The NYTimes does not _need_ to advertise that heavily; it's shortsighted, greedy behavior and is akin to a sort of 'psychic pollution.'
What exactly is it that you think pays for the operation of a newspaper or other periodical? Subscriptions? And in the case of a free online newspaper... free subscriptions?
It certainly wouldn't be impossible to enact legislation that barred some or many advertisements - it's been done before, and could simply be a prerequisite of having a business license.
Personally, I will continue my practice of not only using advertising-supported services, but of avoiding the advertisements themselves. I owe publishers nothing:
While the content may appear to be "free," from the POV of the consumer... it is not. It must be paid for in some form or another. Altruism isn't going to feed the families of the producers and distributors of that content, and advocating that a business should exist simply to serve your desire for something which you did nothing to earn, and should deliver that product to you on your terms and be able to recoup none of the expense of providing the content to you... well, rank idiocy seems too mild a description of such an idea. A business exists for profit, pure and simple.
If ads were to be banned, then you would have to pay out of your own pocket, directly, if you wanted the content.
Speaking as someone who has made a right fair profit himself contracting and consulting for newspapers and other publishers for over 15 years, as well as having worked directly for the same - I can assure you it wouldn't be cheap.
*I change channels on the tv and radio and kill the volume (mute buttons were hotly decried by advertisers when first introduced, I understand)
*I fast forward through commercials
*I flip straight past ads in magazines
*I ignore billboards (though I do like the efforts of legitmate taggers)
The beauty of these solutions is that they cost you nothing save perhaps a minor inconvenience, while the provider of the content which you perceive to be free as in beer is still able to profit from delivering the content to you.
Without advertising revenue, the content would not be there for you in the first place.
What's so special about the web? I'll be damned if they get _my_ eyeballs, or I pay a subscription. I really don't care if they like it, and believe me, there's relatively little that could happen to impact me. (they really imagine that the/. community wouldn't spring up elsewhere if Andover went bankrupt?)
Dot.coms are going belly up despite buckets of venture capital. Do you really think that all those content providers out there are doing it because they know that the information they have worked so hard to gather and organize for human consumption just wants to be free? And even if that were their noble motivation, do you think that all that hardware and software and bandwidth and engineering proficiency wants to be free as well?
The nature of the change is quantitative, in that it puts more police eyeballs out there on the street.
Essentially it's a force multiplier for law enforcement.
The nature of the change is that instead of having more well-trained law enforcement officers actually doing the job of law enforcement by patrolling the streets and investigating reported crimes, we get for our money a permanent record of the activities of whomever the operators of the cameras choose to focus upon - a permanent record for which use we get no guarantee of propriety (note that that's an entirely different word than proprietary - of course there's not even a guarantee that the information gathered will not become proprietary and unavailable to the public for oversight).
They are doing the legally required trademark protection so as not to lose it.
Maybe no one but me read through the entire article. There is this link on page three. According to the USPTO, Fandom.com's claim on the word Fandom as a trademark is "Abandoned: Applicant failed to respond to an Office action." It's a bit late now for them to be whining about it, don't you think?
2000-06-19 - Abandonment - Failure to respond
1999-10-29 - Non-final action mailed - 1st action
1999-10-15 - Case file assigned to examining attorney
ISTM that they they are crying foul (where a foul is said to be a breaking of the rules) when apparently they didn't want to play by those same rules themselves before now.
The thing is Meyer misrepresents ESR and RMS's views. They never said trying to make money is wrong. In fact they say quite the opposite. (see www.gnu.org or www.tuxedo.org/~esr) He intentionally made his definition of free meaning free beer, then used that to attack our definition of free meaning free to improve are share with your neighbor.
(emphasis added by me)
When one must expend such copious amounts of time and effort to so explicitly (re)define common terms so that one's argument is defensible, one has already conceded that said argument cannot stand on its own merits. Why not say "the concepts which we put forth can be thought of in a similar vein to that of the concept of altruism" instead of trying to recompile the English language?
