Complaining about others' butchering of words is also part of that process. Just as planets wouldn't form without both gravity pulling in and electrons repelling each other, languages wouldn't form without both butchering and complaining.
Consider further: before buying the product, the vendor offers to pay for half of the product (making it much more accessible) if you sign a contract to use it the way they tell you to use it, for two whole years.
Consider furthest: we're talking about the 1st generation iPhone, which wasn't subsidized by AT&T at all. As the customer, you bought the hardware outright.
When you buy one of these crappy Verizon phones, what's the application called that you install on your desktop computer, allowing you to sync and manage your MP3 files on your phone? And that application also has access to a store for more MP3s and applications for your phone?
It's my personal files, so it's pretty unlikely that I'll be editing the same file on both of my computers at the same time. If I am doing that, I'll probably be aware of it and be able to take steps to ensure I don't lose the version that's important to me.
I wasn't saying that Apple approached Verizon at the time of the iPhone release. I was saying that the rumor at the time of the first iPhone release was that Apple first approached Verizon (some time before the release), was turned down, and then approached AT&T.
That rumor might not have been true, but I was just reporting it as a rumor.
I didn't jailbreak my phone and my phone was never bricked. I don't really have a horse in this race. I'm really just suggesting that if Apple really bricked phones on purpose, that doesn't seem quite right to me, even if it's legal.
I don't know if you're referring to some official bit of information, but the rumor at the time of the first iPhone release was that Apple approached Verizon before AT&T, but Verizon wouldn't agree to Apple's terms. The terms included:
No carrier branding on the device itself or the installed software
Apple wanted free reign over the product's design and feature set
Apple wanted the iPhone to have a small selection of simple plans with inexpensive data service (the original iPhones had unlimited data for $20/month)
Apple didn't want the phone to be subsidized and therefore wanted a share of the service plan
Apple wanted the carrier's help in creating some features (e.g. visual voicemail)
On the other hand, consider the following formulation: You buy a product. It's your property. The person who sold it to you doesn't like the way you're using it, so they break the product you bought. They don't compensate you for your lost product or offer a refund.
Are you of the opinion that this is generally acceptable behavior on the part of the vendor?
Now yes, it's more complicated than that. You have software licensing terms, and you have warranty terms. People arguably broke their own phones while voiding their warranty. And IIRC, Apple wasn't very strict about refusing to replace bricked phones.
So, even if Android had the same marketshare as Apple's ther app store would always show fewer apps because people are free to use other ways to get from them to their users.
Even beyond that, Apple has the advantage of having iTunes, and not just an app store. I know, I know, some people really hate iTunes, but that's not my point here.
My point is that iTunes provides a single access point that lets you do several things. It lets you organize your music, movies, podcasts, etc., and sync them to your phone in a configurable manner. It's also the program that's used to manage some aspects of your phone and install software updates. So because of those things, if you have an iPhone, you're pretty well guaranteed to be using iTunes.
But iTunes is also a program that allows you to buy media content for your iPhone. If you have an iPhone, there's a pretty good chance that you already have an iTunes account and you're already using it to buy music. So you have the program installed, you have an account all set up, and you're browsing the storefront already. It's just a couple extra clicks to download an application for your iPhone. It's simple. No software installed. No credit card information being put in.
I think other cell phone manufacturers could learn from this. Give your customers a very easy integrated experience for buying, installing, and syncing applications, music and video, and keeping all of it up to date.
Well evidently their crappiness does vary, seeing as different models from different companies have different failure rates.
And it's not just an issue of what components are used. Even if you use all the same electronics, heat sinks, power supplies, etc., even something as seemingly superficial as a bad case design can hurt the reliability of a computer.
This isn't too surprising, really. Whenever you go for the cheap end of things, you get poor quality.
Now don't understand me-- I'm not saying that it's good. I think it'd be great if we could make cheap things also be good quality. Like I imagine someone could manufacture netbooks and still sell them relatively cheaply just by virtue of the fact that they use fewer components and less materials. However, the tendency in a situation like this is for the manufacturer to say, "These are cheaper products with tight profit margins. These are also budget products, and people who buy budget products will tend to buy the cheapest thing available. Let's just cut every corner, make them as cheap as possible, and not worry too much about quality." It's the same reason we get $5 blenders at Walmart that break after a year.
