While there is overreaction and FUD on the part of./ers, you can understand why, given Microsoft's past history.
To me, the key is that Microsoft's license explicitly goes out of its way to say that future versions of the spec aren't covered. Given the embrace-extend-extinguish history of Microsoft, that's a red flag. They could have 1) said nothing about future versions, which if your reading of this is correct was unnecessary because the contract only covers what it says it does, or 2) explicitly said "this and all future versions" of the spec. Why a specification is covered by a patent is another whole can of worms.
My suggestion for a fix, probably too clear for legalese (IANAL): Microsoft will not sue you over your implementation of this specification. Period, full stop.
Figure you have this wired up to your radio mic and are wearing an earpiece...
You have a team entering a building to rescue hostages held by a group of "bad guys"--the team can coordinate their actions and make changes to the plan in real time without the worry that their communication will be overheard. No more whispering into the mike--you just sub-vocalize and your teammates hear you.
And we can stop the Secret Service guys from doing that stupid "talking into my sleeve isn't a dead giveaway what I'm doing" thing.
But not the one you're thinking of. It's a secret formula for Apple to remain profitable.
Apple's restrictions on hardware significantly reduce the amount of development they do and the amount of support Apple has to provide. OSX doesn't have to have drivers for every crappy, made-in-China knockoff MoBo. They never have to take support calls where someone says "Hey, I tried installing OSX on this 286 DX-2 66 machine, and it runs like crap!" When you're Microsoft, you can afford to blow off consumers, since they pretty much don't understand what their options are and have become used to having an OS maker who says "FU!" if you have a WGA problem.
It also ups Apple's profitability, since a lot of people (including yours truly) finally get tired of screwing around trying to get Windows to cooperate and decide to buy something that "just works" even if it costs a little more. I used to build my own boxes back in the day--but eventually I grew up, moved out of the basement (figuratively) and got a life. I want to take my wife to dinner and a movie and have a tea party with my daughter, not spend three hours diagnosing some obscure video card driver issue. I use Linux at work (and love it) but I'm not up for doing Linux support (for my wife and myself) at home.
Apple's thing may not be for you, but it seems to be working out for them.
But from the demo, you can clearly write your own software and install it on your own phone, and all for free. The SDK is free and at the announcement they demo'd loading an app from the dev box to the iPhone without using the store. So sign up as a developer, download the Xcode tools, and code away.
You only have to pay the $99 if you want Apple to distribute your applications for you.
My understanding (and IANAA) is that because Apple realizes the revenue from iPhone purchases over the course of two years, they can make changes to the product and it's no big deal. With the touch, they've already accounted for your purchase, so there's some arcane rule that says they can't give you additional functionality without charging you for it. I'm betting the "nominal" fee really will be nominal--like $2 or something.
A good number of them had a profit motive when undertaking their journeys. Columbus might have been the intrepid explorer, but he had every intention of returning and his financial backers fully expected him to return either carrying the plunder of new colonies or with a shorter trade route for the highly-taxed trade with the orient.
More to the point, though, is that the cost and complexity of modern extra-planetary exploration by humans is ridiculously higher (in proportion) than it was back then. Louis and Clark bought some horses, boats, and rifles and set out. Amundson hired a ship, bought some dogs, and off he went. Drake thought he would plunder the Spanish in the ships given him by the queen.
I'm not sure how accurate it is to compare these expeditions to something funded by the public at NASA prices.
It also has fewer features that "full" Flash. In other Words, sites that use the latest and greatest version of Flash (and specifically, the latest, two-year-old version of Action Script) don't render the same on "Flash Lite" as they do under the "full" version. The lite version may be great for viewing movies, but I don't think it's very good for much of anything else. I can speak on this subject from experience, having worked on Web-based tools for Palm users at a former employer. Flash seemed like a nice way to handle some of the things we needed to do, but the lite version on the Sony PDAs didn't support all the features we would have needed. We ended up writing a native app that pulled data from the Web.
Beyond the inadequacies of Flash lite, there are user experience issues here, too. Action script provides the ability to capture key presses, something that a lot of game sites use but that would be very difficult to support on the iPhone with it's on-screen keyboard. If you've seen data entry on the iPhone in Safari when in landscape mode, you know that the screen essentially disappears when the keyboard is displayed, making it very difficult to see where you're typing what you're typing. Also, the multi-touch interface isn't very mouse-like, which adds another area where the user experience would be less than optimal.
