That's nothing new. Unless you're a ghost, you have a corporeal form, and thus need to occupy space, and are subject to property tax every minute of the day, whether directly by property ownership or occupying public land, or indirectly by paying rent.
Your itinerary, if executed, would essentially turn all health insurance providers into tightly government-regulated clones of each other. Why not simply eliminate the middleman, and socialize health insurance?
Removing a precancerous mole from the skin of one's back is an "elective prodecure" as well. Your reasoning that "elective procedure" automatically excludes "health issue" is groundless.
There is a compelling reason to make elective abortion inexpensive for those who are desperate enough to need it: The women who are the least able to afford it are at the most risk of bearing a child that grows up to be a severe burden on society. In other words, by providing safe elective abortion, we reduce the burden on all of us.
There is no such motivation for a "boob job", and your willingness to conflate an abortion with a "boob job" is execrable.
Now, if you want to go off on a misogynistic tangent about the "rights" of an unborn fetus, feel free. But that tangent is not a cover for the argument you just made.
Seriously, you make a good point, but you've deliberately tarnished it by expressing a smarmy - some would call it unnatural - preference for attention from "fanbois".
You forgot "Apple is a FOR PROFIT company!! That means they HATE YOU, and all they want is to STEAL YOUR MONEY!!1!"
As well as "Apple is just a bunch of commodity parts inside a fashionable case! Foxconn sells some cut-rate motherboards, therefore Apple motherboards are cut-rate!!1!"
And "Apple preventing Palm from piggybacking on iTunes is totally monopolistic and anti-competitive and EVIL!!1!"
Not to mention "Apple has an approval process for iPhone apps, and they've rejected some apps, which means they HATE ALL DEVELOPERS and want to limit your GOD-GIVEN INALIENABLE HUMAN RIGHT to do ANYTHING YOU WANT with your phone and have it still be under warranty!!1!"
Oh yeah and "Apple STOLE the GUI from Xerox!!1!", can't forgot that one...
We should stop putting value on the work of those who make money from money, from paper instruments, rather we should value money for goods.
Easier said than done. If you do, people stop giving loans, which is the most straightforward way of making money from money. That means no new small businesses, no student loans, no mortgages.
Actually I don't see a major reduction in lending as a problem AT ALL. In fact I see the overabundance of willing lenders to be the very thing that is thinning the "middle class" down into the "lower class", and preventing them from getting a leg up.
Remember when parents saved up something known as a "college fund" for their children, over the course of twenty years or so? Well, now children whose parents weren't that smart have the "freedom" to take on a back-breaking loans as a substitute for that. Who is bankrolling those loans?
Remember when people saved up big hunks of money and then purchased land or homes outright? No, I don't either. Those days were long gone a hundred years ago. But here in California where I live, if you want to buy property anywhere near where you work, you either need to be a member of the upper class with almost a million dollars cash, or you need to take on a mortgage that will claim HALF your income as interest for thirty years - effectively turning you into an indentured servant of bank shareholders for almost your entire adult working life. Your only way out is to spread the debt amongst your friends by living together; spread the debt out and down in other words.
Personally, I think the American Dream turned into a myth shortly after credit cards became common. Instead of accumulating cash for which the bank PAID YOU, people now accumulate debt for which they PAY THE BANK. Writ large - across the entire nation, and up into the federal government itself - this mechanism is all it takes to turn capitalism into a brick wall separating an upper class from a lower class.
Fuck moneylenders and fuck their supposed vitality. Banks should lend to generate wealth, not to generate debt. If they need to be split up into tiny entities capped at 1 billion total assets for this purpose or something equally bizarre, then I'm all for it. Too big to fail means too damn big.
So how is this any different from what we have today?
I mean, say Android is deployed on every smartphone in the world that isn't an iPhone. Some are large and fragile, some are gold-plated, some with touchscreens, some without, some with keyboards, et cetera et cetera. To do this, every manufacturer and carrier needs to write custom firmware, apps, and UI elements to work with their handsets, on top of Android,... so let's just say they did, and they work just fine, and here we are.
