Sometimes I disagree, like when we're talking about features.
Here? Yes, you're right. Beta software is often compiled with less optimization and extra debugging information. I was using VMWare Server 2 beta, and it ran painfully slow, well under the speed of Server 1. Because it was a beta.
Don't clean it up. Cleaning up the milk that sprayed out of your nose would show that you were wrong to spray milk out of your nose, and this would show our enemies a lack of resolve on our part.
Are you saying that a cop that tazer's his own nephew, and threatens the life of his ex-wife's dad, shouldn't be fired?
I don't know. Has he been convicted of those charges?
I know the "innocent until proven guilty" clause applies to the courts and not jobs, but at the same time I think that that principle should be applied in general.
Put on desk duty while an investigation is underway? That's appropriate. Fired? No.
(Of course, this ignores the fact that cops often cover up their own, but then she's fixing the wrong problem.)
There's also the issue of whether she would have pursued the problem as vigorously if the officer had no relation to her.
Don't confuse Apple with its lawyers. Apple gets sued regularly over frivolous bullshit like Paystar's, so the the company's legal team is a ravenous bunch of sharks.
Whoa, what?
1) Apple hired and pays its lawyers. There have been way too many aggressive suits from Apple for it to be some rogue employee or rogue department. Apple is very systematic in the way it sues people who publish rumors and such. It's basically corporate policy.
2) If by "Paystar" you mean "Psystar" (Googling Apple Paystar gives a Psystar article the 1st, 3rd, and 5th hit, irrelevant articles for 2nd and 4th), the "frivolous bullshit" that it is filing against Apple is a countersuit brought about in response to one of Apple BS aggressive lawsuits.
This is biased by reading/., but the only entity that I know of that I think is worse than Apple in terms of filing BS lawsuits is the RIAA (and even that is a close contest as I am much less against strong IP laws than most of/. seems to be).
Not even the RIAA (yet) are trying to equate breach of contract with theft.
Blizzard has equated breach of contract with copyright infringement though. (And the courts agreed in that case, though I think that the ruling was legally wrong)
Being able to buy a boxed copy of OS X for any generic x86 PC would lead to a lot of Linux-type scenarios......if you buy a boxed copy of OS X for a generic x86 PC. Apple could continue what they are doing, and I doubt thatmany of their customers would leave. (There would be some, but I would say almost certainly counterbalanced by people buying OS X for non-Apple hardware who currently don't have anything Apple. Hell, I'd probably buy a copy.)
Apple continues to sell the stuff that Just Works at their premium, and others step in for cheaper stuff for people who want to deal with potentially less-than-perfect hardware support.
Damn Nissan for not letting me put a Ford engine in my Bluebird!
Way to miss the point.
Let's say you could, mechanically, put your Ford engine in your Bluebird. Would Nissan or Ford sue you for doing so?
Your modified Bluebird actually turns out pretty well, and you decide to call it a Ostrich (it's a bird that doesn't fly) and sell it. You buy some Nissan Bluebirds and some Fords, and move the engines over. Would Nissan or Ford sue you for doing so?
The point isn't that Psystar wants to make Apple make OS X so you can run it on their computers, the point is that you already can run it on their computers and Apple is suing to prevent them from carrying out that distribution. (And Psystar is suing back saying that Apple's requirement that you use OS X only on their hardware -- roughly equivalent to Nissan saying that you can't mod their car -- is illegal.) I have pretty conservative (with respect to current laws) opinions on IP, but even I think that Apple is in the wrong here.
Take this away, and we'll see the quality of Apple systems fall rapidly.
At worst, you would see the quality of computers running OS X fall. It'll wind up like the PC world: there will be some manufacturers who use high-quality components, and some manufactures who get the cheapest stuff they can get their hands on.
Sure you can get crappy Windows PCs, but you can also get good Windows PCs.
If Psystar wins, Mac will turn into Windows, where nothing can get done to improve the system later because of fears of support and backwards compatibility.
The backwards compatibility on Windows was a decision on the part of MS. There would be nothing to stop Apple from cutting off backwards compatibility any more than there is now.
Speaking as someone who is running an MSDNAA copy of 64-bit Server 2K8 at home, it's almost certainly not totally in the clear. The agreement you accepted (or at least I accepted) to get them seems to rule out using it as your primary OS. For instance, a table of acceptable and unacceptable uses says "Microsoft® Windows® may only be installed to facilitate the use of other MSDNAA software and technologies such as Microsoft Visual Studio®.NET for instruction or research." I would interpret this as meaning if you use it to surf the web, play games, etc. you are beyond the bounds of the license.
