My best guess: no. The problem was that the SEC wasn't empowered to regulate CDS, and so the SEC probably couldn't have done much to stop the financial meltdown anyway. Plus, this was probably a small portion of the employees at the SEC.
Also, surfing for porn at work wouldn't really be the *cause* of problems (excepting sexual harassment). It's better to think of it as a symptom. Porn-viewing employees are either sitting around with nothing to do, or sitting around with things to do which they aren't doing. Either of those would be the actual problem.
In a certain way of thinking, it's not really a case of bureaucracy, but rather a case of too little bureaucracy. Sounds like they weren't being monitored or forced through a series of arbitrary rules and procedures, but rather that they were left to their own devices, without rules and procedures. It's the opposite of bureaucracy.
I'm still on XP so I don't know about Vista and Win7, but saying that they have "better support" doesn't quite assure me that they have good support.
I know in Windows XP, when you changed the DPI settings, it scaled the text, but all sorts of other elements got screwed up. Icons, for example, got all mucked up because they were raster images. You really need all the icons and graphical elements to be SVG.
I've read that both OSX and Windows have put some work into making their UIs scale better, but I have yet to read that either OS will scale perfectly. Until all the operating systems support higher DPI fully, monitors at high DPI will actually cause things to look worse. Either you'll be scaling OS elements badly, or everything will by tiny, or you'll need to run the monitor at a non-native resolution. None of those are great options. You can't blame the monitor vendors for sticking with resolutions that will look good.
Sorry, but your "strawman" claim is BS. Flash is not a good thing, and I've read (and been in) many discussions where people have literally claimed that Flash is the proper way to handle video distribution because it solves *all* the problems and is fully supported on *every* platform except for iPhoneOS. And that's simply not true.
If you read my post history, or even the post that you're replying to, I've said multiple times that I disagree with Apple keeping such tight control on application distribution. As an iPhone own (first gen, before there even was an app store), I've made multiple submissions to Apple's suggestion box asking for them to allow people to install whatever applications they want. It's enough that my next phone will probably be an Android phone.
BUT! That's really not the issue here. The issue is that Adobe is astroturfing, trying subvert web standards and push Flash adoption. They're successfully getting people to argue that Flash is the epitome of what's wrong with Apple's controlling nature. It's not. This is an instance where Apple's controlling behavior is doing everyone a tremendous favor, by damaging Adobe's strangle-hold on video distribution on the web. If you want the epitome of what's wrong with Apple's controlling nature, look instead to the rejection of Google Voice from the App store.
Bigger problem than the weather: if you live in a city and rent an apartment, a lot of landlords won't let you install a dish.
As much as people say that the problem with US's telecommunications infrastructure is caused by low population density, I live in NYC and I only have a single choice in Internet or cable. There's no FIOS, no DSL, and no satellite service available. The one and only option is Time Warner Cable, and they generally stink. Still, I guess I can't complain, since a lot of people are still stuck on dialup connections.
About a year ago I was paying $100/month for cable, just TV, not including Internet, phone, or anything else.
That $100 included basic cable plus HBO, in HD, with a DVR box. I don't remember how it broke down, but I think it was something like $50 for basic cable, $20 for HD, $15 for DVR, and $15 for HBO.
Since that time, I cancelled cable and I now rely exclusively on Netflix and Hulu, spending $12/month. If there's a show I *really* love that's not available through either of those, then I buy it on iTunes. Mostly, though, I just watch Netflix on my PS3.
I'd pay for it - if they stopped being dicks. That means, if I could watch it on my xbox 360
I agree, but I'm kind of looking at a bigger picture than that: I'll gladly pay a subscription service if the quit trying to fragment the market.
Right now, I can watch *some* TV and movies on Hulu, ad supported. I can watch *some* TV and movies on Netflix, subscription based. I can watch *some* TV and movies on Amazon or iTunes, but through a purchase model.
Even within iTunes, I can watch *some* movies on iTunes if I "rent" them, but I can't buy those, while other movies on iTunes I can buy but not rent. Some TV shows release each episode as it airs, but not until the next day, while other TV shows wait until the season is over and the DVDs are released. Some TV and movies available in HD, but some aren't even if they air in HD. The HD is 720p, which means if I want to future-proof things by getting 1080p, I have to buy Bluray instead.