Of course, the problem is often that it's hard for consumers to tell the difference, so companies sometimes don't provide a good middle ground. Like you might find yourself in a situation where you can find a cheap $5-10 blender that will break in the next year, and the next step up is a $1000 "luxury" blender with a built in toaster oven, speakers, and iPhone dock. I guess simple, high quality, economical goods don't sell.
Well that's great. Make the standard as good of a standard as you can, and don't take a not-invented-here attitude. Once you have a good standard, everyone should implement that standard and not make non-compliant versions to increase vendor lock-in.
Because I don't need to handle merges, give version history, rollback, branches, etc. I just need to keep two directories in sync even though changes might be made in either directory.
There's also the question of whether you really want to store things online. If I want to sync a few MBs of documents, syncing over the Internet to a server might be fine. On the other hand, if I want to keep 100 GB synced between two computers on the same network, pushing that over a 512k Internet connection just to download it again might be less than ideal.
I think you can use more than 2 sources of documents, but you basically need to treat one server as your master. So if I have 4 computers, I think I can pick 1 computer as the master and sync the other 3 with it, which will keep all 4 in sync.
You have some choices in handling resolution. I don't know what it checks to determine when a file has been changed, but it keeps some kind of database to keep track of which files have been synced where. During a normal sync, it compares the changes since the last sync and updates the other source to match. In cases where both sources have been changed since the last sync, it will ask you which file you'd like to keep. If you want, you can tell it to "prefer" one of the sources, and it will resolve conflicts in favor of the preferred source if both files have been updated, or you can tell it to "force" one of the sources, in which case any conflicts are resolved in favor of that source no matter what.
I use Unison to sync my laptop and desktop, and I tell it to prefer my laptop. But then my desktop is a Mac and I have Time Machine running, so even if I "hose myself", it just means hunting down the lost files in Time Machine.
I think this generally won't be a replacement computer for most people. Notice they're focussing on the netbook form factor for now. It's going to be for people who have desktops (or bigger laptops that they don't like carrying around too much) to have an on-the-go computer with basic productivity (office suite, email, IM, web browser).
Of course if they start moving for this to take over as everyone's main computer, they'll have to make some changes. Taking photos off their camera is a pretty easy thing-- upload them to picassa automatically. With something like iTunes, Google is going to either have to support big hard drives or provide a lot of online storage with free streaming and local caching. Even with games, you could have a Steam-like service that only needs local storage for a cache.
On the other hand, allowing such permissive downloading raises some problems, and some people are going to have real problems with any one of the solutions. There could be a lot of piracy, which media companies and game developers won't like. If Google doesn't want to allow that, they're going to have to use DRM, which will probably annoy a lot of potential customers. If they don't want to use DRM, then they're going to have to monitor your downloads pretty carefully, which will really bother privacy advocates, who will already be upset at Google for having so much access to personal data.
I thought that the underlying stuff, at least, was supposed to be Linux. I don't know about the window manager, but some things are probably going to need to be released under the GPL.
I second the suggestion. It's basically like rsync except it's more like real synchronization. What I mean is, AFAIK with rsync you basically have to say, "Sync folder A and folder B by assuming that folder A is the copy I want to keep, and changing only folder B." With Unison, on the other hand, you can say, "Sync folders A and B by keeping track of when files get modified, and keeping the most recent version of each file. If a file has been modified in both folders since my last sync, let me know and ask me what to do."
One minor annoyance is the project page links to an OSX version that includes a Cocoa interface, and that's kind of a pain if you want to script it to run in the background. Even if you call it from the command line, the GUI will still open up. Also, if you install it from MacPorts, it doesn't do a good job of maintaining resource forks. Of course, if you're syncing to Linux or Windows, you might not care about resource forks.
