I suppose if I were only vaguely familiar with the topic I might feel this way too. Trouble is there are facts available.
The first is that Apple charges for the OS so you don't need to pretend it's value is greater than it is. That OS can be made to run on compelling hardware not offered by Apple. It's a shame that process sucks more than you'd like.
Second is that Apple uses commodity hardware and has since the switch to Intel. "Amongst the best-performing machines" doesn't really say anything.
Third is that Apple uses less "in-house" design than at any time in their history. They slap their label on like everyone else, just in a prettier package. Apple controls their hardware better because of the captive OS; their hardware isn't better it's the same.
Finally, Apple sometimes gets the "best stuff" and occasionally before "everyone else". More often they can't be bothered to get the best stuff ever, like the aging Mac Pro for instance. It becomes even clearer when you recognize that Apple refuses to even offer products that would have significant demand, like a midrange desktop that's not an all-in-one for instance. Apple is about maximizing profit and maintaining prestige, not about offering the best solution.
Apparently you don't remember the first $3000 Airs. Their overpriced-ness and under-usefulness could not be overstated.
But yes, as long as you can justify getting less for your money because there's something Apple offers that's worth "more", you can justify anything (and people do).
I would say that Apple has reduced the price premium because it can no longer be supported, not that competitors can't build a machine for less. There's plenty of evidence for that. No one came out with an "Air apparent" at $3000 during generation 1 nor did anyone introduce such a crappy product as that one was. Apple's overpricing is alive and well, as we will see when the new Pro comes out. Apple won't leave a dollar on the table.
"...then it will be convincing evidence of the evolutionary superiority of copyleft....Hope I don't get any "libertarian license" jihadis steamed about that..."
It will take your TV box, your video camera, your surround sound receiver, and all the rest of your HDMI devices since it has HDMI inputs. Of course, those won't be 4K since none of your HDMI devices do 4K. The only devices that currently will use DisplayPort, thus that solution. So much for your complaint.
If it is anything like their 50", which I'm sure it is, the 30Hz limitation will be the least of its awful problems. It may be passable as a TV but not as a monitor.
Of course, many people's standards are low and they wouldn't know better anyway. If you think DSLRs exhibit grain, it's the product for you. You won't notice the horrific color problems anyway.
At least the screen size is right. I don't get the 30" screen size for this resolution. 50" is too big for a desktop.
What does screen size have to do with your "cropping range"? You believe the purpose of a camera is to fill your screen?
People whose goal is to share on "Flickr and Google Plus" don't need DSLRs or 4K displays. People who don't realize that grain is a film characteristic don't either.
"The GPL predates the App Store by about 20 years. If Apple decided to create terms for it's store that are incompatible with a 20 year old license then that is on Apple."
No it's not. Apple is under no obligation to accommodate arbitrary licensing terms, even old ones. No one is obligated to support the GPL, it's a choice.
If it's dual-licensed it's not GPL software, the owners of the copyright can do as they wish. What do GPL advocates say? Oh yeah...if you don't like it, write your own.
"Actively counterproductive" implies that you know what the definition of "productive" is in the authors' minds. Clearly you don't.
"very few people use their iphones without protection. iphones could just as well be plastic.. plastic isn't viewed as bad for long term use by consumers, for example you bought it still."
That's some great logic there...you bought so it must be good. I once bought lunch at McDonalds too.
People put iPhones in cases for emotional and personal reasons. The iPhone is also too small and too thin for many to hold comfortably. So yes, the iPhone *could* be plastic but that doesn't mean the S3/S4 *should* be plastic. Fewer S3/S4 users use cases. Different product, different perception.
Phones should either be designed to take a case or their materials should be high enough quality to stand alone. Neither the iPhone nor the S3/S4 get this exactly right.
The definition of a "high-end" phone, not that there is one, is not "large". This is your problem, not Motorola's.
Yes, there is a race towards too large, too much screen resolution, too many cores, and too cluttered an interface. Along with it comes too poor battery life and bad usability (hallmarks of Android). It's possible for a phone to be "high-end" because it avoids those issues, not because it "me toos" them.
This phone has a larger screen and greater resolution than an iPhone5. Only a fool would say the iPhone5 is not "high-end".
LargestPhone != SuperPhone. Why stop with the "superphones" you mentioned when the Note3 embarrasses them all?