Oh, right, and there's not a single set-top device that I can plug into my TV that can watch Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, *and* Bluray. If I want to watch all of them, I have to hack together an expensive computer with a crappy menu system and hope that none of these services decide to change up their DRM on me. And then there are still things that are only available on Cable TV (e.g. sporting events), and they delay movies being available on these services to try to push you to see them in theaters.
And what's worse, they're doing all of this on purpose. It's a highly inefficient and expensive system with a piss-poor user experience, and they're doing it on purpose to squeeze every last penny out of each of us. They want you to pay for Hulu and Netflix and Cable TV and watch the ads and buy it on iTunes or Bluray and then buy it again later. They want you to do all of it, so for the time being they're being dicks. They're going to keep fighting tooth and nail to keep any service from having everything you want.
And then while all of the confusion and frustration is keeping you and me from actually buying these products, they'll complain to the government that their revenue losses are due to evil pirates. Then they'll get even more cultural/economic control out of the deal, and be even bigger dicks.
It's a shame though. If they managed to partner with some of these services I'd happily pay $10 a month for it. It beats the heck out of a $60 per month satellite bill.
... and that's why you won't see it happen. Hulu is run by the TV networks, and the TV networks still want the money from Cable/Satellite. If they make their content available online, it might become a competitive market. Instead of charging $10/month on Hulu, they'd rather lock you into paying $100/month on cable.
I wasn't responding to a post that said, "Apple isn't very open". I was responding to a post that said, "Apple has long been more evil than Microsoft".
Regardless, Apple is *fairly* open. A hell of a lot of the software in OSX is FOSS, both in the server and desktop version. They tend to stick to open standards, and or else develop new standards and then open them. Considering they're basically a hardware company who thinks of their OS as an embedded system, they're remarkably open.
Apple will probably always be Apple (at least as long as Steve Jobs is around).
Well, and I think it's fair to say that Apple plays a role. We could argue quite a lot about this, but the way I see it, Apple is able to make some pretty good stuff that works really well because of their strict control and vertical integration. Because of that, Apple gets to be the sort of high-end luxury brand of computers. Microsoft and other companies meanwhile do a good job at commodifying computing. FOSS helps to keep everyone honest by giving cheap and powerful options. In some ways, this arrangement is working well.
I know some people who want everything to be Linux, but I don't see the point in that. I'd like to see hardware manufacturers open up their specs and even lend a hand in writing drivers, I'd like to see companies like Dell and HP working harder to provide Linux support, and I'd like to see the patent system reformed. Other than that, I think we're doing ok. We've seen a bunch of moves toward greater openness in protocols and file formats, allowing for greater interoperability. Some of the proprietary guys are contributing to open source projects. Linux is getting to be quite a good desktop OS and mobile OS.
Would we have Android today if Apple hadn't released the iPhone? I kind of doubt it. I think Apple's tight little vertical integration produced a fancy product which made these manufacturers get off their asses and produce better phones. Steve being Steve, he produced a new vision for what a phone should be, and I Android seems to be following that vision.
I doubt it. I'd guess he'd think it's funny that someone bothered to do this, and he'd feel confident that most iPhone users won't bother. If you'd ask him, I bet he'd say something like, "If you want to run Android, why not buy a phone that's built for it?"
I would really hope that they wouldn't refuse to license the design. For one thing, it would mean lower volume, more expensive chips.
If Apple did buy ARM, my real hope would be that they had such a good experience in making A4 chips for the iPad that they're planning on making a huge investment in ARM. Not only would it mean better chips for future iPad and iPhones, but maybe it could eventually mean ARM chips for super-efficient Apple laptops, desktops, and servers. If they want to compete with the likes of Intel, they're going to want to do as much volume as possible.
Re:Buying ARM for a leg?
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Apple To Buy ARM?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'd dispute that. Apple keeps pretty tight reigns on its own products, but they aren't very devious and don't particularly try to break interoperability. Apple uses an open source OS (the GUI stuff isn't open, but at its base OSX is a BSD varient). These days, Macs support X11, ODF, and common unix tools out of the box. They've contributed to open source projects, including their own calendar server and webkit. While Apple was pushing the record labels to drop DRM, allowing Apple to sell music in an open standard, Microsoft was pushing them to use Microsoft DRM and distribute music only in their own proprietary format. Apple has been one of the companies leading the charge in pushing HTML and CSS standards forward.
Sorry, Microsoft has historically been far more evil and Apple. It's true, though, that Microsoft seems to be getting better these days, with things like supporting ODF, working with SAMBA, and planning to provide real/compliant support HTML5 in IE9.
