Why doesn't RedHat, or Oracle, or SUSE, or someone else run Linux through the compliance tests?
Primarily? Because it won't pass the testing without a lot of work. In particular, there are negative assertion tests on header files (some things are not allowed to be dragged into the namespace, and the header are promiscuous). There's also a whole bunch of testing having to do with full and almost-full devices. There are also signal issues and process group membership issues. For example, you can "escape" an exclusion group on Linux by setting your default group to one of your other groups; Linux overwrites the membership in cr_groups[0] as a synonym for cr_gid, and doesn't handle POSIX saved IDs quite right, either (Neither do the BSDs, so this isn't a Linux-only problem).
Last time I attempted to run the test suit on Linux as a lark, there were about 20K failures (mostly tests not compiling because of it bailing out over the header file issues. There are also some parts of the system that have been subsumed by systemd; this isn't intrinsically a problem on its own, so long as the system *also* supports flat config files as an addendum, at least for some aspects of logging.
Also, getting the UUCP to work over USB serial dongles is likely to be something of a bear, unless you make the HDB modifications for handling the "rung indicate" as a notification to take the shared file lock on the callout device so the getty's don't start trying to chat with each other.
Finally, there some considerable legal/licensing issues for the trademark.
That is all. A number of us fricking killed ourselves to make sure the thing would notify you when someone had futzed with your machine, and it'd be a terrible shame if 3 minutes and a screwdriver could trojan your machine.
(1) Find a journalist you don't like who has linked to a vulnerable site they don't control (2) Replace the content at the link target with illegally obtained material about someone powerful (3) Sit back and watch how well the new SWATting works!
Journalistic shield laws anyone? The new first amendment-resistant law enforcement looks like we need something to replace the old antibiotics...
If they have good patents on it, they should be able to control a large and growing market 5-10 years out.
William Gibson and others have prior art. Not sure if you watched "Minority Report", or if you have read Gibson's "Virtual Light", but both describe this sort of thing in immense detail. It's basically a straight forward interposition strategy with slightly smaller hardware than has typically been used in the past.
The real issue that's going to come up is idiots wearing these things while driving, and so on, which is actually not as idiotic as it sounds, but will definitely be illegal as hell for no reason involving reported accident rates. Sort of the same thing that happened with Google Glass 1.0, when people didn't undertand that it couldn't film 24x7 because they didn't understand the concept of "connectivity" nor the concept of "battery life".
The conclusions are bogus. The numbers they run only examine public posting, because the data on private posting is inaccessible to them, and then they draw conclusions based on that. Most Google+ activity is private and/or takes place within groups.
One of the people involved stated "just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post content", (emphasis added) and then from that the article concludes no one uses it.
They also picked the first 18 days of the year to analyze the data; this is prime vacation time for most people for 7-14 of those days.
His distribution assumptions are not evidence based, they are straight assumptions about uniform distributions, and they are all drawn from a single file of 45K profiles, which is the same thing as saying "If you want a straight line fit, only select a single data point".
It'd be much more useful if he had verified the distribution uniformity through an analysis of other sitemap files, and even better if he'd just spun up an EC2 instance and looked at *all* of them.
Caller: "I didn't say I wanted to use less energy, dumbass, I said I wanted you to charge me less for the energy I *do* use!"
That's an illogical reaction. Gas stations won't charge you less for using the same amount of gas. Your cable bill won't go down when you have the same channel package. (Yes, many of us want a la carte, but that's the moral equivalent of "use less electricity".)
It's an artificial scarcity used to inflate value. Generating "just enough" electricity, rather than "more than enough", when you are using a nuclear plant, is more about what you do with the heat (do you turn it into electricity, or do you shunt it to the cooling towers, because you can't throw it on the grid), rather than whether or not the heat is going to be relatively constant, unless you are in a changeout cycle.
Thankfully your ala carte cable is coming to pass (i.e. the unbundled ability to get some channels online is now there).
I really do not care if there was revisionist history or not. Japan had shown themselves to be pretty ruthless, and as I recall, they started the whole mess.
Though only after US inflicted crippling economic sanctions on them. I'm not a US basher, but large powers (US, Russia) tend to act like school bullies.. they push you and push you, and then when you push back, it's suddenly "a surprise attack".
Granted, it was a surprise attack, but it should not have come as such.
