Actually, the answers were of a higher quality than most I've seen them give.
McCain's response regarding the No Child Left Behind program was actually well in touch with the reasons why that program faltered. It was surprising, and more than I expected from him. However the solutions he endorsed, in his response and elsewhere in his policy, do not actually address the problems as he described them here. Obama's response to the same question was, by contrast, boilerplate about reform, including rhetoric about increasing the funding for schools and the pay grade for teachers. Neither point makes sense - we already toss quite a lot of money into schools, relative to other countries, and district performance varies WILDLY even among similar funding levels. The issue is just more complicated than a matter of funding.
On the other hand, I was greatly irritated at McCain's response to the question about women's health care. He was practically schizophrenic, talking about helping "challenged" women on the one hand, and then declaring that life begins at conception and all life is sacred on the other. He even trotted out that tired old pony of "partial-birth abortion". He also stood in OBVIOUS contrast to Obama, who described a holistic approach point-by-point and then made it quite clear that he would defend Roe vs. Wade and abortion rights in general. The candidates are markedly different here and your choice between them will have a serious impact.
They both also clearly differed on how seriously they took the idea of workplace discrimination and harassment, Also, Obama offered more detail on how he would create oversight for the bank bailout program, and McCain offered more detail on how he might implement VA reform. You can tell where their strengths lie - if not as character traits, then at least in terms of what they believe their voting bloc is. That information is actually of use.
Neither of them touched the prison population question with a ten-foot pole, which I found irritating. Neither of them wanted to get into the briar patch of drug law I assume. On the other hand, it was quite refreshing to hear an entire sequence of debate responses where neither candidate mentioned Iraq or terrorism.
Also, I find the complaints about the exclusivity of the debate a little disingenuous - they're mostly directed at the Democratic and Republican parties. What's up with that? The roster of participants was chosen by Walden University. Go harangue them.
"Beyond their arguably sleek design, the absolutely only reason any rational person would even consider a Macbook or Macbook Pro is OS X"
I see what you did there. "Aside from their hardware, the only advantage they have is their software." Such strong words!!
I'm typing this on a MacBook Air with a 120GB SSD drive and NVIDIA GPU. You honestly have no idea how solid this thing is until you've carried one around, (maybe drop-tested it from your porch, or hurled it onto the sidewalk a few times because you're on a hardware qualification team). The top half of the enclosure is made from a single milled aluminum block, like the new MacBook. It is the lightest, brightest, quietest, most solid laptop computer I have ever used.
And unless I'm compiling code or using Photoshop, the system is DEAD SILENT. (Remember the days before hard drives, when your computer was DEAD SILENT?)
Call me irrational if you like, but Lenovo's $2600 "elite" X301 with the inferior Intel GMA CPU is a Crackerjack box prize by comparison. Do yourself a favor and mosey into an Apple store and play with one of the new systems for a bit, before you decide that an extra 150 pixels of height is your make-or-break statistic. Knock a Macbook Pro off the table; see how it holds up. (The hard drive will park while it's falling). All that R&D they do really does make a difference.
Don't worry, you can do anything with USB that you could do with Firewire. Just make a partition on your Time Machine drive (you do have one, right?) of about 15 GB or so, and install OS X onto it. Next time you want to do any forensic work, just plug that drive in and boot to the partition.
Now if you don't have a Time Machine drive, for some crazy reason, but you do have a home network with some other machine on it, you can set up that other machine to host a netboot image and boot your Mac offa that... But that procedure is MUCH more complicated.
Or alternatively you could make yourself a boot DVD that uses a ramdisk as swapspace, and move your stuff around over ethernet... But once again, much more complicated. Might as well get a Time Machine drive.:D
How many shows have you been to, where the DJ or performer was controlling some external audio hardware with a plastic macbook? I don't know what your total will be, but mine for that is none.
How many shows have you been to, where the DJ or performer was controlling some external audio hardware with a macbook pro, or a TiBook? Again, I don't know what your total is, but mine for that is dozens.
Manufacturers like MOTU and Mobile I/O actually base the size of their product on the dimensions of the MacBook Pro, so these people can use the product as a laptop stand during shows.
Apple doesn't have to do any levering here. Musicians are style-obsessed enough to lever themselves into the "pro" bracket.
* I've got MBP 17" now. I like it. They are dropping that size.
No they're not.
* I don't like having to carry yet another kind of custom one-use rat tail to put my laptop on someone else's cheap VGA-style projector.
This hasn't changed.
* I do wish my MBP had heat sensors on the graphics system; the processor sensors are sometimes midrange while the graphics head is starting to exhibit heat-induced artifacts.
