I can distribute any Windows application I want to whomever I want in a multitude of ways to choose from with or without involving a third party in doing so. Is Microsoft open? No, but in that sense, it's a hell of a lot more open than Apple is.
Anybody can submit apps to the store.
Actually Apple's vetting process for developers is just as stupid as it is for apps. I paid my $99 to Apple to join their developer program. They demanded documentation that I was who I said I was. I sent them some more paperwork in addition to what I had already filled out. Then they demanded that I send them notarized documentation of my identity, I shit you not. It's not like I have a very common name or have been the victim of ID theft in the past. It's not like I've ever had a problem establishing who I was with anyone in the past.
After several months of trying to satisfy them, I finally said to hell with it, I want my $99 back, and told them that I'll be developing on non-Apple platforms from now on.
So yeah, I would completely disagree with your assertion that anyone can submit apps to the app store. Aside from the obvious (TFA that this submission is about), Apple makes you jump through as many hoops before you can even get to the point where you can submit an app.
I have an iPhone, and it's a wonderful device, but as soon as my contract runs out (maybe sooner), I'll be moving to a different platform, and this is exactly why.
As long as the iPhone is a closed platform with the only way to get apps through the app store, you will be dealing with this. Apple isn't going to allow competing applications on the device because they simply don't have to. They give a good song and dance about how closed the device is being about the "user experience," but the simple truth is that they don't want competition from other sources. That's their business model, it's how they work.
It's a crying shame, because Apple really is a good company when it comes to style and design, and especially in figuring out exactly what scratches consumers' itches. But this is almost historically identical to what happened with the Macintosh a couple of decades ago. They kept it so closely-held and closed that when the PC came along, which allowed users to shrug off proprietary and use it how they wanted to instead of how some company told them to, Apple damn near went out of business.
I really do hate to see them rebuild their reputation (and market value) again, just to throw it all away like they did last time, but damned if it doesn't look like that's exactly what they're trying to do.
You know, now that you mention it, that's not a bad plan if you're a tobacco company. I can't tell you how many times when I try to get friends to stop smoking, they fall back on excuses like, "Well, eventually something is going to kill me..." or "Everything causes cancer..."
Talk about lame rationalization. Still, if they start slapping "This may cause cancer!" labels on stuff that has been proven, in fact, not to cause cancer, it's just more ammunition. If you're a tobacco company, that might be a viable strategy. Get cancer labels on everything so that no one will believe the labels on anything.
A cgi bonanza with an annoying shakeycam and no acting. Truly original, and exactly what Hollywood needs to renew itself!
I'm thinking you're missing the point. If I were Hollywood, I'd be interested in this not because of the plot or the acting, but because the guy made a pretty impressive scene with lots of pretty sophisticated special effects on a shoestring budget.
If I were Sam Raimi, I'd be thinking, "If he can do that for $500, even if $500 is exaggerated and it actually cost him a grand or two, then for $300 million, I could probably get a hell of a lot more bang (literally) for my bucks than I'd get using traditional Hollywood special effects studios."
The "cgi bonanza" is likely precisely what they're interested in, not the shakeycam or acting.
I probably do have some of the facts wrong, it was a while back. And I am not a lawyer, but a buddy of mine is. He tells me stories about this stuff, and that's one of the stories that he tells me about. He has told me about cases such as those linked above.
So I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm 100% positive about what I said. But I will say that based on what I've been told by a trustworthy person who would be positive about it, I'm inclined to believe it.
YMMV, but I wouldn't suggest actually putting it to the test.
Just ask yourself one question, if you don't trust your internet provider enough to do DNS correctly, should you trust them at all?
My ISP's nameservers are broken. Whenever I try to resolve a name that doesn't exist, instead of the DNS server telling me it doesn't exist, it returns the address of one of my ISP's web servers, which presents me with an ad-laden search page for whatever name I typed in. This is clearly not what the DNS spec says it is supposed to do.
While this might not sound like such a big deal, for developers it's a pain in the butt. For one thing, if I want to test to see if, for example, a name I have registered has propagated, I can't just do an nslookup to see if I get a response; I have to actually verify that the address that is returned (since all lookups will resolve to something) is the actual correct address instead of my ISP's web server. Also, on the client side, when my applications communicate via the web, they have to not only verify that an address resolved, but actually verify with the back-end application that it is what it's supposed to be instead of an ISP's search page. Just since I changed my DNS servers last week, I've already saved at least a minute or two I shouldn't have had to spend in the first place.