And by "crippling economic sanctions", you mean we stopped selling them scrap steel for them to use in pursuit of their war on China, where they were attempting to seize territory so that, among other things, they had the ability to mine to produce their own steel.
They were kind of expansionist, empire-building, belligerent asses at the time. A conflict was inevitable, even if we'd enabled them to take China, other areas in Asia, and the Philippines.
Do you think that energy prices are NOT going up anyway?
That's the great thing about smart meters... if you are a power company.
You get to work around the PUC tariffed rates by showing that *on average* electricity price haven't actually gone up, while increasing revenue by 20% without having to go back to the PUC and make any concessions to get the tariff changed.
Well, that and you can charge differential rates from what you pay for solar power generated when no one is home during the day to use it. That's a lot harder to do, if you used an electromechanical meter that actually ran backwards when generation exceeded consumption.
My appliances all work just fine without being connected to the interwebs.
If by "work just fine" you mean wasting energy and costing you more, then you are right.
I see these things (energy use / cost) as disjoint, but then I am pro nuclear power, and think that we should build as many plants as 150% of what we need for peak demand, and when it's a time where there isn't peak demand, use the extra power to desalinate water for Los Angeles so that the people who live in that fricking desert don't have to steal it from Northern California and Colorado.
I also am amazingly pissed off when the PG&E commercial comes on the radio:
PG&E: "Hello, PG&E, can I help you?" Caller: "Yes, my electric bill is too high!" PG&E: "Well, we can help you figure out ways to use less energy..."
My gut reaction on hearing that is:
Caller: "I didn't say I wanted to use less energy, dumbass, I said I wanted you to charge me less for the energy I *do* use!" PG&E: "Uh..." Caller: "Quit being a damn politician, and answer the question I asked, rather than the one you wanted me to ask!" PG&E: "Uh..." Caller: "What an asshole..."
and Google is not in a position, as an OS supplier, rather than a phone vendor (which is what Apple is), to force changes in operational model into the carrier or the partner device vendor.
You're full of shit. Google has already been caught forcing all Android vendors to bundle Google's proprietary shit so that they can spy on users data.
"Just an OS Vendor".. lol.. what a joke.
How does a trademark licence agreement for the use of the "Android(tm)" trademark conflate with them being able to magically update the firmware on phones for which the Android team at Google does not even have full source code, and which the carriers would require recertification for use on their network?
Or do you really not understand how that bundling is achieved through the trademark licensing agreement?
Sorry, but the other poster is right. 1997/8 was essentially a reverse takeover of Apple by NeXT. Not just Jobs, but the rest of the XeXT management team also. And Jobs had plenty of time when he knew he was dying to put the company into a state where it would continue in a good direction. None of your examples come from the last 16 years, and there's no reason to think that current Apple would ever become anything like the mismanaged company of the late 80s early 90s.
First of all, I went to work for Apple in 2003, at which point in time I signed an NDA, and can therefore not give examples subsequent to that which are not based on public knowledge, no matter how much you bait me in your desire to have me do so.
Second of all, Apple had largely been taken over by Sun Microsystems management from 2008 onwards, as middle management was hired in to deal with the power vacuum being created by the (we all saw it) impending death of Steve Jobs. His hands were no longer firmly on the reins, and this was strongly signaled for all to see by the departure of CTO Avie Tevanian in 2006, and capped by the departure of Bertrand Serlet in 2011.
Third of all, Steve never appointed a protege. Tim Cook was COO, and one leg of a three legged stool consisting of himself, Scott Forestall, and Peter Oppenheimer (plus arguably a fourth leg, Phil Schiller). None of these persons were Steve's protege, and Steve failed to set up a clear line of succession, or, indeed, even discuss his illness outside of Apple.
Fourth, when the board named Tim as CEO, the departure of Scott was inevitable. The process prior to Steve's departure was contentious, and he very much liked it that way. As the cap on the legs of the stool, there would be incredibly rancorous arguments between the principal executives, and then after a while, Steve would tell them where the bear shit in the woods.
This is when Apple began *really* teetering, although it's possible to trace the origins as far back as Steve's preannouncement of the Intel switchover - the first preannouncement in Apple history, when he was already into the throes of his illness.
This time ousted by death, rather than a board vote, Apple has once again entered a John Sculley-like era -- the era you criticise me for referring to when I referred to Apple's public failures.
