This is an app that should never have even been started, because it very clearly violates the SDK agreement
Apple UK didn't seem to think it violated the SDK agreement, as they gave the go-ahead (As per the article). It was only later that the app was rejected when it was submitted to the app-store.
So get the hell off your high horse already and live in the real world.
I live in the real world. My real world has people being behind agreements (multiple people with competing interests), not them being a series of arbitrarily laws that are followed in a vacuum without looking at the larger picture. I suspect what will happen here is that either Apple will change its mind and allow this app, or the app will be slightly modified to satisfy Apple's requirements.
because someone like Steve Jobs would have had an team of the very best surgeons working on him, and generally the best medical care that money could buy..
And this reduces a recovery time from 6 months to 2 months? No way in hell. The "2 month return to work" is really likely marketing hype. The marketing people picked the earliest time they could possible claim he returned to work, and that happened to be 2 months.
Money bought Steve the ability to get a liver faster by going to where the liver is. It bought him close monitoring, a nicer environment, and possibly some better odds. It's never going to make his body heal any faster.
More appropriately, why is it that people have to overreact to what was clearly a non-serious comparison?
I guess I don't agree that a well thought out response is an "over-reaction", or that it was clear your response was "non-serious". Your response sounded to me like a complete dismissal of the whole situation, which is equally foolish. Yes, but there are people whose job it is to do that. There's no point worrying the general public about it
Much of the world is a democracy. Running a democracy involves a well educated populace so they continue to support funding for said people. If people don't understand why we fund this kind of thing, the "I was low low taxes!!!" crowd takes over.
I don't think we need to "worry" the general populace, I think we need to educate them. Explaining to people about potential threats might "worry" some people, but that's just the way the world works. Why you continue to think I'm talking about panic here I don't quite understand. There is absolutely no point me worrying about it,
Worrying about things never really got anyone anything useful. Planning for threats, understanding them and overcoming them is what has increased our life span and made us healthier. Worrying about them has only caused some lost sleep.
In general I agree with your sentiment that there's been a lot of over-reaction to this whole thing. A few weeks after the thing first blew up in the news we got more information that this is really "no big deal", but yet there's still remnants in the world of the panic machine going forward. The following, however I don't agree with:
- look at all the fear mongering over bird flu and apocalyptic scenarios they told us to expect then, how a bird flu pandemic was inevitable etc. within just a few months at the time, remind me, how did that turn out again?
What I recall is the idiotic media outlets spreading a lot of fear about bird flu. I recall scientific sources talking about this as a long term problem we need to watch and learn more about because it COULD (but we don't know when, maybe decades) eventually mutate into something that spreads from human to human. If you want a real apocalyptic scenario then there's the idea that Swine flu both mutates to become worse and is vastly more contagious but personally, I'll file that alongside worrying about global nuclear war and alien invasion.
Why is it people have to turn to some other equally idiotic extreme? Global nuclear was and "alien invasion" have never happened except in movies. Global disease outbreaks including flu that killed millions of people have happened with some regularity for hundreds, if not thousands of years. In all likelihood this whole thing will turn out to be nothing as H1N1 is unlikely to mutate into something more deadly. Putting it in the same category as "alien invasion" is just as stupid as all the fear mongering the media outlets love to do. When there's any evidence to suggest we're closer to any of these I'll start worrying or even caring a bit more.
If we're close to a deadly flu outbreak, it's really already too late. We need to start developing techniques to get faster vaccines now, not just before it happens. If this HAD been the real-deal, a several month delay to make the vaccine is just too long. You don't need to sit around and cower in fear or start wearing face masks that likely do nothing. You do need to start thinking about how we should be better prepared.
The sad thing is that this is all Microsoft has become. Microsoft won't leave the US. For one thing there's a lot more to running a business than a freaking tax shelter. This is just another instance of Balmer blowing smoke. It's really a large portion of how he tries to exert influence.