It's nice to see an Android phone with saner dimensions. There's appeal in a 4.5" 720p display. 330 dpi is plenty, it's the same as the current iPhones.
"Few special features" --- really stretching there to come up with criticisms. Worried?
"No fan of the Church here, but it has done good works over the centuries, done by good caring people..."
Curious that you would attribute good works to the church when you recognize they are done by people. It's all about the nature of people, churches are a creation of people and are part of the nature of people. Attributing anything to "the church" is meaningless.
"Not to nitpick, but even Christianity has somewhat of a "middleman" in the form of Jesus..."
Of course there's the Holy Trinity thing which you mention but it's an interesting discussion when you consider the evolution of the myth. Jesus WAS the middleman until the story evolved to include the "loophole" as you say. This is core evidence of the lie, of course, but cognitive dissonance is part of being a believer.
Catholics pray to far more than just God. and it seems you make that point while arguing against it. Christians argue that Catholics aren't christian because they corrupt that fundamental concept. But yes, corruption exists beyond the Catholic church because people are people and churches exist to do man's bidding. They are a center of power, nothing more.
But you did imply that. What reason was there to believe that rates of abuse had changed at all in the 60s and 70s? People started talking about it, that is all.
"Students are orders of magnitude more likely to be abused by public school teachers than by priests(*)."
Your source doesn't support your claim. The article claims that there are more victims on public schools though it appears that it defines "sexual mistreatment", physical sexual abuse", and "sexual comments" as the same thing. It does not in any way discuss the *likelihood" of sexual abuse in either environment. Their data is also US-only.
It would be hard to imagine these comparisons being fair considering the nature of the topic, the heavily extrapolated nature of the resulting data, and the different groups responsible for generating it. Considering that all the pictures in that article are of sexually mature young women, it seems as though they are talking about pedophilia AT ALL.
The article suggests there are two orders of magnitude more victims in public schools than in churches, barely supporting your claim of "orders of magnitude", yet there are no numbers of student populations in either environment. Annual enrollment in US public schools is about 20 times greater than in Catholic schools so the rate is reduced to about 5x already, BUT sexual abuse in the church doesn't just occur in the school, in fact that's probably rare. It's far more likely that sexual abuse occurs in the church outside the school where child populations are far smaller. There may be 2.5 million catholic school kids but there aren't 2.5 million alter boys. If you use the alter boy population, the rate of abuse would be 10x greater in the church than in public schools and far greater than that once you eliminate teenage sexual behavior from the statistics.
You need to consider what about public schools, and the church, either attracts pedophiles or encourages those involved to engage in pedophile acts. It's very hard to imagine any such thing with public schools. With the church it's not hard at all. Regardless, it's unlikely differences in rates of abuse are important. People are people, church or no church.
Sorry, but you are wrong and the article you quote is garbage meant to further an agenda.
"I'm tempted to say, this recalls the old saying, you use Windows because you have to. You use (any other platform) because you want to."
Only stupid people make emotional decisions regarding tools, there are far better reasons than "because you want to". If you choose a platform based solely on "want" then you playing with it, not using it. Very different things.
Regarding the topic, what distinguishes a smartphone is its ability to be extended with apps. These days, if it's not Android or iOS, it's at a severe disadvantage. I am not personally a big user of apps yet I gave up my recent switch to Android because the apps sucked so hard...and Android's a dream compared to the 3rd world of smartphones.
This is the lesson a "career" teaches you and it's true regardless of how good a company you work for. It's the nature of people to be self-serving and to corrupt the process to further their personal goals. The quicker you can identify this and move on the happier you will be.
This only works because attorneys make the rules. This is a horrible way to treat customers.
Both sides should be happy with the result. With attorneys, you are only happy with the result if you believe you have been screwed less than the alternative.
"A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part."
In other words, I'm happy with failure so long as someone else takes the blame.
"Another option: Use the power of bureaucracy to your advantage. For example, create a fairly confusing Mid-Sprint Change Request Form that needs to be signed off by 2-3 people that are never in the office."
In other words, become part of the problem.
"A third option: Make sure that the work that was requested properly gets released on time, while the work that was requested mid-sprint will get released when it's ready (which, if you're doing things right, is always later than on time)."
In other words, make sure you aren't responsive to the customer. Failure is always the answer so long as someone else can be blamed.
"The idea is to use the carrot of on-time quality delivery plus the stick of annoying bureaucracy and late delivery to push the people making requests towards doing the right thing."