Tim Cook is an able COO - perhaps better at supply chain control than IBM's Lou Gerstner was, but he is no Steve Jobs, or he would have been able to let go of the COO operations, concentrated on being CEO, brought in someone else to argue rancorously with Scott and Peter, and then told them where the bear shit in the woods. He has not done that.
Further, he has made some incredibly obvious supply-side driven decisions -- COO, not CEO decisions -- regarding products. Personally, I do not believe Steve Jobs would have made these same decisions.
(1) The Aspect ratio change on the iPhone 5 was a mistake, driven by the display supplier Japan Display Inc. attempting to get out from under Apple's supply chain thumb. The entire Apple content catalog had to be re-transcoded, and Apps updated for the new aspect ratio to avoid letterboxing. This increased the Inktomi CDN costs associated with the cryptographic content knapsacks utilized by the iTunes stores, and while it resulted in a short term gain for the App store as people rebought, either as upgrades, or as complete rebuys, their existing Apps and video content, this was a more or less one time thing. Apple under Steve would never ha made this decision on the basis of a shortlived, one-time revenue enhancement strategy; John Sculley would have, though; that's how Mac OS got licensed to third parties, like Power Computing.
(2) The watch was a marketing driven decision; the press kept demanding a watch, and so rather than delivering a product which surprised and delighted their customers, Apple gave them what marketing said people wanted. Apple under Steve would never, ever have made a marketing dri
Talk about blatant extortion... Perhaps Google should be more concerned about patching the 1,001 vulnerabilities in Android before casting stones at others.
To patch that vulnerability would require the ability to update Android on existing handsets.
For this to work, the handset manufacturers would have to provide a new version of Android for the given handset.
For this to work, the Android development model of "partner, not Google, productizes Android" would have to change.
For this to work, there would have to be ongoing development on an older hardware platform.
For this to work, there would have to be carrier involvement in certification.
For this to work, the carrier revenue model of locking you into a two year contract every 18 months would have to change.
--
It's in absolutely no ones financial interest to provide updates to Android in already shipped handsets, and Google is not in a position, as an OS supplier, rather than a phone vendor (which is what Apple is), to force changes in operational model into the carrier or the partner device vendor.
U.S. Carriers are *NOT* going to change their revenue model just so people can buy ala carte devices that will work with any carrier, and cost more up front for you to go with their service, rather than rolling it into the monthly payment when you go with a competitors service. Everyone would have to change at once (collusion, a violation of both the Sherman Antitrust Act and the RICO Statutes, and definitely something that would be prosecuted), or the carrier that tried to move to the European model would find itself out of business.
Likewise, the handset vendors, whose revenue model is completely built on thin margins, but selling a new handset every 18 months, instead of you buying one and keeping it for 10 years, would have to charge higher margin on their device sales in order to keep their revenue numbers up, and to pay for the R&D ongoing on the already-sold platform. And then they'd need to change their FAS accounting to match that of Apple's, or face charges under Sarbanes-Oxley, which is what Apple had to do before it could give away the WiFi updates to 802.11g/n for iPods. You'll (maybe) remember that they got a percentage of the monthly wireless fee from the carrier for iPhones, but realized their income at time of sale on iPod Touch and non-3G iPads, and so they had to charge $5 for the update.
And seriously, would you be willing to pay $5 for a bug fix for a bug you were pretty sure wasn't impacting you anyway, and was just some security "researcher" throwing a hissy fit to get their company name in the news so they got audit contracts out of it?
In the bug tracker for the impersonation vulnerability, Google said it had queried Microsoft on Wednesday, asking when the flaw would be patched and reminding its rival that the 90 days were about to expire.
"Microsoft informed us that a fix was planned for the January patches but [had] to be pulled due to compatibility issues," the bug tracker stated. "Therefore the fix is now expected in the February patches."
The next Patch Tuesday is scheduled for Feb. 10.
So 90 days is an appropriate time to wait but not 106 days?
It's not like MS was sitting on their hands, they made a patch but found problems in QA and had to do more work to get it working properly.
Technically, it should have been in the November patch set, they should have found the compatibility problem in testing (as they did), and the revised patch should have been in the December patch set. Then the clock would have run out.
So basically the *did* sit on their hands -- for two months.
When Christianity turned 1400 they were hyper violent, and it took 4-500 years for that to wear down. Guess how old Islam is?
I kind of think it doesn't matter; all you are really saying is that they don't learn from mistakes by watching the people on the road in front of them. They have an example of how to go from being violent to being non-violent, and they are unwilling to follow that example. That's a choice, not them lacking a working example, as Christianity did when they were stumbling around trying to find a road forward. I don't think the situation is comparable, and it's certainly not comparable on time scale, just because both of them are religions.