It does.
* I do wish they'd fix the runaway-syslogd problem in Leopard. I have read all the howtos and forum lists, nothing but a 15min cronjob to kill it is helping. * I do wish they'd fix the too-many-hd-resets problem in Leopard, if I leave the machine on overnight with little disk activity, my drive will reset itself to a state it won't spin up again. Everything RAM-resident runs, but more and more processes go zombie when the disk doesn't spin up.
Never experienced or seen either of these myself.
* I don't like the new "partial tapered" (their term) or "puffy" (my term) lid. * I don't like the black bezel inside the lid. Match the whole case. * I hate the fugly new keyboards that feel and look like IBM PCjr chicklet. * I don't care if it's magnetic or a button to pop the lid. * I don't care if there's a slot visible on the front.
Then screw you, jack. Go buy a Dell. Or better yet: Don't replace what you have, and donate a couple thousand bucks to a charity instead. You know what I don't like? Sugarless gum. And those new-fangled behind-the-head earphones. I also don't like tiny toy dogs. And open-toed shoes. And I hate vinyl records. And I hate it when the cat drinks from the toilet. Furthermore, I hate other people's personal preferences, and the way they spew them onto public forums like they have any qualitative value whatsoever.
Just out of curiosity, how would you feel working on a modern plasma HDTV? For example, this one? Assuming you slap a color calibration tool onto it and get a proper display profile, would you consider this good enough for your work? Or barring that, good enough to retouch a photo?
" The poor can still feed themselves and live in some sort of shelter, and as a result there isn't rampant crime or sick people dying in the streets"....
I once worked for an educational software and curriculum developer. One year we were tasked by the government to travel to the Tampa, Florida area and figure out how their school districts were generating such "adequate" students from such poor funding and conditions.
For as long as I live, I will never forget the tour I took of the slums there. Four or five entire families living in a single mobile home. The homes and trailers in rough patchworks spreading for miles along mud roads growing over with weeds. Haphazard plumbing and electricity. The schools were coping by merging with the community to pack three or four bi-lingual or Spanish-only "teachers" to a room, hired on for appallingly low salaries, training them on the job. A very dedicated and clever collection of master teachers kept the whole enterprise afloat. The kids spent a lot of their time in school because they literally had no where else to go; nowhere else to play. Unfortunately when they became working age they vanished from the system. Health care? Absolutely not. Savings? Little. Retirement plans? Zero. Recourse to the law or legal system? Very little. Mostly immigrants too isolated and poor to assimilate.
There is an America you see in your mind's eye and on suburban roads, and then there is the America you have absolutely no idea exists. When you say "our poverty in the US isn't as bad as...", your use of the word "our" is what's suspect. The poorest of the poor on American soil aren't even citizens here, and the barriers to gaining citizenship are too high for them. Their only hope is their children, and their children mostly drown off-grid in the slums. To this, I've heard people respond: "They don't count, they're not citizens."
That analogy is absolutely ridiculous. The rich man is not a goose who poops golden eggs and shares them out of kindness. The rich man's wealth is where everyone else's is: In the bar.
When ten men go to a bar, the first five clock in and start working. The next four buy their own drinks. And the tenth gets a free beer because he owns the place. If ANY of them stop going to the bar, the musical chairs just shuffle around, until there are too few people left to operate a bar. And then it closes. And no more rich man.
You talk as though the rich are the lynchpin of capitalism. They're not; they're a byproduct, and in many cases a sign of inefficiency or poor regulation. The middle class are the lynchpin of capitalism. And they have been slowly disappearing into WalMart, CostCo, and the military industrial complex for the last 25 years. Have you noticed that the steps are getting a bit narrow on your ivory tower?
"That's a bunch of crap. There is no such thing as irreparable damage to software."
What, you've never overclocked an [expletive] Pentium before? You've never seen a fumbled BIOS upgrade? You've never seen a hacker stomp all over encryption hashes in NVRAM as part of an "unlock" procedure and then whine that the manufacturers should have anticipated and magically prevented his own abject clumsiness?
"This is a clear example of monopoly tying, which is illegal."
You think you can read the law like you can read code fragments? The law doesn't work that way. The iPhone is a subsidized phone.
Tell that to guy who developed Trism... and dropped his app into the online store.
A process, by the way, that goes: Fill out two web forms, send an email, and then sit and wait for a hundred thousand dollars to arrive in your mailbox.
