Just because you don't see a use for it doesn't mean others don't.
You know what a "sustained bubble of nothing" is? It's the vehement prediction of the imminent failure of the most profitable company in recorded history, just after a conference call where they announce the most profitable quarter in their own history, and citing as evidence the fact that they have been so ridiculously successful that they can't possibly go anywhere but down, and therefore they will drop into a chasm and declare bankruptcy any second now.
You are simply offering a different spin on what are still enormous numbers. The fact that you can spin them to make this look like the _second_ most profitable quarter in the history of any company, relative to the quarter that same company had a year ago, does not matter much.
Another "more accurate" comparison would be to look at a week-by-week year-over-year breakdown of profits, and subtract off only the profits for that _specific_ extra week. Wouldn't you agree? What's a dull week in October, compared to the second week of December, aye? For all you know, this extra week was _a_handicap_.
From the conference call Q&A: "We had the benefit of a 14th week, but this was offset by several factors including less channel fill than last year and a one-time $548 million patent judgment receipt last year."
In my day we used to dreaaaaam of having a big gorilla tech company like Microsoft, whose demise we could foretell. We had to content ourselves with big oil, and big coal, and THAT'S if we were LUCKY. Most people had to hate on the auto industry. And those poor buggers were almost proven right!! You kids, with your tech hardware juggernauts and your defense contractors, you don't know easy you have it...
Sometime soon, I swear. The company is balanced on a tiny wire, with all its appeal based on fashion and the whims of teenagers, and soon it will trip over itself, and totally bungle it's designs and delivery, on such an epic scale that the whole business will collapse like a soufflé and the stock will tank and huge layoffs will happen and everyone will walk away. And that prediction of demise that I made fifteen years ago will be COMPLETELY ACCURATE. The fact that they've had the most profitable year of any company in recorded history is just another nail in the coffin; you'll see...
Why is the Safari bounty higher than the Firefox bounty, even though more people are on Firefox? More backing from Apple? More easily exploited target userbase?
Neal Stephenson floated a similar idea in Seveneves. Rather than dumb hunks of metal, combatants would fire autonomous drone-like projectiles at their enemies that would hunt them down through foliage and around corners. And since the enemy has them too, some drone projectiles would specialize in defensive work - forming a cloud around their user, attempting to absorb projectiles or neutralize attacking drones.
In the story it was a technology developed out of necessity, for combat off-planet in enclosed spaces, where a dumb bullet would usually just punch a hole in the wall and kill everyone, attacker included.
Nice to see that we're on our way into the future!
Fair enough, as long as you discontinue your use of the word "immorality" to describe their behavior.
Also, yes, you did make a declaration about the intention of the lawmakers. I quote: "The lawmakers wrote the law that way because they feel so strongly about the issue ideologically and not for any other reason."
Well, you made the claim that lawmakers wrote the law because of an ideological preference, and then implied that their ideology was irrelevant because it had secondary effects that the lawmakers did not (likely) anticipate. But that implication doesn't stand, because as you say, a company will tend to do exactly what maximizes its return for its stockholders. You call it "wanting the benefits without paying the fees", and label it immoral. But there are no fees to be paid - they are acting legally - and that is their expected behavior. What compels you to call it immoral? The same ideology that inspired the laws.
Ideology is at the very core of this argument. Change the law to fit a different ideology - do away with the tax, for the sake of american workers - and by lucky coincidence, corporations will find it in their interest to repatriate a _massive_ amount of money.
Everybody wins but the politicians, who would rather drum up taxes by any other means than raising taxes on their constituents.
Why the hell would ANY government impose a "repatriation tax", on funds that a company or individual wants to bring in from foreign shores, no matter how or where it was made? Money brought in here is money spent here. It stands a chance of going into the pockets of the working and middle class. (Or at the VERY least, the reverse is incontrovertible: Money that never comes back, is NEVER spent here, GUARANTEED.) Want more money for government projects? Raise taxes on high earners. A repatriation tax is effectively just butting in line to leech money directly out of the economy before the less-powerful can even get a chance at earning it. It feeds the government _at_the_expense_ of economic growth, and _at_the_expense_ of the enrichment of its workforce with money from foreign shores. It's straight-up illogical. If you think it's about "fairness" to make companies pay this money, it just shows your head isn't on straight.
There are many things a government can tax. Some have better effects than others. Quit haggling over the percentage of a repatriation tax, when, for your own sake and everyone else's in this country, it should be ZERO.
If a US-educated, US-residing workforce designs a product, and that product is then sourced, manufactured, shipped, sold, serviced, and recycled, ENTIRELY overseas, how much of that profit is actually owed to the US government at all?