How does that in any way constitute a threat to the iPhone?
Here's another scenario: Let's take every computer in the world, from the toughest HP rig to the crappiest mini-ATX, and make them all run the same OS. Let's call this rival OS something suitably generic, like, "windows". By sheer numbers alone, it will totally crush Apple and their puny OS X! Except not.
What magic sauce does Android promise that will counteract the crushing weight of a zillion competing handsets and their chump code monkeys clamoring to distinguish themselves with blingy but utterly unusable interfaces?
Welcome to the fold! Glad to see another LAMP dev who appreciates OS X!
I know cheerful tips-of-the-hat are not customary around here. Slashdot's mod system makes them "unprofitable", so nobody makes the effort. But I'm bucking the trend. Hah! I do, though, have a question for you, something that's been on my mind.
I too grew up from Windows 3.1 all the way through XP. Since I moved to OS X around 2002, my attention shifted from Windows to OS X. I've not been paying attention to Vista, or to Windows 7.
The last seven years of using OS X have seemed to me like a natural progression of OS software, because as OS X bootstrapped itself up into feature completeness, it added most of the things I thought were missing from XP.
My question is this: Why is Windows Vista/7 as bad as you describe? To put the question broader, what HAPPENED to Microsoft in the last ten years that made them so systematically, repeatedly bad at OS design? Where is their usable window manager? Where is their efficient built-in search and backup mechanism? Why is their control panel an absolute nightmare? After TEN YEARS?
With all due respect, your statistic does not support your claim. "R&D to sales" is a measure of the effectiveness of a company's effort to convert R&D into sales. If that ratio is low, all the better. You originally claimed that "Apple's R&D investment is far below industry average". That claim has been refuted in the grandparent to this post. Now you want to divorce the "R" from the "D" to complain that Apple doesn't publish papers or have its papers cited. That's an entirely different subject.
What's your point? If you want to argue that Apple is doing a disservice to the world of technology, you need a better yardstick than "papers published". Need I remind you that Apple basically invented the home computer, basically invented the PDA, and has recently completely re-energized the smartphone industry? Those accomplishments have had obvious penumbral effects.
Three years or so ago I would have been skeptical enough to agree with you, but nowadays Microsoft really needs their upgrade process to not suck, because if it sucks again, people will remain on XP for another three years.
At other OS companies, squads of test engineers maintain "DO NOT BREAK" lists. All during development, and especially before the revision ships, these engineers test builds of the OS to make sure that the new version DOES NOT BREAK a good variety of commonly used apps. If they find breakage, they respond in various ways, including contacting the developers of the application to help with a workaround or to help build a patched revision.
Assuming Microsoft does this - and they'd be insane if they didn't - then Windows 7 should not complain about iTunes.
The point is, TO END END USER it doesn't matter who the hell used proper APIs and who didn't. If they upgrade-in-place and their apps break, they are going to blame the upgrade.
Yes, it's a slick strategy. You're right: Apple doesn't compete in the commodity PC space. But why are you picking on your art department?
You say that people buy Macs because they are "chic, cool, and exclusive -- a luxury item", as if your fellow employees wanted them just to boost their egos. To say that, you need to deliberately ignore a very important fact, and what is probably the real reason your art department wants Mac hardware: Mac hardware runs OS X, and runs it well. Why not give your artists the benefit of the doubt?
I think a lot of apple's success has to do with the so-called RDF (don't stop fanboys, read on, I'll explain it).
Your "explanation" is nuts. You really think the iPhone was seen as superior because of marketing alone?
Smartphones had been around for years before the iPhone appeared, but the general public was not even aware of them. The height of interest in smartphone-like devices was with businessmen and their "Crackberries". The reason for this was that no one had yet come up with a smartphone experience - hardware and software - that didn't SUCK, and everyone knew it. Do you remember how bad it was, browsing the "web" on a smartphone from 2006? If you do you are the exception, because most people never could, or never bothered to try, or tried it once and hated it so much they vowed to avoid it as much as possible.