In other words, don't try to be part of a solution, just be part of the mess.
The solution to these problems is to fire people like you, not adopt your approaches.
"To be perfectly honest, you as a developer probably shouldn't be defining timelines."
Completely wrong. if you, as a developer, aren't involved in defining timelines then the battle is already lost. You are the one that knows, management is a service to help facilitate you, as a developer, doing a good job.
"The whole point of a sprint is that once it starts, it doesn't change."
You speak as though this is a virtue when it is just a consequence of arbitrary management decisions. The goal should always be to determine what needs to be done and how to best go about doing it. All you are describing is a process for preventing that without taking the blame.
Agile is a load of crap predicated on fallacious assumptions. It is no surprise that people commonly declare how Agile is "supposed" to be so that it mitigates the consequences to them personally.
Good project management should be suited to the task, optimized to the team, and should have low overhead. Agile approaches may work this way at times but they frequently will not. Relatively few projects need to prioritize customer responsiveness over all else and very little can treat developers as interchangeable. These are two frequently invalid assumptions that Agile makes. If your view of the world is every project is website development then you may feel Agile is great. The world has a wider variety of tasks than that.
A well-done project achieves a balance between over-design and under-design. Agile leads to chronic under-design and frequently no-design. This is demonstrated again and again in the comments in this thread. Developers, because they are only motivated to make their own lives easier, push design consequences off onto someone else. Where good project management makes good design central, Agile subjugates design to rapid releases of nothing. With Agile, the tendency is to avoid anything that could jeopardize your next deliverable. This pushes the blame onto someone else and results in crappy design becoming institutionalized.
The sooner Agile dies the better. What's important is doing the job well, not doing it the way that works for someone else on a project unlike your own.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose if I were only vaguely familiar with the topic I might feel this way too. Trouble is there are facts available.
The first is that Apple charges for the OS so you don't need to pretend it's value is greater than it is. That OS can be made to run on compelling hardware not offered by Apple. It's a shame that process sucks more than you'd like.
Second is that Apple uses commodity hardware and has since the switch to Intel. "Amongst the best-performing machines" doesn't really say anything.
Third is that Apple uses less "in-house" design than at any time in their history. They slap their label on like everyone else, just in a prettier package. Apple controls their hardware better because of the captive OS; their hardware isn't better it's the same.
Finally, Apple sometimes gets the "best stuff" and occasionally before "everyone else". More often they can't be bothered to get the best stuff ever, like the aging Mac Pro for instance. It becomes even clearer when you recognize that Apple refuses to even offer products that would have significant demand, like a midrange desktop that's not an all-in-one for instance. Apple is about maximizing profit and maintaining prestige, not about offering the best solution.
The "apple tax" is no myth.
Apparently you don't remember the first $3000 Airs. Their overpriced-ness and under-usefulness could not be overstated.
But yes, as long as you can justify getting less for your money because there's something Apple offers that's worth "more", you can justify anything (and people do).
I would say that Apple has reduced the price premium because it can no longer be supported, not that competitors can't build a machine for less. There's plenty of evidence for that. No one came out with an "Air apparent" at $3000 during generation 1 nor did anyone introduce such a crappy product as that one was. Apple's overpricing is alive and well, as we will see when the new Pro comes out. Apple won't leave a dollar on the table.
The OP is correct and your two positions are not contradictory.
"...then it will be convincing evidence of the evolutionary superiority of copyleft. ...Hope I don't get any "libertarian license" jihadis steamed about that..."
What a jackass.
It will take your TV box, your video camera, your surround sound receiver, and all the rest of your HDMI devices since it has HDMI inputs. Of course, those won't be 4K since none of your HDMI devices do 4K. The only devices that currently will use DisplayPort, thus that solution. So much for your complaint.
If it is anything like their 50", which I'm sure it is, the 30Hz limitation will be the least of its awful problems. It may be passable as a TV but not as a monitor.
Of course, many people's standards are low and they wouldn't know better anyway. If you think DSLRs exhibit grain, it's the product for you. You won't notice the horrific color problems anyway.
At least the screen size is right. I don't get the 30" screen size for this resolution. 50" is too big for a desktop.
Grain?
What does screen size have to do with your "cropping range"? You believe the purpose of a camera is to fill your screen?
People whose goal is to share on "Flickr and Google Plus" don't need DSLRs or 4K displays. People who don't realize that grain is a film characteristic don't either.