I'm not saying that Apple has necessarily thought all this through, though I think it's likely that they have. But it does seem like Flash on the iPhone is probably not worth implementing.
I'm always amused to hear folks complaining about the relatively short life they get out of various products with moving parts by comparing them to something with none. For instance, last week a co-worker was complaining that his washing machine died and part of the complaint was something like "my TVs last 10 years, but this washing machine only lasted six." Hello! You're wearing out the moving components of your washing machine every time you do a load of laundry--there's nothing in your TV to wear out.
Well built/tested consumer products that don't have moving parts (like Sony TVs) will last a very long time. I always appreciated the quality of Sony products, though their odd formats and some of their antics of late have put me off the brand. I had a Sony radio that lasted almost 15 years and at the end of that time when I gave it away, it was still going strong.
In my day job as a tech writer, the only thing that keeps me tied to my Windows box is FrameMaker. Of which, at one time, there was a Linux version, later canceled for (apparent) lack of interest. Unfortunately, the project didn't live very long, and I wasn't able to get a copy while it was alive... something that I regret morning when I fire up Windows.
I can get email (the company uses Outlook) through the Web-based Outlook tool, I use vi to write man pages and do HTML, and I can read various Word/Excel files sent to me in OO, but I NEED FrameMaker--there's no adequate replacement available. So I have an unwanted Windows box.
I think I'd argue that most "goods" are not free. Nor are they likely to become so, as the marginal cost of distributing, say, a hamburger or a Ford F150, are never going to approach zero. Costs will fall, prices will fall, but physical goods are constrained in ways that bits are not (until we have TNGs replicator technology). Sure advances in technology improve our lives. But the idea that somehow we're approaching a utopia where everything, including physical goods, is "free" is an unproven one at best.
I bring this up because the conflation of "goods" and software (which is not a "good" in the sense of a physical item) is what drives the notion that copying bits is somehow "theft" in the same way that stealing a burger or truck is. Since copying the bits has no real cost, and since the original "owner" of the bits doesn't lose the use of them, it's pretty clear that these are two different things. When a FOSS advocate, as you appear to be, makes this same mistake (saying that software is somehow equal to "goods") even while denigrating RIAA, it's clear that RIAA has started winning the PR war.
Forgot to mention: if the boots on the ground like this (after sufficient trials) that's a good sign that it's a keeper. I wouldn't trust a major to make that evaluation.
Only from the top (Majors and above) does it appear that HQ is telling the patrol leader "what to think." On the ground, the NCOs and junior officers are quite capable of evaluating situations and responding to them as appropriate.
In an ideal military (which as a vet, I realize ours isn't--but closer than you might think) the chain of command sets an objective and then the lowers carry it out as they see fit. Micromanagement (something most line soldiers were apprehensive about with the Land Warrior system, or whatever they're calling it this week) is never a good thing in a fight. You don't want a general, most of whom are at least 50% political animals with their eye always on the "how will this look on my evaluation" factor, telling a private which window to throw a grenade in when clearing a house. The general says "take the city" the colonel says "Company A attack from the north, Company B attack from the west" and the captains tell the NCOs "go get 'em" and leave the minor details up to platoon/squad leaders.
On a similar note, more information (contrary to the commonly-held slashdot idea) isn't always better. Aside from information overload (another Land Warrior worry) there's the fact that details can get lost in an outpouring of video and maps. It's equally effective to talk to the last patrol's leader and get him to tell you "don't go down Saddam Street" or "We've had problems when we go past the former Baath Party HQ." Better in some ways, since an actual person can communicate nuances and answer questions. Also, I think there can be a tendency to put some portion of your attention on mapping the actual space to what you've seen in the dog-and-pony show, which lowers your situational awareness.
I'm not completely discounting TIGR, just saying that whether this TIGR deal is the bee's knees or not... remains to be seen
When I was in the Army, I weighed significantly less than I do right now (180~ then, 220 now) and on field exercises we would sometimes eat three MREs a day for a good number of days straight. Each MRE has 2000 calories (or thereabouts)--so 6,000 calories a day--and we still carried pougue-bait and were hungry most of the time. No I eat ~1800 calories a day and I'm 20 pounds overweight for my 6'2" height.