Language is an agent of shared thought. It is a tool of communication, and words have specific meanings. That's why we use them, because with the aid of words we can convey to Others what we are thinking Ourselves. Language is, to be sure, an Open Protocol, but it is nonetheless a standardized protocol, and redefining it at one's convenience to make a point is, IMNSHO, reprehensible.
Tha claim you make against Meyer is equally applicable to RMS and ESR.
I just don't get excited anymore about Apple's overdue attempts at joining the game so damn late. 3 or 4 years ago, this would have been great, but to anyone but the Mac-Jihad, it's a big yawner and deserves a big "who (else) cares?"
The 9500/180MP was introduced August 5, 1996. Dual 180Mhz 604e; 6 PCI slots; officially supported up to 768Mb RAM, but was capable in reality of 1.5G of RAM; shipped with minimum 2G HD (not exactly small for the time); optional PC compatibility card.
The 9600/200MP shipped February 17, 1997, with similar overall specs (4G minimum HD).
Yes, you're right. Their attempt to join the game is long overdue.
Also, I think a lot of people need to think through the concept of "banning spam". There are significant free speech issues involved here. If the federal government restricts people's rights to send communications to private individuals, that is the "slippery slope" to the government controlling how individuals communicate.
Freedom of speech has a sibling that you seem to be forgetting. I am free to write this, and you are free to ignore it. UCE bypasses my right to choose what speech I wish to hear/read. It also circumvents my right to control MY PROPERTY, specifically my machines and my network. I do not allow persons unknown to me to paper the walls of my house with flyers and advertisements, why would I want them doing so to my inbox?
And, BTW, slippery slope arguments are utterly fallacious. There is no spoon, and there is no slippery slope. You have made no argument to support your claim that restricting UCE must lead to some draconian 1984 scenario.
Um...Then what is it supposed to be, congratulatory? Sheesh. I don't agree with what they're doing, but statements like these make no sense.
Have you never taken a position with a probationary period? A period of time wherein you had to prove your ability to fulfill the requirements of the job description? Mitnick is on probation, which is supposed to be a period of time wherein he has to prove that he can be a productive member of society. He is attempting to contribute and make a living at the same time, and he is being slapped down.
Yes, he is on probation for committing a crime, whether or not we agree with that definition... but why is he being further punished for pursuing an avenue of profit, both for himself and those he would speak to, when it does not fit into the class of endeavours prohibited to him by the terms of his probation?
I'm not a large fan of MS by any means but I always go by the saying "If it's not broke, then don't fix it" and if the US Dept of Labor is comfortable with a product they already use, or the feel that MS has an advantage, then thats their right as a consumer.
The US DoL is NOT the consumer in this case... I am, along with every other American citizen and legal alien working in the US whose money was taken by the government by threat of force (ie: tax dollars). It is NOT their right to squander what they have stolen from us. If I have to give up 40% of my earnings to support an unnecessary bureaucracy, I damn well want that money to be stewarded in the most efficient manner possible.
They have a set of rules in place which they do not follow as a matter of course. When I was in the military, I saw this first hand. My mother has been in government service for 24 years, and I have heard the inside scoop on how government procurement works in the civil sector. This case really is not so much about Corel's bruised ego and the M$ monster as it is about bringing to light, and to court, some basic facts that most people just accept as business as usual.
An object in motion will tend to remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force. A government corrupt will remain corrupt as long as it is allowed to do so.
--
Re:five minute impressions
on
Browser news
·
· Score: 1
2 minutes to d/l netomat and JRE...
2 minutes clicking and waiting for content that never appeared
I'm too lame^H^Hzy to attribute and reply to this post properly... sue me
Several good points made here... I think the most important one being that yes, at some point Sun will lose the iron grip on Java that they now have. Don't know if I will personally like it any better then, but a lot of others probably will.
Separating good ideas from politics should become part of the core curriculum for anyone who wants to hack profitably [1] in the world in which we live today. The source of a good idea does not make it less good. It may make it less accessible to some if the source wants you to pay for it, or control how you use it, but it is still good (else why would you care whether you could use it at all).