That said... I'm running an MSDNAA copy of Windows on my home computer. If MS doesn't like it, Gentoo is waiting in the wings. (I also have an academic copy of XP that doesn't fall under those terms, but I do think my primary OS would change.)
My aunt got one of my cousins a toy that had a steering wheel and such, and a button that when you pressed it would say, in an Elmo voice, "Me drive car!"
A couple weeks later she comes home to an answering message that said "me drive car!" over and over again then my uncle saying "just wanted to know what we've been listening to for the last two weeks"
Another way of looking at my point is that money value isn't linear, and the value of even that tiny chance of a few million to couple hundred million is more than the value of a couple thousand.
For instance, say that you have a 1-in-20-million chance of winning $10m if you buy a $1 ticket. You don't want to just say that the expected return is (1/20,000,000)*$10,000,000 - $1 = -$0.50, so your expected monetary return is negative. You might say that having the $1 you were to put into the adventure is worth 1 "happy point", but that getting that $10,000,000 would actually give you 30 million happy points. At that point, you have a 1/20,000,000 chance of getting 30,000,000 happy points by spending 1 happy point. This means your expected return is 1/20,000,000*30,000,000 - 1, or 0.5 happy points. This means that in expectation you will wind up with more happy points if you buy the lottery ticket.
People who follow the logic I presented before aren't actually calculating that all out or anything, but they either believe both, neither, or are inconsistent.;-)
(A lot of research has shown that money has decreasing value as you get more, and this seems to fly in the face of this too. But I don't think it's as strict as that implies; I think there are humps where having $x allows you to do something you wouldn't be able to with less. For instance, I'd love to be given, say, $30,000, but if I got that it would go in a bank (/roth IRA). OTOH, if I were given, say, $100,000, I'd probably go buy a house, and I'd be happier with that than "just" having $30,000 in an account somewhere. More to the point, I think I would be happier with a house than "just" having $100,000 in an account. This means that I get more happiness points per dollar with $100,000 than I would with $30,000. It's these sorts of humps that make it so that I would probably rather have a 1/20,000,00th chance of $20,000,000 than $1.)
I am somewhat sympathetic to your argument, but I don't buy it. It can be entirely reasonable to play the lottery, though not very regularly.
Let's say that once a month you get a Powerball ticket with Powerplay, costing (according to Wikipedia) $2. You do this for 50 years. (In other words, you play the lottery starting when you are 20 until you're 70.)
According to this compound interest calculator, if you aggressively invested that money instead and got 10% annual return for that timespan (probably entirely ridiculous), at the end of that you'd have $30,727. If we were to assume an already-optimistic 7% rate of return, that's only $10,500.
If you were to play every other month (or not get powerplay) and get 10%, you're at $15,500, and at 7%, $5,200.
In addition, you're not really going to be out all that money... on average, Wikipedia says the powerball has about a 50% rate of return. Which means that the $15,500 and $5,200 numbers are actually more realistic if you pay $2/mth.
While it's not exactly a shabby sum, it's also not that much money if you've been wise with other investments. Giving up that amount of money is probably not really going to change your lifestyle. You might lose out on a couple vacations you could take when retired or something. (If we are even a little more conservative with how much we spend on the lottery... you play for 40 years instead of 50, spending $1/mth but getting back half, and could get 7% otherwise, you're looking at $1,200. That's barely enough for one "fancy" vacation.)
Now, at the same time, in the very very remote chance you were to actually win a jackpot, your life would change. If you won even a million dollars -- let alone tens of millions -- you might be able to retire now (depending on how old you are), go buy a farm, do almost anything you want monitarily.
It is not unreasonable to say "I'll take one less vacation when I'm 70 in exchange for an almost-zero-but-not-quite chance of a totally life-changing event."
(The fact that a lot of lottery winnings result in people blowing through the winnings quickly, sometimes result in failed families or other bad effects, or that a lot of people don't play the lottery this way and actually put significant money into it is beside the point that playing the lottery isn't necessarily an irrational move.)
I am surprised that Intel still has the power to stop companies from building x86 processors. That patent is like 30 years old now. Doesn't it expire eventually?
Intel hasn't been making the same chip for 30 years you know. Sure, Nvidia could safely make an 80486-compatible chip, but that won't have nifty things like SSE.