There's no way physical fit and active folks are going to be out-eaten by (us) oldsters.
T.H. White said it best
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
"Anything not prohibited is compulsory and anything that is not compulsory is prohibited."
They're comments on the IT guys and the company's new password policy. I log on to my Windows box with WhatALoadofCrap! (apropos of both Windows and the policy), onto the intranet with IT-sucketh-mightily and into some of the restricted applications with PassThis,MF and IhatelamePWPolicies.
Of course, I've carefully written each password on a PostIt affixed to the side of my monitor.
Anyone can change out an electrical panel without being a "licensed" electrician here in the States. You can do it as a homeowner (which I've done) as long as you can do a sufficiently good job to garner the approval of the inspector that the City sends out to look your work over. You can do it as a handyman, as long as you have the homeowner pull the permit and call for the inspection. If you want to pull the permit and have the inspection yourself, at a location other than your own home, you merely need a business license, and that's more so the municipal entity can collect taxes than for any real safety reason.
In fact, I'm not aware of any "construction type" work that must be done by a "licensed" worker. When I've done remodeling, the City Engineer will stamp my hand-drawn plans as long as what I'm doing isn't too extreme. They've stamped off on structural work where I knocked out a 5-minute drawing of the floor joists that I'd be installing. I'm not a licensed anything, but I've made significant structural changes to my house, completely re-wired the kitchen (removing the old wiring and installing new) and done other work without any issues.
All the people who didn't get their chance to flame yesterday and wound up with mod points today.
Sometimes I picture mods sitting there reading through the posts talking under their breath like a kid playing a video game: "Oh, got that one... here's another... Slam! Nailed you, you slashdotting fool... Bam! There's another one! Die, troll, die!"
Slashdot Mirror
While there is overreaction and FUD on the part of ./ers, you can understand why, given Microsoft's past history.
To me, the key is that Microsoft's license explicitly goes out of its way to say that future versions of the spec aren't covered. Given the embrace-extend-extinguish history of Microsoft, that's a red flag. They could have 1) said nothing about future versions, which if your reading of this is correct was unnecessary because the contract only covers what it says it does, or 2) explicitly said "this and all future versions" of the spec. Why a specification is covered by a patent is another whole can of worms.
My suggestion for a fix, probably too clear for legalese (IANAL): Microsoft will not sue you over your implementation of this specification. Period, full stop.
Figure you have this wired up to your radio mic and are wearing an earpiece...
You have a team entering a building to rescue hostages held by a group of "bad guys"--the team can coordinate their actions and make changes to the plan in real time without the worry that their communication will be overheard. No more whispering into the mike--you just sub-vocalize and your teammates hear you.
And we can stop the Secret Service guys from doing that stupid "talking into my sleeve isn't a dead giveaway what I'm doing" thing.
But not the one you're thinking of. It's a secret formula for Apple to remain profitable.
Apple's restrictions on hardware significantly reduce the amount of development they do and the amount of support Apple has to provide. OSX doesn't have to have drivers for every crappy, made-in-China knockoff MoBo. They never have to take support calls where someone says "Hey, I tried installing OSX on this 286 DX-2 66 machine, and it runs like crap!" When you're Microsoft, you can afford to blow off consumers, since they pretty much don't understand what their options are and have become used to having an OS maker who says "FU!" if you have a WGA problem.
It also ups Apple's profitability, since a lot of people (including yours truly) finally get tired of screwing around trying to get Windows to cooperate and decide to buy something that "just works" even if it costs a little more. I used to build my own boxes back in the day--but eventually I grew up, moved out of the basement (figuratively) and got a life. I want to take my wife to dinner and a movie and have a tea party with my daughter, not spend three hours diagnosing some obscure video card driver issue. I use Linux at work (and love it) but I'm not up for doing Linux support (for my wife and myself) at home.
Apple's thing may not be for you, but it seems to be working out for them.
But from the demo, you can clearly write your own software and install it on your own phone, and all for free. The SDK is free and at the announcement they demo'd loading an app from the dev box to the iPhone without using the store. So sign up as a developer, download the Xcode tools, and code away.
You only have to pay the $99 if you want Apple to distribute your applications for you.