No * contract negotiations * cold-calling distributors * combat over shelf space * surrendering 85% of your profits to an umbrella company (I'm looking at you, EA) * ASTRONOMICAL fees for using an SDK or a TPM chip (I'm looking at you, Nintendo, Sony, et cetera).
You have no idea how unprecedented the ease-of-use is for a software developer, relative to the exposure. It's easier than putting a t-shirt up for sale on CafePress, and for end users seeking your product, it's even easier than that. The "buy" link is sitting in their hand or pocket, seconds away from the home screen, 16 hours a day.
Many thousands of developers have looked at these golden handcuffs and put their wrists out enthusiastically.
Here's a hypothetical question for you. What would you think about a contractual clause in an SDK that states that the company can ban your app from their app store if their internal judges declare that your app "just sucks"? Like, it crashes the OS, it deletes user information, it has a mangled and broken UI, it insults the user, it's overpriced and buggy, et cetera?
No excuses about competitiveness, or duplicate functionality, just a clause that goes, "if we think your app sucks, we will refuse to distribute it."
Of course it would be even more draconian than the examples of Apple's banning thus far. Even more unacceptable to developers. But probably closer to the level of control that Apple WISHES it could exert. (It would also, coincidentally, be very close to the licensing terms of the Nintendo Wii, which also stipulate that to receive the SDK you must be a fine upstanding citizen with a bricks-and-mortar business office and a measure of "financial stability". It reads like the criteria for an arranged marriage.)
It may be interesting to consider that this is basically the way book publishers operate. They retain a battery of editors, who make personal decisions about what the company will and won't set to paper. If they reject you, your options are: 1. Rewrite and 2. Leave. No one even thinks of complaining because no one publisher owns the distribution model for books. Does Apple own the distribution model for apps? No. Phone apps? No. iPhone apps? Yes. Depending on where and how you wish to make a profit, you could see their behavior as either totally acceptable, or totally insane.
If Apple exerted THAT kind of control, the first things to disappear would be those idiotic 99-cent "flashlight" apps. A pile of half-assed Labyrinth games would vanish. And a bunch of voice-note apps with awkward UI. Most offline-reader apps would be axed because of their excruciating sync processes. And anything that appears to be one of Apple's own developer examples with the resources swapped out. "I Am Rich" would have been banned before appearing. Et cetera. Of course, that level of control would also have a PROFOUNDLY depressing effect on developer participation, which is why their current terms aren't written that way.
A lot of the anger expressed here comes from people who are (or feel threatened of) being pushed out of what is, currently, the only way to extract a profit from writing an app for the iPhone. They not defending some hallowed ideology, they want an unchallenged slice of that fat money cake. You can still add your app to the Installer manifest and make it available to the many tens of thousands of users who jailbroke - a significant and refined audience - but the expectation there is that it's free. You'll need to make your ramen-money somewhere else. And I'll just bet that when some company declares itself a for-profit distributor for jailbroken apps, Apple will fire lawyers at it point-blank.
Anyway, hypotheticals aside, here's a point for you to consider. The clause about not duplicating pre-existing functionality has bitten a small-time developer in the ass just now. But that clause is probably in place to prevent the bigger players from hijacking Apple's platform. Suppose Microsoft writes a "Zune Jukebox" app for the iPhone, then markets the bejesus out of it. Or more likely, a superior Exchange client that businesses scramble to adopt. Or Internet Explorer for the iPhone. Forced to choose between giving customers "what they want" and losing grip on the reins of its own platform to a direct competitor, Apple would choose the lesser evil.
Opinions vary on whether this scenario is likely. Personally, I think it's very unlikely. Which is why I think the duplicate functionality clause should be axed.
"You're complaining about license validation, therefore you're a pirate! I hate pirates, grr!" Nice, uh, "counterpoint" there. The Catch-22 is not over piracy, it's that if all you have is wireless, you have to send your own license info in an insecure manner to get a wireless security patch.
"People are so beguiled they will do anything to defend Apple! Grr, the fanboys, grr!"
The original poster has it right... Slashdot editors are submitting inflammatory summaries in the Apple section, and people either flame in tune with them, or they offer corrections or say ho-hum and get labeled "fanboys". Surely you've noticed the pattern. I suspect it's the usual journalistic sensationalism to drive up page hits.
"Users Report Faulty WPA In 2nd-Gen IPod Touch" :... when connecting to certain Linksys routers. "Apple has failed to respond!"... post submitted to the front page before anyone even filed a bug report. Yawn-worthy.
"ITunes 8 a Real Killer App; Taking Down Vista" : Turns out it's a fault in Vista's USB driver, as unplugging your HP printer eliminates the problem. Percentage of people affected: Small. Non-news.
