Frankly, flash / shockwave totally sucks on OS X. Its a CPU hog which affects battery, when I run any flash CPU spikes to 100%.
I'm not a "real" programmer, but it seems to me that effect might be related to how OSX on PowerPC also spikes when you hold the mouse button down. I think flash must monopolize the event loop in some similar way, which makes OSX (on PPC) barf while Windows doesn't as bad. If OSX on iPhone works in a similar way, that effect would indeed be a fatal flaw.
I do think it might be overly disingenious on Jobs' part to blame Adobe 100%, but anything that gets rid of these damned flash movies is OK in my book.
Unfortunately, he only had about $700K in assets, so he's really repaying about 2% of it. The rest went up his nose or something.
You may seize my assets, but you can't erase the memories of night after night spent with mountains of coke and all the hookers my Viagra-riddled knob can handle!
Maybe so, but in newspaper terms he's "below the fold". Obama/Hillary is "top story", and will remain that way until the Democratic nomination is decided.
Very true, but the way they're taking shots at each other, that press helps the Republicans. McCain will get back into the "above the fold coverage" pretty soon, once the Obama/Hillary debacle sorts itself out.
My girlfriend at the time gave me crap because some group of them (I'm assuming it was The Council of the Wise) decided that Hispanic reminded them of the Spanish conquest, and they preferred Latino.
Yeah, that's dumb, because all they're doing is going 1000 years and one conqueror further back to the Roman conquest of Spain.
Which I think is ridiculous, because when I say Hispanic, I mean a Spanish-speaker (which excludes Brazilians), and when I say Latino, I mean a Latin American (which excludes Spaniards).
OK, how about Iberian Western Hemispherians? That should cover North, Central, and South Americans whose genetic background includes Spain, Portugal, and even those crazy Andorrans and Basque separatists should they get up off their asses and found an Empire somewhere over here.
It isn't a matter of the media reporting badly about McCain. It is a matter of them simply overtly shutting him out of the news coverage altogether,
Right now, that's a good thing for him as Obama and Hillary murder each other. He's still getting press, as I'm still seeing his head on TV nearly every day. Somehow, I don't think he's at all disappointed with how this is shaping up.
in many states (maybe even all, by now?) when you get a speeding ticket, ANY cop can show up in court and be 'the accusor'. its fake, but our system is built on fakeness, many times;(
Interesting, I'd never heard that. I'd like to see it go to the Supreme Court, because I could see them having a problem with it.
Alternately, I'd ask the cop that does show up the same questions I'd ask the actual cop. "What was the angle of your car relative to the traveling vehicles?" "How much traffic was there?" etc. If the cop who shows up is comfortable answering "I don't know" for all his testimony, go for it.
its designed to GET you, not to give you FAIRNESS.
the old trick of changing your court date to try to lose the traffic cop in the shuffle does not work anymore. and so since that is 'broken' I see no reason why our 'justice' system isn't also similarly broken, to their advantage.
The old 'changing your court date' trick wasn't about fairness either, rather a loophole around the justice system. I don't agree with the method they've chosen to use - I'd have simply worked with judges to be a lot more harsh on changing court dates, and working them to ensure the traffic cop is there.
Remember when it started getting around that people were beating DUI charges by requesting the source code of the machine? If that was reasonable, this is a slam-dunk. The basic right to confront your accuser is one of the most important of the rights we have. If the defendant doesn't have the right to attack the evidence presented against him, he is effectively denied due process.
I don't. The reason is so blindingly obvious, it takes a superb amount of fanboyism to ignore:
Apple released a non-3G iPhone, to ensure that everyone who buys the first iPhone for $500, will buy the iPhone3G for $500, a year later.
I think the reasons were a little more complicated. While I fully agree that Apple likes to ensure that their fans purchase the same thing many, many times, I don't think that's what happened here. I honestly think they would have gone with a better network initially if they could, but that they couldn't get a provider with 3G support and willing to cave to all their demands initially. What you're suggesting is that Apple intentionally crippled a product that, if we recall from a year ago, was given a real chance of being the next Newton. I think making a phone was sufficiently important to Jobs that he wasn't going to dick around intentionally crippling it.