"App developers deserve to distribute their software under their own terms."
But they don't deserve to distribute other people's software in violation of their terms and Apple doesn't have to solve that problem for them.
"This breaks the fundamental principles of free software..."
Apple isn't obligated to support your notion of the "fundamental principles of free software".
"...which says that you the user should not be dominated by someone else in order to do your computing."
Unless, of course, that "someone else" is RMS and then it's for the greater good.
"Apple does not allow developers to distribute their software under fair conditions."
Of course it does. You just don't understand what's "fair".
"The GPL predates the App Store by about 20 years. If Apple decided to create terms for it's store that are incompatible with a 20 year old license then that is on Apple."
No it's not. Apple is under no obligation to accommodate arbitrary licensing terms, even old ones. No one is obligated to support the GPL, it's a choice.
If it's dual-licensed it's not GPL software, the owners of the copyright can do as they wish. What do GPL advocates say? Oh yeah...if you don't like it, write your own.
"Actively counterproductive" implies that you know what the definition of "productive" is in the authors' minds. Clearly you don't.
"very few people use their iphones without protection. iphones could just as well be plastic.. plastic isn't viewed as bad for long term use by consumers, for example you bought it still."
That's some great logic there...you bought so it must be good. I once bought lunch at McDonalds too.
People put iPhones in cases for emotional and personal reasons. The iPhone is also too small and too thin for many to hold comfortably. So yes, the iPhone *could* be plastic but that doesn't mean the S3/S4 *should* be plastic. Fewer S3/S4 users use cases. Different product, different perception.
Phones should either be designed to take a case or their materials should be high enough quality to stand alone. Neither the iPhone nor the S3/S4 get this exactly right.
The definition of a "high-end" phone, not that there is one, is not "large". This is your problem, not Motorola's.
Yes, there is a race towards too large, too much screen resolution, too many cores, and too cluttered an interface. Along with it comes too poor battery life and bad usability (hallmarks of Android). It's possible for a phone to be "high-end" because it avoids those issues, not because it "me toos" them.
This phone has a larger screen and greater resolution than an iPhone5. Only a fool would say the iPhone5 is not "high-end".
LargestPhone != SuperPhone. Why stop with the "superphones" you mentioned when the Note3 embarrasses them all?
It's nice to see an Android phone with saner dimensions. There's appeal in a 4.5" 720p display. 330 dpi is plenty, it's the same as the current iPhones.
"Few special features" --- really stretching there to come up with criticisms. Worried?
No amount of upmodding is enough for this post.
"Finally, it is not true that the Church has always been corrupt."
You were doing quite well until this. Without corruption the church would not exist at all.
Making up, and evolving, a myth so as to control the beliefs of others is inherently corrupt.
"No fan of the Church here, but it has done good works over the centuries, done by good caring people..."
Curious that you would attribute good works to the church when you recognize they are done by people. It's all about the nature of people, churches are a creation of people and are part of the nature of people. Attributing anything to "the church" is meaningless.
"Not to nitpick, but even Christianity has somewhat of a "middleman" in the form of Jesus..."
Of course there's the Holy Trinity thing which you mention but it's an interesting discussion when you consider the evolution of the myth. Jesus WAS the middleman until the story evolved to include the "loophole" as you say. This is core evidence of the lie, of course, but cognitive dissonance is part of being a believer.
Catholics pray to far more than just God. and it seems you make that point while arguing against it. Christians argue that Catholics aren't christian because they corrupt that fundamental concept. But yes, corruption exists beyond the Catholic church because people are people and churches exist to do man's bidding. They are a center of power, nothing more.
But you did imply that. What reason was there to believe that rates of abuse had changed at all in the 60s and 70s? People started talking about it, that is all.
"Students are orders of magnitude more likely to be abused by public school teachers than by priests(*)."
Your source doesn't support your claim. The article claims that there are more victims on public schools though it appears that it defines "sexual mistreatment", physical sexual abuse", and "sexual comments" as the same thing. It does not in any way discuss the *likelihood" of sexual abuse in either environment. Their data is also US-only.
It would be hard to imagine these comparisons being fair considering the nature of the topic, the heavily extrapolated nature of the resulting data, and the different groups responsible for generating it. Considering that all the pictures in that article are of sexually mature young women, it seems as though they are talking about pedophilia AT ALL.