"iPhone Takes Screenshots of Everything You Do" : Yeah, saving a texture to disk of where you last were in an app before you hit the home button is, like, Everything You Do, and cause for panic. Utter non-news.
"Apple Losing Touchscreen War" : The actual six paragraph "article" is a content-free blurb about how Apple doesn't have dominance in the Asian market. Once again, non-news.
"AT&T Slaps Family With a $19,370 Cell Phone Bill" : WTF?
Et cetera. I've been employed as a Windows programmer, a Mac programmer, and an X-Windows programmer over the last 15 years, and browsed Slashdot for the last 10. I know a hack-job when I see one. Basically, we're being trolled by Slashdot's own article submitters. "Consider what you would be saying if this had happened with the Zune?" Remember the Zune 30? That didn't even support WPA2 at all. A firmware patch eventually "fixed" that. Meantime, was there a front-page Slashdotting? No. There's your answer.
I've also learned that people who complain about "fanboys" are like people who complain about "immigrants": Insecure about their own qualifications, and obsessed with the notion, "I was here first! Before it was cool!"
His point is that you have to connect to Microsoft and send them your licensing information in order to download a patch which THEN makes your connection secure. It's a Catch-22. By comparison, the iPod touch does not send anything vital anywhere when you connect, and when a firmware update is available, it will be downloaded via a separate device, and involve NO exchange of licensing information. Even if WPA2 was broken as well as WPA (which it isn't), this would still not be as bad.
Lest you forget, the poster was responding to the question: "As for your comparison with Microsoft, consider what you would be saying if this had happened with the Zune." His response? Forget the Zune. Windows ITSELF has had worse problems.
Also, ease up on the anti-fanboy hipster angle. People can discuss whatever they want here. And they have been discussing Windows security holes for a long, long, LONG time.
The only article I've seen is one where a (rather irritating) young woman received an iPhone bill with many pages.
Also, why would you expect Steve Jobs to do something about this? Do you expect Bill Gates to refund your money every time your identity is stolen via some Internet Explorer security hole?
That's a great scenario, except that Psystar is selling you that adaptation service on condition that you buy their hardware.... Which makes them a direct competitor in Apple's marketplace, which puts them in violation of the many patents that Apple has either been granted or bought their own license to use within OS X. And Apple _can_ exercise it's parent rights to dictate terms about how it's product can be employed within it's marketplace. So even if your attempt to slip free of copyright law by separating point-of-sale from point-of-service was viable (which I doubt), Psystar would still be tangled up in the briar patch of patent law and forbidden from selling you their PC.
Except Psystar is advertising this process as part of a service that comes bundled with THEIR hardware. Not something that they will do for "your" system. That's their whole point: Psystar is trying to turn a profit by advertising computers that will boot into OS X before you even take them out of the box. Their business model is in direct conflict with your interpretation of what is actually taking place. It is _not_ YOUR disc. It is the disc they are SELLING you as part of a PACKAGE, which also includes a hacked installation on a hard drive.
Add to this the method they use - installing an EFI emulator that they have no authorization to use for commercial purposes - and Psystar hasn't a leg to stand on. They're a business that has done no innovation, whose product breaks several license agreements and violates copyright law and countless patents, and who doesn't even have a stable home address. Why in the world are you defending their business model?
You're claiming that this law, about your rights vis-a-vis ownership of property, allows Psystar to install a derivative work FOR you, and then you're claiming in the same breath that the second part of the law doesn't apply to Psystar, because it supposedly doesn't apply to you, because you are supposedly already the owner of the equipment and software that Psystar is installing, therefore no "transfer" is taking place, even though Psystar hasn't even shipped either the software or the hardware to you yet. That's pretzel logic and won't stand up in court.
You've noticed too, eh? In the last 12 months, Apple has crossed some kind of invisible threshold, and now both the article headings and the commentary here have flipped 180 degrees and become almost entirely negative.
That's great for the hackintosh crowd. Kudos to them for extracting those hardware keys from the hardware and turning them into a software layer. But Psystar can't legally touch that code with a five-hundred-foot pole.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh huh. Well, it's certainly a question tailored to drive up mod ratings in Slashdot. But go ahead, ask that of a presidential candidate:
"Do you believe in legislating protections for failed business models, or do you believe the free market should determine success?"
Their answer?
"No, and yes. Next question."
Honestly, what sort of answer do you expect?
Actually, the answers were of a higher quality than most I've seen them give.