[1] don't even flame me on this... you like to eat and have a home stocked with unlimited Mountain Dew and Coke Classic just as much as I do
As someone who was held hostage by the government for the last week (in jail without arraignment or formal charges) for defending my property with deadly force, I will say that it should be a much smaller place.
And the worst part of the whole ordeal was... you can't get to/. from a jail cell...
Hey, painting the stroke of Libertarianism a little broad are we. While many Libertarians admire and agree with Ayn Rand, she does not speak for all Libertarians. Many do not follow her Objectivist philosophy.
And some (at least one) who agree with Ayn Rand may also agree with some tenets of Libertarianism. We also may not agree with everything Ms. Rand had to say. In her own writings, she notes that for every effect there is a cause. The writings of Ayn Rand are not the cause of objectivist thought, they are an effect thereof.
Libertarians generally feel that there is a place for government, it just should be a much smaller place than the one we have now occupies.
As someone who was held hostage by the government for the last week (in jail without arraignment or formal charges) for defending my property with deadly force, I will say that it should be a much smaller place.
You're telling me that the concept of the binary search is practically worthless? At some point that concept did not exist, until it sprang forth from someone's clever application of ingenuity (otherwise known as a hack). Or shall we look back to 1937 and remember fondly that misguided soul, Alan Turing, whose ideas are just as obviously worthless.
It is not how long it holds nor even how much its value that is the deciding factor. Determinism is not relative, it is objective. The taxi and the software, after 5 years, still required the same investment of time, effort, and ingenuity that they did at the moment that they began to exist as themselves, and not just a notion. Your statement seems to assert that there is some sort of sliding scale of determinism of value, and of what constitutes property and what is merely there for the taking. Yet you provide no explanation of this curious phenomenon.
On one hand, a taxi is a physical commodity while a piece of software is rather more intangible.
How did that taxi come into existence? What had to happen before it came to be?
The factories and manufacturing methods that make possible the production of that taxi did not simply spring into existence for the benefit of all, nor did the computing devices and processes which make possible the creation of a piece of code. Simply because it is easy to copy a manufacturer's process for making a CPU in a third-world company, is the CPU any less tangible? The progenitor of anything manmade, whether tangibly solid as the taxi, or "rather more intangible" as a software application or chunk of code, is the original rational thought of a man (or woman... I have no care for being PC, so if you can't wrap your mind around using a masculine word to refer to either sex, stop reading now).
Ponder for a moment the phrase "Linux is only free if your time has no value." Look at what your time represents. I don't get paid for sitting at my keyboard surfing the web, cribbing code from others so I don't have to do anything myself. I get paid for the product of my mind, for my ability to analyze problems and create solutions that did not exist before, at least not in the exact way that I have reasoned out how to solve the problem in question. I may find use for someone else's code, perhaps because they approached the problem from a different perspective than I have been.
Does the writer of the code I borrow have a right to tell me how I can or can't use it? Most certainly. It is his property just as a taxi that he built with his own hands using materials he ethically acquired is his property, as much as a taxi he purchased with his earnings is his property.
Simply because you can't throw a rock at the code and smash a window or leave a dent does not make it "more intangible." Software applications do things, they have an effect. I cannot see the wind, but I can observe its effect. The wind exists, just as the software exists. Because you have declared that software is less tangible does not make it so. Words cannot create reality, they can only describe it, accurately or not. Please feel free to support your declaration with something more than the declaration itself.
The simple fact that it may be easier to reproduce a piece of software than a taxi does not make it any less a piece of property, the product of someone's rational thought, that one thing which must precede any act of man's creative/productive processes.
(note to self: don't post to/. so close to bedtime anymore)
You are dead-on right that Apple has to now, as then, provide a workable backwards-compatibility option for existing and developing apps (now if I could just get my System 6 games to work in OS X I would be truly happy, and I could finally retire my SE/30).
I think my argument was that Apple has done the job right so far by providing a way for developers to migrate existing code easily (good for developers) and at the same time insuring that most legacy code will probably work fine as is (good for users), at least for now, in the transition period. But I was half-asleep and I see how I probably didn't make the point very clear.
