yes, no, maybe so / promise never to repeat
on
Is Blogging Journalism?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd say some bloggers definitely qualify as journalists...those that do extensive research and aren't just editorializing.
Most blogs however are poorly written, poorly researched and just platforms for people to voice their opinions - definitely not journalism by any stretch of the imagination.
In regards to the Apple/thinksecret case - the blogger wasn't acting as a journalist...you can't violate an NDA and then try to hide behind the shield of being a journalist. He signed the NDA first, then released the information to the public...he may not have been editorializing, but he was violating a contract w/Apple that had to be respected first, even if that infringed on his 1st amendment rights and his desire to be a journalist.
Yeah, it sucks he got nailed - but you can't blame Apple for defending it's NDAs and the gross violation of their trust with the particular employee responsible. You can bet that any company in a similar situation would do exactly the same thing, otherwise the NDAs have no weight and are pointless. Given the current environment with patents and the laws surrounding them, it's important that if someone actually innovates, they be given an opportunity to actually make something of those innovations. In truth, this didn't hurt Apple that much, but they at least need to set the record straight in regards to what they'll tolerate and what they will prosecute - the next time someone pulls something like this, it could be much more costly to them.
As an aside, is Taco trying to figure out what to put on his Resume(journalist??)?? I keed!
Maybe I'm completely ignorant of the law and how banks work, but what's to stop people from playing the shell game and going to say, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky or Pennsylvania(or elsewhere) to sell through a second party? All they'd truly have to do is set up a bank account in another state and find someone to act as a front. I suppose this might be a bit riskier than just selling it yourself since it gives the appearance of something illegal if they can follow the paper trail(if they can find it) - but it would certainly get around having to front bond and get licensed.
AFAIK, heroin is NOT legal in Amsterdam. Pot has been decriminalized so that the police could spend their time fighting heroin/coke/meth/exstacy trafficking which they view as more of a threat.
Apple is by far the most profitable and has the highest visibility of anyone playing this particular market - you generally don't go after companies who don't have the pockets to cover your claimed damages unless you're trying to compete - they aren't and are merely trying to profit off of what they saw as an opportunity to captialize on something that hadn't been covered by a patent. Since they can't actually offer a product and service of their own(and knew this) they use the "law" to try and get rich.
frankly, they're just throwing their own money away on lawyers - both patents have tons of prior art and will likely be thrown out of court. that doesn't however stop them from trying and making some noise. they're simply all bark and no bite...they lost their teeth at least 5 years before they even filed for the patents because of prior art.
$499 is hardly painting yourself into a corner financially, unless a $30 KVM switch would break your bank.
and what difference does it matter if it's an already complete system, or not in a "generic" case?? if you program for altivec enabled processors, it's probably going to be running on a Mac anyway. it's highly unlikely that any code you may write will be running on IBM hardware as it's even less common and much more expensive than any Mac(G4/5) w/altivec.
Ignoring Altivec isn't a very good idea either. As sales increase in the Mac arena(and they will/are currently), altivec is going to be more commonly used - think of all the games that could be ported! If you think that Apple is just going to die off, you're nuts - people have been saying that for 10 years now and it's not even close to being a possibility at this moment or in the future. Apple has definitely learned from the rough times in the mid to late 90's and is on a much more secure road than they were...but even then, Apple dying off just wasn't going to happen.
Personally, having learned how to program assembly on PowerPC chips, I feel I have a much better understanding of how everything works and where you can optimize code than I would have taken away from anything x86 based. It may have had a slightly steeper learning curve and sometimes required re-thinking some processes to use vectors, but I think it was worth every minute.
This "tipping point" seems like the ultimate vaporware...how long have supporters been saying this? How long will they have to continue?
Everyone I know who ran Linux for scientific reasons switched to OS X because it was just more polished and easier to install and maintain. Or there were people who couldn't get SATA drivers(and still can't) and actually went back to XP(albeit grudgingly)! So when is this type of story going to stop being a yearly promise and actually become a reality?
HP has really gone downhill, and only picked up speed during the "Carly Years".
I remember a time when their hardware was second to none, and their software and support were stellar to say the least. I'm serious when I say that I noticed the change in leadership almost as immediately as she took office - and I was just a consumer of their products. Their hardware started going up in price, but failed to move forward. Their software became more bug filled than the Amazon jungle, and their support, well, just stopped existing.
One of the largest problems I saw was how they produced new versions of some of their software packages, writing Windows versions of packages that used to be strictly HP-UX native and then porting them back to HP-UX...this was at best a dumb idea and at worst resulted in programs advertised as being HP-UX native refusing to operate properly, especially anything with a GUI. Program crashes went from almost non-existant to an almost weekly if not daily occurance.