Re:Buying ARM for a leg?
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Apple To Buy ARM?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Sorry, but the 1990s were the absolute wrong time to be an Apple fan. That's when they sucked.
Yeah, pro-Flash and anti-Apple people talk as though Flash is a stable and established standard component of any mobile platform, and has been for years.
In truth, there's a crippled version of Flash that has been running on some mobile devices for a couple years. Adobe is planning to release something better soon, but at this point, Flash stinks on every platform except the Windows desktop. After a couple years of Apple refusing to put the Flash player on any mobile devices because (among other reasons) Steve Jobs thinks it's a buggy, bloated, power-draining POS, Adobe proceeds to think up a plan which would have Flash developers submitting their Flash applications to Apple with a copy of the Flash player embedded. They don't bother to consult Apple first.
It doesn't take a genius to guess what comes next. It's not surprising that they stopped development; it's surprising that they started development in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if this is all a ploy by Adobe to get real Flash support on the iPhone. If Apple had accepted these Flash apps, then Adobe would have grounds to say, "See? You already have Flash running on the iPhone. Just expand support a little." Since Apple has rejected the whole plan, Adobe can complain about how close Apple is.
Not that I approve of Apple's closed stance on the iPhone. It's just that, if you ask me, this is just two large companies vying for control over your computing experience. Adobe wants to create a massive metaplatform of Flash and PDF that runs on everything, and puts them in control over everything. Apple instead wants to retain control over their own devices..
No. It isn't. Their moral responsibility is to maximize shareholder profits which they have succeeded in doing, beyond expectations
Well the truth is they have *many* moral responsibilities, as we all do. One of their many legal responsibilities is to not defraud shareholders of their investment, true, and there is a moral component of that. But they also have moral responsibilities that go beyond that.
I could easily understand Jobs believing (sincerely and with some valid reason) that he has a moral obligation to provide parental controls, and even to refuse to endorse porn by offering it in their App store. However, I hope he realizes that their iPhone lockdown means that their refusal to distribute applications goes beyond "refusing to endorse them" and into the realm of "actively blocking them". Having the power to block access to functions and applications of a large portion of the population itself carries some moral responsibilities, one of which is to be *very careful* to make sure that power isn't abused.
Well really it's stupid regardless of what the director has to say. I could imagine the director taking it all very seriously and being upset that people were making fun of his movie or making light of Hitler's actions. Still, forcing these clips to be taken down would be stupid.
These parodies aren't being done for profit. They're not competing with the movie. They're not taking away from the movie. Nobody is going to watch these clips and say, "Well I don't need to see this movie now." This isn't what copyright was created for.
The whole thing might even be covered under the first amendment as parody.
I find it hard to believe that Apple would just hand these things out without keeping track of who had them. It probably didn't take too long to figure out whose phone was missing once the first photos were published.
I feel like things might be able to be simplified a little better if there were better use of certificates for authentication and encryption. Of course, that requires a better (free) method of managing and authenticating the certificates themselves.
It might not have a lot of improvements in the realm of firewalls, but it might enable better/easier VPN and control over routing rules. Instead of dealing with IPs and MAC addresses, you could allow specific users and machines. Of course, I'm not sure how much you want to deal with the overhead of all that. Current IP-based routing is doing well enough, and speed matters.
Otherwise, I don't know... IPv6 and ditching NAT? As far as the feeding a Visio diagram in, I'm not sure how much I want my firewall interpreting diagrams for intent. Some firewalls already have GUIs of some kind or another, with varying degrees of helpfulness.
For my purposes, I wouldn't mind seeing cheap, standard, dead-simple VPN that's supported across all clients without additional software installs. Firewalls are only one part of that problem. I imagine a better system of distributing/verifying certs might help.
In a more general way of saying what I think you're saying, we might guess that he thinks games aren't art because he hasn't played enough games.
I think this betrays a lack of understanding:
Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009.
He seems to be saying (though I may be misinterpreting) that people at the top of their game (e.g. Bobby Fischer) didn't think their game-playing abilities made them artists, but I don't think game-players want to claim to be artists. Your ability to appreciate the art isn't determined by your skill at the game.
