We're going in circles here. If the company hadn't accused him of an unrelated (and probably fictitous) crime, he never would have had to "lawyer up".
Let's start over: A whistle blower should not have to resign when they report illegal activity by their employer. That is the point of whistle blower laws. As long as he remains an employee, any retaliatory actions taken by the employer (firing him, usually, but also demotions and de facto demotions and the like) will be prosecuted by the state, rather than requiring him to spend his own money defending himself. Financially, it is to the whistleblowers benefit to not resign, as he continues to draw paychecks and gains the ability to have the state deal with punishing unfair treatment by the company, rather than having to do it out of his own pocket.
The only reason this is costing him a dime is because the company apparently decided to commit a second crime (filing a false police report) in retaliation; this requires him to retain his own lawyer to defend himself against the criminal charges involved, and could/would have happened even if he had resigned.
In summary: Saying he should have resigned is utterly asinine.
It might be a violation of the terms of service with their ISP, but I'm not sure it's illegal... In any case, if what he was doing turns out to be illegal then it really doesn't matter if he has the goods on the company or not.
Depends on which "what he was doing" you mean: if what the company is accusing him of doing were true, whistleblower laws would not protect him. But the charges they are leveling reek of retaliatory accusations with no substance. He is protected from that.
If the actions he took at the company's behest (ie, developing software to work around ISP blocks of their spyders) is illegal, whistleblower laws do protect him, provided he reports the illegal actions to the proper authorities when he becomes aware of their illegality.
Why would he still have legal bills if HMS hadn't decided to trump up charges? He made criminal accusations; those are prosecuted by the state, now by him.
Whistle blower laws were enacted to encourage employees to bring to light nefarious and illegal activities being perpetrated by their employers without fear of retaliation. HMS appears to be trying to side step these laws by, rather than firing him for doing the ethical thing, falsely accusing him of crimes based on highly flimsy evidence in an attempt to ruin him financially long before the courts can sort the mess out and bitch slap them for breaking a number of laws.
I like pages a lot, but don't go into it expecting anything like your standard Office-esque word processor, because that isn't what it's intended to be. It's essentially a combination simple word processor and page layout program, and using it is much more akin to a sort of visual version of the experience of writing your document in LaTeX.
Localization applies to documentation and other human readable stuff, because it involves adapting the program and it's documentation for a particular locale.
Internationalization is the process of adapting your program so that it can easily be made to work in any locale. Not hardcoding strings in english, not assuming 1 byte == 1 char, that kind of thing. A good i18n architecture makes localization much easier.
But the more important question is: if it lacks a feature, will you roll your own? What's the closest equivalent to iTunes for linux? Rhythmbox? That's like comparing an intercontinental jet to a crop duster, and yet no one seems to be rolling their own solutions to Rhythmbox's ugliness, and lack of features.
And that's an iLife app that even has something that tries to be equivalent. Nobody out there is rolling their own GarageBand, because, lets face it, apps that complex and high quality take expertise and time, which cost money.
Why use the app dir when you could simply offer two downloads, one for OS X (a Mach-O Universal binary), and a PEF executable if you're still trying to target old OS 9 users?
At any rate, this is all irrelevant. You seem to change how you're using terms any time you're accused of not knowing what you're talking about. I was responding to your claim:
To get a Carbon app to work as a universal binary you'll have to wrap it inside at least a minimal Cocoa shell, so you can't make an app that'll just automatically run on OS 9 and OS X any more.
Which is totally incorrect. A Carbon app will work perfectly fine as a Universal Binary without writing a "Cocoa shell".
To get a Carbon app to work as a universal binary you'll have to wrap it inside at least a minimal Cocoa shell, so you can't make an app that'll just automatically run on OS 9 and OS X any more.
Cite? I see that no where in Apple's Universal Binary Programming Guide, so post a link or quit making shit up.
Considering it asks during the install whether he would like to manage his music folder or let iTunes do it for him, and the default is to leave it to the user to manage it.
Heh, and I told my dad to sell his Freescale stock over the Apple switch.:D
No, seriously, Apple is a tiny fraction of Freescale's sales base. They're a global leader for automotive CPUs, embedded micro controllers, and communications processors (like cellular base stations). Desktop and Mobile CPUs were a complete after thought to them.
Nitpicking, but shouldn't it be 7458? The currently sold Powerbook chip (I looked it up) is the 7457B. The first PB G4 was 7410, and the second was 7451.
No, it's the 7448. See here (The "Future" section).