This means that as long as I get my work done, I can go home at noon every day if I wanted and they can't do anything about it.
Well, they can fire you. Whether they would if you're getting your work done is another matter of course, but it's not like their hands are exactly tied.
1) Abandonware is not a legally sound concept, and that defense won't hold up in court. (Though it may lessen damages since it'd be harder to establish actual ones. That said, the main killer in copyright law is statutory damages, and this wouldn't less that.)
I'm not a lawyer either, but at least I've read a good portion of the 1976 copyright act, and there's nothing in it for abandoned work.
2) Your parent's point is largely that some stuff -- like the Caravan song he mentions -- are not abandonware.
It's even quite possible that they could have made it so that the track pad and tablet were in removable bays like laptop CD drives and batteries are, thus making it customizable.
As another option, leave off the track pad and put the tablet center (or slightly right).
Yeah, I understand IBM's predicament. I'm half joking. Though it would be a PITA for a lefty, and even though 10 or 15 percent or whatever of the market isn't that big, it's still big enough to pay attention to. If the Wacom tablet really is a selling point, either this is a rather low-volume item or they'll almost certainly lose quite a few sales.
One potential option would be to offer a left-handed version. It seems likely that they could mirror some of the internals or rearrange things without too much effort, though perhaps not.
The Wacom tablet is on the right of the trackpad, a very inconvenient place for us left-handers. Just another example example of the man trying to keeps us down.
Too bad it doesn't explain what they actually did and just says "ooo, this is really bad". It'd be interesting to see a description, and see if other systems with similar protections are vulnerable.
There are better ways of dealing with it than capping malpractice awards. For instance, force a record of past malpractice suits and their resolutions (including settlements and their values) to be public. Then people could pick a doctor based on their record.
The problem with caps is you either need to make them almost uselessly high or you'll be denying people who truly deserve an amount higher than the cap.
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Sometimes I disagree, like when we're talking about features.
Here? Yes, you're right. Beta software is often compiled with less optimization and extra debugging information. I was using VMWare Server 2 beta, and it ran painfully slow, well under the speed of Server 1. Because it was a beta.
Don't clean it up. Cleaning up the milk that sprayed out of your nose would show that you were wrong to spray milk out of your nose, and this would show our enemies a lack of resolve on our part.
Stay the course, don't clean and run.
Are you saying that a cop that tazer's his own nephew, and threatens the life of his ex-wife's dad, shouldn't be fired?
I don't know. Has he been convicted of those charges?
I know the "innocent until proven guilty" clause applies to the courts and not jobs, but at the same time I think that that principle should be applied in general.
Put on desk duty while an investigation is underway? That's appropriate. Fired? No.
(Of course, this ignores the fact that cops often cover up their own, but then she's fixing the wrong problem.)
There's also the issue of whether she would have pursued the problem as vigorously if the officer had no relation to her.
Don't confuse Apple with its lawyers. Apple gets sued regularly over frivolous bullshit like Paystar's, so the the company's legal team is a ravenous bunch of sharks.
Whoa, what?
1) Apple hired and pays its lawyers. There have been way too many aggressive suits from Apple for it to be some rogue employee or rogue department. Apple is very systematic in the way it sues people who publish rumors and such. It's basically corporate policy.
2) If by "Paystar" you mean "Psystar" (Googling Apple Paystar gives a Psystar article the 1st, 3rd, and 5th hit, irrelevant articles for 2nd and 4th), the "frivolous bullshit" that it is filing against Apple is a countersuit brought about in response to one of Apple BS aggressive lawsuits.
This is biased by reading /., but the only entity that I know of that I think is worse than Apple in terms of filing BS lawsuits is the RIAA (and even that is a close contest as I am much less against strong IP laws than most of /. seems to be).
Not even the RIAA (yet) are trying to equate breach of contract with theft.
Blizzard has equated breach of contract with copyright infringement though. (And the courts agreed in that case, though I think that the ruling was legally wrong)
Being able to buy a boxed copy of OS X for any generic x86 PC would lead to a lot of Linux-type scenarios... ...if you buy a boxed copy of OS X for a generic x86 PC. Apple could continue what they are doing, and I doubt thatmany of their customers would leave. (There would be some, but I would say almost certainly counterbalanced by people buying OS X for non-Apple hardware who currently don't have anything Apple. Hell, I'd probably buy a copy.)