My understanding (and IANAA) is that because Apple realizes the revenue from iPhone purchases over the course of two years, they can make changes to the product and it's no big deal. With the touch, they've already accounted for your purchase, so there's some arcane rule that says they can't give you additional functionality without charging you for it. I'm betting the "nominal" fee really will be nominal--like $2 or something.
Glorious, that is.
A good number of them had a profit motive when undertaking their journeys. Columbus might have been the intrepid explorer, but he had every intention of returning and his financial backers fully expected him to return either carrying the plunder of new colonies or with a shorter trade route for the highly-taxed trade with the orient.
More to the point, though, is that the cost and complexity of modern extra-planetary exploration by humans is ridiculously higher (in proportion) than it was back then. Louis and Clark bought some horses, boats, and rifles and set out. Amundson hired a ship, bought some dogs, and off he went. Drake thought he would plunder the Spanish in the ships given him by the queen.
I'm not sure how accurate it is to compare these expeditions to something funded by the public at NASA prices.
When the Decepticons were near it would transform into a giant robot! Who knew that PARC was responsible for the autobots?
It also has fewer features that "full" Flash. In other Words, sites that use the latest and greatest version of Flash (and specifically, the latest, two-year-old version of Action Script) don't render the same on "Flash Lite" as they do under the "full" version. The lite version may be great for viewing movies, but I don't think it's very good for much of anything else. I can speak on this subject from experience, having worked on Web-based tools for Palm users at a former employer. Flash seemed like a nice way to handle some of the things we needed to do, but the lite version on the Sony PDAs didn't support all the features we would have needed. We ended up writing a native app that pulled data from the Web.
Beyond the inadequacies of Flash lite, there are user experience issues here, too. Action script provides the ability to capture key presses, something that a lot of game sites use but that would be very difficult to support on the iPhone with it's on-screen keyboard. If you've seen data entry on the iPhone in Safari when in landscape mode, you know that the screen essentially disappears when the keyboard is displayed, making it very difficult to see where you're typing what you're typing. Also, the multi-touch interface isn't very mouse-like, which adds another area where the user experience would be less than optimal.
I'm not saying that Apple has necessarily thought all this through, though I think it's likely that they have. But it does seem like Flash on the iPhone is probably not worth implementing.
when your chores are done.
AT&T is now a bank? Sprint Nextel?
I don't insist that the article titles (or summaries) be perfect, but could they at least have SOME relation to the story itself?
I'm always amused to hear folks complaining about the relatively short life they get out of various products with moving parts by comparing them to something with none. For instance, last week a co-worker was complaining that his washing machine died and part of the complaint was something like "my TVs last 10 years, but this washing machine only lasted six." Hello! You're wearing out the moving components of your washing machine every time you do a load of laundry--there's nothing in your TV to wear out.
Well built/tested consumer products that don't have moving parts (like Sony TVs) will last a very long time. I always appreciated the quality of Sony products, though their odd formats and some of their antics of late have put me off the brand. I had a Sony radio that lasted almost 15 years and at the end of that time when I gave it away, it was still going strong.
You can get away from the *ssholes by speeding up until you go to plaid
In my day job as a tech writer, the only thing that keeps me tied to my Windows box is FrameMaker. Of which, at one time, there was a Linux version, later canceled for (apparent) lack of interest. Unfortunately, the project didn't live very long, and I wasn't able to get a copy while it was alive... something that I regret morning when I fire up Windows.
I can get email (the company uses Outlook) through the Web-based Outlook tool, I use vi to write man pages and do HTML, and I can read various Word/Excel files sent to me in OO, but I NEED FrameMaker--there's no adequate replacement available. So I have an unwanted Windows box.
Sigh
I think I'd argue that most "goods" are not free. Nor are they likely to become so, as the marginal cost of distributing, say, a hamburger or a Ford F150, are never going to approach zero. Costs will fall, prices will fall, but physical goods are constrained in ways that bits are not (until we have TNGs replicator technology). Sure advances in technology improve our lives. But the idea that somehow we're approaching a utopia where everything, including physical goods, is "free" is an unproven one at best.