The hype surrounding the iPhone was big, yes. People had high expectations from Apple. What made the iPhone a success however was that those expectations were generally met or exceeded. They were met or exceeded by a device that did a lot of things quite differently than most phones had done in the past:
* The UI elements were relatively large, and uniformly rendered, and their behavior was tailored for small-screen use (ask yourself: Why is there not a single "radio button" anywhere in the iPhone's preferences? Because having all the options visible at the same time is a waste of space) * Navigation offered smooth visual feedback to communicate meaning (e.g. the screen "bounces" when you hit a scrolling limit, instead of stopping dead, therefore you know the device has received your command to scroll. Try and find this ANYWHERE on ANY smartphone before the iPhone.) * The web browser could render real-world content and offered a means of browsing it that retained the users' knowledge of the structure of the page and their location in it (pinch-to-zoom, animated zooming to blocks, smooth scrolling - this is more important than you think) * NO ONE had delivered multi-touch UI elements on a phone-sized device before (this doesn't just include pinch-to-zoom, but tracking the size and orientation of finger-marks. You can actually lean your thumb up or down to scroll a tiny amount)
Now I'll give them credit for using intuitive controls and whatnot, but using the iPod as an example, it is not simpler than other brand's MP3 players
Yes, you should give credit. And discard your earlier "explanation" for their success.
Actually the original iPod was "simpler" than other brands of MP3 players, in exactly the way you mean. It offered less functionality than most of them, and had less capacity than the largest of them. But what was simpler was the usage of the device. Primarily the scroll-wheel (which no other player had) and the painless sync ability for the masses of people in the world who did not like hand-crafting m3u playlists.
If it was a significant or majority behavior, you would have a point. But it isn't, and you don't.
Ooo, good one.
... to blame the community for actions that it does not condone by one of its members (or even a vanishingly small percentage of its members) is absurd.
That's the trouble. "Not condoning" something is not the same as "not accepting" it. In general, sexist behavior is accepted, because it's ignored. Patently moronic statements are left to fester unchallenged on message boards because, basically, no one - or almost no one - cares. More directly, overbearing socially maladapted twits will ping and pester a female code contributor PRIMARILY for reasons unrelated to the code she contributes. You clearly have no idea how incredibly frustrating that is.
And while you are thinking about a presentation featuring scantily clad females, watch some TV and notice that SEX SELLS. If you are presenting to a room (mostly) full of men, you have three sure fire ways to maintain their attention - booze, sports, and women. Booze is expensive, considering the audience, sports perhaps isn't all that surefire, so that leaves women. Okay, perhaps a better way would have been to have an engaging presentation with interesting content, but not all geeks are professional presenters. An admonition and a slap on the wrist is an appropriate response to such insensitive behavior (for a first offense), but assigning this to sexism (rather than red-blooded maleness and a small dose of ignorance) is disingenuous at best.
Yes, sex sells, and it gets attention, and dumbass presenters will leverage that to attract interest. But the advertising and sale of sex has obvious repercussions. Suppose your daughter's grade-school textbook was splashed with lurid snapshots of bimbos in lipstick, for the sake of "holding the attention" of her male classmates. Suppose she had to look at that shit every night, for an hour, as she did her homework. Would you just shrug your shoulders and say "well, men like boobies, that's the way it goes"?
Then why do you shrug your shoulders when that crap happens at work? I don't know where YOU work, but in my workplace, if a presenter scattered nude women into a slide show, internal or external, the presentation would be STOPPED COLD and the presenter would be reprimanded severely, and quite possibly fired that very day. And that's the way it should be. It would cause too much strife among our engineers to do otherwise.
Seriously... You state that this is not evidence of sexism... but "red-blooded maleness"? You have just jumped over your own personal shark.
Read the fable of the boy who cried wolf. That's what's happening here. The offended need to grow a thicker skin, try to resolve the issue privately with the offender, and then, as a last resort, go to the community (which, ironically, is the same community they are besmirching unfairly, which makes me think this isn't about fairness, but about some political agenda).