One could make a case that those US-educated US-residing employees are already paying the "fair burden" of tax dollars simply by raking in a boatload of cash from foreign shores and then paying a large hunk of that in income tax. Why call them dodgers, when you could call them heroes, because they are pulling money into the US economy without creating any wear on the local public infrastructure to source, manufacture, sell, service, or recycle anything.
50 bucks for this? Back in "my day", we made these things for nothing, and we used them too. Here's how you do it:
1. Cut the cord off a lamp 2. Cut a data interface cable in half 3. Splice the two together
Plug one end into a surge protector outlet, and one end in to any computer component. BLAMMO!!!! Then reset the surge protector, and you're ready again.
O NOES HOW DO WE PROTECT OUR DEVICES FROM THIS!!! Here's an idea: Don't let your idiot h4xx0r children borrow any hardware you actually NEED.:D (Took my parents a round or two to learn that One Simple Trick.)
Do you think computer programming is a "real job"?
It didn't exist until new technology allowed it less than 100 years ago. It's in high demand. It earns a high wage if done right, and a survivable wage if done barely adequately.
Nevertheless, I bet there were plenty of people alive a century ago and more who would call it pure leisure. It's not physical labor. It doesn't require you to breathe poison gas, or wrestle with criminals. You don't have to deal with inclement weather, hard travel, biting insects, or constant humiliation. You get health coverage. Pure luxury, my lad.
And yet, money changes hands on a massive, massive scale for this practice, because you have to train like a mad motherfucker all the time to do it well.
And that spells out the crucial factor that will always make the hierarchy form: Those who put in the time, to get the training, to learn how to get a larger slice of the pie, will do so. And there will be jobs for ever and ever, hallelujah, amen.
First question: Are they knockoffs? Second question: If this is only happening in China, has the Chinese government asked Apple to modify their firmware in some way? Third question: Are we hearing about this because someone is trying to FUD Apple out of the Chinese market?
Well, you can make a case to preserve the current state of technology, and through that maintain the status quo - or at least the part of the status quo that you like.
Or you can make a different case: Technological innovation is one of the few ways that the status quo can change for _everyone_, rather than just a subset of the population. E.g. rather than resigning 80% of the population to the task of tending fields, and giving the remaining 20% more powerful and comfortable jobs (and arguing over who's in the 80% and who's in the 20%), technology can actually change that ratio, and/or make new categories.
Is there something fundamentally different about "AI" technology that completely upends this approach? If so, what is it?
Seth's glorified blog post is not news - and it is barely noteworthy. He is looking to Apple for innovations in word processing and spreadsheets, as though that were the new frontier? That is laughably out of touch.
He claims no progress in "file sharing and internet tools"... right after Apple simultaneously releases mobile and desktop operating systems that automatically share a common clipboard, documents folder, and desktop across all devices. Whut?
And this is on top of the "file sharing and internet tools" they have already crammed in over the last six years (and keep in mind these are ALL software) :
Per-app cloud space management, cloud-based backup and restore, automatically synchronized logins, web forms, network settings, photo libraries, music libraries, chat histories, open web pages, browsing histories, calendars, app purchases (each of these requires a different implementation). Laptops that back themselves up wirelessly over your home network _while_asleep_... (That's excellent software and firmware working in tandem, that is.) Watches that authenticate laptops, phones that complete purchases for laptops, two-factor authentication across five classes of device... In-device transcription of your voicemails, background visual analysis of your photos, intelligent automatic data-mining of your mail, documents, chats, etc for unorganized contact information - again, on device... Oh yeah, and they threw together what's become a very good competitor to Google Maps in half a decade or so, including 3D flyover data and public transit... This is a wide-ranging suite of useful functions that no other company - not even your precious Google - is able to offer.
I agree, the seams are showing a lot more often these days. I'm quite upset that they cannibalized Aperture to work on Photos. I feel the rest of their "professional" offerings are already going the same way - getting hollowed out and left for dead. (Luckily Adobe is taking up that slack.) But anyone who claims software innovation has just "stopped" at Apple is either out of touch, or perhaps being willfully ignorant to try and sound clever or profound. And Seth has the temerity to claim that DROPBOX is somehow the company to beat? Ugh.
Inductive charging is horribly inefficient and it would be a huge pain to have to lug your six-foot-radius inductive charging transmitter around with you. So that's out.
