challenges that, if met, will improve the *buntus' usability and lower the barrier to consumer application on Linux development. People who think it's about an Apple-esque skin are missing the point.
I like form and function. Can I be in both camps, please?
I wonder if design is easily translated to an open source development model. Unlike application correctness, design ultimately is subjective. Also unlike application correctness, it is subject to culture and fashion (2 + 2 = 4, that's so Pythogoras). I guess by "wonder" I mean "not gonna happen." You see, somebody would have to publish a high quality interface guideline. Someone has to take the guidelines and produce and maintain a library of widgets (this being more functional in nature feels like it could be a community effort). Then the developers out there producing applications have to read and understand the guidelines and the libraries and implement them in their apps.
That last one is ringing the "Uh Oh" alarm, because it would require a lot of people revisiting finished elements of their apps because somebody said it doesn't look pretty enough.
Don't get me wrong, aesthetics are important, and Shuttleworth has a point that a better looking environment promotes its use, I think look and feel, though, is a more difficult kind of problem and not amenable to world-wide, loosely affiliated team structures.
Scheme or SmallTalk (using the Squeak environment). I think javascript/html has its merits for accessibility, but there's an awful lot of casting into and out of String representations, which is a big deal and a security issue. Since the programmer has to be involved with the whys and hows, it's my feeling that such domain-specific hacking, though impressive, is a distraction.
In the course of learning languages one learns to look not for the specific implementation details (does an expression end with a line break or a semi-colon or...) but the larger concept, i.e., how does the compiler or interpreter know that an expression is complete. We walk up to a new language with expectations, for instance, that there will be a way to do basic output and maybe, we hope, a way to make the output nice looking. Then we look for what the printf is called and how is it used.
So then, here's my real suggestion: pick a language you'd like to learn and and learn it together with your child. You'd see the language through experienced eyes and can call out things that are idiosyncratic and things that are fundamental and can demonstrate how much of the problem solving occurs before the coding starts. Plus, if you're lucky and your child is engaging with all their curiosity, you'll have to field a whole lot of "Why" questions and formulating the explanation will be recreational, in all senses of the word. I expect your explanations will be better if you, too, are navigating new seas.
How did you get cash? I think it got to you via check which, when it was deposited it was -boom- income. Having not written the check to Jane's Software, expenses were lower and profits were higher and the tax liability increased for the company or its owners.
Meanwhile, if you paid for that fifth license, you wrote a check to the software company, likely to be in a different state, and they posted the income and paid taxes there. The state they chose to be in, what are the odds that it was chosen because tax rates were lower or non-existent?
We know that between now and November, he will have formulate the response to the challenge that reversing the erosion of liberty is really America-hating terrorism-loving. Maybe now would have been the time to address it head-on and maybe now is not the time. One has to figure that there's national polling which indicates how the electorate views FISA. Though, having read the Senator's explanation, finding it reasonable, I still say this felt like time for little profile in courage.
Now, to the progressive base: next February when Senator Feingold stands on the Senate floor and proposes amendments to this FISA law to remove the civil action immunity and/or when the Attorney General prioritizes which crimes to prosecute, whom would you rather have as President?
I was going to say that accountants wouldn't book as a loss the unrealized hypothetical sale from an unlicensed download. Why that'd be as crazy as booking a gain for each person who didn't do an unlicensed download.
Every story about "x" is an opportunity for the BashDotters to appear. Very few things in this world are unbashable.
I read this over on zdnet in a Mary Jo Foley column yesterday. I think the really telling (and sad) part to the story is the nature of the responses to his e-mail, i.e., finger-pointing and defensiveness. Down the thread somebody takes ownership of assigning ownership to fixing it. That suggests that major groups use billg's withering critiques to score turf points and this is more important than fixing the immediate problem. It also suggests that there's an inability for major groups to team in ad hoc ways. Why wasn't there a customer usability czar to knock heads and make sure that people can get the product/service? Was it, because it was free, no one paid attention to the distribution? This stands on its head why it was made a free product, which was to get an installed base and support the Windows OS product. We have to assume that billg would give this more effort than jane doe and jane would have thought about getting a Mac the next time a friend shows her iMovie.
It was from 2003 so there's a chance that the underlying dysfunctions were addressed in some way. We know that the Longhorn development debacle opened some eyes and kicked some asses.
Well, from my chair, the iPhone was designed to take user input via fingers, to be aware of acceleration rates in three dimensions, to have a large display (relatively), to allow the software writer to have just as many buttons as they need, and to use a variation on the application framework for the Mac. So gaming on the iPhone, yeah, I can see it's possible and from there it's whether or not the games' designers find it an expressive, profitable medium.
As far as ringing death knells for java games, because there are so many other phones and tiers, if anything, this will be a rising tide effect (lift all boats).