An issue like this should not have to be resolved privately with the offender. The offender should be shouted down by his peers for being a complete moron. There is no "political agenda" on tap here, Mr. "boy who cried wolf", this is a matter of common sense.
As evidenced here (on Slashdot - not the friendliest or most sympathetic community by any stretch), you will find sympathy for your cause, which shows that the problem is not endemic to the community as a whole, which is the whole argument I've been making from the start.
So the system is not broken because some people acknowledge the system is broken? What?
You're missing the point. The point was about how the community is perceived BY OUTSIDERS. In your analogy, it's like 10,000 people living in an apartment building, and 1 person putting a big banner across the front door saying "THIS IS A CHRISTIANS-ONLY FACILITY", without the objection of the other 9,999. What do you think passerby will conclude?
Just because the userbase here will descend like a pack of starving dogs on any article lampooning the latest Microsoft failure, doesn't mean that they will, or should, respond in the same inane, irresponsible way to news of an Apple screw-up. That you expect them to is a testament to the low standards of Slashdot and, perhaps, your own ulterior motives. This particular incident is a case of Apple accidentally offering an update that is of no commercial interest to them. All they get by offering it is a higher bill from their update hosting provider. And you want to compare this to Microsoft? The company that hands you Windows Media Player like it was a security patch, and hogties your system with so much DRM that you need a cabal of starving Russian crackers just to restore your fair use rights?
Slashdot Mirror
That's nothing new. Unless you're a ghost, you have a corporeal form, and thus need to occupy space, and are subject to property tax every minute of the day, whether directly by property ownership or occupying public land, or indirectly by paying rent.
Your itinerary, if executed, would essentially turn all health insurance providers into tightly government-regulated clones of each other.
Why not simply eliminate the middleman, and socialize health insurance?
Removing a precancerous mole from the skin of one's back is an "elective prodecure" as well. Your reasoning that "elective procedure" automatically excludes "health issue" is groundless.
There is a compelling reason to make elective abortion inexpensive for those who are desperate enough to need it: The women who are the least able to afford it are at the most risk of bearing a child that grows up to be a severe burden on society. In other words, by providing safe elective abortion, we reduce the burden on all of us.
There is no such motivation for a "boob job", and your willingness to conflate an abortion with a "boob job" is execrable.
Now, if you want to go off on a misogynistic tangent about the "rights" of an unborn fetus, feel free. But that tangent is not a cover for the argument you just made.
I bet you loathe all those wheelchair ramps in front of restaurants.
Ok, if you insist. ...
Seriously, you make a good point, but you've deliberately tarnished it by expressing a smarmy - some would call it unnatural - preference for attention from "fanbois".
Why do you seek them out?
How about Goldman Sachs?
"... allowing other people (most of who purchased your product legitimately) to use your product illegitimately. "
You forgot "Apple is a FOR PROFIT company!! That means they HATE YOU, and all they want is to STEAL YOUR MONEY!!1!"
As well as "Apple is just a bunch of commodity parts inside a fashionable case! Foxconn sells some cut-rate motherboards, therefore Apple motherboards are cut-rate!!1!"
And "Apple preventing Palm from piggybacking on iTunes is totally monopolistic and anti-competitive and EVIL!!1!"
Not to mention "Apple has an approval process for iPhone apps, and they've rejected some apps, which means they HATE ALL DEVELOPERS and want to limit your GOD-GIVEN INALIENABLE HUMAN RIGHT to do ANYTHING YOU WANT with your phone and have it still be under warranty!!1!"
Oh yeah and "Apple STOLE the GUI from Xerox!!1!", can't forgot that one...
We should stop putting value on the work of those who make money from money, from paper instruments, rather we should value money for goods.
Easier said than done. If you do, people stop giving loans, which is the most straightforward way of making money from money. That means no new small businesses, no student loans, no mortgages.