I think the best place to get the OSX version is here: link
It's been a while since I've downloaded it, though.
Even if web standards came along later, it still wouldn't be a good reason to ignore them. The standard electrical outlet was designed after someone discovered how to harness electricity, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use them.
Standards are good. If someone wants to argue that IE's version of HTML is better than W3C's and we should be using it as our standard instead, I'm all ears. Of course, for that to be a reasonable idea, we'd have to have a well documented explanation of what IE's "standard" is and how it works, because otherwise it's not much of a standard.
Bubbles are going to keep happening anyway. You have a bunch of free-floating money out there just waiting to jump onto the next fad of sure-thing investments. It was tech stocks, then real estate, and it's going to be something else. I think it's just what happens when you treat civilization as a big get-rich-quick scheme. It'd like to think it's possible to instill a culture of solid long-term investments including continual updating of necessary social services and infrastructure, but at least here in the US, it seems to be a foreign idea. We're looking to maximize our profits THIS QUARTER and don't care what happens in two years.
If the content is trusted then requiring the user to get root privileges is just a security risk (key-loggers). I do hope, however, that they had to foresight to require specific permissions to allow users to install signed packages.
I could see having some kind of permission that can be set to allow particular users the rights to install signed packages without any additional administrative rights. That could be useful. However, I don't think it would make sense to have that right granted to non-admin users in the default case. It should be a right that the admin needs to specifically grant to users before it is allowed.
Well... yeah, maybe there's a lot you don't understand. I don't know what you understand. As I was saying, I don't think the Obama administration or the economists who have advocated the bailout really *like* the bailout. They didn't want to do it. They didn't believe that the plan would be without complications, problems, or downsides.
But of course, the problem is, what's the alternative? If not some kind of bailout, then what? Yes, I've heard lots of people making a big stink about how bailing companies out, but none of these people have followed up with any explanation of how you could have kept our financial system working without some kind of bailout.
I like Peter Schiff. He's interesting and I know he predicted a lot of these economic problems when no one seemed to want to listen.** However, I haven't heard an explanation from him as to how to solve the problem without some kind of a bailout. If you have, please post.
** ps- It is worth noting that it didn't take a genius to see these economic problems coming. It just took for someone to be somewhat informed and not-suffering from denial. I don't say that to put Schiff down. On the contrary, I think he'd agree.
Rather than socialize the risk while leaving the profits in private hands, which is what the Bush/Obama administration did, putting them into receivership was clearly the right thing to do.
Meh, maybe. I don't want to shut down discussion or say that the situation was easy and simple and there were no other possible options or variations on how these things could have been handled. I've just read/heard a lot of people complaining about how the government shouldn't have been involved *at all*, how the government's investments in the banks are evidence of Obama's socialist agenda, etc.
So my post was sort of a condensed version of a conversation I've had many times before, going something like this:
someone: Damned bailouts. I don't even understand how people are so stupid as to bail the banks out. If they weren't good enough to be profitable, the government shouldn't have gotten involved at all. Just let them fail. That's the free market. We shouldn't be socializing banks.
me: I don't know. It seems like if all the banks went under, it could cause lots of problems. It really could be panic-in-the-street time, if all of our bank accounts and 401k accounts were emptied out because the bank went out of business.
someone: What are you talking about? I'm not talking about banks like my savings account. I'm talking about... you know... like these banks that got bailed out because of sub-prime mortgages and derivatives and stuff.
me: Yeah, but they're the same company. Or even if they're not, they've lent each other money and the money from your savings account might have been loaned out to one of the other banks, which means if that other bank goes under, they won't repay the loan, so your savings account money will still be gone.
someone: Ok, but what about that FDIC insurance thing? Couldn't they just give me my money through that instead of socializing the banks?
me: Well you know, they'd still socialize the bank that way. The government would still bail them out. It would just be a different process, and I don't know if that process will necessarily be without any kind of hiccups or delays in service. All of the solutions seem to have problems.
And I'm not claiming to be an expert on this stuff. I'm not a banker or economist. But the only people that I've heard advocate the government doing *nothing* are people who clearly don't understand the situation very clearly.