To make matters worse the average hold time I spent on the phone went from less than 10 minutes to as much as 4 HOURS. I'm not making this up! And when you finally did get an engineer on the phone they mostly stalled for time because they knew they had no solution to a problem, or had too much to deal with. As we paid for our service agreement we expected to get prompt service and instead were left sitting for days, sometimes weeks while someone tried to resolve the issue, if it could be resolved. Even when told that issues were absolutely mission critical and costing us huge amounts of money and at times lost data due to failure we still did not notice any change in service.
Like the author, my first calculator was an HP - I remembered being astounded by the ability to graph solutions and solve multi-variable equations. It was one of the first pieces of hardware I learned to program - I wrote a program to switch the in class TV channels back in High School. At one time, before Carly, I even wanted desperately to work for them....I'm glad I didn't.
How Carly ever got into office on anything but her looks(which weren't much) will forever remain a mystery to me. How she was allowed to stay in her position for more than a few months is something I can only blame on investors not having a finger on the pulse of the company. Maybe HP will recover, but they've lost so much ground in recent years, I really can't see it happening.
"Apple makes, Microsoft takes"
Exactly! Who can blame them for not wanting to protect their interests in a reasonable manner. If MS ever innovated anything, they'd be hounding bloggers the same way if not in an even harsher fashion.
What makes me SO irritated is when MS zealots cry "Apple stole their GUI from Xerox" when this is completely false! Apple actually paid Xerox developers for their work, which resulted in an almost completely different interface than what Xerox had developed for their own use. Aside from the fact that it was windowed and relied on a mouse for navigation, nothing was actually "stolen" as so often claimed. You can't say the same about Microsoft - they've stolen many a product(as you outlined) in the past without so much as a thank you. At least Apple paid for anything they didn't develop themselves.
Add to that the fact that Apple DOES support OSS and provides the FreeBSD team with bug-fixes, gives away a ton of their code and MS looks even worse. MS will barely cop to bugs in code they've "borrowed" or even developed themselves - Apple is pretty forthcoming with fixing exploits and making them known to their users.
Another sore spot is the notion of Apple having some sort of monopoly with iTMS and the iPod, or that they "stole" the idea of HD based players somehow. Nobody is forcing end users to pick the iPod over another player and you don't need to use iTMS to put music on an iPod. It's sad when something that's genuinely superior to most of the market and more succesful because of it's superiority is seen as a monopoly and not the better choice for consumers.
Apple is the much better citizen in my book and in no danger of ever becoming another Mircosoft.
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Most blogs however are poorly written, poorly researched and just platforms for people to voice their opinions - definitely not journalism by any stretch of the imagination.
In regards to the Apple/thinksecret case - the blogger wasn't acting as a journalist...you can't violate an NDA and then try to hide behind the shield of being a journalist. He signed the NDA first, then released the information to the public...he may not have been editorializing, but he was violating a contract w/Apple that had to be respected first, even if that infringed on his 1st amendment rights and his desire to be a journalist.
Yeah, it sucks he got nailed - but you can't blame Apple for defending it's NDAs and the gross violation of their trust with the particular employee responsible. You can bet that any company in a similar situation would do exactly the same thing, otherwise the NDAs have no weight and are pointless. Given the current environment with patents and the laws surrounding them, it's important that if someone actually innovates, they be given an opportunity to actually make something of those innovations. In truth, this didn't hurt Apple that much, but they at least need to set the record straight in regards to what they'll tolerate and what they will prosecute - the next time someone pulls something like this, it could be much more costly to them.
As an aside, is Taco trying to figure out what to put on his Resume(journalist??)?? I keed!
I just want to know who did the work on 50 Cent's DS's custom skin/paint job. I'd leave the "G-Unit" script off, but the camo is sweet as hell.
Maybe I'm completely ignorant of the law and how banks work, but what's to stop people from playing the shell game and going to say, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky or Pennsylvania(or elsewhere) to sell through a second party? All they'd truly have to do is set up a bank account in another state and find someone to act as a front. I suppose this might be a bit riskier than just selling it yourself since it gives the appearance of something illegal if they can follow the paper trail(if they can find it) - but it would certainly get around having to front bond and get licensed.