McCain's response regarding the No Child Left Behind program was actually well in touch with the reasons why that program faltered. It was surprising, and more than I expected from him. However the solutions he endorsed, in his response and elsewhere in his policy, do not actually address the problems as he described them here. Obama's response to the same question was, by contrast, boilerplate about reform, including rhetoric about increasing the funding for schools and the pay grade for teachers. Neither point makes sense - we already toss quite a lot of money into schools, relative to other countries, and district performance varies WILDLY even among similar funding levels. The issue is just more complicated than a matter of funding.
On the other hand, I was greatly irritated at McCain's response to the question about women's health care. He was practically schizophrenic, talking about helping "challenged" women on the one hand, and then declaring that life begins at conception and all life is sacred on the other. He even trotted out that tired old pony of "partial-birth abortion". He also stood in OBVIOUS contrast to Obama, who described a holistic approach point-by-point and then made it quite clear that he would defend Roe vs. Wade and abortion rights in general. The candidates are markedly different here and your choice between them will have a serious impact.
They both also clearly differed on how seriously they took the idea of workplace discrimination and harassment,
Also, Obama offered more detail on how he would create oversight for the bank bailout program, and McCain offered more detail on how he might implement VA reform. You can tell where their strengths lie - if not as character traits, then at least in terms of what they believe their voting bloc is. That information is actually of use.
Neither of them touched the prison population question with a ten-foot pole, which I found irritating. Neither of them wanted to get into the briar patch of drug law I assume. On the other hand, it was quite refreshing to hear an entire sequence of debate responses where neither candidate mentioned Iraq or terrorism.
Also, I find the complaints about the exclusivity of the debate a little disingenuous - they're mostly directed at the Democratic and Republican parties. What's up with that? The roster of participants was chosen by Walden University. Go harangue them.
"Beyond their arguably sleek design, the absolutely only reason any rational person would even consider a Macbook or Macbook Pro is OS X"
I see what you did there. "Aside from their hardware, the only advantage they have is their software." Such strong words!!
I'm typing this on a MacBook Air with a 120GB SSD drive and NVIDIA GPU. You honestly have no idea how solid this thing is until you've carried one around, (maybe drop-tested it from your porch, or hurled it onto the sidewalk a few times because you're on a hardware qualification team). The top half of the enclosure is made from a single milled aluminum block, like the new MacBook. It is the lightest, brightest, quietest, most solid laptop computer I have ever used.
And unless I'm compiling code or using Photoshop, the system is DEAD SILENT. (Remember the days before hard drives, when your computer was DEAD SILENT?)
Call me irrational if you like, but Lenovo's $2600 "elite" X301 with the inferior Intel GMA CPU is a Crackerjack box prize by comparison. Do yourself a favor and mosey into an Apple store and play with one of the new systems for a bit, before you decide that an extra 150 pixels of height is your make-or-break statistic. Knock a Macbook Pro off the table; see how it holds up. (The hard drive will park while it's falling). All that R&D they do really does make a difference.
Don't worry, you can do anything with USB that you could do with Firewire. Just make a partition on your Time Machine drive (you do have one, right?) of about 15 GB or so, and install OS X onto it. Next time you want to do any forensic work, just plug that drive in and boot to the partition.
Now if you don't have a Time Machine drive, for some crazy reason, but you do have a home network with some other machine on it, you can set up that other machine to host a netboot image and boot your Mac offa that... But that procedure is MUCH more complicated.
Or alternatively you could make yourself a boot DVD that uses a ramdisk as swapspace, and move your stuff around over ethernet... But once again, much more complicated. Might as well get a Time Machine drive. :D
How many shows have you been to, where the DJ or performer was controlling some external audio hardware with a plastic macbook? I don't know what your total will be, but mine for that is none.
How many shows have you been to, where the DJ or performer was controlling some external audio hardware with a macbook pro, or a TiBook? Again, I don't know what your total is, but mine for that is dozens.
Manufacturers like MOTU and Mobile I/O actually base the size of their product on the dimensions of the MacBook Pro, so these people can use the product as a laptop stand during shows.
Apple doesn't have to do any levering here. Musicians are style-obsessed enough to lever themselves into the "pro" bracket.
* I've got MBP 17" now. I like it. They are dropping that size.
No they're not.
* I don't like having to carry yet another kind of custom one-use rat tail to put my laptop on someone else's cheap VGA-style projector.
This hasn't changed.
* I do wish my MBP had heat sensors on the graphics system; the processor sensors are sometimes midrange while the graphics head is starting to exhibit heat-induced artifacts.
It does.