... and that is why I go with Apple products. At least I know that Apple goes 100% behind the devices they release and they will be around in 5 years and supported.
Apple is a horrible counterexample.
Pippin. Newton. Macintosh TV. Lisa. Macintosh Portable. eMate. You could argue for both the Apple III, AppleLink, and eWorld to have places on this list as well. And that's not even mentioning the unreleased products that were killed internally, such as Copeland and project Star Trek (well known), and the less well known ones I probably can't mention without violating NDA.
Also, the 5 years has shortened to about 3 years, or even less; the flip on requiring 64 bit EFI in Intel systems to use new versions of the OS happened in less than 2 years, and stranded a lot of older systems with 32 bit EFI (I had a 64 bit EFI loaded onto a system that was originally 32 bit EFI, but the new firmware for the laptop was never released outside Apple because the CPU Software Group didn't want to have to support it, and they had a preference for selling new hardware and not supporting old hardware).
When you have a lot of highly successful products, people tend to forgive/forget failures.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the IoT is coming... as soon as IPv6 is fully deployed with stateless autoconfiguration so we'll have network addresses for all the things.
I hear both Verizon and Comcast are really happy about the idea of offering routable addresses for everyone, without finding some way to monetize it.
Why doesn't RedHat, or Oracle, or SUSE, or someone else run Linux through the compliance tests?
Primarily? Because it won't pass the testing without a lot of work. In particular, there are negative assertion tests on header files (some things are not allowed to be dragged into the namespace, and the header are promiscuous). There's also a whole bunch of testing having to do with full and almost-full devices. There are also signal issues and process group membership issues. For example, you can "escape" an exclusion group on Linux by setting your default group to one of your other groups; Linux overwrites the membership in cr_groups[0] as a synonym for cr_gid, and doesn't handle POSIX saved IDs quite right, either (Neither do the BSDs, so this isn't a Linux-only problem).
Last time I attempted to run the test suit on Linux as a lark, there were about 20K failures (mostly tests not compiling because of it bailing out over the header file issues. There are also some parts of the system that have been subsumed by systemd; this isn't intrinsically a problem on its own, so long as the system *also* supports flat config files as an addendum, at least for some aspects of logging.
Also, getting the UUCP to work over USB serial dongles is likely to be something of a bear, unless you make the HDB modifications for handling the "rung indicate" as a notification to take the shared file lock on the callout device so the getty's don't start trying to chat with each other.
Finally, there some considerable legal/licensing issues for the trademark.
Thank fricking God it requires developer mode.
That is all. A number of us fricking killed ourselves to make sure the thing would notify you when someone had futzed with your machine, and it'd be a terrible shame if 3 minutes and a screwdriver could trojan your machine.
Wake me up when they post a useful article on how to run Unix on my Macbook Pro.
Mac OS X *is* UNIX. It's certified. Wake me up when Linux passes conformance testing.
PS: We even put UUCP on the damn thing to pass the tests; it's definitely UNIX, so feel free to spin up your own NetNews node on your MacBook Air.
(3) Sit back and watch how well the new SWATting works!
what's new about it?
2 years in prison, a million $ fine, and no actual SWAT teams involved?
And now... 3... 2... 1...
(1) Find a journalist you don't like who has linked to a vulnerable site they don't control
(2) Replace the content at the link target with illegally obtained material about someone powerful
(3) Sit back and watch how well the new SWATting works!
Journalistic shield laws anyone? The new first amendment-resistant law enforcement looks like we need something to replace the old antibiotics...
Their funny definition of "walk" is designed to go with their funny definition of "bio-inpired".
No one wants to switch from a Mac/Windows to a Windows/Mac system if their files or programs are not 100% guaranteed to work.
Most businesses use this same example:
"No one wants to switch from a Windows XP system to a Windows [inset non-XP Windows here] if their files or programs are not 100% guaranteed to work."
Why do you equate gun-rights advocates with KKK members?
When your hash table only has two buckets, you either hash into bucket 'A' or you hash into bucket 'B'.
If they have good patents on it, they should be able to control a large and growing market 5-10 years out.
William Gibson and others have prior art. Not sure if you watched "Minority Report", or if you have read Gibson's "Virtual Light", but both describe this sort of thing in immense detail. It's basically a straight forward interposition strategy with slightly smaller hardware than has typically been used in the past.