AFAIK, heroin is NOT legal in Amsterdam. Pot has been decriminalized so that the police could spend their time fighting heroin/coke/meth/exstacy trafficking which they view as more of a threat.
frankly, they're just throwing their own money away on lawyers - both patents have tons of prior art and will likely be thrown out of court. that doesn't however stop them from trying and making some noise. they're simply all bark and no bite...they lost their teeth at least 5 years before they even filed for the patents because of prior art.
and what difference does it matter if it's an already complete system, or not in a "generic" case?? if you program for altivec enabled processors, it's probably going to be running on a Mac anyway. it's highly unlikely that any code you may write will be running on IBM hardware as it's even less common and much more expensive than any Mac(G4/5) w/altivec.
Ignoring Altivec isn't a very good idea either. As sales increase in the Mac arena(and they will/are currently), altivec is going to be more commonly used - think of all the games that could be ported! If you think that Apple is just going to die off, you're nuts - people have been saying that for 10 years now and it's not even close to being a possibility at this moment or in the future. Apple has definitely learned from the rough times in the mid to late 90's and is on a much more secure road than they were...but even then, Apple dying off just wasn't going to happen.
Personally, having learned how to program assembly on PowerPC chips, I feel I have a much better understanding of how everything works and where you can optimize code than I would have taken away from anything x86 based. It may have had a slightly steeper learning curve and sometimes required re-thinking some processes to use vectors, but I think it was worth every minute.
Everyone I know who ran Linux for scientific reasons switched to OS X because it was just more polished and easier to install and maintain. Or there were people who couldn't get SATA drivers(and still can't) and actually went back to XP(albeit grudgingly)! So when is this type of story going to stop being a yearly promise and actually become a reality?
I remember a time when their hardware was second to none, and their software and support were stellar to say the least. I'm serious when I say that I noticed the change in leadership almost as immediately as she took office - and I was just a consumer of their products. Their hardware started going up in price, but failed to move forward. Their software became more bug filled than the Amazon jungle, and their support, well, just stopped existing.
One of the largest problems I saw was how they produced new versions of some of their software packages, writing Windows versions of packages that used to be strictly HP-UX native and then porting them back to HP-UX...this was at best a dumb idea and at worst resulted in programs advertised as being HP-UX native refusing to operate properly, especially anything with a GUI. Program crashes went from almost non-existant to an almost weekly if not daily occurance.
To make matters worse the average hold time I spent on the phone went from less than 10 minutes to as much as 4 HOURS. I'm not making this up! And when you finally did get an engineer on the phone they mostly stalled for time because they knew they had no solution to a problem, or had too much to deal with. As we paid for our service agreement we expected to get prompt service and instead were left sitting for days, sometimes weeks while someone tried to resolve the issue, if it could be resolved. Even when told that issues were absolutely mission critical and costing us huge amounts of money and at times lost data due to failure we still did not notice any change in service.
Like the author, my first calculator was an HP - I remembered being astounded by the ability to graph solutions and solve multi-variable equations. It was one of the first pieces of hardware I learned to program - I wrote a program to switch the in class TV channels back in High School. At one time, before Carly, I even wanted desperately to work for them....I'm glad I didn't.
How Carly ever got into office on anything but her looks(which weren't much) will forever remain a mystery to me. How she was allowed to stay in her position for more than a few months is something I can only blame on investors not having a finger on the pulse of the company. Maybe HP will recover, but they've lost so much ground in recent years, I really can't see it happening.
"Apple makes, Microsoft takes" Exactly! Who can blame them for not wanting to protect their interests in a reasonable manner. If MS ever innovated anything, they'd be hounding bloggers the same way if not in an even harsher fashion. What makes me SO irritated is when MS zealots cry "Apple stole their GUI from Xerox" when this is completely false! Apple actually paid Xerox developers for their work, which resulted in an almost completely different interface than what Xerox had developed for their own use. Aside from the fact that it was windowed and relied on a mouse for navigation, nothing was actually "stolen" as so often claimed. You can't say the same about Microsoft - they've stolen many a product(as you outlined) in the past without so much as a thank you. At least Apple paid for anything they didn't develop themselves. Add to that the fact that Apple DOES support OSS and provides the FreeBSD team with bug-fixes, gives away a ton of their code and MS looks even worse. MS will barely cop to bugs in code they've "borrowed" or even developed themselves - Apple is pretty forthcoming with fixing exploits and making them known to their users. Another sore spot is the notion of Apple having some sort of monopoly with iTMS and the iPod, or that they "stole" the idea of HD based players somehow. Nobody is forcing end users to pick the iPod over another player and you don't need to use iTMS to put music on an iPod. It's sad when something that's genuinely superior to most of the market and more succesful because of it's superiority is seen as a monopoly and not the better choice for consumers. Apple is the much better citizen in my book and in no danger of ever becoming another Mircosoft.