* I do wish they'd fix the runaway-syslogd problem in Leopard. I have read all the howtos and forum lists, nothing but a 15min cronjob to kill it is helping.
* I do wish they'd fix the too-many-hd-resets problem in Leopard, if I leave the machine on overnight with little disk activity, my drive will reset itself to a state it won't spin up again. Everything RAM-resident runs, but more and more processes go zombie when the disk doesn't spin up.
Never experienced or seen either of these myself.
* I don't like the new "partial tapered" (their term) or "puffy" (my term) lid.
* I don't like the black bezel inside the lid. Match the whole case.
* I hate the fugly new keyboards that feel and look like IBM PCjr chicklet.
* I don't care if it's magnetic or a button to pop the lid.
* I don't care if there's a slot visible on the front.
Then screw you, jack. Go buy a Dell. Or better yet: Don't replace what you have, and donate a couple thousand bucks to a charity instead.
You know what I don't like? Sugarless gum. And those new-fangled behind-the-head earphones. I also don't like tiny toy dogs. And open-toed shoes. And I hate vinyl records. And I hate it when the cat drinks from the toilet. Furthermore, I hate other people's personal preferences, and the way they spew them onto public forums like they have any qualitative value whatsoever.
Just out of curiosity, how would you feel working on a modern plasma HDTV? For example, this one? Assuming you slap a color calibration tool onto it and get a proper display profile, would you consider this good enough for your work? Or barring that, good enough to retouch a photo?
" The poor can still feed themselves and live in some sort of shelter, and as a result there isn't rampant crime or sick people dying in the streets" ....
I once worked for an educational software and curriculum developer. One year we were tasked by the government to travel to the Tampa, Florida area and figure out how their school districts were generating such "adequate" students from such poor funding and conditions.
For as long as I live, I will never forget the tour I took of the slums there. Four or five entire families living in a single mobile home. The homes and trailers in rough patchworks spreading for miles along mud roads growing over with weeds. Haphazard plumbing and electricity. The schools were coping by merging with the community to pack three or four bi-lingual or Spanish-only "teachers" to a room, hired on for appallingly low salaries, training them on the job. A very dedicated and clever collection of master teachers kept the whole enterprise afloat. The kids spent a lot of their time in school because they literally had no where else to go; nowhere else to play. Unfortunately when they became working age they vanished from the system. Health care? Absolutely not. Savings? Little. Retirement plans? Zero. Recourse to the law or legal system? Very little. Mostly immigrants too isolated and poor to assimilate.
There is an America you see in your mind's eye and on suburban roads, and then there is the America you have absolutely no idea exists. When you say "our poverty in the US isn't as bad as...", your use of the word "our" is what's suspect. The poorest of the poor on American soil aren't even citizens here, and the barriers to gaining citizenship are too high for them. Their only hope is their children, and their children mostly drown off-grid in the slums. To this, I've heard people respond: "They don't count, they're not citizens."
Sick.
That analogy is absolutely ridiculous. The rich man is not a goose who poops golden eggs and shares them out of kindness. The rich man's wealth is where everyone else's is: In the bar.
When ten men go to a bar, the first five clock in and start working. The next four buy their own drinks. And the tenth gets a free beer because he owns the place. If ANY of them stop going to the bar, the musical chairs just shuffle around, until there are too few people left to operate a bar. And then it closes. And no more rich man.
You talk as though the rich are the lynchpin of capitalism. They're not; they're a byproduct, and in many cases a sign of inefficiency or poor regulation. The middle class are the lynchpin of capitalism. And they have been slowly disappearing into WalMart, CostCo, and the military industrial complex for the last 25 years. Have you noticed that the steps are getting a bit narrow on your ivory tower?
This warrants a heading like "Tapping The iPhone"? Har har, Slashdot. Way to give those banner ads another 50,000 rotations.
They have. It's called jailbreaking. ;)
"That's a bunch of crap. There is no such thing as irreparable damage to software."
What, you've never overclocked an [expletive] Pentium before? You've never seen a fumbled BIOS upgrade? You've never seen a hacker stomp all over encryption hashes in NVRAM as part of an "unlock" procedure and then whine that the manufacturers should have anticipated and magically prevented his own abject clumsiness?
"This is a clear example of monopoly tying, which is illegal."
You think you can read the law like you can read code fragments? The law doesn't work that way. The iPhone is a subsidized phone.
Then what, do you suppose, was the rationale for Microsoft giving away Internet Explorer for free?
A waste of investment?
Tell that to guy who developed Trism ... and dropped his app into the online store.