Actually I don't see a major reduction in lending as a problem AT ALL. In fact I see the overabundance of willing lenders to be the very thing that is thinning the "middle class" down into the "lower class", and preventing them from getting a leg up.
Remember when parents saved up something known as a "college fund" for their children, over the course of twenty years or so? Well, now children whose parents weren't that smart have the "freedom" to take on a back-breaking loans as a substitute for that. Who is bankrolling those loans?
Remember when people saved up big hunks of money and then purchased land or homes outright? No, I don't either. Those days were long gone a hundred years ago. But here in California where I live, if you want to buy property anywhere near where you work, you either need to be a member of the upper class with almost a million dollars cash, or you need to take on a mortgage that will claim HALF your income as interest for thirty years - effectively turning you into an indentured servant of bank shareholders for almost your entire adult working life. Your only way out is to spread the debt amongst your friends by living together; spread the debt out and down in other words.
Personally, I think the American Dream turned into a myth shortly after credit cards became common. Instead of accumulating cash for which the bank PAID YOU, people now accumulate debt for which they PAY THE BANK. Writ large - across the entire nation, and up into the federal government itself - this mechanism is all it takes to turn capitalism into a brick wall separating an upper class from a lower class.
Fuck moneylenders and fuck their supposed vitality. Banks should lend to generate wealth, not to generate debt. If they need to be split up into tiny entities capped at 1 billion total assets for this purpose or something equally bizarre, then I'm all for it. Too big to fail means too damn big.
Now get off my lawn you damn kids!
So how is this any different from what we have today?
I mean, say Android is deployed on every smartphone in the world that isn't an iPhone. Some are large and fragile, some are gold-plated, some with touchscreens, some without, some with keyboards, et cetera et cetera. To do this, every manufacturer and carrier needs to write custom firmware, apps, and UI elements to work with their handsets, on top of Android, ... so let's just say they did, and they work just fine, and here we are.
How does that in any way constitute a threat to the iPhone?
Here's another scenario: Let's take every computer in the world, from the toughest HP rig to the crappiest mini-ATX, and make them all run the same OS. Let's call this rival OS something suitably generic, like, "windows". By sheer numbers alone, it will totally crush Apple and their puny OS X! Except not.
What magic sauce does Android promise that will counteract the crushing weight of a zillion competing handsets and their chump code monkeys clamoring to distinguish themselves with blingy but utterly unusable interfaces?
I'd really like to know.
Then buy a PC and shut the bloody hell up about it already.
Welcome to the fold! Glad to see another LAMP dev who appreciates OS X!
I know cheerful tips-of-the-hat are not customary around here. Slashdot's mod system makes them "unprofitable", so nobody makes the effort. But I'm bucking the trend. Hah! I do, though, have a question for you, something that's been on my mind.
I too grew up from Windows 3.1 all the way through XP. Since I moved to OS X around 2002, my attention shifted from Windows to OS X. I've not been paying attention to Vista, or to Windows 7.
The last seven years of using OS X have seemed to me like a natural progression of OS software, because as OS X bootstrapped itself up into feature completeness, it added most of the things I thought were missing from XP.
My question is this: Why is Windows Vista/7 as bad as you describe? To put the question broader, what HAPPENED to Microsoft in the last ten years that made them so systematically, repeatedly bad at OS design? Where is their usable window manager? Where is their efficient built-in search and backup mechanism? Why is their control panel an absolute nightmare? After TEN YEARS?
With all due respect, your statistic does not support your claim. "R&D to sales" is a measure of the effectiveness of a company's effort to convert R&D into sales. If that ratio is low, all the better. You originally claimed that "Apple's R&D investment is far below industry average". That claim has been refuted in the grandparent to this post. Now you want to divorce the "R" from the "D" to complain that Apple doesn't publish papers or have its papers cited. That's an entirely different subject.
What's your point? If you want to argue that Apple is doing a disservice to the world of technology, you need a better yardstick than "papers published". Need I remind you that Apple basically invented the home computer, basically invented the PDA, and has recently completely re-energized the smartphone industry? Those accomplishments have had obvious penumbral effects.