We saw what he did instead - charge early adopters a tax for the privilege.
Software development can be far lower than in other industries - after all, one person and a computer can do it. So the legal fees to research whether a line of code infringes on a patent are far greater in terms of proportion, compared to some multi-million pound drug company or manufacturing company.
True. But for that reason you have be able to document that you were doing something. It's not enough to just say "hey, I did that in 1995." You have to have proof. I also think there should be a statute of limitations (or a shorter one) on infringement. That's also why I think the patent term for software should be shorter and the applications expidited - the life cycle is very short.
Software seems to be more likely to be built on previous innovations.
As someone trained in chemistry, I can tell you that drug discovery is probably even more likely to be built on previous inventions. It's all based on peer-reviewed academic literature. Nobody's working in a vacuum, but that's the idea - building upon the work that came before.
Software algorithms are a subset of mathematics. It's not clear how the line is drawn between an algorithm, and any mathematical process, nor is it clear why mathematical knowledge should be seen as an "invention" than can be owned by a person or corporation.
That's true...but the fact that algorithms are an application of math holds in the same way that machines are an application of physics. You aren't "owning" math by developing a novel algorithm any more than you are owning physics by building something based on gears. As such, you aren't getting a patent the mathematical knowledge, but the *specfic* application of it. And I have no problem with that...again, assuming that the "nonobvious" part comes back.
The problem isn't software patents. The problem is actually business model patents masquerading as software patents. Another issue is that patent length is standard across industries, when it should vary based on the timescale of innovation. Seven years in software is an epoch; the same for pharmaceuticals would be about a third of the amount of time spent developing a drug.
But the mechanism by which one implements his invention shouldn't matter. The fact that the bar is too low is an entirely separate problem.
he failure of our government to (re-)introduce a $1000 bill, in spite of massive inflation, is a deliberate scheme to make it impractical for us to use untraceable funds for any substantial purchase. And it has nothing to do with tracking terrorists or drug money, it's just to keep tabs on and control over the law abiding populous.
It might also have something to do with the fact that most people aren't crazy enough to walk around with thousands of dollars on them. In the end, it wouldn't matter, because any transaction of $10,000 or more with a bank will get reported anyway.
Besides, a suitcase full of stacks of $100 bills has more class.
you need to do something valuable to justify you being a bunch of dicks
Right, that's what it all hinges on. I'm betting - and I think the subtext of his message supports the notion - that their method of offering something valuable is to buy somebody else who's currently doing something valuable, locking it up, and probably crippling it. Like if Google didn't own YouTube, one of those clowns could buy it and try to make it an "exclusive". That's not value, that's still being dicks.
Now if they want to actually offer something new that people would want, that would make me see things differently. But I'm betting their thinking is more along the lines of Verizon's craptastic V-cast junk.
..."dickiness pisses them off so much they use there massive internal network, budget, and technical expertise to just cut you out of the picture."
But that still makes me wonder why it wouldn't just be easier to just stop being dicks in the first place. But that concept seems completely alien to these guys.
I think that he is referring to long term and big sites. Honestly it's not too unreasonable. If Comcast is fucking me up the ass and I can get my internet from Google why wouldn't I?
The problem with that thinking is that his proposed *solution* is what's causing the problem in the first place, pretty much exactly as you lay it out. If the carriers stop screwing people, Google wouldn't have anything better to offer as a carrier. The message should be "if you don't stop being a bunch of dicks, someone will step in and kill you." McNealy's message, on the other hand, is basically "Since people want to get away from you because you're a bunch of dicks, you could become even bigger dicks, get a monopoly on all the media, and give people no recource but to do business with you."
Which seems like better business - make people want to use your service, or try to get a monopoly so people have to use your service? Problem with the second choice is that 1) only one company can "win", and 2) people don't want canned content anymore, so you can't win at that anyway.
It's not so much that. It's that they developed their instincts (now permanently crystallized in their aging minds) in a different world than you did. If you want to know what I mean, take your 60 year old aunt to the grocery store, pick up the first brand name product you find, and listen to her rattle on about how that's ridiculously overpriced, and this one is much better quality and costs half as much and blah blah blah blah. Her 'bullshit detector' is calibrated for a different set of situations than yours.