I wonder if the solution is that Leopard will continue to be updated through 10.5.10/11. The PPC Macs are a mixed bag of 32 and 64 bit processors and trying to keep one box for Mac regardless of processor has to be a big headache. This would effectively mean 10.5 is Leopard PPC and 10.6 is Leopard Intel. This really, really makes sense in that there are times when Apple has been overambitious and to correct, they tweak the product line. This addresses the issue without explicitly saying they goofed. Single SKU OS was so cool, as far as I'm concerned, and they tried it and it didn't work. (I think one public bit of evidence is the Carbon 64/Photoshop fiasco.)
By the time 10.7 rolls around (2011 at best), you'll be at that 7 year mark and the customer will be ready to get in on the Intel Mac fun. This is not an original thought: I'm riffing on something I read at DaringFireball a couple of days ago.
I think you are right in that there will be major grumblings from people like me if the G4s and G5s are abandoned while Leopard is consolidated over the life of 10.6. It seems like a bad idea, just from the standpoint of money left on the table for PPC users who'd like better Leopard stability too. We shall see if Apple does cross that Rubicon.
Is tech innovation about sitting down one day and saying "I'm going to invent tech." Or is it really a convergence where a solution in one field is applied to problems for another. I suspect the latter, and it takes young, bright minds to want to make those connections. Let me be clear, talented people do exceptional work through their middle and senior years, but revolutions are the domain of the young.
Well, cool, I dodged the question mainly because I don't know. We've had a downcycle every 7-8 years since WWII, if one could measure "tech achievement rates" then it could be correlated or not.
So far so good, you were up $350 for your choice, which is a nice sum of money. Now, we need to look at the cost side of the choice. Let's value your time at $50 per hour and any distro would require a minimum of one hour's worth of time for the reformat, install and setup. So, up $300, which supports your point. As long as any problems took less that 6 hours, it was a net plus. Did the installation and setup go flawlessly?
The most people you speak of are the ones who buy Office one license at a time. A lot of people, to be sure, but Office makes its big bucks with the site purchases. At these places, there are gatekeepers who may have been alerted about the long-term costs of non-standard file formats (and may already be approving FOSS deployments) and will darn well drop the product from the approved list if the vendor is playing games.
I was at a Rockpile show at the Hollywood Palladium in the late 70s and Bob Ezrin got on stage and said he wanted to record us cheering for an upcoming Pink Floyd recording. So, I've put "The Wall" on my discography. Is that wrong?
How many "eyes" were watching BSD systems use Samba for a DOS filesystem? Seems to me, someone saw behavior and exactly because it was open source, looked into it, found the coding error and filed a bug report. It will be fixed, because everyone now knows about this, and that too is a side effect of open source, even if it's related to the politics.
Slashdot Mirror
An affirmative defense to a suit would be that one took all reasonable precautions. As you say, Apple may not be able to do the impossible, such as communicate with a phone that has had its phone-home mechanism killed, but my argument was about minimizing the things a plaintiff's attorney may say to a jury in a civil action.
I'm entirely certain you are capable. But, let's think about this, a rogue program gets on an iPhone because an Apple approved developer writes and pays Apple to distribute and Apple delivers it to the phone. I'm also sure you are not a litigious sob, but they do exist, and in these days it would be foolishly negligent to bet your deep pockets on every coder being pure of heart and competent and/or your ability to cobble together some wildfire extinguishing after the fact.
So there it is, Apple may very well be selling something that has been dumbed down beneath your tolerance. Everyone does what they need to do.
Let's say 500,000 people buy the game, let's say 5,000,000 people pirate it and then play it as much as the people who buy it. Near as I can tell, there 290 million people in the United States who ignored the game. I would be in that latter category. To get 100,000 more sales one needs to convince .2% of pirates or .035% of the population to buy. Which seems easier?
Let's imagine that 50% of piracy is self-help try before buy. Well, there's maybe locking it down harder and hope that that doesn't reduce the 500,000 or increase support costs as honest people stumble into locked down situations. How about a 30 day pay before play policy. Well, some of those 500,000 will second-guess their decision after playing the game for a while. So... can the game beat a 16% conversion rate for the 3,000,000 looky lous? The lower the rate of looky-pirates, the higher the conversion has to be in order to break even.
I gather making a better game is prohibitively expensive?
I kinda smell that this question has the makings of a FreeCiv type of game.
Ojai?