The Java reference was pretty much unrelated to the rest, it was just something that was on my mind due to a lengthy debate on the subject at work earlier.
Carbon... an API that allows for and expects a transition from the old to the new... this would indicate to the casual observer what...?? an unwillingness toward or apathy about moving into the future while making use of what's available now?
Hmmmm... seems to me that software that worked before and will more than likely work now and in the future, along with being provided with a tool to determine its level of functionality, and having the number of API calls needed to make it work reduced, would be a good thing...
Oh, wait!! It's too flexible!! That's it!! They already considered the migration/transition and planned accordingly (yet again).
Now Java, I can do without... for now. Popular though it may be, it still has many shortcomings (what language doesn't?). The jury is still out on that, as far as claims that Apple will eventually be the most Java-friendly and -compliant OS (yes such claims are extant).
There is nowhere else for the company to go, with Microsoft owning most of the market, that is the lesson of almost two decades.
The lesson of almost two decades is this: that a company that has always been on the brink of extinction is not consorting with the dodo bird.
The claims of unavoidable eradication seem almost exclusively to originate from the idiots with the means to put forth opinions that are mostly heard by like-minded idiots who:
somehow make valid, in the eyes of most beholders who have abandoned actual critical thought processes, the original assertion by rubberstamping it in knee-jerk response
exhibit no care for nor even acknowledgement of objective reality, most notably the fact that words cannot create reality, they can only describe it (accurately or not)
What do we learn from this lesson?
Rumours are just that. They may have some basis in fact, but more often than not the connection to truth is marginal at best.
This is not flamebait, or an intentionally vitriolic tirade. It is merely my assertion, based on the fact that I personally have made a helluva good living (and expect to continue to do so) supporting and developing for the MacOS throughout the time period in question from which we are supposed to be learning in this particular thread, that it does not "have to happen."
I have and always will be one of Apple's most vocal critics as well as most loyal supporters (meaning I get pissed and let them and others know when I think they've gone astray as well as defending them against overwhelming odds). Yes, I've been burned more than a few times by them, but the reward has always been more than enough to make up for it. How many of you can say that of developing for M$ or any *nix? And yes I develop for Linux and Unix as well, and I love it, and I love my RedHat box as much as my MkLinux box; I also like my Sparcs.
If there is a "best deal for the company and its shareholders" (of which I am one, btw), it would probably be examining and assessing the facts before becoming a pundit.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly is it that you think pays for the operation of a newspaper or other periodical? Subscriptions? And in the case of a free online newspaper... free subscriptions?
While the content may appear to be "free," from the POV of the consumer... it is not. It must be paid for in some form or another. Altruism isn't going to feed the families of the producers and distributors of that content, and advocating that a business should exist simply to serve your desire for something which you did nothing to earn, and should deliver that product to you on your terms and be able to recoup none of the expense of providing the content to you... well, rank idiocy seems too mild a description of such an idea. A business exists for profit, pure and simple.
If ads were to be banned, then you would have to pay out of your own pocket, directly, if you wanted the content.
Speaking as someone who has made a right fair profit himself contracting and consulting for newspapers and other publishers for over 15 years, as well as having worked directly for the same - I can assure you it wouldn't be cheap.
The beauty of these solutions is that they cost you nothing save perhaps a minor inconvenience, while the provider of the content which you perceive to be free as in beer is still able to profit from delivering the content to you.
Without advertising revenue, the content would not be there for you in the first place.
Dot.coms are going belly up despite buckets of venture capital. Do you really think that all those content providers out there are doing it because they know that the information they have worked so hard to gather and organize for human consumption just wants to be free? And even if that were their noble motivation, do you think that all that hardware and software and bandwidth and engineering proficiency wants to be free as well?
--
The nature of the change is that instead of having more well-trained law enforcement officers actually doing the job of law enforcement by patrolling the streets and investigating reported crimes, we get for our money a permanent record of the activities of whomever the operators of the cameras choose to focus upon - a permanent record for which use we get no guarantee of propriety (note that that's an entirely different word than proprietary - of course there's not even a guarantee that the information gathered will not become proprietary and unavailable to the public for oversight).