Apple continues to sell the stuff that Just Works at their premium, and others step in for cheaper stuff for people who want to deal with potentially less-than-perfect hardware support.
Damn Nissan for not letting me put a Ford engine in my Bluebird!
Way to miss the point.
Let's say you could, mechanically, put your Ford engine in your Bluebird. Would Nissan or Ford sue you for doing so?
Your modified Bluebird actually turns out pretty well, and you decide to call it a Ostrich (it's a bird that doesn't fly) and sell it. You buy some Nissan Bluebirds and some Fords, and move the engines over. Would Nissan or Ford sue you for doing so?
The point isn't that Psystar wants to make Apple make OS X so you can run it on their computers, the point is that you already can run it on their computers and Apple is suing to prevent them from carrying out that distribution. (And Psystar is suing back saying that Apple's requirement that you use OS X only on their hardware -- roughly equivalent to Nissan saying that you can't mod their car -- is illegal.) I have pretty conservative (with respect to current laws) opinions on IP, but even I think that Apple is in the wrong here.
This post is full of unsupported assumptions:
Take this away, and we'll see the quality of Apple systems fall rapidly.
At worst, you would see the quality of computers running OS X fall. It'll wind up like the PC world: there will be some manufacturers who use high-quality components, and some manufactures who get the cheapest stuff they can get their hands on.
Sure you can get crappy Windows PCs, but you can also get good Windows PCs.
If Psystar wins, Mac will turn into Windows, where nothing can get done to improve the system later because of fears of support and backwards compatibility.
The backwards compatibility on Windows was a decision on the part of MS. There would be nothing to stop Apple from cutting off backwards compatibility any more than there is now.
Speaking as someone who is running an MSDNAA copy of 64-bit Server 2K8 at home, it's almost certainly not totally in the clear. The agreement you accepted (or at least I accepted) to get them seems to rule out using it as your primary OS. For instance, a table of acceptable and unacceptable uses says "Microsoft® Windows® may only be installed to facilitate the use of other MSDNAA software and technologies such as Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET for instruction or research." I would interpret this as meaning if you use it to surf the web, play games, etc. you are beyond the bounds of the license.
That said... I'm running an MSDNAA copy of Windows on my home computer. If MS doesn't like it, Gentoo is waiting in the wings. (I also have an academic copy of XP that doesn't fall under those terms, but I do think my primary OS would change.)
My aunt got one of my cousins a toy that had a steering wheel and such, and a button that when you pressed it would say, in an Elmo voice, "Me drive car!"
A couple weeks later she comes home to an answering message that said "me drive car!" over and over again then my uncle saying "just wanted to know what we've been listening to for the last two weeks"
Silly poster. The interesting thing isn't that you can use logic to solve Sudoku, it's that dpkg implements a logic strong enough to do it.
Yeah, same here. It was down the first time I tried, but up just now. Was very pleasantly surprised at the apparent hotloading of plugins.
Another way of looking at my point is that money value isn't linear, and the value of even that tiny chance of a few million to couple hundred million is more than the value of a couple thousand.
For instance, say that you have a 1-in-20-million chance of winning $10m if you buy a $1 ticket. You don't want to just say that the expected return is (1/20,000,000)*$10,000,000 - $1 = -$0.50, so your expected monetary return is negative. You might say that having the $1 you were to put into the adventure is worth 1 "happy point", but that getting that $10,000,000 would actually give you 30 million happy points. At that point, you have a 1/20,000,000 chance of getting 30,000,000 happy points by spending 1 happy point. This means your expected return is 1/20,000,000*30,000,000 - 1, or 0.5 happy points. This means that in expectation you will wind up with more happy points if you buy the lottery ticket.
People who follow the logic I presented before aren't actually calculating that all out or anything, but they either believe both, neither, or are inconsistent. ;-)
(A lot of research has shown that money has decreasing value as you get more, and this seems to fly in the face of this too. But I don't think it's as strict as that implies; I think there are humps where having $x allows you to do something you wouldn't be able to with less. For instance, I'd love to be given, say, $30,000, but if I got that it would go in a bank (/roth IRA). OTOH, if I were given, say, $100,000, I'd probably go buy a house, and I'd be happier with that than "just" having $30,000 in an account somewhere. More to the point, I think I would be happier with a house than "just" having $100,000 in an account. This means that I get more happiness points per dollar with $100,000 than I would with $30,000. It's these sorts of humps that make it so that I would probably rather have a 1/20,000,00th chance of $20,000,000 than $1.)