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Complaining about others' butchering of words is also part of that process. Just as planets wouldn't form without both gravity pulling in and electrons repelling each other, languages wouldn't form without both butchering and complaining.
Consider further: before buying the product, the vendor offers to pay for half of the product (making it much more accessible) if you sign a contract to use it the way they tell you to use it, for two whole years.
Consider furthest: we're talking about the 1st generation iPhone, which wasn't subsidized by AT&T at all. As the customer, you bought the hardware outright.
When you buy one of these crappy Verizon phones, what's the application called that you install on your desktop computer, allowing you to sync and manage your MP3 files on your phone? And that application also has access to a store for more MP3s and applications for your phone?
It's my personal files, so it's pretty unlikely that I'll be editing the same file on both of my computers at the same time. If I am doing that, I'll probably be aware of it and be able to take steps to ensure I don't lose the version that's important to me.
I wasn't saying that Apple approached Verizon at the time of the iPhone release. I was saying that the rumor at the time of the first iPhone release was that Apple first approached Verizon (some time before the release), was turned down, and then approached AT&T.
That rumor might not have been true, but I was just reporting it as a rumor.
Nobody paid for half of my iPhone.
I didn't jailbreak my phone and my phone was never bricked. I don't really have a horse in this race. I'm really just suggesting that if Apple really bricked phones on purpose, that doesn't seem quite right to me, even if it's legal.
I don't know if you're referring to some official bit of information, but the rumor at the time of the first iPhone release was that Apple approached Verizon before AT&T, but Verizon wouldn't agree to Apple's terms. The terms included:
And yes, visual voicemail is nice.
On the other hand, consider the following formulation: You buy a product. It's your property. The person who sold it to you doesn't like the way you're using it, so they break the product you bought. They don't compensate you for your lost product or offer a refund.
Are you of the opinion that this is generally acceptable behavior on the part of the vendor?
Now yes, it's more complicated than that. You have software licensing terms, and you have warranty terms. People arguably broke their own phones while voiding their warranty. And IIRC, Apple wasn't very strict about refusing to replace bricked phones.
So, even if Android had the same marketshare as Apple's ther app store would always show fewer apps because people are free to use other ways to get from them to their users.
Even beyond that, Apple has the advantage of having iTunes, and not just an app store. I know, I know, some people really hate iTunes, but that's not my point here.
My point is that iTunes provides a single access point that lets you do several things. It lets you organize your music, movies, podcasts, etc., and sync them to your phone in a configurable manner. It's also the program that's used to manage some aspects of your phone and install software updates. So because of those things, if you have an iPhone, you're pretty well guaranteed to be using iTunes.
But iTunes is also a program that allows you to buy media content for your iPhone. If you have an iPhone, there's a pretty good chance that you already have an iTunes account and you're already using it to buy music. So you have the program installed, you have an account all set up, and you're browsing the storefront already. It's just a couple extra clicks to download an application for your iPhone. It's simple. No software installed. No credit card information being put in.
I think other cell phone manufacturers could learn from this. Give your customers a very easy integrated experience for buying, installing, and syncing applications, music and video, and keeping all of it up to date.
...except these are all cheap crappy PCs
Well evidently their crappiness does vary, seeing as different models from different companies have different failure rates.
And it's not just an issue of what components are used. Even if you use all the same electronics, heat sinks, power supplies, etc., even something as seemingly superficial as a bad case design can hurt the reliability of a computer.
This isn't too surprising, really. Whenever you go for the cheap end of things, you get poor quality.
Now don't understand me-- I'm not saying that it's good. I think it'd be great if we could make cheap things also be good quality. Like I imagine someone could manufacture netbooks and still sell them relatively cheaply just by virtue of the fact that they use fewer components and less materials. However, the tendency in a situation like this is for the manufacturer to say, "These are cheaper products with tight profit margins. These are also budget products, and people who buy budget products will tend to buy the cheapest thing available. Let's just cut every corner, make them as cheap as possible, and not worry too much about quality." It's the same reason we get $5 blenders at Walmart that break after a year.