--
They are doing the legally required trademark protection so as not to lose it.
Maybe no one but me read through the entire article. There is this link on page three. According to the USPTO, Fandom.com's claim on the word Fandom as a trademark is "Abandoned: Applicant failed to respond to an Office action." It's a bit late now for them to be whining about it, don't you think?
2000-06-19 - Abandonment - Failure to respond
1999-10-29 - Non-final action mailed - 1st action
1999-10-15 - Case file assigned to examining attorney
ISTM that they they are crying foul (where a foul is said to be a breaking of the rules) when apparently they didn't want to play by those same rules themselves before now.
--
MPW (Mac OS) C compiler errors: http://www.pbbt.com/Directory/Jokes/58 7.html
My favourite was always "Too many errors on one line (make fewer)"
"You can't modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler" is another classic.
--
The thing is Meyer misrepresents ESR and RMS's views. They never said trying to make money is wrong. In fact they say quite the opposite. (see www.gnu.org or www.tuxedo.org/~esr) He intentionally made his definition of free meaning free beer, then used that to attack our definition of free meaning free to improve are share with your neighbor.
(emphasis added by me)
When one must expend such copious amounts of time and effort to so explicitly (re)define common terms so that one's argument is defensible, one has already conceded that said argument cannot stand on its own merits. Why not say "the concepts which we put forth can be thought of in a similar vein to that of the concept of altruism" instead of trying to recompile the English language?
Language is an agent of shared thought. It is a tool of communication, and words have specific meanings. That's why we use them, because with the aid of words we can convey to Others what we are thinking Ourselves. Language is, to be sure, an Open Protocol, but it is nonetheless a standardized protocol, and redefining it at one's convenience to make a point is, IMNSHO, reprehensible.
Tha claim you make against Meyer is equally applicable to RMS and ESR.
--
I just don't get excited anymore about Apple's overdue attempts at joining the game so damn late. 3 or 4 years ago, this would have been great, but to anyone but the Mac-Jihad, it's a big yawner and deserves a big "who (else) cares?"
The 9500/180MP was introduced August 5, 1996. Dual 180Mhz 604e; 6 PCI slots; officially supported up to 768Mb RAM, but was capable in reality of 1.5G of RAM; shipped with minimum 2G HD (not exactly small for the time); optional PC compatibility card.
The 9600/200MP shipped February 17, 1997, with similar overall specs (4G minimum HD).
Yes, you're right. Their attempt to join the game is long overdue.
--
Also, I think a lot of people need to think through the concept of "banning spam". There are significant free speech issues involved here. If the federal government restricts people's rights to send communications to private individuals, that is the "slippery slope" to the government controlling how individuals communicate.
Freedom of speech has a sibling that you seem to be forgetting. I am free to write this, and you are free to ignore it. UCE bypasses my right to choose what speech I wish to hear/read. It also circumvents my right to control MY PROPERTY, specifically my machines and my network. I do not allow persons unknown to me to paper the walls of my house with flyers and advertisements, why would I want them doing so to my inbox?
And, BTW, slippery slope arguments are utterly fallacious. There is no spoon, and there is no slippery slope. You have made no argument to support your claim that restricting UCE must lead to some draconian 1984 scenario.
--
Um...Then what is it supposed to be, congratulatory? Sheesh. I don't agree with what they're doing, but statements like these make no sense.
Have you never taken a position with a probationary period? A period of time wherein you had to prove your ability to fulfill the requirements of the job description? Mitnick is on probation, which is supposed to be a period of time wherein he has to prove that he can be a productive member of society. He is attempting to contribute and make a living at the same time, and he is being slapped down.
Yes, he is on probation for committing a crime, whether or not we agree with that definition... but why is he being further punished for pursuing an avenue of profit, both for himself and those he would speak to, when it does not fit into the class of endeavours prohibited to him by the terms of his probation?