A guy knocks at the door and you ask for ID and they show a picture and a name on a business card. Self-certified is less secure than a certification which calls to an authority. As to preferred method of handling self-certs, I vote for Firefox which calls my attention to non-authoritative certs and gives me a choice of not connecting, connecting once, or storing revocable trust of that cert. I would expect that if that cert changes, I'll find out. Safari, which asks every time, won't notice if a cert changes. This feels like a security hole. Any browser which lets a self-cert pass without comment will burn, some day, its users. I say this because the "Security is hard, let's go shopping" attitude has been a source of much misery, fraud, and loss on the web. It is always a mistake to smooth out the speed bumps that precede an exchange of confidential information.
First of all, my enthusiasm for looking for the interesting points amidst dismissive names, such as fanboys and freetards, is waning. Please, if we must babble our useless cliches, let us return to welcoming our frist posting "In Soviet Union" joke overlords.
The phrase "just works" dates back to the mid-80s and was no more than a relative statement at best. Since then, everyone has made great strides in simplifying usability. Comments about server and embedded space are irrelevant because, as you imply, when people talk about using or not using Apple, they are talking about consumer use. Commercial use (and there are niches where Apple systems have been and are preferred) make higher demands on systems and somebody spends time with the users and back in the server room to keep things going. Word has it that Windows systems require more administration, but I certainly cannot prove those assertions. I have experiences and observations which suggest it's true, but I would imagine this holds no more credence than your claim of dual-booting adequacy, or any other commonly heard testimony which, much like the phrase "This call is important to us," fades in believability with its repetition.
Let me conclude by adding that I want form and function, engineering and aesthetics. Again, though others are rapidly catching up, Apple has been leading the way at delivering a high level of both in a personal computer. People use Macs because people like using Macs. Was that so hard? And Shuttleworth is right in thinking that striving for a higher aesthetic in the gui and making the concomitant library changes will necessitate engineering challenges that, if met, will improve the *buntus' usability and lower the barrier to consumer application on Linux development. People who think it's about an Apple-esque skin are missing the point.
Works beautifully until they get a second monitoring account.
I like form and function. Can I be in both camps, please?
I wonder if design is easily translated to an open source development model. Unlike application correctness, design ultimately is subjective. Also unlike application correctness, it is subject to culture and fashion (2 + 2 = 4, that's so Pythogoras). I guess by "wonder" I mean "not gonna happen." You see, somebody would have to publish a high quality interface guideline. Someone has to take the guidelines and produce and maintain a library of widgets (this being more functional in nature feels like it could be a community effort). Then the developers out there producing applications have to read and understand the guidelines and the libraries and implement them in their apps.
That last one is ringing the "Uh Oh" alarm, because it would require a lot of people revisiting finished elements of their apps because somebody said it doesn't look pretty enough.
Don't get me wrong, aesthetics are important, and Shuttleworth has a point that a better looking environment promotes its use, I think look and feel, though, is a more difficult kind of problem and not amenable to world-wide, loosely affiliated team structures.
Scheme or SmallTalk (using the Squeak environment). I think javascript/html has its merits for accessibility, but there's an awful lot of casting into and out of String representations, which is a big deal and a security issue. Since the programmer has to be involved with the whys and hows, it's my feeling that such domain-specific hacking, though impressive, is a distraction.
In the course of learning languages one learns to look not for the specific implementation details (does an expression end with a line break or a semi-colon or...) but the larger concept, i.e., how does the compiler or interpreter know that an expression is complete. We walk up to a new language with expectations, for instance, that there will be a way to do basic output and maybe, we hope, a way to make the output nice looking. Then we look for what the printf is called and how is it used.
So then, here's my real suggestion: pick a language you'd like to learn and and learn it together with your child. You'd see the language through experienced eyes and can call out things that are idiosyncratic and things that are fundamental and can demonstrate how much of the problem solving occurs before the coding starts. Plus, if you're lucky and your child is engaging with all their curiosity, you'll have to field a whole lot of "Why" questions and formulating the explanation will be recreational, in all senses of the word. I expect your explanations will be better if you, too, are navigating new seas.
How did you get cash? I think it got to you via check which, when it was deposited it was -boom- income. Having not written the check to Jane's Software, expenses were lower and profits were higher and the tax liability increased for the company or its owners.
Meanwhile, if you paid for that fifth license, you wrote a check to the software company, likely to be in a different state, and they posted the income and paid taxes there. The state they chose to be in, what are the odds that it was chosen because tax rates were lower or non-existent?
We know that between now and November, he will have formulate the response to the challenge that reversing the erosion of liberty is really America-hating terrorism-loving. Maybe now would have been the time to address it head-on and maybe now is not the time. One has to figure that there's national polling which indicates how the electorate views FISA. Though, having read the Senator's explanation, finding it reasonable, I still say this felt like time for little profile in courage.
Now, to the progressive base: next February when Senator Feingold stands on the Senate floor and proposes amendments to this FISA law to remove the civil action immunity and/or when the Attorney General prioritizes which crimes to prosecute, whom would you rather have as President?