Mod parent right the heck up. This is exactly what is rotten here.
This is like Les Paul suing Jack White because he didn't put in his "fair share" of research time on the electric guitar.
Three years or so ago I would have been skeptical enough to agree with you, but nowadays Microsoft really needs their upgrade process to not suck, because if it sucks again, people will remain on XP for another three years.
At other OS companies, squads of test engineers maintain "DO NOT BREAK" lists. All during development, and especially before the revision ships, these engineers test builds of the OS to make sure that the new version DOES NOT BREAK a good variety of commonly used apps. If they find breakage, they respond in various ways, including contacting the developers of the application to help with a workaround or to help build a patched revision.
Assuming Microsoft does this - and they'd be insane if they didn't - then Windows 7 should not complain about iTunes.
The point is, TO END END USER it doesn't matter who the hell used proper APIs and who didn't. If they upgrade-in-place and their apps break, they are going to blame the upgrade.
Yes, it's a slick strategy. You're right: Apple doesn't compete in the commodity PC space.
But why are you picking on your art department?
You say that people buy Macs because they are "chic, cool, and exclusive -- a luxury item", as if your fellow employees wanted them just to boost their egos. To say that, you need to deliberately ignore a very important fact, and what is probably the real reason your art department wants Mac hardware: Mac hardware runs OS X, and runs it well.
Why not give your artists the benefit of the doubt?
Given the form factors are the same dimensions,
That's your problem right there. A slide-out keyboard would make the device TWICE as thick, and significantly more fragile.
I think a lot of apple's success has to do with the so-called RDF (don't stop fanboys, read on, I'll explain it).
Your "explanation" is nuts. You really think the iPhone was seen as superior because of marketing alone?
Smartphones had been around for years before the iPhone appeared, but the general public was not even aware of them. The height of interest in smartphone-like devices was with businessmen and their "Crackberries". The reason for this was that no one had yet come up with a smartphone experience - hardware and software - that didn't SUCK, and everyone knew it. Do you remember how bad it was, browsing the "web" on a smartphone from 2006? If you do you are the exception, because most people never could, or never bothered to try, or tried it once and hated it so much they vowed to avoid it as much as possible.
The hype surrounding the iPhone was big, yes. People had high expectations from Apple. What made the iPhone a success however was that those expectations were generally met or exceeded. They were met or exceeded by a device that did a lot of things quite differently than most phones had done in the past:
* The UI elements were relatively large, and uniformly rendered, and their behavior was tailored for small-screen use (ask yourself: Why is there not a single "radio button" anywhere in the iPhone's preferences? Because having all the options visible at the same time is a waste of space)
* Navigation offered smooth visual feedback to communicate meaning (e.g. the screen "bounces" when you hit a scrolling limit, instead of stopping dead, therefore you know the device has received your command to scroll. Try and find this ANYWHERE on ANY smartphone before the iPhone.)
* The web browser could render real-world content and offered a means of browsing it that retained the users' knowledge of the structure of the page and their location in it (pinch-to-zoom, animated zooming to blocks, smooth scrolling - this is more important than you think)
* NO ONE had delivered multi-touch UI elements on a phone-sized device before (this doesn't just include pinch-to-zoom, but tracking the size and orientation of finger-marks. You can actually lean your thumb up or down to scroll a tiny amount)
Now I'll give them credit for using intuitive controls and whatnot, but using the iPod as an example, it is not simpler than other brand's MP3 players
Yes, you should give credit. And discard your earlier "explanation" for their success.
Actually the original iPod was "simpler" than other brands of MP3 players, in exactly the way you mean. It offered less functionality than most of them, and had less capacity than the largest of them. But what was simpler was the usage of the device. Primarily the scroll-wheel (which no other player had) and the painless sync ability for the masses of people in the world who did not like hand-crafting m3u playlists.