I think Balmer is going to soon learn this is simply NOT the time to start drawing lines in the sand between greedy corporations and everyone else. Public opinion of Microsoft DOES matter, and painting your corporation as a bunch of dickweeds that'll just up and leave over some legislation is just idiotic.
if I were to work the numbers the way you present, it would only make the numbers work in my favor, not yours.
I'd be curious as to how they work out in your favor. It seems to me that taking LESS than the full population of the U.S. and multiplying that by food in tons will give a smaller number than taking the full population and doing the same.
It's actually not possible to compare the numbers you're talking about, since we aren't given the percentage of the populace facing hunger, or alternatively the number of people facing hunger.
bad numbers like that make me a bit suspicious of their methodology.
You should be more suspicious of your assumptions. The actual quote is:
That turns out to be about nearly 1.5 tons of food per year for every man, woman, and child in the United States who faces hunger.
The problems are really more ones of logistics than the actual food. Sure, we produce too much food and much of it goes to waste. But getting the food to the right people at the right time is the hard part.
which leads to blatant disregard for anything, really sloppy ways of coding and development, zero ideology or best practice on how to truly harness and control resources efficiently.
I see lots of sloppy coding practices, but they have about nothing to do with hardware efficiency. (Think buginess and maintainability). Unless you're writing for specialized environments, the days of worrying about a few cycles of CPU, or a few kilobytes of memory are over (and good riddance).
The world has changed and the challenges have changed. It's great to design your own CPU, and I'm sure he learned an enormous amount. But to pretend that we should all be thinking like it's still 1979 is absurd.
DARPA wanted "something that doesn't require any electronics or heavy equipment to lug around," says Walt.
Which means it needs to be COVERT.
I read the whole article again, and nowhere does it say the communication needs to be covert. It does say "encoded", but that has nothing to do with covert.
You might want to re-read the article again (assuming you did in the first place). You seem to be making several errors about its content.
So it only transmits 2 km, and presumably someone has to be looking in the right direction to receive your signal, and you need some kind of special equipment to encode a long message. This just looks like the wrong approach. It seems to me there's always a trade-off between distance, information transmitted, and signal power (a rough restating of Shannon/Hartley). I don't know how far flares can be seen, but that's already a chemical means of sending a short message a limited distance.
One thing that might be interesting, the ability to produce a powerful radio signal by some chemical means. You wouldn't be able to transmit much information beyond say "help!", but if you had a satellite in geo-stationary orbit looking for these signals (and somehow triangulating the position) that might solve the "has to be someone looking" problem. Whether there are chemical reactions that produce radio signals, I have no idea.
I mean, that monstrosity of a language - Perl actually became popular. If that doesn't prove that popularity doesn't prove goodness, I don't know what does.
I'm not a perl programmer, and I dislike the language quite a bit. But.. over the years I've definitely seen that it simply must have some intrinsic value, especially with regard to text processing as so much useful code exists for this very purpose.
I guess my point is that "goodness" is a product of its environment. If you're doing text processing and largely only text processing, perl is "goodness". If you're doing programming where code size is a concern (but not a MAJOR concern, i.e. you have a few kilobytes) then C is "goodness". If you're doing business programming with lots of business logic on the server side, Java becomes "goodness".
I'd even go so far as to say that the value of a language, stripped away from the domain of what the problem is, is meaningless. I don't think a language has intrinsic merit, since there's always a job to be done (and thus a problem domain).
I'm not a performance guru, but if you're talking about static HTML pages I'd guess you're correct. If you're talking about a dynamically generated page though, the underlying code that generates the page plays a much larger role in performance than does the underlying architecture you're describing.
The article referenced being fast at serving up dynamic content. That means it's being compared to things like PHP, perl, Java, etc. It's also about "small" (which isn't defined). But I'd guess the languages I just mentioned wouldn't be included in "small".
Home automation, and especially security, is not something I would want to put on radio waves. That makes it way too open to a denial of service attack.