The real issue that's going to come up is idiots wearing these things while driving, and so on, which is actually not as idiotic as it sounds, but will definitely be illegal as hell for no reason involving reported accident rates. Sort of the same thing that happened with Google Glass 1.0, when people didn't undertand that it couldn't film 24x7 because they didn't understand the concept of "connectivity" nor the concept of "battery life".
The conclusions are bogus. The numbers they run only examine public posting, because the data on private posting is inaccessible to them, and then they draw conclusions based on that. Most Google+ activity is private and/or takes place within groups.
One of the people involved stated "just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post content", (emphasis added) and then from that the article concludes no one uses it.
They also picked the first 18 days of the year to analyze the data; this is prime vacation time for most people for 7-14 of those days.
His distribution assumptions are not evidence based, they are straight assumptions about uniform distributions, and they are all drawn from a single file of 45K profiles, which is the same thing as saying "If you want a straight line fit, only select a single data point".
It'd be much more useful if he had verified the distribution uniformity through an analysis of other sitemap files, and even better if he'd just spun up an EC2 instance and looked at *all* of them.
But I'm sure he got a lot of clicks out of this.
I don't know about the rest of you... but I, for one, am very happy that Oracle's products are now Massively Secure.
Fitting in with other people is one of the most important aspects of most jobs.
I keep hearing this. And not believing it.
The most important part of a job is being able to do the job.
Nothing GREAT comes from "just fitting in". If you can't handle DOING THE JOB then screw you. You suck. Live with it.
At this point... I would like to introduce the concept of "corruption vacuum", which I think is equal in metrics to the idea of "power vacuum".
That's an illogical reaction. Gas stations won't charge you less for using the same amount of gas. Your cable bill won't go down when you have the same channel package. (Yes, many of us want a la carte, but that's the moral equivalent of "use less electricity".)
It's an artificial scarcity used to inflate value. Generating "just enough" electricity, rather than "more than enough", when you are using a nuclear plant, is more about what you do with the heat (do you turn it into electricity, or do you shunt it to the cooling towers, because you can't throw it on the grid), rather than whether or not the heat is going to be relatively constant, unless you are in a changeout cycle.
Thankfully your ala carte cable is coming to pass (i.e. the unbundled ability to get some channels online is now there).
I really do not care if there was revisionist history or not. Japan had shown themselves to be pretty ruthless, and as I recall, they started the whole mess.
Though only after US inflicted crippling economic sanctions on them. I'm not a US basher, but large powers (US, Russia) tend to act like school bullies.. they push you and push you, and then when you push back, it's suddenly "a surprise attack".
Granted, it was a surprise attack, but it should not have come as such.
And by "crippling economic sanctions", you mean we stopped selling them scrap steel for them to use in pursuit of their war on China, where they were attempting to seize territory so that, among other things, they had the ability to mine to produce their own steel.
They were kind of expansionist, empire-building, belligerent asses at the time. A conflict was inevitable, even if we'd enabled them to take China, other areas in Asia, and the Philippines.
Do you think that energy prices are NOT going up anyway?
That's the great thing about smart meters ... if you are a power company.
You get to work around the PUC tariffed rates by showing that *on average* electricity price haven't actually gone up, while increasing revenue by 20% without having to go back to the PUC and make any concessions to get the tariff changed.
Well, that and you can charge differential rates from what you pay for solar power generated when no one is home during the day to use it. That's a lot harder to do, if you used an electromechanical meter that actually ran backwards when generation exceeded consumption.
My appliances all work just fine without being connected to the interwebs.
If by "work just fine" you mean wasting energy and costing you more, then you are right.
I see these things (energy use / cost) as disjoint, but then I am pro nuclear power, and think that we should build as many plants as 150% of what we need for peak demand, and when it's a time where there isn't peak demand, use the extra power to desalinate water for Los Angeles so that the people who live in that fricking desert don't have to steal it from Northern California and Colorado.
I also am amazingly pissed off when the PG&E commercial comes on the radio:
PG&E: "Hello, PG&E, can I help you?"
Caller: "Yes, my electric bill is too high!"
PG&E: "Well, we can help you figure out ways to use less energy..."
My gut reaction on hearing that is:
Caller: "I didn't say I wanted to use less energy, dumbass, I said I wanted you to charge me less for the energy I *do* use!"