Magsafe went away on the Macbook because the designers did a bunch of testing and realized that the USBC connector yanks out of the socket almost as easily, unless pulled at an angle, and in that case, the Macbook is light enough that it tends to pivot before it gains enough momentum to fall off a desk. That and, everything in the Macbook is solid-state. The risk of damage from tripping over a cord is less, while the risk of damage from dropping it at standing-height was never addressed by magsafe in the first place.
What remains to be seen is, will they refine the design of USB enough that the extra weight of a Pro machine doesn't interfere with cable detachment, and, will they be able to charge a Pro-level battery acceptably fast enough by the USB quick-charge standard. If one or both of those questions come out "no", then you'll be seeing a magsafe connector, or dongle, on your new Macbook Pro.
Your history lesson about Apple removing the floppy drive is just a little bit revisionist. All those devices you mention that eclipsed the 3.5-inch drive really only became usable once the USB standard got entrenched, and the iMac was one of the biggest reasons for that. Remember when ZipDrives needed a special driver, and ran off the parallel port? Or off the SCSI port? Same with SyQuest drives. They were SCSI- or IDE-only for a very long time. What was killing the floppy before the iMac was all those ZipDrives and SyQuests AND the rise of dirt-cheap home and small business LAN hardware, and the ever-cheapening cost of CDs and CDRs. Ubiquitous USB came later. Let's not put the historical cart before the horse;)
Don't think of the new MacBook Pro as having a bunch of small-size USB ports, think of it as having a bunch of Thunderbolt 3 ports. That's one port for supplying data in and out, at massive speeds, including multiple displays, and it's daisy-chainable, and it supplies power!! Of course Apple is all over this! What else would they be doing?
That said, if they eliminate the headphone jack, I'm going to have to drive down to Cupertino and slap some people around.
Slashdot Mirror
you can get a good pair of sneakers for 30 bucks, and those will get you from point A to point B.
Therefore ALL cars are a fashion accessory.
Personally, I like saving time, so I spent a few hundred more than that and I ride a bicycle.
If I got tired of hauling my phone out of my pocket every ten minutes for 12 hours a day every day, I'd probably buy a smartwatch.
Everybody's on their own scale, aye?
1998 called, it wants it's "insight" back.
Just because you don't see a use for it doesn't mean others don't.
You know what a "sustained bubble of nothing" is?
It's the vehement prediction of the imminent failure of the most profitable company in recorded history,
just after a conference call where they announce the most profitable quarter in their own history,
and citing as evidence the fact that they have been so ridiculously successful that they can't possibly go anywhere but down,
and therefore they will drop into a chasm and declare bankruptcy any second now.
Find another hobby, please!
By that metric, Les Paul is a failure because not everybody wants a guitar.
You are simply offering a different spin on what are still enormous numbers. The fact that you can spin them to make this look like the _second_ most profitable quarter in the history of any company, relative to the quarter that same company had a year ago, does not matter much.
Another "more accurate" comparison would be to look at a week-by-week year-over-year breakdown of profits, and subtract off only the profits for that _specific_ extra week. Wouldn't you agree? What's a dull week in October, compared to the second week of December, aye? For all you know, this extra week was _a_handicap_.
From the conference call Q&A:
"We had the benefit of a 14th week, but this was offset by several factors including less channel fill than last year and a one-time $548 million patent judgment receipt last year."
In my day we used to dreaaaaam of having a big gorilla tech company like Microsoft, whose demise we could foretell. We had to content ourselves with big oil, and big coal, and THAT'S if we were LUCKY. Most people had to hate on the auto industry. And those poor buggers were almost proven right!! You kids, with your tech hardware juggernauts and your defense contractors, you don't know easy you have it...
A Pratchett fan I see!
Sometime soon, I swear.
The company is balanced on a tiny wire, with all its appeal based on fashion and the whims of teenagers, and soon it will trip over itself, and totally bungle it's designs and delivery, on such an epic scale that the whole business will collapse like a soufflé and the stock will tank and huge layoffs will happen and everyone will walk away. And that prediction of demise that I made fifteen years ago will be COMPLETELY ACCURATE. The fact that they've had the most profitable year of any company in recorded history is just another nail in the coffin; you'll see...
Why is the Safari bounty higher than the Firefox bounty, even though more people are on Firefox? More backing from Apple? More easily exploited target userbase?
Neal Stephenson floated a similar idea in Seveneves. Rather than dumb hunks of metal, combatants would fire autonomous drone-like projectiles at their enemies that would hunt them down through foliage and around corners. And since the enemy has them too, some drone projectiles would specialize in defensive work - forming a cloud around their user, attempting to absorb projectiles or neutralize attacking drones.