I think you overestimate the abilities of your average burglar. I'm certain what you're describing is possible and attainable with only the knowledge and a few days work. For the average burglar though this is way beyond his abilities. If he can really do what you're describing, why is he ripping off what probably amounts to few hundred dollars of random junk in your average house? A "smart" burglar like that would be better off ripping off the electronics store down the street, or get an actual job building and designing electronics.
Even so, it's a lot easier to break into the house next door that doesn't even have a security system.
People who rely on package maintainers or "the community" to help them out and keep things up to date could very well be let down. Moral of the story, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
Righto.. The moral of the story is to spend most a large portion of your day tracking down all the security bugs yourself to all the various parts of software on your machine. Then testing, patching, and testing again. Be sure to keep up at night worrying about even the most esoteric, hard to exploit, unlikely to work breaches like these.
If you like doing that sort of thing, that's great. But don't try to tell me everyone has to act like yourself to be "secure". Security has always been about managing the risk, not about creating a perfect impenetrable system. All systems have flaws, it's the nature of the beast.
Irrelevant - the test is: do they always spit-out provably correct numbers?
Completely wrong. The law isn't mathematics, and doesn't need to be 100% provably correct. To be admissible the device only has to be accurate to within a set of standards. (Whatever that is, and I don't care to speculate about it). Do you really think all the evidence provided in a court of law is provably correct? Of course not. This is no exception.
You know there's two things I've learned in my nearly 30 years on this earth.
Here's one thing I've found to be true on my slightly longer years on this earth.
Reasoning purely using peoples motivations and what's _possible_ without looking for actual evidence to support your conclusions will turn you quickly into a conspiracy nut. Conspiracy theories always seem to have at their base the motivations of the people involved. Any "evidence" is always secondary, and contrary evidence is ignored.
Uhh.. so you called the police department, and the DESK guy essentially said "didn't happen like that, call our media people"?
Do you think that 3rd hand information (rent-a-cop-> cop on scene-> desk cop) who didn't really tell you anything is more accurate than 1st hand information?
Huh. I didn't read through the bug reports, but the few I've read through it didn't seem like there was any point where you you definitively say "Ulrich is wrong here". Bugs are sometimes a matter of perspective about where the problem lies.
If you ask me, his problem is he's a dick, not that he's "wrong".
But I thought the Republicans were to blame for this economy
The repeal of Glass-Steagall was one of many pieces of de-regulation that lead to this mess. The loudest voices I hear championing the call for less regulation, smaller government, etc is the republican party. If you read the article the vast majority of the opposition came from the Democrats (with only 1 Republican Senator voting no). It was pretty weak opposition to be sure.
So sure, Democrats can share a lot of the blame here. But don't ignore the fact that Republicans are largely the ones pushing for de-regulation (many still want even MORE).
Anyway, I think the thing to take home from all this is not one party over another, but rather one set of ideas as being wrong. I always hear the main argument against regulation being "unintended consequences", like it's some kind of magical argument to wave over everything. What people seem to forget is that ANYTHING can have "unintended consequences", including doing nothing.
Huh? I'll never understand the persistent beliefs about disease. Yesterday I heard a (translated) Chinese woman dismissing swine flu as nothing compared to SARS. She truly believed that as long as you kept a clean house, opened your doors and windows a lot, and kept clean you could avoid the virus.
So after more than 100 years of understanding Germ theory of diseasewe still have people thinking it's all caused by "bad vapors".
(Just to be clear, influeza isn't transmitted through "being dirty", it's transmitted through the air by people coughing and sneezing.)
It it is most dangerous to those with strong immune systems because of the potential for cytokine storms
Which is pure speculation at this point. The truth is nobody knows why it's mostly killed young people so far. Pointing to a cytokine storm as the cause is possible, but very misleading.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an app that should never have even been started, because it very clearly violates the SDK agreement
Apple UK didn't seem to think it violated the SDK agreement, as they gave the go-ahead (As per the article). It was only later that the app was rejected when it was submitted to the app-store.