Eh....except chain letters have been around for centuries. These are the same things that people flooded the office copier with 20 years ago. I don't think this one's an era thing. And in most cases, the email forwards I get aren't from here aren't tech related stuff; it's urban legends (like the one about Target turning their back on military families because it's a French coropration). Things like that are a fair test of anyone's bullshit detector. Sophisticated phishes I could understand, but we're talking about old-school social engineering.
But I doubt you even bother to compare ingredients and price for more than the two major competing brands at the supermarket.
Oh, but I do.;) Not only do I check ingredients, I know what most of the ingredients are, and routinely do head math to determine what quantity is the best unit cost. Which would bolster my general point, that people with good bullshit detectors apply them anywhere they have a fair amount of understanding.
They didn't grow up with the kinds of con artists and scams we deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Oh hell, we don't even live in the golden age of con artists. Consumer protection is better now than ever. Go check out the patent medicine era. There have been con artists since the beginning of organized civilization. I shouldn't have to remind you of PT Barnum's classic line...and he wasn't talking about the current times.
Software's just an implementation like anything else - gears, pulleys, etc. The more our economy and innovation tends toward information-based research, the more patents *should* be novel algorithms and such. That has nothing at all to do with the quality of the software patents now being approved, but it doesn't mean that an invention that is implemented in software is inherently bad.
The business method patents...I'm not willing to say they're all inherently bad, but the bar is retarded low for getting one.
The real problem is the diverse nature of laws between different countries and the strong enforcement in some places and near zero enforcement elsewhere.
From a defensive perspective, the problem is that most people are really bad at recognizing phishes, hoaxes, scams, and the like. At this point, 100% of the email forwards I get from my 60 year old aunt have been debunked. Most people just lack that "this is bullshit" detector.
There are some exceptions, of course, like apache, and linux is obviously successful in the server market. However, the notion that any commercial products are having a hard time "competing with free" is bass ackwards.
You just named two. To the list of "free beats for-pay", add web browsers, news content, and a whole lot more. When I said free, I meant free as in beer. And yes, there's been a lot of complaining in recent years from quite a few companies whose commercial offerings are undercut by competitors who figure out how to make money off of free (of cost) offerings.
Same old rubbish. Companies have been giving away free gifts and vouchers for free gifts for years, tacking on "on the internet" doesn't make it a new invention in anyway shape or form.
Thank you for saving me the effort of posting that exact comment.;) Seriously though, what part of doing business as usual but adding "on the internet" passes the "nonobvious" threshold required? And shouldn't "business method" patents require a far higher standard of "nonobvious" than actual implementations and technologies?
And that is the problem, circumstantial evidence should not be enough to convict. And no, the defense doesn't have to 'explain' the seat, nor does anyone need to answer 'who did it' to aquit him.
You've been watching too many crime shows. Before modern forensics, circumstantial evidence was all there was besides eyewitness testimony (which is notoriously unreliable), yet the criminal justice system functioned. At some point, the number of coincidences or stretched explanations necessary to overcome the 'reasonable doubt' barrier simply becomes too much. Reiser's behavior seems to be somewhere around that line.
And no, the defense doesn't have to 'explain' the seat.
You're right, as long as they don't mind a conviction. In the real world, they do.
nor does anyone need to answer 'who did it' to aquit him.
This kinda makes me wonder if NASA and other space agencies purposely over-estimate the useful lives of their spacecraft.
I think it's a testament to how difficult it is to estimate the challenges of space exploration. To me, keeping a vehicle operational on another planet we've never set foot on with no opportunity for maintenance sounds damn hard. Doing that for the first time, I imagine 90 days sounded like a stretch. The fact that they've done it for over 3 years to me is one of the great successes of space exploration.
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Erm, what? I'm on an older G5 right now running an older version of OS X (10.3) and the CPU use doesn't spike doing that.
My experience is G4, can't say anything about the G5.
Frankly, flash / shockwave totally sucks on OS X. Its a CPU hog which affects battery, when I run any flash CPU spikes to 100%.