PG&E: "Uh..."
Caller: "Quit being a damn politician, and answer the question I asked, rather than the one you wanted me to ask!"
PG&E: "Uh..."
Caller: "What an asshole..."
and Google is not in a position, as an OS supplier, rather than a phone vendor (which is what Apple is), to force changes in operational model into the carrier or the partner device vendor.
You're full of shit. Google has already been caught forcing all Android vendors to bundle Google's proprietary shit so that they can spy on users data.
"Just an OS Vendor" .. lol.. what a joke.
How does a trademark licence agreement for the use of the "Android(tm)" trademark conflate with them being able to magically update the firmware on phones for which the Android team at Google does not even have full source code, and which the carriers would require recertification for use on their network?
Or do you really not understand how that bundling is achieved through the trademark licensing agreement?
Sorry, but the other poster is right. 1997/8 was essentially a reverse takeover of Apple by NeXT. Not just Jobs, but the rest of the XeXT management team also. And Jobs had plenty of time when he knew he was dying to put the company into a state where it would continue in a good direction. None of your examples come from the last 16 years, and there's no reason to think that current Apple would ever become anything like the mismanaged company of the late 80s early 90s.
First of all, I went to work for Apple in 2003, at which point in time I signed an NDA, and can therefore not give examples subsequent to that which are not based on public knowledge, no matter how much you bait me in your desire to have me do so.
Second of all, Apple had largely been taken over by Sun Microsystems management from 2008 onwards, as middle management was hired in to deal with the power vacuum being created by the (we all saw it) impending death of Steve Jobs. His hands were no longer firmly on the reins, and this was strongly signaled for all to see by the departure of CTO Avie Tevanian in 2006, and capped by the departure of Bertrand Serlet in 2011.
Third of all, Steve never appointed a protege. Tim Cook was COO, and one leg of a three legged stool consisting of himself, Scott Forestall, and Peter Oppenheimer (plus arguably a fourth leg, Phil Schiller). None of these persons were Steve's protege, and Steve failed to set up a clear line of succession, or, indeed, even discuss his illness outside of Apple.
Fourth, when the board named Tim as CEO, the departure of Scott was inevitable. The process prior to Steve's departure was contentious, and he very much liked it that way. As the cap on the legs of the stool, there would be incredibly rancorous arguments between the principal executives, and then after a while, Steve would tell them where the bear shit in the woods.
This is when Apple began *really* teetering, although it's possible to trace the origins as far back as Steve's preannouncement of the Intel switchover - the first preannouncement in Apple history, when he was already into the throes of his illness.
This time ousted by death, rather than a board vote, Apple has once again entered a John Sculley-like era -- the era you criticise me for referring to when I referred to Apple's public failures.
Tim Cook is an able COO - perhaps better at supply chain control than IBM's Lou Gerstner was, but he is no Steve Jobs, or he would have been able to let go of the COO operations, concentrated on being CEO, brought in someone else to argue rancorously with Scott and Peter, and then told them where the bear shit in the woods. He has not done that.
Further, he has made some incredibly obvious supply-side driven decisions -- COO, not CEO decisions -- regarding products. Personally, I do not believe Steve Jobs would have made these same decisions.
(1) The Aspect ratio change on the iPhone 5 was a mistake, driven by the display supplier Japan Display Inc. attempting to get out from under Apple's supply chain thumb. The entire Apple content catalog had to be re-transcoded, and Apps updated for the new aspect ratio to avoid letterboxing. This increased the Inktomi CDN costs associated with the cryptographic content knapsacks utilized by the iTunes stores, and while it resulted in a short term gain for the App store as people rebought, either as upgrades, or as complete rebuys, their existing Apps and video content, this was a more or less one time thing. Apple under Steve would never ha made this decision on the basis of a shortlived, one-time revenue enhancement strategy; John Sculley would have, though; that's how Mac OS got licensed to third parties, like Power Computing.
(2) The watch was a marketing driven decision; the press kept demanding a watch, and so rather than delivering a product which surprised and delighted their customers, Apple gave them what marketing said people wanted. Apple under Steve would never, ever have made a marketing dri
Talk about blatant extortion... Perhaps Google should be more concerned about patching the 1,001 vulnerabilities in Android before casting stones at others.
For example, how about this: http://www.extremetech.com/mob...
That's a inappropriate comparison.
To patch that vulnerability would require the ability to update Android on existing handsets.