If sculpting is an art, then making 3D models should be an art. If writing music or a story for a movie is art, then why should it be different for a video game? Essentially, video games can contain all the audio/visual artistic expression that a movie contains. Creating an animation in a game doesn't take less skill than creating the same animation for a movie. The only difference is that, in addition to what a movie has, games have interactivity. Deciding how/when to blend that interactivity into audio/visual expressions is itself a creative process. The effect might not be obvious to non-gamers, but placing you into the role of a character or placing you in the action can have a significant dramatic effect.
I'm sure there are better examples, but "Portal" comes to mind (warning: possible spoilers if you haven't played the game). The fact that it was set up to appear as a simple puzzle game with discrete levels set you up to have a certain set of expectations. You believe you're in a well defined world with rules, and that the world is "working the way it's supposed to." As the game progresses, you begin to see signs that the in-game world is not what it appears, and therefor the game itself is not what it appears. This is an artistic progression that the audience experiences somewhat passively, but it wouldn't be possible in a non-interactive medium.
I would also say that, in a lot of games, you don't "win". It seems that you don't "win" games like WoW, but they just go on and on. Various achievements might me attained along the way, but there isn't necessarily a defined "goal". Also, in my opinion, you don't "win" at games like Portal or Half Life. You complete them, yes. There are goals along the way, and you are guided through them, but you're also guided through movies in a way. Movies aren't *completely* passive in the experience; you choose what to pay attention to and what to think about.
It's certainly a murky distinction. Yes, you are actively involved and participating in games. But then, depending on whether you consider modern performance art to be "art", the audience might be very involved in the art of "normal" art. The audience plays a role in stage acting. In a sense, the audience even plays a role in painting. You might argue that a painting wouldn't be art if the painter never expected it to be seen.
It's better to lose hardware that can only be looked at than lose the hardware and the software
Especially if the hardware wasn't final, and the phone was "in the wild" because they were testing new software features. FindMyPhone only works if the phone is on and connected, same as the remote wipe.
We all know that Apple has controlled leaks when they want to have an unofficial press release, but I agree that (assuming this really is a prototype for the next iPhone) this probably wasn't leaked on purpose. They've never been known to drop hardware like this, and they could have just as easly "leaked" photographs of the case. I bet that, even if this was a prototype, this isn't the final casing.
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My best guess: no. The problem was that the SEC wasn't empowered to regulate CDS, and so the SEC probably couldn't have done much to stop the financial meltdown anyway. Plus, this was probably a small portion of the employees at the SEC.
Also, surfing for porn at work wouldn't really be the *cause* of problems (excepting sexual harassment). It's better to think of it as a symptom. Porn-viewing employees are either sitting around with nothing to do, or sitting around with things to do which they aren't doing. Either of those would be the actual problem.
Good point. It wouldn't have been better for us if they were sitting around posting on discussion boards or something.
In a certain way of thinking, it's not really a case of bureaucracy, but rather a case of too little bureaucracy. Sounds like they weren't being monitored or forced through a series of arbitrary rules and procedures, but rather that they were left to their own devices, without rules and procedures. It's the opposite of bureaucracy.
I'm still on XP so I don't know about Vista and Win7, but saying that they have "better support" doesn't quite assure me that they have good support.
I know in Windows XP, when you changed the DPI settings, it scaled the text, but all sorts of other elements got screwed up. Icons, for example, got all mucked up because they were raster images. You really need all the icons and graphical elements to be SVG.
I've read that both OSX and Windows have put some work into making their UIs scale better, but I have yet to read that either OS will scale perfectly. Until all the operating systems support higher DPI fully, monitors at high DPI will actually cause things to look worse. Either you'll be scaling OS elements badly, or everything will by tiny, or you'll need to run the monitor at a non-native resolution. None of those are great options. You can't blame the monitor vendors for sticking with resolutions that will look good.
Sorry, but your "strawman" claim is BS. Flash is not a good thing, and I've read (and been in) many discussions where people have literally claimed that Flash is the proper way to handle video distribution because it solves *all* the problems and is fully supported on *every* platform except for iPhoneOS. And that's simply not true.
If you read my post history, or even the post that you're replying to, I've said multiple times that I disagree with Apple keeping such tight control on application distribution. As an iPhone own (first gen, before there even was an app store), I've made multiple submissions to Apple's suggestion box asking for them to allow people to install whatever applications they want. It's enough that my next phone will probably be an Android phone.