So get the hell off your high horse already and live in the real world.
I live in the real world. My real world has people being behind agreements (multiple people with competing interests), not them being a series of arbitrarily laws that are followed in a vacuum without looking at the larger picture. I suspect what will happen here is that either Apple will change its mind and allow this app, or the app will be slightly modified to satisfy Apple's requirements.
because someone like Steve Jobs would have had an team of the very best surgeons working on him, and generally the best medical care that money could buy..
And this reduces a recovery time from 6 months to 2 months? No way in hell. The "2 month return to work" is really likely marketing hype. The marketing people picked the earliest time they could possible claim he returned to work, and that happened to be 2 months.
Money bought Steve the ability to get a liver faster by going to where the liver is. It bought him close monitoring, a nicer environment, and possibly some better odds. It's never going to make his body heal any faster.
More appropriately, why is it that people have to overreact to what was clearly a non-serious comparison?
I guess I don't agree that a well thought out response is an "over-reaction", or that it was clear your response was "non-serious". Your response sounded to me like a complete dismissal of the whole situation, which is equally foolish.
Yes, but there are people whose job it is to do that. There's no point worrying the general public about it
Much of the world is a democracy. Running a democracy involves a well educated populace so they continue to support funding for said people. If people don't understand why we fund this kind of thing, the "I was low low taxes!!!" crowd takes over.
I don't think we need to "worry" the general populace, I think we need to educate them. Explaining to people about potential threats might "worry" some people, but that's just the way the world works. Why you continue to think I'm talking about panic here I don't quite understand.
There is absolutely no point me worrying about it,
Worrying about things never really got anyone anything useful. Planning for threats, understanding them and overcoming them is what has increased our life span and made us healthier. Worrying about them has only caused some lost sleep.
In general I agree with your sentiment that there's been a lot of over-reaction to this whole thing. A few weeks after the thing first blew up in the news we got more information that this is really "no big deal", but yet there's still remnants in the world of the panic machine going forward. The following, however I don't agree with:
- look at all the fear mongering over bird flu and apocalyptic scenarios they told us to expect then, how a bird flu pandemic was inevitable etc. within just a few months at the time, remind me, how did that turn out again?
What I recall is the idiotic media outlets spreading a lot of fear about bird flu. I recall scientific sources talking about this as a long term problem we need to watch and learn more about because it COULD (but we don't know when, maybe decades) eventually mutate into something that spreads from human to human.
If you want a real apocalyptic scenario then there's the idea that Swine flu both mutates to become worse and is vastly more contagious but personally, I'll file that alongside worrying about global nuclear war and alien invasion.
Why is it people have to turn to some other equally idiotic extreme? Global nuclear was and "alien invasion" have never happened except in movies. Global disease outbreaks including flu that killed millions of people have happened with some regularity for hundreds, if not thousands of years. In all likelihood this whole thing will turn out to be nothing as H1N1 is unlikely to mutate into something more deadly. Putting it in the same category as "alien invasion" is just as stupid as all the fear mongering the media outlets love to do.
When there's any evidence to suggest we're closer to any of these I'll start worrying or even caring a bit more.
If we're close to a deadly flu outbreak, it's really already too late. We need to start developing techniques to get faster vaccines now, not just before it happens. If this HAD been the real-deal, a several month delay to make the vaccine is just too long. You don't need to sit around and cower in fear or start wearing face masks that likely do nothing. You do need to start thinking about how we should be better prepared.
The sad thing is that this is all Microsoft has become. Microsoft won't leave the US. For one thing there's a lot more to running a business than a freaking tax shelter. This is just another instance of Balmer blowing smoke. It's really a large portion of how he tries to exert influence.
I think Balmer is going to soon learn this is simply NOT the time to start drawing lines in the sand between greedy corporations and everyone else. Public opinion of Microsoft DOES matter, and painting your corporation as a bunch of dickweeds that'll just up and leave over some legislation is just idiotic.
AFAIK, all local phone companies in the US are required to still connect 911 calls, even if you're not paying for service.