For this to work, the handset manufacturers would have to provide a new version of Android for the given handset.
For this to work, the Android development model of "partner, not Google, productizes Android" would have to change.
For this to work, there would have to be ongoing development on an older hardware platform.
For this to work, there would have to be carrier involvement in certification.
For this to work, the carrier revenue model of locking you into a two year contract every 18 months would have to change.
--
It's in absolutely no ones financial interest to provide updates to Android in already shipped handsets, and Google is not in a position, as an OS supplier, rather than a phone vendor (which is what Apple is), to force changes in operational model into the carrier or the partner device vendor.
U.S. Carriers are *NOT* going to change their revenue model just so people can buy ala carte devices that will work with any carrier, and cost more up front for you to go with their service, rather than rolling it into the monthly payment when you go with a competitors service. Everyone would have to change at once (collusion, a violation of both the Sherman Antitrust Act and the RICO Statutes, and definitely something that would be prosecuted), or the carrier that tried to move to the European model would find itself out of business.
Likewise, the handset vendors, whose revenue model is completely built on thin margins, but selling a new handset every 18 months, instead of you buying one and keeping it for 10 years, would have to charge higher margin on their device sales in order to keep their revenue numbers up, and to pay for the R&D ongoing on the already-sold platform. And then they'd need to change their FAS accounting to match that of Apple's, or face charges under Sarbanes-Oxley, which is what Apple had to do before it could give away the WiFi updates to 802.11g/n for iPods. You'll (maybe) remember that they got a percentage of the monthly wireless fee from the carrier for iPhones, but realized their income at time of sale on iPod Touch and non-3G iPads, and so they had to charge $5 for the update.
And seriously, would you be willing to pay $5 for a bug fix for a bug you were pretty sure wasn't impacting you anyway, and was just some security "researcher" throwing a hissy fit to get their company name in the news so they got audit contracts out of it?
From the article:
In the bug tracker for the impersonation vulnerability, Google said it had queried Microsoft on Wednesday, asking when the flaw would be patched and reminding its rival that the 90 days were about to expire.
"Microsoft informed us that a fix was planned for the January patches but [had] to be pulled due to compatibility issues," the bug tracker stated. "Therefore the fix is now expected in the February patches."
The next Patch Tuesday is scheduled for Feb. 10.
So 90 days is an appropriate time to wait but not 106 days?
It's not like MS was sitting on their hands, they made a patch but found problems in QA and had to do more work to get it working properly.
Technically, it should have been in the November patch set, they should have found the compatibility problem in testing (as they did), and the revised patch should have been in the December patch set. Then the clock would have run out.
So basically the *did* sit on their hands -- for two months.
Interesting fact.
When Christianity turned 1400 they were hyper violent, and it took 4-500 years for that to wear down.
Guess how old Islam is?
I kind of think it doesn't matter; all you are really saying is that they don't learn from mistakes by watching the people on the road in front of them. They have an example of how to go from being violent to being non-violent, and they are unwilling to follow that example. That's a choice, not them lacking a working example, as Christianity did when they were stumbling around trying to find a road forward. I don't think the situation is comparable, and it's certainly not comparable on time scale, just because both of them are religions.
All your counter examples are from before 1998, also known as the "Second Coming of Steve Jobs". It was a different company back then.
Let me know when there's a third coming of Steve Jobs; until then, the bean counters are in control of Apple now, and have been for several years.
... and that is why I go with Apple products. At least I know that Apple goes 100% behind the devices they release and they will be around in 5 years and supported.
Apple is a horrible counterexample.
Pippin. Newton. Macintosh TV. Lisa. Macintosh Portable. eMate. You could argue for both the Apple III, AppleLink, and eWorld to have places on this list as well. And that's not even mentioning the unreleased products that were killed internally, such as Copeland and project Star Trek (well known), and the less well known ones I probably can't mention without violating NDA.
Also, the 5 years has shortened to about 3 years, or even less; the flip on requiring 64 bit EFI in Intel systems to use new versions of the OS happened in less than 2 years, and stranded a lot of older systems with 32 bit EFI (I had a 64 bit EFI loaded onto a system that was originally 32 bit EFI, but the new firmware for the laptop was never released outside Apple because the CPU Software Group didn't want to have to support it, and they had a preference for selling new hardware and not supporting old hardware).
When you have a lot of highly successful products, people tend to forgive/forget failures.