I'm not a "real" programmer, but it seems to me that effect might be related to how OSX on PowerPC also spikes when you hold the mouse button down. I think flash must monopolize the event loop in some similar way, which makes OSX (on PPC) barf while Windows doesn't as bad. If OSX on iPhone works in a similar way, that effect would indeed be a fatal flaw.
I do think it might be overly disingenious on Jobs' part to blame Adobe 100%, but anything that gets rid of these damned flash movies is OK in my book.
Unfortunately, he only had about $700K in assets, so he's really repaying about 2% of it. The rest went up his nose or something.
You may seize my assets, but you can't erase the memories of night after night spent with mountains of coke and all the hookers my Viagra-riddled knob can handle!
Maybe so, but in newspaper terms he's "below the fold". Obama/Hillary is "top story", and will remain that way until the Democratic nomination is decided.
Very true, but the way they're taking shots at each other, that press helps the Republicans. McCain will get back into the "above the fold coverage" pretty soon, once the Obama/Hillary debacle sorts itself out.
My girlfriend at the time gave me crap because some group of them (I'm assuming it was The Council of the Wise) decided that Hispanic reminded them of the Spanish conquest, and they preferred Latino.
Yeah, that's dumb, because all they're doing is going 1000 years and one conqueror further back to the Roman conquest of Spain.
Which I think is ridiculous, because when I say Hispanic, I mean a Spanish-speaker (which excludes Brazilians), and when I say Latino, I mean a Latin American (which excludes Spaniards).
OK, how about Iberian Western Hemispherians? That should cover North, Central, and South Americans whose genetic background includes Spain, Portugal, and even those crazy Andorrans and Basque separatists should they get up off their asses and found an Empire somewhere over here.
It isn't a matter of the media reporting badly about McCain. It is a matter of them simply overtly shutting him out of the news coverage altogether,
Right now, that's a good thing for him as Obama and Hillary murder each other. He's still getting press, as I'm still seeing his head on TV nearly every day. Somehow, I don't think he's at all disappointed with how this is shaping up.
in many states (maybe even all, by now?) when you get a speeding ticket, ANY cop can show up in court and be 'the accusor'. its fake, but our system is built on fakeness, many times ;(
Interesting, I'd never heard that. I'd like to see it go to the Supreme Court, because I could see them having a problem with it.
Alternately, I'd ask the cop that does show up the same questions I'd ask the actual cop. "What was the angle of your car relative to the traveling vehicles?" "How much traffic was there?" etc. If the cop who shows up is comfortable answering "I don't know" for all his testimony, go for it.
its designed to GET you, not to give you FAIRNESS. the old trick of changing your court date to try to lose the traffic cop in the shuffle does not work anymore. and so since that is 'broken' I see no reason why our 'justice' system isn't also similarly broken, to their advantage.
The old 'changing your court date' trick wasn't about fairness either, rather a loophole around the justice system. I don't agree with the method they've chosen to use - I'd have simply worked with judges to be a lot more harsh on changing court dates, and working them to ensure the traffic cop is there.
Remember when it started getting around that people were beating DUI charges by requesting the source code of the machine? If that was reasonable, this is a slam-dunk. The basic right to confront your accuser is one of the most important of the rights we have. If the defendant doesn't have the right to attack the evidence presented against him, he is effectively denied due process.
It's your case, RIAA. Put up or shut up.
I don't. The reason is so blindingly obvious, it takes a superb amount of fanboyism to ignore:
Apple released a non-3G iPhone, to ensure that everyone who buys the first iPhone for $500, will buy the iPhone3G for $500, a year later.
I think the reasons were a little more complicated. While I fully agree that Apple likes to ensure that their fans purchase the same thing many, many times, I don't think that's what happened here. I honestly think they would have gone with a better network initially if they could, but that they couldn't get a provider with 3G support and willing to cave to all their demands initially. What you're suggesting is that Apple intentionally crippled a product that, if we recall from a year ago, was given a real chance of being the next Newton. I think making a phone was sufficiently important to Jobs that he wasn't going to dick around intentionally crippling it.
We saw what he did instead - charge early adopters a tax for the privilege.