BUT! That's really not the issue here. The issue is that Adobe is astroturfing, trying subvert web standards and push Flash adoption. They're successfully getting people to argue that Flash is the epitome of what's wrong with Apple's controlling nature. It's not. This is an instance where Apple's controlling behavior is doing everyone a tremendous favor, by damaging Adobe's strangle-hold on video distribution on the web. If you want the epitome of what's wrong with Apple's controlling nature, look instead to the rejection of Google Voice from the App store.
Bigger problem than the weather: if you live in a city and rent an apartment, a lot of landlords won't let you install a dish.
As much as people say that the problem with US's telecommunications infrastructure is caused by low population density, I live in NYC and I only have a single choice in Internet or cable. There's no FIOS, no DSL, and no satellite service available. The one and only option is Time Warner Cable, and they generally stink. Still, I guess I can't complain, since a lot of people are still stuck on dialup connections.
About a year ago I was paying $100/month for cable, just TV, not including Internet, phone, or anything else.
That $100 included basic cable plus HBO, in HD, with a DVR box. I don't remember how it broke down, but I think it was something like $50 for basic cable, $20 for HD, $15 for DVR, and $15 for HBO.
Since that time, I cancelled cable and I now rely exclusively on Netflix and Hulu, spending $12/month. If there's a show I *really* love that's not available through either of those, then I buy it on iTunes. Mostly, though, I just watch Netflix on my PS3.
I'd pay for it - if they stopped being dicks. That means, if I could watch it on my xbox 360
I agree, but I'm kind of looking at a bigger picture than that: I'll gladly pay a subscription service if the quit trying to fragment the market.
Right now, I can watch *some* TV and movies on Hulu, ad supported. I can watch *some* TV and movies on Netflix, subscription based. I can watch *some* TV and movies on Amazon or iTunes, but through a purchase model.
Even within iTunes, I can watch *some* movies on iTunes if I "rent" them, but I can't buy those, while other movies on iTunes I can buy but not rent. Some TV shows release each episode as it airs, but not until the next day, while other TV shows wait until the season is over and the DVDs are released. Some TV and movies available in HD, but some aren't even if they air in HD. The HD is 720p, which means if I want to future-proof things by getting 1080p, I have to buy Bluray instead.
Oh, right, and there's not a single set-top device that I can plug into my TV that can watch Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, *and* Bluray. If I want to watch all of them, I have to hack together an expensive computer with a crappy menu system and hope that none of these services decide to change up their DRM on me. And then there are still things that are only available on Cable TV (e.g. sporting events), and they delay movies being available on these services to try to push you to see them in theaters.
And what's worse, they're doing all of this on purpose. It's a highly inefficient and expensive system with a piss-poor user experience, and they're doing it on purpose to squeeze every last penny out of each of us. They want you to pay for Hulu and Netflix and Cable TV and watch the ads and buy it on iTunes or Bluray and then buy it again later. They want you to do all of it, so for the time being they're being dicks. They're going to keep fighting tooth and nail to keep any service from having everything you want.
And then while all of the confusion and frustration is keeping you and me from actually buying these products, they'll complain to the government that their revenue losses are due to evil pirates. Then they'll get even more cultural/economic control out of the deal, and be even bigger dicks.
It's a shame though. If they managed to partner with some of these services I'd happily pay $10 a month for it. It beats the heck out of a $60 per month satellite bill.
... and that's why you won't see it happen. Hulu is run by the TV networks, and the TV networks still want the money from Cable/Satellite. If they make their content available online, it might become a competitive market. Instead of charging $10/month on Hulu, they'd rather lock you into paying $100/month on cable.
I wasn't responding to a post that said, "Apple isn't very open". I was responding to a post that said, "Apple has long been more evil than Microsoft".
Regardless, Apple is *fairly* open. A hell of a lot of the software in OSX is FOSS, both in the server and desktop version. They tend to stick to open standards, and or else develop new standards and then open them. Considering they're basically a hardware company who thinks of their OS as an embedded system, they're remarkably open.
Apple will probably always be Apple (at least as long as Steve Jobs is around).
Well, and I think it's fair to say that Apple plays a role. We could argue quite a lot about this, but the way I see it, Apple is able to make some pretty good stuff that works really well because of their strict control and vertical integration. Because of that, Apple gets to be the sort of high-end luxury brand of computers. Microsoft and other companies meanwhile do a good job at commodifying computing. FOSS helps to keep everyone honest by giving cheap and powerful options. In some ways, this arrangement is working well.