Of course, the problem is often that it's hard for consumers to tell the difference, so companies sometimes don't provide a good middle ground. Like you might find yourself in a situation where you can find a cheap $5-10 blender that will break in the next year, and the next step up is a $1000 "luxury" blender with a built in toaster oven, speakers, and iPhone dock. I guess simple, high quality, economical goods don't sell.
Well that's great. Make the standard as good of a standard as you can, and don't take a not-invented-here attitude. Once you have a good standard, everyone should implement that standard and not make non-compliant versions to increase vendor lock-in.
Because I don't need to handle merges, give version history, rollback, branches, etc. I just need to keep two directories in sync even though changes might be made in either directory.
There's also the question of whether you really want to store things online. If I want to sync a few MBs of documents, syncing over the Internet to a server might be fine. On the other hand, if I want to keep 100 GB synced between two computers on the same network, pushing that over a 512k Internet connection just to download it again might be less than ideal.
Sort of, but I'd hesitate to call it that. It's very simple, both in that it's easy to use and that it doesn't handle much complexity.
I think you can use more than 2 sources of documents, but you basically need to treat one server as your master. So if I have 4 computers, I think I can pick 1 computer as the master and sync the other 3 with it, which will keep all 4 in sync.
You have some choices in handling resolution. I don't know what it checks to determine when a file has been changed, but it keeps some kind of database to keep track of which files have been synced where. During a normal sync, it compares the changes since the last sync and updates the other source to match. In cases where both sources have been changed since the last sync, it will ask you which file you'd like to keep. If you want, you can tell it to "prefer" one of the sources, and it will resolve conflicts in favor of the preferred source if both files have been updated, or you can tell it to "force" one of the sources, in which case any conflicts are resolved in favor of that source no matter what.
I use Unison to sync my laptop and desktop, and I tell it to prefer my laptop. But then my desktop is a Mac and I have Time Machine running, so even if I "hose myself", it just means hunting down the lost files in Time Machine.
I think this generally won't be a replacement computer for most people. Notice they're focussing on the netbook form factor for now. It's going to be for people who have desktops (or bigger laptops that they don't like carrying around too much) to have an on-the-go computer with basic productivity (office suite, email, IM, web browser).
Of course if they start moving for this to take over as everyone's main computer, they'll have to make some changes. Taking photos off their camera is a pretty easy thing-- upload them to picassa automatically. With something like iTunes, Google is going to either have to support big hard drives or provide a lot of online storage with free streaming and local caching. Even with games, you could have a Steam-like service that only needs local storage for a cache.
On the other hand, allowing such permissive downloading raises some problems, and some people are going to have real problems with any one of the solutions. There could be a lot of piracy, which media companies and game developers won't like. If Google doesn't want to allow that, they're going to have to use DRM, which will probably annoy a lot of potential customers. If they don't want to use DRM, then they're going to have to monitor your downloads pretty carefully, which will really bother privacy advocates, who will already be upset at Google for having so much access to personal data.
I thought that the underlying stuff, at least, was supposed to be Linux. I don't know about the window manager, but some things are probably going to need to be released under the GPL.
I second the suggestion. It's basically like rsync except it's more like real synchronization. What I mean is, AFAIK with rsync you basically have to say, "Sync folder A and folder B by assuming that folder A is the copy I want to keep, and changing only folder B." With Unison, on the other hand, you can say, "Sync folders A and B by keeping track of when files get modified, and keeping the most recent version of each file. If a file has been modified in both folders since my last sync, let me know and ask me what to do."
One minor annoyance is the project page links to an OSX version that includes a Cocoa interface, and that's kind of a pain if you want to script it to run in the background. Even if you call it from the command line, the GUI will still open up. Also, if you install it from MacPorts, it doesn't do a good job of maintaining resource forks. Of course, if you're syncing to Linux or Windows, you might not care about resource forks.
I think the best place to get the OSX version is here: link
It's been a while since I've downloaded it, though.