Nice work on drawing attention to the original problems also...it's always amusing how much political types don't get it.
...Striesand!!!
Software development can be far lower than in other industries - after all, one person and a computer can do it. So the legal fees to research whether a line of code infringes on a patent are far greater in terms of proportion, compared to some multi-million pound drug company or manufacturing company.
True. But for that reason you have be able to document that you were doing something. It's not enough to just say "hey, I did that in 1995." You have to have proof. I also think there should be a statute of limitations (or a shorter one) on infringement. That's also why I think the patent term for software should be shorter and the applications expidited - the life cycle is very short.
Software seems to be more likely to be built on previous innovations.
As someone trained in chemistry, I can tell you that drug discovery is probably even more likely to be built on previous inventions. It's all based on peer-reviewed academic literature. Nobody's working in a vacuum, but that's the idea - building upon the work that came before.
Software algorithms are a subset of mathematics. It's not clear how the line is drawn between an algorithm, and any mathematical process, nor is it clear why mathematical knowledge should be seen as an "invention" than can be owned by a person or corporation.
That's true...but the fact that algorithms are an application of math holds in the same way that machines are an application of physics. You aren't "owning" math by developing a novel algorithm any more than you are owning physics by building something based on gears. As such, you aren't getting a patent the mathematical knowledge, but the *specfic* application of it. And I have no problem with that...again, assuming that the "nonobvious" part comes back.
The problem isn't software patents. The problem is actually business model patents masquerading as software patents. Another issue is that patent length is standard across industries, when it should vary based on the timescale of innovation. Seven years in software is an epoch; the same for pharmaceuticals would be about a third of the amount of time spent developing a drug.
But the mechanism by which one implements his invention shouldn't matter. The fact that the bar is too low is an entirely separate problem.
he failure of our government to (re-)introduce a $1000 bill, in spite of massive inflation, is a deliberate scheme to make it impractical for us to use untraceable funds for any substantial purchase. And it has nothing to do with tracking terrorists or drug money, it's just to keep tabs on and control over the law abiding populous.
It might also have something to do with the fact that most people aren't crazy enough to walk around with thousands of dollars on them. In the end, it wouldn't matter, because any transaction of $10,000 or more with a bank will get reported anyway.
Besides, a suitcase full of stacks of $100 bills has more class.
you need to do something valuable to justify you being a bunch of dicks
Right, that's what it all hinges on. I'm betting - and I think the subtext of his message supports the notion - that their method of offering something valuable is to buy somebody else who's currently doing something valuable, locking it up, and probably crippling it. Like if Google didn't own YouTube, one of those clowns could buy it and try to make it an "exclusive". That's not value, that's still being dicks.
Now if they want to actually offer something new that people would want, that would make me see things differently. But I'm betting their thinking is more along the lines of Verizon's craptastic V-cast junk.
But that still makes me wonder why it wouldn't just be easier to just stop being dicks in the first place. But that concept seems completely alien to these guys.
I think that he is referring to long term and big sites. Honestly it's not too unreasonable. If Comcast is fucking me up the ass and I can get my internet from Google why wouldn't I?
The problem with that thinking is that his proposed *solution* is what's causing the problem in the first place, pretty much exactly as you lay it out. If the carriers stop screwing people, Google wouldn't have anything better to offer as a carrier. The message should be "if you don't stop being a bunch of dicks, someone will step in and kill you." McNealy's message, on the other hand, is basically "Since people want to get away from you because you're a bunch of dicks, you could become even bigger dicks, get a monopoly on all the media, and give people no recource but to do business with you."
Which seems like better business - make people want to use your service, or try to get a monopoly so people have to use your service? Problem with the second choice is that 1) only one company can "win", and 2) people don't want canned content anymore, so you can't win at that anyway.
It's not so much that. It's that they developed their instincts (now permanently crystallized in their aging minds) in a different world than you did. If you want to know what I mean, take your 60 year old aunt to the grocery store, pick up the first brand name product you find, and listen to her rattle on about how that's ridiculously overpriced, and this one is much better quality and costs half as much and blah blah blah blah. Her 'bullshit detector' is calibrated for a different set of situations than yours.