I can tell you this is not true. My landline is DSL only, and I don't have dialtone.
if I were to work the numbers the way you present, it would only make the numbers work in my favor, not yours.
I'd be curious as to how they work out in your favor. It seems to me that taking LESS than the full population of the U.S. and multiplying that by food in tons will give a smaller number than taking the full population and doing the same.
It's actually not possible to compare the numbers you're talking about, since we aren't given the percentage of the populace facing hunger, or alternatively the number of people facing hunger.
bad numbers like that make me a bit suspicious of their methodology.
You should be more suspicious of your assumptions. The actual quote is:
The problems are really more ones of logistics than the actual food. Sure, we produce too much food and much of it goes to waste. But getting the food to the right people at the right time is the hard part.
which leads to blatant disregard for anything, really sloppy ways of coding and development, zero ideology or best practice on how to truly harness and control resources efficiently.
I see lots of sloppy coding practices, but they have about nothing to do with hardware efficiency. (Think buginess and maintainability). Unless you're writing for specialized environments, the days of worrying about a few cycles of CPU, or a few kilobytes of memory are over (and good riddance).
The world has changed and the challenges have changed. It's great to design your own CPU, and I'm sure he learned an enormous amount. But to pretend that we should all be thinking like it's still 1979 is absurd.
Really?
Yup, really. Here's the quote from the article.
Which means it needs to be COVERT.
I read the whole article again, and nowhere does it say the communication needs to be covert. It does say "encoded", but that has nothing to do with covert.
You might want to re-read the article again (assuming you did in the first place). You seem to be making several errors about its content.
It's called a battery. You hook it up to your walkie-talkie, and away you go.
Which involves electronics, which DARPA specifically didn't want.
So it only transmits 2 km, and presumably someone has to be looking in the right direction to receive your signal, and you need some kind of special equipment to encode a long message. This just looks like the wrong approach. It seems to me there's always a trade-off between distance, information transmitted, and signal power (a rough restating of Shannon/Hartley). I don't know how far flares can be seen, but that's already a chemical means of sending a short message a limited distance.
One thing that might be interesting, the ability to produce a powerful radio signal by some chemical means. You wouldn't be able to transmit much information beyond say "help!", but if you had a satellite in geo-stationary orbit looking for these signals (and somehow triangulating the position) that might solve the "has to be someone looking" problem. Whether there are chemical reactions that produce radio signals, I have no idea.
I mean, that monstrosity of a language - Perl actually became popular. If that doesn't prove that popularity doesn't prove goodness, I don't know what does.
I'm not a perl programmer, and I dislike the language quite a bit. But.. over the years I've definitely seen that it simply must have some intrinsic value, especially with regard to text processing as so much useful code exists for this very purpose.
I guess my point is that "goodness" is a product of its environment. If you're doing text processing and largely only text processing, perl is "goodness". If you're doing programming where code size is a concern (but not a MAJOR concern, i.e. you have a few kilobytes) then C is "goodness". If you're doing business programming with lots of business logic on the server side, Java becomes "goodness".
I'd even go so far as to say that the value of a language, stripped away from the domain of what the problem is, is meaningless. I don't think a language has intrinsic merit, since there's always a job to be done (and thus a problem domain).
I'm not a performance guru, but if you're talking about static HTML pages I'd guess you're correct. If you're talking about a dynamically generated page though, the underlying code that generates the page plays a much larger role in performance than does the underlying architecture you're describing.
The article referenced being fast at serving up dynamic content. That means it's being compared to things like PHP, perl, Java, etc. It's also about "small" (which isn't defined). But I'd guess the languages I just mentioned wouldn't be included in "small".
Home automation, and especially security, is not something I would want to put on radio waves. That makes it way too open to a denial of service attack.