I know some people who want everything to be Linux, but I don't see the point in that. I'd like to see hardware manufacturers open up their specs and even lend a hand in writing drivers, I'd like to see companies like Dell and HP working harder to provide Linux support, and I'd like to see the patent system reformed. Other than that, I think we're doing ok. We've seen a bunch of moves toward greater openness in protocols and file formats, allowing for greater interoperability. Some of the proprietary guys are contributing to open source projects. Linux is getting to be quite a good desktop OS and mobile OS.
Would we have Android today if Apple hadn't released the iPhone? I kind of doubt it. I think Apple's tight little vertical integration produced a fancy product which made these manufacturers get off their asses and produce better phones. Steve being Steve, he produced a new vision for what a phone should be, and I Android seems to be following that vision.
I doubt it. I'd guess he'd think it's funny that someone bothered to do this, and he'd feel confident that most iPhone users won't bother. If you'd ask him, I bet he'd say something like, "If you want to run Android, why not buy a phone that's built for it?"
I would really hope that they wouldn't refuse to license the design. For one thing, it would mean lower volume, more expensive chips.
If Apple did buy ARM, my real hope would be that they had such a good experience in making A4 chips for the iPad that they're planning on making a huge investment in ARM. Not only would it mean better chips for future iPad and iPhones, but maybe it could eventually mean ARM chips for super-efficient Apple laptops, desktops, and servers. If they want to compete with the likes of Intel, they're going to want to do as much volume as possible.
I'd dispute that. Apple keeps pretty tight reigns on its own products, but they aren't very devious and don't particularly try to break interoperability. Apple uses an open source OS (the GUI stuff isn't open, but at its base OSX is a BSD varient). These days, Macs support X11, ODF, and common unix tools out of the box. They've contributed to open source projects, including their own calendar server and webkit. While Apple was pushing the record labels to drop DRM, allowing Apple to sell music in an open standard, Microsoft was pushing them to use Microsoft DRM and distribute music only in their own proprietary format. Apple has been one of the companies leading the charge in pushing HTML and CSS standards forward.
Sorry, Microsoft has historically been far more evil and Apple. It's true, though, that Microsoft seems to be getting better these days, with things like supporting ODF, working with SAMBA, and planning to provide real/compliant support HTML5 in IE9.
Sorry, but the 1990s were the absolute wrong time to be an Apple fan. That's when they sucked.
Yeah, pro-Flash and anti-Apple people talk as though Flash is a stable and established standard component of any mobile platform, and has been for years.
In truth, there's a crippled version of Flash that has been running on some mobile devices for a couple years. Adobe is planning to release something better soon, but at this point, Flash stinks on every platform except the Windows desktop. After a couple years of Apple refusing to put the Flash player on any mobile devices because (among other reasons) Steve Jobs thinks it's a buggy, bloated, power-draining POS, Adobe proceeds to think up a plan which would have Flash developers submitting their Flash applications to Apple with a copy of the Flash player embedded. They don't bother to consult Apple first.
It doesn't take a genius to guess what comes next. It's not surprising that they stopped development; it's surprising that they started development in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if this is all a ploy by Adobe to get real Flash support on the iPhone. If Apple had accepted these Flash apps, then Adobe would have grounds to say, "See? You already have Flash running on the iPhone. Just expand support a little." Since Apple has rejected the whole plan, Adobe can complain about how close Apple is.
Not that I approve of Apple's closed stance on the iPhone. It's just that, if you ask me, this is just two large companies vying for control over your computing experience. Adobe wants to create a massive metaplatform of Flash and PDF that runs on everything, and puts them in control over everything. Apple instead wants to retain control over their own devices..
No. It isn't. Their moral responsibility is to maximize shareholder profits which they have succeeded in doing, beyond expectations
Well the truth is they have *many* moral responsibilities, as we all do. One of their many legal responsibilities is to not defraud shareholders of their investment, true, and there is a moral component of that. But they also have moral responsibilities that go beyond that.
I could easily understand Jobs believing (sincerely and with some valid reason) that he has a moral obligation to provide parental controls, and even to refuse to endorse porn by offering it in their App store. However, I hope he realizes that their iPhone lockdown means that their refusal to distribute applications goes beyond "refusing to endorse them" and into the realm of "actively blocking them". Having the power to block access to functions and applications of a large portion of the population itself carries some moral responsibilities, one of which is to be *very careful* to make sure that power isn't abused.