On the other hand, this will be the Year of the Linux 386 Desktop!
I thought it was about University of Iowa football for a while.
I was going to say that accountants wouldn't book as a loss the unrealized hypothetical sale from an unlicensed download. Why that'd be as crazy as booking a gain for each person who didn't do an unlicensed download.
Every story about "x" is an opportunity for the BashDotters to appear. Very few things in this world are unbashable.
I read this over on zdnet in a Mary Jo Foley column yesterday. I think the really telling (and sad) part to the story is the nature of the responses to his e-mail, i.e., finger-pointing and defensiveness. Down the thread somebody takes ownership of assigning ownership to fixing it. That suggests that major groups use billg's withering critiques to score turf points and this is more important than fixing the immediate problem. It also suggests that there's an inability for major groups to team in ad hoc ways. Why wasn't there a customer usability czar to knock heads and make sure that people can get the product/service? Was it, because it was free, no one paid attention to the distribution? This stands on its head why it was made a free product, which was to get an installed base and support the Windows OS product. We have to assume that billg would give this more effort than jane doe and jane would have thought about getting a Mac the next time a friend shows her iMovie.
It was from 2003 so there's a chance that the underlying dysfunctions were addressed in some way. We know that the Longhorn development debacle opened some eyes and kicked some asses.
JasperReports won't cut it?
Self-evidently untrue. In the meantime, until I see the price, I'm going to say yay to improvements and defer my decision to buy.
Well, from my chair, the iPhone was designed to take user input via fingers, to be aware of acceleration rates in three dimensions, to have a large display (relatively), to allow the software writer to have just as many buttons as they need, and to use a variation on the application framework for the Mac. So gaming on the iPhone, yeah, I can see it's possible and from there it's whether or not the games' designers find it an expressive, profitable medium.
As far as ringing death knells for java games, because there are so many other phones and tiers, if anything, this will be a rising tide effect (lift all boats).
I wonder if the solution is that Leopard will continue to be updated through 10.5.10/11. The PPC Macs are a mixed bag of 32 and 64 bit processors and trying to keep one box for Mac regardless of processor has to be a big headache. This would effectively mean 10.5 is Leopard PPC and 10.6 is Leopard Intel. This really, really makes sense in that there are times when Apple has been overambitious and to correct, they tweak the product line. This addresses the issue without explicitly saying they goofed. Single SKU OS was so cool, as far as I'm concerned, and they tried it and it didn't work. (I think one public bit of evidence is the Carbon 64/Photoshop fiasco.)
By the time 10.7 rolls around (2011 at best), you'll be at that 7 year mark and the customer will be ready to get in on the Intel Mac fun. This is not an original thought: I'm riffing on something I read at DaringFireball a couple of days ago.
I think you are right in that there will be major grumblings from people like me if the G4s and G5s are abandoned while Leopard is consolidated over the life of 10.6. It seems like a bad idea, just from the standpoint of money left on the table for PPC users who'd like better Leopard stability too. We shall see if Apple does cross that Rubicon.
Is tech innovation about sitting down one day and saying "I'm going to invent tech." Or is it really a convergence where a solution in one field is applied to problems for another. I suspect the latter, and it takes young, bright minds to want to make those connections. Let me be clear, talented people do exceptional work through their middle and senior years, but revolutions are the domain of the young.
Well, cool, I dodged the question mainly because I don't know. We've had a downcycle every 7-8 years since WWII, if one could measure "tech achievement rates" then it could be correlated or not.
So far so good, you were up $350 for your choice, which is a nice sum of money. Now, we need to look at the cost side of the choice. Let's value your time at $50 per hour and any distro would require a minimum of one hour's worth of time for the reformat, install and setup. So, up $300, which supports your point. As long as any problems took less that 6 hours, it was a net plus. Did the installation and setup go flawlessly?
POOP: Pie-Ocular Optimistic Punditry
The most people you speak of are the ones who buy Office one license at a time. A lot of people, to be sure, but Office makes its big bucks with the site purchases. At these places, there are gatekeepers who may have been alerted about the long-term costs of non-standard file formats (and may already be approving FOSS deployments) and will darn well drop the product from the approved list if the vendor is playing games.
You are absolutely correct.
I was at a Rockpile show at the Hollywood Palladium in the late 70s and Bob Ezrin got on stage and said he wanted to record us cheering for an upcoming Pink Floyd recording. So, I've put "The Wall" on my discography. Is that wrong?
How many "eyes" were watching BSD systems use Samba for a DOS filesystem? Seems to me, someone saw behavior and exactly because it was open source, looked into it, found the coding error and filed a bug report. It will be fixed, because everyone now knows about this, and that too is a side effect of open source, even if it's related to the politics.