Inquiring minds want to know.
--
I'm not a large fan of MS by any means but I always go by the saying "If it's not broke, then don't fix it" and if the US Dept of Labor is comfortable with a product they already use, or the feel that MS has an advantage, then thats their right as a consumer.
The US DoL is NOT the consumer in this case... I am, along with every other American citizen and legal alien working in the US whose money was taken by the government by threat of force (ie: tax dollars). It is NOT their right to squander what they have stolen from us. If I have to give up 40% of my earnings to support an unnecessary bureaucracy, I damn well want that money to be stewarded in the most efficient manner possible.
They have a set of rules in place which they do not follow as a matter of course. When I was in the military, I saw this first hand. My mother has been in government service for 24 years, and I have heard the inside scoop on how government procurement works in the civil sector. This case really is not so much about Corel's bruised ego and the M$ monster as it is about bringing to light, and to court, some basic facts that most people just accept as business as usual.
An object in motion will tend to remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force. A government corrupt will remain corrupt as long as it is allowed to do so.
--
I'm too lame^H^Hzy to attribute and reply to this post properly... sue me
Several good points made here... I think the most important one being that yes, at some point Sun will lose the iron grip on Java that they now have. Don't know if I will personally like it any better then, but a lot of others probably will.
Separating good ideas from politics should become part of the core curriculum for anyone who wants to hack profitably [1] in the world in which we live today. The source of a good idea does not make it less good. It may make it less accessible to some if the source wants you to pay for it, or control how you use it, but it is still good (else why would you care whether you could use it at all).
[1] don't even flame me on this... you like to eat and have a home stocked with unlimited Mountain Dew and Coke Classic just as much as I do
As someone who was held hostage by the government for the last week (in jail without arraignment or formal charges) for defending my property with deadly force, I will say that it should be a much smaller place.
And the worst part of the whole ordeal was... you can't get to /. from a jail cell...
Hey, painting the stroke of Libertarianism a little broad are we. While many Libertarians admire and agree with Ayn Rand, she does not speak for all Libertarians. Many do not follow her Objectivist philosophy.
And some (at least one) who agree with Ayn Rand may also agree with some tenets of Libertarianism. We also may not agree with everything Ms. Rand had to say. In her own writings, she notes that for every effect there is a cause. The writings of Ayn Rand are not the cause of objectivist thought, they are an effect thereof.
Libertarians generally feel that there is a place for government, it just should be a much smaller place than the one we have now occupies.
As someone who was held hostage by the government for the last week (in jail without arraignment or formal charges) for defending my property with deadly force, I will say that it should be a much smaller place.
You're telling me that the concept of the binary search is practically worthless? At some point that concept did not exist, until it sprang forth from someone's clever application of ingenuity (otherwise known as a hack). Or shall we look back to 1937 and remember fondly that misguided soul, Alan Turing, whose ideas are just as obviously worthless.
It is not how long it holds nor even how much its value that is the deciding factor. Determinism is not relative, it is objective. The taxi and the software, after 5 years, still required the same investment of time, effort, and ingenuity that they did at the moment that they began to exist as themselves, and not just a notion. Your statement seems to assert that there is some sort of sliding scale of determinism of value, and of what constitutes property and what is merely there for the taking. Yet you provide no explanation of this curious phenomenon.
On one hand, a taxi is a physical commodity while a piece of software is rather more intangible.
How did that taxi come into existence? What had to happen before it came to be?
The factories and manufacturing methods that make possible the production of that taxi did not simply spring into existence for the benefit of all, nor did the computing devices and processes which make possible the creation of a piece of code. Simply because it is easy to copy a manufacturer's process for making a CPU in a third-world company, is the CPU any less tangible? The progenitor of anything manmade, whether tangibly solid as the taxi, or "rather more intangible" as a software application or chunk of code, is the original rational thought of a man (or woman... I have no care for being PC, so if you can't wrap your mind around using a masculine word to refer to either sex, stop reading now).