Well really it's stupid regardless of what the director has to say. I could imagine the director taking it all very seriously and being upset that people were making fun of his movie or making light of Hitler's actions. Still, forcing these clips to be taken down would be stupid.
These parodies aren't being done for profit. They're not competing with the movie. They're not taking away from the movie. Nobody is going to watch these clips and say, "Well I don't need to see this movie now." This isn't what copyright was created for.
The whole thing might even be covered under the first amendment as parody.
Yeah, he's pretty pissed.
I find it hard to believe that Apple would just hand these things out without keeping track of who had them. It probably didn't take too long to figure out whose phone was missing once the first photos were published.
I feel like things might be able to be simplified a little better if there were better use of certificates for authentication and encryption. Of course, that requires a better (free) method of managing and authenticating the certificates themselves.
It might not have a lot of improvements in the realm of firewalls, but it might enable better/easier VPN and control over routing rules. Instead of dealing with IPs and MAC addresses, you could allow specific users and machines. Of course, I'm not sure how much you want to deal with the overhead of all that. Current IP-based routing is doing well enough, and speed matters.
Otherwise, I don't know... IPv6 and ditching NAT? As far as the feeding a Visio diagram in, I'm not sure how much I want my firewall interpreting diagrams for intent. Some firewalls already have GUIs of some kind or another, with varying degrees of helpfulness.
For my purposes, I wouldn't mind seeing cheap, standard, dead-simple VPN that's supported across all clients without additional software installs. Firewalls are only one part of that problem. I imagine a better system of distributing/verifying certs might help.
In a more general way of saying what I think you're saying, we might guess that he thinks games aren't art because he hasn't played enough games.
I think this betrays a lack of understanding:
Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009.
He seems to be saying (though I may be misinterpreting) that people at the top of their game (e.g. Bobby Fischer) didn't think their game-playing abilities made them artists, but I don't think game-players want to claim to be artists. Your ability to appreciate the art isn't determined by your skill at the game.
If sculpting is an art, then making 3D models should be an art. If writing music or a story for a movie is art, then why should it be different for a video game? Essentially, video games can contain all the audio/visual artistic expression that a movie contains. Creating an animation in a game doesn't take less skill than creating the same animation for a movie. The only difference is that, in addition to what a movie has, games have interactivity. Deciding how/when to blend that interactivity into audio/visual expressions is itself a creative process. The effect might not be obvious to non-gamers, but placing you into the role of a character or placing you in the action can have a significant dramatic effect.
I'm sure there are better examples, but "Portal" comes to mind (warning: possible spoilers if you haven't played the game). The fact that it was set up to appear as a simple puzzle game with discrete levels set you up to have a certain set of expectations. You believe you're in a well defined world with rules, and that the world is "working the way it's supposed to." As the game progresses, you begin to see signs that the in-game world is not what it appears, and therefor the game itself is not what it appears. This is an artistic progression that the audience experiences somewhat passively, but it wouldn't be possible in a non-interactive medium.
I would also say that, in a lot of games, you don't "win". It seems that you don't "win" games like WoW, but they just go on and on. Various achievements might me attained along the way, but there isn't necessarily a defined "goal". Also, in my opinion, you don't "win" at games like Portal or Half Life. You complete them, yes. There are goals along the way, and you are guided through them, but you're also guided through movies in a way. Movies aren't *completely* passive in the experience; you choose what to pay attention to and what to think about.
It's certainly a murky distinction. Yes, you are actively involved and participating in games. But then, depending on whether you consider modern performance art to be "art", the audience might be very involved in the art of "normal" art. The audience plays a role in stage acting. In a sense, the audience even plays a role in painting. You might argue that a painting wouldn't be art if the painter never expected it to be seen.
It's better to lose hardware that can only be looked at than lose the hardware and the software
Especially if the hardware wasn't final, and the phone was "in the wild" because they were testing new software features. FindMyPhone only works if the phone is on and connected, same as the remote wipe.
We all know that Apple has controlled leaks when they want to have an unofficial press release, but I agree that (assuming this really is a prototype for the next iPhone) this probably wasn't leaked on purpose. They've never been known to drop hardware like this, and they could have just as easly "leaked" photographs of the case. I bet that, even if this was a prototype, this isn't the final casing.
How do they know what feels nicer in *my* pants. God, I hope they haven't been feeling around in my pants. I keep my junk in there.