A process, by the way, that goes: Fill out two web forms, send an email, and then sit and wait for a hundred thousand dollars to arrive in your mailbox.
No
* contract negotiations
* cold-calling distributors
* combat over shelf space
* surrendering 85% of your profits to an umbrella company (I'm looking at you, EA)
* ASTRONOMICAL fees for using an SDK or a TPM chip (I'm looking at you, Nintendo, Sony, et cetera).
You have no idea how unprecedented the ease-of-use is for a software developer, relative to the exposure. It's easier than putting a t-shirt up for sale on CafePress, and for end users seeking your product, it's even easier than that. The "buy" link is sitting in their hand or pocket, seconds away from the home screen, 16 hours a day.
Many thousands of developers have looked at these golden handcuffs and put their wrists out enthusiastically.
Here's a hypothetical question for you. What would you think about a contractual clause in an SDK that states that the company can ban your app from their app store if their internal judges declare that your app "just sucks"? Like, it crashes the OS, it deletes user information, it has a mangled and broken UI, it insults the user, it's overpriced and buggy, et cetera?
No excuses about competitiveness, or duplicate functionality, just a clause that goes, "if we think your app sucks, we will refuse to distribute it."
Of course it would be even more draconian than the examples of Apple's banning thus far. Even more unacceptable to developers. But probably closer to the level of control that Apple WISHES it could exert. (It would also, coincidentally, be very close to the licensing terms of the Nintendo Wii, which also stipulate that to receive the SDK you must be a fine upstanding citizen with a bricks-and-mortar business office and a measure of "financial stability". It reads like the criteria for an arranged marriage.)
It may be interesting to consider that this is basically the way book publishers operate. They retain a battery of editors, who make personal decisions about what the company will and won't set to paper. If they reject you, your options are: 1. Rewrite and 2. Leave. No one even thinks of complaining because no one publisher owns the distribution model for books. Does Apple own the distribution model for apps? No. Phone apps? No. iPhone apps? Yes. Depending on where and how you wish to make a profit, you could see their behavior as either totally acceptable, or totally insane.
If Apple exerted THAT kind of control, the first things to disappear would be those idiotic 99-cent "flashlight" apps. A pile of half-assed Labyrinth games would vanish. And a bunch of voice-note apps with awkward UI. Most offline-reader apps would be axed because of their excruciating sync processes. And anything that appears to be one of Apple's own developer examples with the resources swapped out. "I Am Rich" would have been banned before appearing. Et cetera. Of course, that level of control would also have a PROFOUNDLY depressing effect on developer participation, which is why their current terms aren't written that way.
A lot of the anger expressed here comes from people who are (or feel threatened of) being pushed out of what is, currently, the only way to extract a profit from writing an app for the iPhone. They not defending some hallowed ideology, they want an unchallenged slice of that fat money cake. You can still add your app to the Installer manifest and make it available to the many tens of thousands of users who jailbroke - a significant and refined audience - but the expectation there is that it's free. You'll need to make your ramen-money somewhere else. And I'll just bet that when some company declares itself a for-profit distributor for jailbroken apps, Apple will fire lawyers at it point-blank.
Anyway, hypotheticals aside, here's a point for you to consider. The clause about not duplicating pre-existing functionality has bitten a small-time developer in the ass just now. But that clause is probably in place to prevent the bigger players from hijacking Apple's platform. Suppose Microsoft writes a "Zune Jukebox" app for the iPhone, then markets the bejesus out of it. Or more likely, a superior Exchange client that businesses scramble to adopt. Or Internet Explorer for the iPhone. Forced to choose between giving customers "what they want" and losing grip on the reins of its own platform to a direct competitor, Apple would choose the lesser evil.
Opinions vary on whether this scenario is likely. Personally, I think it's very unlikely. Which is why I think the duplicate functionality clause should be axed.
"You're complaining about license validation, therefore you're a pirate! I hate pirates, grr!" Nice, uh, "counterpoint" there. The Catch-22 is not over piracy, it's that if all you have is wireless, you have to send your own license info in an insecure manner to get a wireless security patch.
"People are so beguiled they will do anything to defend Apple! Grr, the fanboys, grr!"
The original poster has it right... Slashdot editors are submitting inflammatory summaries in the Apple section, and people either flame in tune with them, or they offer corrections or say ho-hum and get labeled "fanboys". Surely you've noticed the pattern. I suspect it's the usual journalistic sensationalism to drive up page hits.
"Users Report Faulty WPA In 2nd-Gen IPod Touch" : ... when connecting to certain Linksys routers. "Apple has failed to respond!" ... post submitted to the front page before anyone even filed a bug report. Yawn-worthy.