I bring this up because the conflation of "goods" and software (which is not a "good" in the sense of a physical item) is what drives the notion that copying bits is somehow "theft" in the same way that stealing a burger or truck is. Since copying the bits has no real cost, and since the original "owner" of the bits doesn't lose the use of them, it's pretty clear that these are two different things. When a FOSS advocate, as you appear to be, makes this same mistake (saying that software is somehow equal to "goods") even while denigrating RIAA, it's clear that RIAA has started winning the PR war.
Forgot to mention: if the boots on the ground like this (after sufficient trials) that's a good sign that it's a keeper. I wouldn't trust a major to make that evaluation.
Only from the top (Majors and above) does it appear that HQ is telling the patrol leader "what to think." On the ground, the NCOs and junior officers are quite capable of evaluating situations and responding to them as appropriate.
In an ideal military (which as a vet, I realize ours isn't--but closer than you might think) the chain of command sets an objective and then the lowers carry it out as they see fit. Micromanagement (something most line soldiers were apprehensive about with the Land Warrior system, or whatever they're calling it this week) is never a good thing in a fight. You don't want a general, most of whom are at least 50% political animals with their eye always on the "how will this look on my evaluation" factor, telling a private which window to throw a grenade in when clearing a house. The general says "take the city" the colonel says "Company A attack from the north, Company B attack from the west" and the captains tell the NCOs "go get 'em" and leave the minor details up to platoon/squad leaders.
On a similar note, more information (contrary to the commonly-held slashdot idea) isn't always better. Aside from information overload (another Land Warrior worry) there's the fact that details can get lost in an outpouring of video and maps. It's equally effective to talk to the last patrol's leader and get him to tell you "don't go down Saddam Street" or "We've had problems when we go past the former Baath Party HQ." Better in some ways, since an actual person can communicate nuances and answer questions. Also, I think there can be a tendency to put some portion of your attention on mapping the actual space to what you've seen in the dog-and-pony show, which lowers your situational awareness.
I'm not completely discounting TIGR, just saying that whether this TIGR deal is the bee's knees or not... remains to be seen
Federation fools! Our ship is already on your moon, but it cleverly cloaked, so you'll just have to take our word for it and send us the $1 million
or the 2008 elections?
In Soviet Russia, WiFi charges coffee for you!
It's... 1... 2... 3... 4... 5!
When I was in the Army, I weighed significantly less than I do right now (180~ then, 220 now) and on field exercises we would sometimes eat three MREs a day for a good number of days straight. Each MRE has 2000 calories (or thereabouts)--so 6,000 calories a day--and we still carried pougue-bait and were hungry most of the time. No I eat ~1800 calories a day and I'm 20 pounds overweight for my 6'2" height.
There's no way physical fit and active folks are going to be out-eaten by (us) oldsters.
"Anything not prohibited is compulsory and anything that is not compulsory is prohibited."
I do so love that mamy mamy mamy song
They're comments on the IT guys and the company's new password policy. I log on to my Windows box with WhatALoadofCrap! (apropos of both Windows and the policy), onto the intranet with IT-sucketh-mightily and into some of the restricted applications with PassThis,MF and IhatelamePWPolicies.
Of course, I've carefully written each password on a PostIt affixed to the side of my monitor.
Anyone can change out an electrical panel without being a "licensed" electrician here in the States. You can do it as a homeowner (which I've done) as long as you can do a sufficiently good job to garner the approval of the inspector that the City sends out to look your work over. You can do it as a handyman, as long as you have the homeowner pull the permit and call for the inspection. If you want to pull the permit and have the inspection yourself, at a location other than your own home, you merely need a business license, and that's more so the municipal entity can collect taxes than for any real safety reason.
In fact, I'm not aware of any "construction type" work that must be done by a "licensed" worker. When I've done remodeling, the City Engineer will stamp my hand-drawn plans as long as what I'm doing isn't too extreme. They've stamped off on structural work where I knocked out a 5-minute drawing of the floor joists that I'd be installing. I'm not a licensed anything, but I've made significant structural changes to my house, completely re-wired the kitchen (removing the old wiring and installing new) and done other work without any issues.
YMMV outside the U.S. of course.
All the people who didn't get their chance to flame yesterday and wound up with mod points today.
Sometimes I picture mods sitting there reading through the posts talking under their breath like a kid playing a video game: "Oh, got that one... here's another... Slam! Nailed you, you slashdotting fool... Bam! There's another one! Die, troll, die!"