Probably. It was due in the market 3 months ago, and from all reports it's still in pre-production and only now showing up in engineering quantities because of a number of issues. Freescale's bread and butter is selling low power, 400 and 500 MHz chips to car manufacturers as on-board controllers. Apple isn't a big customer for them, and Apple's requirements have never been a big priority.
The 7448 (the model you're thinking of) will probably show up in the market at some point. But it will almost certainly suffer from Freescale/Motorola's modus operandi: very, very modest speed bumps for 2 or 3 years followed by a half-hearted enginneering push to redesign things yet again when they've fallen well behind the market. Hell, not getting a 2GHz chip out in the market until sometime towards the end of 2005 means their new chip is well behind Apple's competitors from the start.
Between that and IBM's disinterest in the low-power consumption laptop CPU space, it's no wonder Apple is moving to a different CPU supplier.
Especially in the case of Mini owners, this announcement changes nothing. Nobody was buying the Mini thinking they were getting cutting edge tech to begin with, so 3 - 4 years from now you'd undoubtedly have been looking to upgrade even if this announcement had never happened. And the Mini will certainly be supported by all releases happening in that time frame.
1.67 GHz with a 167 MHz bus aren't anything to write home about, and Freescale isn't looking to be speeding those things up in the foreseeable future.
Compared to Intel's portable offerings, the G4 is by far the "bottom of the barrel", and in the future that comparison is only looking to get uglier for Freescale.
BeOS's disadvantage was that, to make money selling just an OS, you need a hell of a lot more than walk in sales for a box copy at Best Buy. You absolutely need OEM licensing deals to ship your OS pre-installed on their computers. And MS made damn sure that those deals were impossible for Be to obtain.
Apple isn't pining its future on OEMs being willing to get fucked in the ass by Microsoft in return for licensing their OS, so it's a totally different situation.
Acutally, I'd give good odds Apple intentionally leaked it.
The developers would have shit a brick if he'd come out of nowhere with this halfway through the keynote. On the other hand, if the come in nervous and having heard not just rumors, but reports from credible news organizations (OK, maybe news.com isn't that, but the WSJ and NYT are) citing industry sources, they're at least psychological prepared for the possibility that this is going to happen. They've had some time to get over the initial shock of the idea.
And this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers.
No, this is bullshit. There's an extremely viable benefit to consumers: Apple will still be relevant in three years.
Why do you think Apple is doing this? It's not for shits and giggles. Those mobile G5s everyone's been waiting for, the one's that were going to save Apple's portable line from irrelevancy? It should be pretty obvious at this point that IBM has told Apple they aren't coming. Freescale dropped the ball, the G4 line is miles behind the times and Freescale lacks the ability to bring it up to date.
"Consumers don't benefit"? Bullshit. Consumers benefit because this is the only way Apple can keep their portables competitive. Laptops are the fastest growing segment of the market place, and Apple finally hitting 2Ghz with a G4 and its you've-got-to-be-shitting-me slow bus sometime next year wasn't going to cut it. Laptop sales fall, software makers lose interest, Apple fails, Apple's customers lose.
I'd rather they bet it all on a transition to keep the company relevant, rather than keep Freescale's incompetency and IBM's disinterest in laptop-suitable engineering as an anchor to hold them back in the market place until sheer inevitability kills the platform.
The PPC is a fantastic proc, but if IBM has come to Apple and said that they simply cannot deliver an efficient mobile PPC 970, given the way Freescale has totally dropped the ball on delivering a G4 with a clock and bus speed that belongs in this century, this would be the probable reaction by Apple.
Laptops are the fastest growing, most important segment to the company, and the iBook and PowerBook lines are both hurting for serious updates. The continued failure of these updates to appear suggests that their are serious issues preventing their appearance. If Apple's portable lines were projected to be stuck with the moribund G4 line for the foreseeable future, they'd react in the only way possible to ensure the continued relevance of their computers in their most important market; they'd switch to someone who could supply the mobile CPUs they need to survive, even if that meant some tough times in their immediate future.
"The IBM can't deliver a mobile G5" theory even explains the rumored roll out time line; the low-end minis and the portables will have fallen furthest behind the rest of the industry in another year or two if they're stuck with the G4, and be most desperately in need of an upgrade the soonest. The desktop G5s, thanks to the G5's excellent performance as a desktop CPU, will keep pace with the industry longer, and thus be in far less need of an upgrade than the heat- and power-constrained lines.
Slashdot Mirror
We're going in circles here. If the company hadn't accused him of an unrelated (and probably fictitous) crime, he never would have had to "lawyer up".