"ITunes 8 a Real Killer App; Taking Down Vista" : Turns out it's a fault in Vista's USB driver, as unplugging your HP printer eliminates the problem. Percentage of people affected: Small. Non-news.
"iPhone Takes Screenshots of Everything You Do" : Yeah, saving a texture to disk of where you last were in an app before you hit the home button is, like, Everything You Do, and cause for panic. Utter non-news.
"Apple Losing Touchscreen War" : The actual six paragraph "article" is a content-free blurb about how Apple doesn't have dominance in the Asian market. Once again, non-news.
"AT&T Slaps Family With a $19,370 Cell Phone Bill" : WTF?
Et cetera. I've been employed as a Windows programmer, a Mac programmer, and an X-Windows programmer over the last 15 years, and browsed Slashdot for the last 10. I know a hack-job when I see one. Basically, we're being trolled by Slashdot's own article submitters. "Consider what you would be saying if this had happened with the Zune?" Remember the Zune 30? That didn't even support WPA2 at all. A firmware patch eventually "fixed" that. Meantime, was there a front-page Slashdotting? No. There's your answer.
I've also learned that people who complain about "fanboys" are like people who complain about "immigrants": Insecure about their own qualifications, and obsessed with the notion, "I was here first! Before it was cool!"
Grow up.
Imagine?? :D
No need, friend, no need...
His point is that you have to connect to Microsoft and send them your licensing information in order to download a patch which THEN makes your connection secure. It's a Catch-22. By comparison, the iPod touch does not send anything vital anywhere when you connect, and when a firmware update is available, it will be downloaded via a separate device, and involve NO exchange of licensing information. Even if WPA2 was broken as well as WPA (which it isn't), this would still not be as bad.
Lest you forget, the poster was responding to the question: "As for your comparison with Microsoft, consider what you would be saying if this had happened with the Zune." His response? Forget the Zune. Windows ITSELF has had worse problems.
Also, ease up on the anti-fanboy hipster angle. People can discuss whatever they want here. And they have been discussing Windows security holes for a long, long, LONG time.
Mod parent up to a permanent position on the front page of Slashdot.
[citation needed].
The only article I've seen is one where a (rather irritating) young woman received an iPhone bill with many pages.
Also, why would you expect Steve Jobs to do something about this? Do you expect Bill Gates to refund your money every time your identity is stolen via some Internet Explorer security hole?
That's a great scenario, except that Psystar is selling you that adaptation service on condition that you buy their hardware. ... Which makes them a direct competitor in Apple's marketplace, which puts them in violation of the many patents that Apple has either been granted or bought their own license to use within OS X. And Apple _can_ exercise it's parent rights to dictate terms about how it's product can be employed within it's marketplace. So even if your attempt to slip free of copyright law by separating point-of-sale from point-of-service was viable (which I doubt), Psystar would still be tangled up in the briar patch of patent law and forbidden from selling you their PC.
Except Psystar is advertising this process as part of a service that comes bundled with THEIR hardware. Not something that they will do for "your" system. That's their whole point: Psystar is trying to turn a profit by advertising computers that will boot into OS X before you even take them out of the box. Their business model is in direct conflict with your interpretation of what is actually taking place. It is _not_ YOUR disc. It is the disc they are SELLING you as part of a PACKAGE, which also includes a hacked installation on a hard drive.
Add to this the method they use - installing an EFI emulator that they have no authorization to use for commercial purposes - and Psystar hasn't a leg to stand on. They're a business that has done no innovation, whose product breaks several license agreements and violates copyright law and countless patents, and who doesn't even have a stable home address. Why in the world are you defending their business model?
You're claiming that this law, about your rights vis-a-vis ownership of property, allows Psystar to install a derivative work FOR you, and then you're claiming in the same breath that the second part of the law doesn't apply to Psystar, because it supposedly doesn't apply to you, because you are supposedly already the owner of the equipment and software that Psystar is installing, therefore no "transfer" is taking place, even though Psystar hasn't even shipped either the software or the hardware to you yet. That's pretzel logic and won't stand up in court.
You've noticed too, eh? In the last 12 months, Apple has crossed some kind of invisible threshold, and now both the article headings and the commentary here have flipped 180 degrees and become almost entirely negative.
For no sensible reason at all.
That's great for the hackintosh crowd. Kudos to them for extracting those hardware keys from the hardware and turning them into a software layer. But Psystar can't legally touch that code with a five-hundred-foot pole.