In the story it was a technology developed out of necessity, for combat off-planet in enclosed spaces, where a dumb bullet would usually just punch a hole in the wall and kill everyone, attacker included.
Nice to see that we're on our way into the future!
Better hurry this along you guys, I'm almost out of popcorn...
Fair enough, as long as you discontinue your use of the word "immorality" to describe their behavior.
Also, yes, you did make a declaration about the intention of the lawmakers. I quote: "The lawmakers wrote the law that way because they feel so strongly about the issue ideologically and not for any other reason."
Own your words.
Well, I find it very hard to care what you think.
So that makes us even.
Well, you made the claim that lawmakers wrote the law because of an ideological preference, and then implied that their ideology was irrelevant because it had secondary effects that the lawmakers did not (likely) anticipate. But that implication doesn't stand, because as you say, a company will tend to do exactly what maximizes its return for its stockholders. You call it "wanting the benefits without paying the fees", and label it immoral. But there are no fees to be paid - they are acting legally - and that is their expected behavior. What compels you to call it immoral? The same ideology that inspired the laws.
Ideology is at the very core of this argument. Change the law to fit a different ideology - do away with the tax, for the sake of american workers - and by lucky coincidence, corporations will find it in their interest to repatriate a _massive_ amount of money.
Everybody wins but the politicians, who would rather drum up taxes by any other means than raising taxes on their constituents.
That's US deficits financing Apple.
Ergo, the solution is PAY DOWN THE F*#@*$ DEBT.
The only way to win is not to play.
Why the hell would ANY government impose a "repatriation tax", on funds that a company or individual wants to bring in from foreign shores, no matter how or where it was made? Money brought in here is money spent here. It stands a chance of going into the pockets of the working and middle class. (Or at the VERY least, the reverse is incontrovertible: Money that never comes back, is NEVER spent here, GUARANTEED.) Want more money for government projects? Raise taxes on high earners. A repatriation tax is effectively just butting in line to leech money directly out of the economy before the less-powerful can even get a chance at earning it. It feeds the government _at_the_expense_ of economic growth, and _at_the_expense_ of the enrichment of its workforce with money from foreign shores. It's straight-up illogical. If you think it's about "fairness" to make companies pay this money, it just shows your head isn't on straight.
There are many things a government can tax. Some have better effects than others. Quit haggling over the percentage of a repatriation tax, when, for your own sake and everyone else's in this country, it should be ZERO.
It's more ideological than you think.
If a US-educated, US-residing workforce designs a product, and that product is then sourced, manufactured, shipped, sold, serviced, and recycled, ENTIRELY overseas, how much of that profit is actually owed to the US government at all?
One could make a case that those US-educated US-residing employees are already paying the "fair burden" of tax dollars simply by raking in a boatload of cash from foreign shores and then paying a large hunk of that in income tax. Why call them dodgers, when you could call them heroes, because they are pulling money into the US economy without creating any wear on the local public infrastructure to source, manufacture, sell, service, or recycle anything.
No need to activate them. Just sell them cut-rate to suckers farther down the food chain and move on.
50 bucks for this? Back in "my day", we made these things for nothing, and we used them too. Here's how you do it:
1. Cut the cord off a lamp
2. Cut a data interface cable in half
3. Splice the two together
Plug one end into a surge protector outlet, and one end in to any computer component. BLAMMO!!!!
Then reset the surge protector, and you're ready again.
O NOES HOW DO WE PROTECT OUR DEVICES FROM THIS!!! :D
Here's an idea: Don't let your idiot h4xx0r children borrow any hardware you actually NEED.
(Took my parents a round or two to learn that One Simple Trick.)
This time has come, and passed.
Do you think computer programming is a "real job"?
It didn't exist until new technology allowed it less than 100 years ago. It's in high demand. It earns a high wage if done right, and a survivable wage if done barely adequately.
Nevertheless, I bet there were plenty of people alive a century ago and more who would call it pure leisure. It's not physical labor. It doesn't require you to breathe poison gas, or wrestle with criminals. You don't have to deal with inclement weather, hard travel, biting insects, or constant humiliation. You get health coverage. Pure luxury, my lad.
And yet, money changes hands on a massive, massive scale for this practice, because you have to train like a mad motherfucker all the time to do it well.
And that spells out the crucial factor that will always make the hierarchy form: Those who put in the time, to get the training, to learn how to get a larger slice of the pie, will do so. And there will be jobs for ever and ever, hallelujah, amen.
You forgot to finish it with "Nyeeaaaah, see?"
Nyeeaaah!