Let's start over: A whistle blower should not have to resign when they report illegal activity by their employer. That is the point of whistle blower laws. As long as he remains an employee, any retaliatory actions taken by the employer (firing him, usually, but also demotions and de facto demotions and the like) will be prosecuted by the state, rather than requiring him to spend his own money defending himself. Financially, it is to the whistleblowers benefit to not resign, as he continues to draw paychecks and gains the ability to have the state deal with punishing unfair treatment by the company, rather than having to do it out of his own pocket.
The only reason this is costing him a dime is because the company apparently decided to commit a second crime (filing a false police report) in retaliation; this requires him to retain his own lawyer to defend himself against the criminal charges involved, and could/would have happened even if he had resigned.
In summary: Saying he should have resigned is utterly asinine.
It might be a violation of the terms of service with their ISP, but I'm not sure it's illegal... In any case, if what he was doing turns out to be illegal then it really doesn't matter if he has the goods on the company or not.
Depends on which "what he was doing" you mean: if what the company is accusing him of doing were true, whistleblower laws would not protect him. But the charges they are leveling reek of retaliatory accusations with no substance. He is protected from that.
If the actions he took at the company's behest (ie, developing software to work around ISP blocks of their spyders) is illegal, whistleblower laws do protect him, provided he reports the illegal actions to the proper authorities when he becomes aware of their illegality.
s/now/not/
Why would he still have legal bills if HMS hadn't decided to trump up charges? He made criminal accusations; those are prosecuted by the state, now by him.
Whistle blower laws were enacted to encourage employees to bring to light nefarious and illegal activities being perpetrated by their employers without fear of retaliation. HMS appears to be trying to side step these laws by, rather than firing him for doing the ethical thing, falsely accusing him of crimes based on highly flimsy evidence in an attempt to ruin him financially long before the courts can sort the mess out and bitch slap them for breaking a number of laws.
I like pages a lot, but don't go into it expecting anything like your standard Office-esque word processor, because that isn't what it's intended to be. It's essentially a combination simple word processor and page layout program, and using it is much more akin to a sort of visual version of the experience of writing your document in LaTeX.
Localization applies to documentation and other human readable stuff, because it involves adapting the program and it's documentation for a particular locale.
Internationalization is the process of adapting your program so that it can easily be made to work in any locale. Not hardcoding strings in english, not assuming 1 byte == 1 char, that kind of thing. A good i18n architecture makes localization much easier.
But the more important question is: if it lacks a feature, will you roll your own? What's the closest equivalent to iTunes for linux? Rhythmbox? That's like comparing an intercontinental jet to a crop duster, and yet no one seems to be rolling their own solutions to Rhythmbox's ugliness, and lack of features.
And that's an iLife app that even has something that tries to be equivalent. Nobody out there is rolling their own GarageBand, because, lets face it, apps that complex and high quality take expertise and time, which cost money.
Zawinski's flames against the X11 window system have not helped the platform. Let him live with XCode, Objective-C, and Quartz for a while...
"He complains to much about bologna sandwiches and spam. I condemn him to eating fine French cuisine".
"Tying" is only illegal if you're a monopoly in the market.
Why use the app dir when you could simply offer two downloads, one for OS X (a Mach-O Universal binary), and a PEF executable if you're still trying to target old OS 9 users?
At any rate, this is all irrelevant. You seem to change how you're using terms any time you're accused of not knowing what you're talking about. I was responding to your claim:
To get a Carbon app to work as a universal binary you'll have to wrap it inside at least a minimal Cocoa shell, so you can't make an app that'll just automatically run on OS 9 and OS X any more.
Which is totally incorrect. A Carbon app will work perfectly fine as a Universal Binary without writing a "Cocoa shell".
To get a Carbon app to work as a universal binary you'll have to wrap it inside at least a minimal Cocoa shell, so you can't make an app that'll just automatically run on OS 9 and OS X any more.
Cite? I see that no where in Apple's Universal Binary Programming Guide, so post a link or quit making shit up.
Set it up on your desk blowing towards you for the full "Wind in your hair, bugs in your teeth" experience.
It's because the moderators here suck.
- What?
I SAID, "NICE CASE!"
- WHAT??
Oh forget it.
- WHAT?!
Worst. Idea. Ever.
Considering it asks during the install whether he would like to manage his music folder or let iTunes do it for him, and the default is to leave it to the user to manage it.
Heh, and I told my dad to sell his Freescale stock over the Apple switch. :D
No, seriously, Apple is a tiny fraction of Freescale's sales base. They're a global leader for automotive CPUs, embedded micro controllers, and communications processors (like cellular base stations). Desktop and Mobile CPUs were a complete after thought to them.
Nitpicking, but shouldn't it be 7458? The currently sold Powerbook chip (I looked it up) is the 7457B. The first PB G4 was 7410, and the second was 7451.