These are lenticular clouds. I saw a similar set five years ago in Alaska.
http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/alaska/pages-full/day_31/20040616-083000-more_morning_clouds.html
If it was a significant or majority behavior, you would have a point. But it isn't, and you don't.
Ooo, good one.
... to blame the community for actions that it does not condone by one of its members (or even a vanishingly small percentage of its members) is absurd.
That's the trouble. "Not condoning" something is not the same as "not accepting" it. In general, sexist behavior is accepted, because it's ignored. Patently moronic statements are left to fester unchallenged on message boards because, basically, no one - or almost no one - cares. More directly, overbearing socially maladapted twits will ping and pester a female code contributor PRIMARILY for reasons unrelated to the code she contributes. You clearly have no idea how incredibly frustrating that is.
And while you are thinking about a presentation featuring scantily clad females, watch some TV and notice that SEX SELLS. If you are presenting to a room (mostly) full of men, you have three sure fire ways to maintain their attention - booze, sports, and women. Booze is expensive, considering the audience, sports perhaps isn't all that surefire, so that leaves women. Okay, perhaps a better way would have been to have an engaging presentation with interesting content, but not all geeks are professional presenters. An admonition and a slap on the wrist is an appropriate response to such insensitive behavior (for a first offense), but assigning this to sexism (rather than red-blooded maleness and a small dose of ignorance) is disingenuous at best.
Yes, sex sells, and it gets attention, and dumbass presenters will leverage that to attract interest. But the advertising and sale of sex has obvious repercussions. Suppose your daughter's grade-school textbook was splashed with lurid snapshots of bimbos in lipstick, for the sake of "holding the attention" of her male classmates. Suppose she had to look at that shit every night, for an hour, as she did her homework. Would you just shrug your shoulders and say "well, men like boobies, that's the way it goes"?
Then why do you shrug your shoulders when that crap happens at work? I don't know where YOU work, but in my workplace, if a presenter scattered nude women into a slide show, internal or external, the presentation would be STOPPED COLD and the presenter would be reprimanded severely, and quite possibly fired that very day. And that's the way it should be. It would cause too much strife among our engineers to do otherwise.
Seriously... You state that this is not evidence of sexism ... but "red-blooded maleness"? You have just jumped over your own personal shark.
Read the fable of the boy who cried wolf. That's what's happening here. The offended need to grow a thicker skin, try to resolve the issue privately with the offender, and then, as a last resort, go to the community (which, ironically, is the same community they are besmirching unfairly, which makes me think this isn't about fairness, but about some political agenda).
An issue like this should not have to be resolved privately with the offender. The offender should be shouted down by his peers for being a complete moron. There is no "political agenda" on tap here, Mr. "boy who cried wolf", this is a matter of common sense.
As evidenced here (on Slashdot - not the friendliest or most sympathetic community by any stretch), you will find sympathy for your cause, which shows that the problem is not endemic to the community as a whole, which is the whole argument I've been making from the start.
So the system is not broken because some people acknowledge the system is broken? What?
You're missing the point. The point was about how the community is perceived BY OUTSIDERS.
In your analogy, it's like 10,000 people living in an apartment building, and 1 person putting a big banner across the front door saying "THIS IS A CHRISTIANS-ONLY FACILITY", without the objection of the other 9,999.
What do you think passerby will conclude?
Well, if you wait long enough, technology may provide you with a pink pony that can fly. ... well ... keep waiting.
The rest
Just because the userbase here will descend like a pack of starving dogs on any article lampooning the latest Microsoft failure, doesn't mean that they will, or should, respond in the same inane, irresponsible way to news of an Apple screw-up. That you expect them to is a testament to the low standards of Slashdot and, perhaps, your own ulterior motives. This particular incident is a case of Apple accidentally offering an update that is of no commercial interest to them. All they get by offering it is a higher bill from their update hosting provider. And you want to compare this to Microsoft? The company that hands you Windows Media Player like it was a security patch, and hogties your system with so much DRM that you need a cabal of starving Russian crackers just to restore your fair use rights?
Apparently you do.