Even if web standards came along later, it still wouldn't be a good reason to ignore them. The standard electrical outlet was designed after someone discovered how to harness electricity, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use them.
Standards are good. If someone wants to argue that IE's version of HTML is better than W3C's and we should be using it as our standard instead, I'm all ears. Of course, for that to be a reasonable idea, we'd have to have a well documented explanation of what IE's "standard" is and how it works, because otherwise it's not much of a standard.
Bubbles are going to keep happening anyway. You have a bunch of free-floating money out there just waiting to jump onto the next fad of sure-thing investments. It was tech stocks, then real estate, and it's going to be something else. I think it's just what happens when you treat civilization as a big get-rich-quick scheme. It'd like to think it's possible to instill a culture of solid long-term investments including continual updating of necessary social services and infrastructure, but at least here in the US, it seems to be a foreign idea. We're looking to maximize our profits THIS QUARTER and don't care what happens in two years.
If the content is trusted then requiring the user to get root privileges is just a security risk (key-loggers). I do hope, however, that they had to foresight to require specific permissions to allow users to install signed packages.
I could see having some kind of permission that can be set to allow particular users the rights to install signed packages without any additional administrative rights. That could be useful. However, I don't think it would make sense to have that right granted to non-admin users in the default case. It should be a right that the admin needs to specifically grant to users before it is allowed.
Well... yeah, maybe there's a lot you don't understand. I don't know what you understand. As I was saying, I don't think the Obama administration or the economists who have advocated the bailout really *like* the bailout. They didn't want to do it. They didn't believe that the plan would be without complications, problems, or downsides.
But of course, the problem is, what's the alternative? If not some kind of bailout, then what? Yes, I've heard lots of people making a big stink about how bailing companies out, but none of these people have followed up with any explanation of how you could have kept our financial system working without some kind of bailout.
I like Peter Schiff. He's interesting and I know he predicted a lot of these economic problems when no one seemed to want to listen.** However, I haven't heard an explanation from him as to how to solve the problem without some kind of a bailout. If you have, please post.
** ps- It is worth noting that it didn't take a genius to see these economic problems coming. It just took for someone to be somewhat informed and not-suffering from denial. I don't say that to put Schiff down. On the contrary, I think he'd agree.
Well that's not really an option C. That's still "some kind of bailout".
Rather than socialize the risk while leaving the profits in private hands, which is what the Bush/Obama administration did, putting them into receivership was clearly the right thing to do.
Meh, maybe. I don't want to shut down discussion or say that the situation was easy and simple and there were no other possible options or variations on how these things could have been handled. I've just read/heard a lot of people complaining about how the government shouldn't have been involved *at all*, how the government's investments in the banks are evidence of Obama's socialist agenda, etc.
So my post was sort of a condensed version of a conversation I've had many times before, going something like this:
someone: Damned bailouts. I don't even understand how people are so stupid as to bail the banks out. If they weren't good enough to be profitable, the government shouldn't have gotten involved at all. Just let them fail. That's the free market. We shouldn't be socializing banks.
me: I don't know. It seems like if all the banks went under, it could cause lots of problems. It really could be panic-in-the-street time, if all of our bank accounts and 401k accounts were emptied out because the bank went out of business.
someone: What are you talking about? I'm not talking about banks like my savings account. I'm talking about... you know... like these banks that got bailed out because of sub-prime mortgages and derivatives and stuff.
me: Yeah, but they're the same company. Or even if they're not, they've lent each other money and the money from your savings account might have been loaned out to one of the other banks, which means if that other bank goes under, they won't repay the loan, so your savings account money will still be gone.
someone: Ok, but what about that FDIC insurance thing? Couldn't they just give me my money through that instead of socializing the banks?
me: Well you know, they'd still socialize the bank that way. The government would still bail them out. It would just be a different process, and I don't know if that process will necessarily be without any kind of hiccups or delays in service. All of the solutions seem to have problems.
And I'm not claiming to be an expert on this stuff. I'm not a banker or economist. But the only people that I've heard advocate the government doing *nothing* are people who clearly don't understand the situation very clearly.