I think you overestimate the abilities of your average burglar. I'm certain what you're describing is possible and attainable with only the knowledge and a few days work. For the average burglar though this is way beyond his abilities. If he can really do what you're describing, why is he ripping off what probably amounts to few hundred dollars of random junk in your average house? A "smart" burglar like that would be better off ripping off the electronics store down the street, or get an actual job building and designing electronics.
Even so, it's a lot easier to break into the house next door that doesn't even have a security system.
Perhaps you should re-read the quoted text and my response. Then ignore everything you just said, since the it has nothing to do with what I said.
People who rely on package maintainers or "the community" to help them out and keep things up to date could very well be let down. Moral of the story, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
Righto.. The moral of the story is to spend most a large portion of your day tracking down all the security bugs yourself to all the various parts of software on your machine. Then testing, patching, and testing again. Be sure to keep up at night worrying about even the most esoteric, hard to exploit, unlikely to work breaches like these.
If you like doing that sort of thing, that's great. But don't try to tell me everyone has to act like yourself to be "secure". Security has always been about managing the risk, not about creating a perfect impenetrable system. All systems have flaws, it's the nature of the beast.
Irrelevant - the test is: do they always spit-out provably correct numbers?
Completely wrong. The law isn't mathematics, and doesn't need to be 100% provably correct. To be admissible the device only has to be accurate to within a set of standards. (Whatever that is, and I don't care to speculate about it). Do you really think all the evidence provided in a court of law is provably correct? Of course not. This is no exception.
You know there's two things I've learned in my nearly 30 years on this earth.
Here's one thing I've found to be true on my slightly longer years on this earth.
Reasoning purely using peoples motivations and what's _possible_ without looking for actual evidence to support your conclusions will turn you quickly into a conspiracy nut. Conspiracy theories always seem to have at their base the motivations of the people involved. Any "evidence" is always secondary, and contrary evidence is ignored.
Go ahead then. I guarantee you're going to need a lawyer though.
Not everyone is as afraid in guys in rent-a-cop uniforms as you appear to be.
Nope.. Just ref'd me to their media department.
Uhh.. so you called the police department, and the DESK guy essentially said "didn't happen like that, call our media people"?
Do you think that 3rd hand information (rent-a-cop-> cop on scene-> desk cop) who didn't really tell you anything is more accurate than 1st hand information?
Huh. I didn't read through the bug reports, but the few I've read through it didn't seem like there was any point where you you definitively say "Ulrich is wrong here". Bugs are sometimes a matter of perspective about where the problem lies.
If you ask me, his problem is he's a dick, not that he's "wrong".
But I thought the Republicans were to blame for this economy
The repeal of Glass-Steagall was one of many pieces of de-regulation that lead to this mess. The loudest voices I hear championing the call for less regulation, smaller government, etc is the republican party. If you read the article the vast majority of the opposition came from the Democrats (with only 1 Republican Senator voting no). It was pretty weak opposition to be sure.
So sure, Democrats can share a lot of the blame here. But don't ignore the fact that Republicans are largely the ones pushing for de-regulation (many still want even MORE).
Anyway, I think the thing to take home from all this is not one party over another, but rather one set of ideas as being wrong. I always hear the main argument against regulation being "unintended consequences", like it's some kind of magical argument to wave over everything. What people seem to forget is that ANYTHING can have "unintended consequences", including doing nothing.
Also, rich people tend to be clean
Huh? I'll never understand the persistent beliefs about disease. Yesterday I heard a (translated) Chinese woman dismissing swine flu as nothing compared to SARS. She truly believed that as long as you kept a clean house, opened your doors and windows a lot, and kept clean you could avoid the virus.
So after more than 100 years of understanding Germ theory of diseasewe still have people thinking it's all caused by "bad vapors".
(Just to be clear, influeza isn't transmitted through "being dirty", it's transmitted through the air by people coughing and sneezing.)
It it is most dangerous to those with strong immune systems because of the potential for cytokine storms
Which is pure speculation at this point. The truth is nobody knows why it's mostly killed young people so far. Pointing to a cytokine storm as the cause is possible, but very misleading.