Eh....except chain letters have been around for centuries. These are the same things that people flooded the office copier with 20 years ago. I don't think this one's an era thing. And in most cases, the email forwards I get aren't from here aren't tech related stuff; it's urban legends (like the one about Target turning their back on military families because it's a French coropration). Things like that are a fair test of anyone's bullshit detector. Sophisticated phishes I could understand, but we're talking about old-school social engineering.
But I doubt you even bother to compare ingredients and price for more than the two major competing brands at the supermarket.
Oh, but I do. ;) Not only do I check ingredients, I know what most of the ingredients are, and routinely do head math to determine what quantity is the best unit cost. Which would bolster my general point, that people with good bullshit detectors apply them anywhere they have a fair amount of understanding.
They didn't grow up with the kinds of con artists and scams we deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Oh hell, we don't even live in the golden age of con artists. Consumer protection is better now than ever. Go check out the patent medicine era. There have been con artists since the beginning of organized civilization. I shouldn't have to remind you of PT Barnum's classic line...and he wasn't talking about the current times.
Software patents are stupid.
Software's just an implementation like anything else - gears, pulleys, etc. The more our economy and innovation tends toward information-based research, the more patents *should* be novel algorithms and such. That has nothing at all to do with the quality of the software patents now being approved, but it doesn't mean that an invention that is implemented in software is inherently bad.
The business method patents...I'm not willing to say they're all inherently bad, but the bar is retarded low for getting one.
The real problem is the diverse nature of laws between different countries and the strong enforcement in some places and near zero enforcement elsewhere.
From a defensive perspective, the problem is that most people are really bad at recognizing phishes, hoaxes, scams, and the like. At this point, 100% of the email forwards I get from my 60 year old aunt have been debunked. Most people just lack that "this is bullshit" detector.
Local weather does not refute a global climate trend.
I'm pretty sure that freaking SUNSPOTS probably create global climate trends. You know, unless you have a few sunspots caged up in your backyard.
There are some exceptions, of course, like apache, and linux is obviously successful in the server market. However, the notion that any commercial products are having a hard time "competing with free" is bass ackwards.
You just named two. To the list of "free beats for-pay", add web browsers, news content, and a whole lot more. When I said free, I meant free as in beer. And yes, there's been a lot of complaining in recent years from quite a few companies whose commercial offerings are undercut by competitors who figure out how to make money off of free (of cost) offerings.
Just another has-been who can't compete with free.
However in the same real world, old style 'criminal justice' worked because people don't argue with a lynch mob.
It also worked because for the vast majority of crime, people who act guilty are guilty.
Same old rubbish. Companies have been giving away free gifts and vouchers for free gifts for years, tacking on "on the internet" doesn't make it a new invention in anyway shape or form.
Thank you for saving me the effort of posting that exact comment. ;) Seriously though, what part of doing business as usual but adding "on the internet" passes the "nonobvious" threshold required? And shouldn't "business method" patents require a far higher standard of "nonobvious" than actual implementations and technologies?
And that is the problem, circumstantial evidence should not be enough to convict. And no, the defense doesn't have to 'explain' the seat, nor does anyone need to answer 'who did it' to aquit him.
You've been watching too many crime shows. Before modern forensics, circumstantial evidence was all there was besides eyewitness testimony (which is notoriously unreliable), yet the criminal justice system functioned. At some point, the number of coincidences or stretched explanations necessary to overcome the 'reasonable doubt' barrier simply becomes too much. Reiser's behavior seems to be somewhere around that line.
And no, the defense doesn't have to 'explain' the seat.
You're right, as long as they don't mind a conviction. In the real world, they do.
nor does anyone need to answer 'who did it' to aquit him.
No, but it sure would make it easier.
This kinda makes me wonder if NASA and other space agencies purposely over-estimate the useful lives of their spacecraft.
I think it's a testament to how difficult it is to estimate the challenges of space exploration. To me, keeping a vehicle operational on another planet we've never set foot on with no opportunity for maintenance sounds damn hard. Doing that for the first time, I imagine 90 days sounded like a stretch. The fact that they've done it for over 3 years to me is one of the great successes of space exploration.