The article suggests there are two orders of magnitude more victims in public schools than in churches, barely supporting your claim of "orders of magnitude", yet there are no numbers of student populations in either environment. Annual enrollment in US public schools is about 20 times greater than in Catholic schools so the rate is reduced to about 5x already, BUT sexual abuse in the church doesn't just occur in the school, in fact that's probably rare. It's far more likely that sexual abuse occurs in the church outside the school where child populations are far smaller. There may be 2.5 million catholic school kids but there aren't 2.5 million alter boys. If you use the alter boy population, the rate of abuse would be 10x greater in the church than in public schools and far greater than that once you eliminate teenage sexual behavior from the statistics.
You need to consider what about public schools, and the church, either attracts pedophiles or encourages those involved to engage in pedophile acts. It's very hard to imagine any such thing with public schools. With the church it's not hard at all. Regardless, it's unlikely differences in rates of abuse are important. People are people, church or no church.
Sorry, but you are wrong and the article you quote is garbage meant to further an agenda.
"I'm tempted to say, this recalls the old saying, you use Windows because you have to. You use (any other platform) because you want to."
Only stupid people make emotional decisions regarding tools, there are far better reasons than "because you want to". If you choose a platform based solely on "want" then you playing with it, not using it. Very different things.
Regarding the topic, what distinguishes a smartphone is its ability to be extended with apps. These days, if it's not Android or iOS, it's at a severe disadvantage. I am not personally a big user of apps yet I gave up my recent switch to Android because the apps sucked so hard...and Android's a dream compared to the 3rd world of smartphones.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. I wonder if you've ever uses a camera not built into a phone in your life.
This is the lesson a "career" teaches you and it's true regardless of how good a company you work for. It's the nature of people to be self-serving and to corrupt the process to further their personal goals. The quicker you can identify this and move on the happier you will be.
This only works because attorneys make the rules. This is a horrible way to treat customers.
Both sides should be happy with the result. With attorneys, you are only happy with the result if you believe you have been screwed less than the alternative.
"A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part."
In other words, I'm happy with failure so long as someone else takes the blame.
"Another option: Use the power of bureaucracy to your advantage. For example, create a fairly confusing Mid-Sprint Change Request Form that needs to be signed off by 2-3 people that are never in the office."
In other words, become part of the problem.
"A third option: Make sure that the work that was requested properly gets released on time, while the work that was requested mid-sprint will get released when it's ready (which, if you're doing things right, is always later than on time)."
In other words, make sure you aren't responsive to the customer. Failure is always the answer so long as someone else can be blamed.
"The idea is to use the carrot of on-time quality delivery plus the stick of annoying bureaucracy and late delivery to push the people making requests towards doing the right thing."
In other words, don't try to be part of a solution, just be part of the mess.
The solution to these problems is to fire people like you, not adopt your approaches.
"To be perfectly honest, you as a developer probably shouldn't be defining timelines."
Completely wrong. if you, as a developer, aren't involved in defining timelines then the battle is already lost. You are the one that knows, management is a service to help facilitate you, as a developer, doing a good job.
"The whole point of a sprint is that once it starts, it doesn't change."
You speak as though this is a virtue when it is just a consequence of arbitrary management decisions. The goal should always be to determine what needs to be done and how to best go about doing it. All you are describing is a process for preventing that without taking the blame.
Agile is a load of crap predicated on fallacious assumptions. It is no surprise that people commonly declare how Agile is "supposed" to be so that it mitigates the consequences to them personally.
Good project management should be suited to the task, optimized to the team, and should have low overhead. Agile approaches may work this way at times but they frequently will not. Relatively few projects need to prioritize customer responsiveness over all else and very little can treat developers as interchangeable. These are two frequently invalid assumptions that Agile makes. If your view of the world is every project is website development then you may feel Agile is great. The world has a wider variety of tasks than that.
A well-done project achieves a balance between over-design and under-design. Agile leads to chronic under-design and frequently no-design. This is demonstrated again and again in the comments in this thread. Developers, because they are only motivated to make their own lives easier, push design consequences off onto someone else. Where good project management makes good design central, Agile subjugates design to rapid releases of nothing. With Agile, the tendency is to avoid anything that could jeopardize your next deliverable. This pushes the blame onto someone else and results in crappy design becoming institutionalized.
The sooner Agile dies the better. What's important is doing the job well, not doing it the way that works for someone else on a project unlike your own.