I am somewhat sympathetic to your argument, but I don't buy it. It can be entirely reasonable to play the lottery, though not very regularly.
Let's say that once a month you get a Powerball ticket with Powerplay, costing (according to Wikipedia) $2. You do this for 50 years. (In other words, you play the lottery starting when you are 20 until you're 70.)
According to this compound interest calculator, if you aggressively invested that money instead and got 10% annual return for that timespan (probably entirely ridiculous), at the end of that you'd have $30,727. If we were to assume an already-optimistic 7% rate of return, that's only $10,500.
If you were to play every other month (or not get powerplay) and get 10%, you're at $15,500, and at 7%, $5,200.
In addition, you're not really going to be out all that money... on average, Wikipedia says the powerball has about a 50% rate of return. Which means that the $15,500 and $5,200 numbers are actually more realistic if you pay $2/mth.
While it's not exactly a shabby sum, it's also not that much money if you've been wise with other investments. Giving up that amount of money is probably not really going to change your lifestyle. You might lose out on a couple vacations you could take when retired or something. (If we are even a little more conservative with how much we spend on the lottery... you play for 40 years instead of 50, spending $1/mth but getting back half, and could get 7% otherwise, you're looking at $1,200. That's barely enough for one "fancy" vacation.)
Now, at the same time, in the very very remote chance you were to actually win a jackpot, your life would change. If you won even a million dollars -- let alone tens of millions -- you might be able to retire now (depending on how old you are), go buy a farm, do almost anything you want monitarily.
It is not unreasonable to say "I'll take one less vacation when I'm 70 in exchange for an almost-zero-but-not-quite chance of a totally life-changing event."
(The fact that a lot of lottery winnings result in people blowing through the winnings quickly, sometimes result in failed families or other bad effects, or that a lot of people don't play the lottery this way and actually put significant money into it is beside the point that playing the lottery isn't necessarily an irrational move.)
I am surprised that Intel still has the power to stop companies from building x86 processors. That patent is like 30 years old now. Doesn't it expire eventually?
Intel hasn't been making the same chip for 30 years you know. Sure, Nvidia could safely make an 80486-compatible chip, but that won't have nifty things like SSE.
And if someone from the company does any investigating, then you'll find yourself fired AND in court to get that patent transferred to the company.
This means that as long as I get my work done, I can go home at noon every day if I wanted and they can't do anything about it.
Well, they can fire you. Whether they would if you're getting your work done is another matter of course, but it's not like their hands are exactly tied.
1) Abandonware is not a legally sound concept, and that defense won't hold up in court. (Though it may lessen damages since it'd be harder to establish actual ones. That said, the main killer in copyright law is statutory damages, and this wouldn't less that.)
I'm not a lawyer either, but at least I've read a good portion of the 1976 copyright act, and there's nothing in it for abandoned work.
2) Your parent's point is largely that some stuff -- like the Caravan song he mentions -- are not abandonware.
It's even quite possible that they could have made it so that the track pad and tablet were in removable bays like laptop CD drives and batteries are, thus making it customizable.
As another option, leave off the track pad and put the tablet center (or slightly right).
Yeah, I understand IBM's predicament. I'm half joking. Though it would be a PITA for a lefty, and even though 10 or 15 percent or whatever of the market isn't that big, it's still big enough to pay attention to. If the Wacom tablet really is a selling point, either this is a rather low-volume item or they'll almost certainly lose quite a few sales.
One potential option would be to offer a left-handed version. It seems likely that they could mirror some of the internals or rearrange things without too much effort, though perhaps not.
The Wacom tablet is on the right of the trackpad, a very inconvenient place for us left-handers. Just another example example of the man trying to keeps us down.
Works for me... does the link work if I write it? http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ggR18cBzd8I
Too bad it doesn't explain what they actually did and just says "ooo, this is really bad". It'd be interesting to see a description, and see if other systems with similar protections are vulnerable.
Yes, but those fairly large number of future humans could very well also bring an astronomical amount of benefit to future society as well.
There are better ways of dealing with it than capping malpractice awards. For instance, force a record of past malpractice suits and their resolutions (including settlements and their values) to be public. Then people could pick a doctor based on their record.
The problem with caps is you either need to make them almost uselessly high or you'll be denying people who truly deserve an amount higher than the cap.