No, it's the 7448. See here (The "Future" section).
Is Freescale just bullshitting us?
Probably. It was due in the market 3 months ago, and from all reports it's still in pre-production and only now showing up in engineering quantities because of a number of issues. Freescale's bread and butter is selling low power, 400 and 500 MHz chips to car manufacturers as on-board controllers. Apple isn't a big customer for them, and Apple's requirements have never been a big priority.
The 7448 (the model you're thinking of) will probably show up in the market at some point. But it will almost certainly suffer from Freescale/Motorola's modus operandi: very, very modest speed bumps for 2 or 3 years followed by a half-hearted enginneering push to redesign things yet again when they've fallen well behind the market. Hell, not getting a 2GHz chip out in the market until sometime towards the end of 2005 means their new chip is well behind Apple's competitors from the start.
Between that and IBM's disinterest in the low-power consumption laptop CPU space, it's no wonder Apple is moving to a different CPU supplier.
It'll be fine.
Especially in the case of Mini owners, this announcement changes nothing. Nobody was buying the Mini thinking they were getting cutting edge tech to begin with, so 3 - 4 years from now you'd undoubtedly have been looking to upgrade even if this announcement had never happened. And the Mini will certainly be supported by all releases happening in that time frame.
1.67 GHz with a 167 MHz bus aren't anything to write home about, and Freescale isn't looking to be speeding those things up in the foreseeable future.
Compared to Intel's portable offerings, the G4 is by far the "bottom of the barrel", and in the future that comparison is only looking to get uglier for Freescale.
BeOS's disadvantage was that, to make money selling just an OS, you need a hell of a lot more than walk in sales for a box copy at Best Buy. You absolutely need OEM licensing deals to ship your OS pre-installed on their computers. And MS made damn sure that those deals were impossible for Be to obtain.
Apple isn't pining its future on OEMs being willing to get fucked in the ass by Microsoft in return for licensing their OS, so it's a totally different situation.
Acutally, I'd give good odds Apple intentionally leaked it.
The developers would have shit a brick if he'd come out of nowhere with this halfway through the keynote. On the other hand, if the come in nervous and having heard not just rumors, but reports from credible news organizations (OK, maybe news.com isn't that, but the WSJ and NYT are) citing industry sources, they're at least psychological prepared for the possibility that this is going to happen. They've had some time to get over the initial shock of the idea.
*cough*
And this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers.
No, this is bullshit. There's an extremely viable benefit to consumers: Apple will still be relevant in three years.
Why do you think Apple is doing this? It's not for shits and giggles. Those mobile G5s everyone's been waiting for, the one's that were going to save Apple's portable line from irrelevancy? It should be pretty obvious at this point that IBM has told Apple they aren't coming. Freescale dropped the ball, the G4 line is miles behind the times and Freescale lacks the ability to bring it up to date.
"Consumers don't benefit"? Bullshit. Consumers benefit because this is the only way Apple can keep their portables competitive. Laptops are the fastest growing segment of the market place, and Apple finally hitting 2Ghz with a G4 and its you've-got-to-be-shitting-me slow bus sometime next year wasn't going to cut it. Laptop sales fall, software makers lose interest, Apple fails, Apple's customers lose.
I'd rather they bet it all on a transition to keep the company relevant, rather than keep Freescale's incompetency and IBM's disinterest in laptop-suitable engineering as an anchor to hold them back in the market place until sheer inevitability kills the platform.
The PPC is a fantastic proc, but if IBM has come to Apple and said that they simply cannot deliver an efficient mobile PPC 970, given the way Freescale has totally dropped the ball on delivering a G4 with a clock and bus speed that belongs in this century, this would be the probable reaction by Apple.
Laptops are the fastest growing, most important segment to the company, and the iBook and PowerBook lines are both hurting for serious updates. The continued failure of these updates to appear suggests that their are serious issues preventing their appearance. If Apple's portable lines were projected to be stuck with the moribund G4 line for the foreseeable future, they'd react in the only way possible to ensure the continued relevance of their computers in their most important market; they'd switch to someone who could supply the mobile CPUs they need to survive, even if that meant some tough times in their immediate future.
"The IBM can't deliver a mobile G5" theory even explains the rumored roll out time line; the low-end minis and the portables will have fallen furthest behind the rest of the industry in another year or two if they're stuck with the G4, and be most desperately in need of an upgrade the soonest. The desktop G5s, thanks to the G5's excellent performance as a desktop CPU, will keep pace with the industry longer, and thus be in far less need of an upgrade than the heat- and power-constrained lines.