First question: Are they knockoffs?
Second question: If this is only happening in China, has the Chinese government asked Apple to modify their firmware in some way?
Third question: Are we hearing about this because someone is trying to FUD Apple out of the Chinese market?
Well, you can make a case to preserve the current state of technology, and through that maintain the status quo - or at least the part of the status quo that you like.
Or you can make a different case: Technological innovation is one of the few ways that the status quo can change for _everyone_, rather than just a subset of the population. E.g. rather than resigning 80% of the population to the task of tending fields, and giving the remaining 20% more powerful and comfortable jobs (and arguing over who's in the 80% and who's in the 20%), technology can actually change that ratio, and/or make new categories.
Is there something fundamentally different about "AI" technology that completely upends this approach? If so, what is it?
Seth's glorified blog post is not news - and it is barely noteworthy. He is looking to Apple for innovations in word processing and spreadsheets, as though that were the new frontier? That is laughably out of touch.
He claims no progress in "file sharing and internet tools" ... right after Apple simultaneously releases mobile and desktop operating systems that automatically share a common clipboard, documents folder, and desktop across all devices. Whut?
And this is on top of the "file sharing and internet tools" they have already crammed in over the last six years (and keep in mind these are ALL software) :
Per-app cloud space management, cloud-based backup and restore, automatically synchronized logins, web forms, network settings, photo libraries, music libraries, chat histories, open web pages, browsing histories, calendars, app purchases (each of these requires a different implementation). Laptops that back themselves up wirelessly over your home network _while_asleep_... (That's excellent software and firmware working in tandem, that is.) Watches that authenticate laptops, phones that complete purchases for laptops, two-factor authentication across five classes of device... In-device transcription of your voicemails, background visual analysis of your photos, intelligent automatic data-mining of your mail, documents, chats, etc for unorganized contact information - again, on device... Oh yeah, and they threw together what's become a very good competitor to Google Maps in half a decade or so, including 3D flyover data and public transit... This is a wide-ranging suite of useful functions that no other company - not even your precious Google - is able to offer.
I agree, the seams are showing a lot more often these days. I'm quite upset that they cannibalized Aperture to work on Photos. I feel the rest of their "professional" offerings are already going the same way - getting hollowed out and left for dead. (Luckily Adobe is taking up that slack.) But anyone who claims software innovation has just "stopped" at Apple is either out of touch, or perhaps being willfully ignorant to try and sound clever or profound. And Seth has the temerity to claim that DROPBOX is somehow the company to beat? Ugh.
Inductive charging is horribly inefficient and it would be a huge pain to have to lug your six-foot-radius inductive charging transmitter around with you. So that's out.
Magsafe went away on the Macbook because the designers did a bunch of testing and realized that the USBC connector yanks out of the socket almost as easily, unless pulled at an angle, and in that case, the Macbook is light enough that it tends to pivot before it gains enough momentum to fall off a desk. That and, everything in the Macbook is solid-state. The risk of damage from tripping over a cord is less, while the risk of damage from dropping it at standing-height was never addressed by magsafe in the first place.
What remains to be seen is, will they refine the design of USB enough that the extra weight of a Pro machine doesn't interfere with cable detachment, and, will they be able to charge a Pro-level battery acceptably fast enough by the USB quick-charge standard. If one or both of those questions come out "no", then you'll be seeing a magsafe connector, or dongle, on your new Macbook Pro.
Your history lesson about Apple removing the floppy drive is just a little bit revisionist. All those devices you mention that eclipsed the 3.5-inch drive really only became usable once the USB standard got entrenched, and the iMac was one of the biggest reasons for that. Remember when ZipDrives needed a special driver, and ran off the parallel port? Or off the SCSI port? Same with SyQuest drives. They were SCSI- or IDE-only for a very long time. What was killing the floppy before the iMac was all those ZipDrives and SyQuests AND the rise of dirt-cheap home and small business LAN hardware, and the ever-cheapening cost of CDs and CDRs. Ubiquitous USB came later. Let's not put the historical cart before the horse ;)
But anyhoo... Thunderbolt. I'm glad you mentioned that. There's some good news on that front: https://www.cnet.com/news/thun...
Don't think of the new MacBook Pro as having a bunch of small-size USB ports, think of it as having a bunch of Thunderbolt 3 ports. That's one port for supplying data in and out, at massive speeds, including multiple displays, and it's daisy-chainable, and it supplies power!! Of course Apple is all over this! What else would they be doing?
That said, if they eliminate the headphone jack, I'm going to have to drive down to Cupertino and slap some people around.