Ponder for a moment the phrase "Linux is only free if your time has no value." Look at what your time represents. I don't get paid for sitting at my keyboard surfing the web, cribbing code from others so I don't have to do anything myself. I get paid for the product of my mind, for my ability to analyze problems and create solutions that did not exist before, at least not in the exact way that I have reasoned out how to solve the problem in question. I may find use for someone else's code, perhaps because they approached the problem from a different perspective than I have been.
Does the writer of the code I borrow have a right to tell me how I can or can't use it? Most certainly. It is his property just as a taxi that he built with his own hands using materials he ethically acquired is his property, as much as a taxi he purchased with his earnings is his property.
Simply because you can't throw a rock at the code and smash a window or leave a dent does not make it "more intangible." Software applications do things, they have an effect. I cannot see the wind, but I can observe its effect. The wind exists, just as the software exists. Because you have declared that software is less tangible does not make it so. Words cannot create reality, they can only describe it, accurately or not. Please feel free to support your declaration with something more than the declaration itself.
The simple fact that it may be easier to reproduce a piece of software than a taxi does not make it any less a piece of property, the product of someone's rational thought, that one thing which must precede any act of man's creative/productive processes.
(note to self: don't post to /. so close to bedtime anymore)
You are dead-on right that Apple has to now, as then, provide a workable backwards-compatibility option for existing and developing apps (now if I could just get my System 6 games to work in OS X I would be truly happy, and I could finally retire my SE/30).
I think my argument was that Apple has done the job right so far by providing a way for developers to migrate existing code easily (good for developers) and at the same time insuring that most legacy code will probably work fine as is (good for users), at least for now, in the transition period. But I was half-asleep and I see how I probably didn't make the point very clear.
The Java reference was pretty much unrelated to the rest, it was just something that was on my mind due to a lengthy debate on the subject at work earlier.
Carbon... an API that allows for and expects a transition from the old to the new... this would indicate to the casual observer what...?? an unwillingness toward or apathy about moving into the future while making use of what's available now?
Hmmmm... seems to me that software that worked before and will more than likely work now and in the future, along with being provided with a tool to determine its level of functionality, and having the number of API calls needed to make it work reduced, would be a good thing...
Oh, wait!! It's too flexible!! That's it!! They already considered the migration/transition and planned accordingly (yet again).
Now Java, I can do without... for now. Popular though it may be, it still has many shortcomings (what language doesn't?). The jury is still out on that, as far as claims that Apple will eventually be the most Java-friendly and -compliant OS (yes such claims are extant).
There is nowhere else for the company to go, with Microsoft owning most of the market, that is the lesson of almost two decades.
The lesson of almost two decades is this: that a company that has always been on the brink of extinction is not consorting with the dodo bird.
The claims of unavoidable eradication seem almost exclusively to originate from the idiots with the means to put forth opinions that are mostly heard by like-minded idiots who:
- somehow make valid, in the eyes of most beholders who have abandoned actual critical thought processes, the original assertion by rubberstamping it in knee-jerk response
- exhibit no care for nor even acknowledgement of objective reality, most notably the fact that words cannot create reality, they can only describe it (accurately or not)
What do we learn from this lesson?Rumours are just that. They may have some basis in fact, but more often than not the connection to truth is marginal at best.
This is not flamebait, or an intentionally vitriolic tirade. It is merely my assertion, based on the fact that I personally have made a helluva good living (and expect to continue to do so) supporting and developing for the MacOS throughout the time period in question from which we are supposed to be learning in this particular thread, that it does not "have to happen."
I have and always will be one of Apple's most vocal critics as well as most loyal supporters (meaning I get pissed and let them and others know when I think they've gone astray as well as defending them against overwhelming odds). Yes, I've been burned more than a few times by them, but the reward has always been more than enough to make up for it. How many of you can say that of developing for M$ or any *nix? And yes I develop for Linux and Unix as well, and I love it, and I love my RedHat box as much as my MkLinux box; I also like my Sparcs.
If there is a "best deal for the company and its shareholders" (of which I am one, btw), it would probably be examining and assessing the facts before becoming a pundit.