Plus, even if all of that still doesn't convince you that Google is actually doing something helpful, there's the simple fact that my ISP's servers actually had on average an hour or so down time every couple of months. It wasn't scheduled or anything (that I know of, anyway), I would just all of a sudden not be able to resolve any addresses. If I called technical support, the goobs there would insist on me plugging my computer directly into their modem, and when it still wouldn't work, they'd schedule a time a few days out for a technician to come out to my house. They simply wouldn't acknowledge that the problem was on their end, not mine, and they didn't understand simple concepts like nslookups, tracerts, etc. I'd invariably just give up, tell them not to send anyone, and wait without Internet access for their network people to figure it out after a lot more people called in.
I started using OpenDNS a long time ago because of all of the problems with my ISP's DNS servers, even though they also redirect queries that aren't found to their search page. If I wanted other features OpenDNS offers like parental controls and such, I'd probably stay with them. As it is, though, consider me another happy consumer of another helpful Google service. As the informal tech support guy for most of my family and friends, I'll be switching as many of them over as I can too, so I can avoid just a few more "Hey, I can't get to the Internet" calls.
In the U.S., there is no defense against such crimes. If a girl uses a fake ID, for example, to make you think that she's 18, they will still haul your ass to jail for statutory rape if you meet her in an adults-only club and have sex with her later that night. That's one of the big complaints people have about our laws. You do have to be a mind reader.
Here in Georgia not too long ago, we had a case of a 17-year-old girl and her 18-year-old boyfriend having consensual sex. I think it was her parents that found out about it, reported him to the police, and he had to spend the next three years of his life in jail and register as a sex offender because of it. Yes, he probably knew that she was only 17, but the point is that when it comes to "protecting" children, never underestimate the stupidity of politicians trying to pick up votes for being "tough on crime."
So what if it did? Would anyone really stop using cell phones? I suspect it's kind of like knowing that the odds are pretty good that sometime in your lifetime, you'll have an automobile accident. It might even be fatal. Are you going to stop driving?
Everything is a risk. It all comes down to judging how much of a risk something is versus what you gain from taking that risk. Even if using cell phones increases your risk of brain cancer, it must be by some amount that is so minuscule that it's practically non-existent, witnessed by the fact that 95% of our population isn't walking around with brain cancer.
So Google fanboism has gotten to the point where people are HAPPY about getting more targetted ads?
No, but we're smart enough to realize that no one is going to pay out of pocket to provide all the services that Google does for free with no revenue model at all, not even to pay for the infrastructure servers and network necessary to do it.
I'll make you a deal. Multi-billionaire technology philanthropist that you seem to be, you set up a company to compete with Google, one that provides all that they do and that has exactly zero sources of revenue, and I'll willingly become your fanboy.
The practical situation is that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. When Google came along, we were headed towards every web site--especially search engines and directories--pushing out more and more pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, graphics-heavy, annoying ads, and they changed that. God forbid any of them actually contribute back to the community in the form of numerous open source projects and free services.
Google changed all that by providing a much more customer-friendly "less is more" philosophy, and their customers have supported their efforts in a very free market-friendly way. So while you can take potshots at targeted advertising if you want, I honestly can't think of a less obtrusive and relatively harmless revenue model that can support all that Google does and how much they are contributing to advancing technology.
While I'd love for someone to volunteer to do all that Google does without making money for it, given that that's not going to happen, yeah, targeted advertising is about the least annoying way I can think of to get the bills paid and continue providing service.
You know that old phrase about those who don't know their history being doomed to repeat it?
I don't know what Apple is thinking. Up until now, it's all been good for them because of the lack of serious competition. With Android-based phones cranking up, how long will it be before Apple loses their market share due to these shenanigans?
The scary thing is that Apple has been in this EXACT situation before. They owned a large market share of the PC market way back when IBM PCs were too expensive for the common consumer to afford. They kept all of their hardware all locked up tight, with proprietary everything. As the cost of PCs came down as the hardware moved to commodity parts and the PC "clone wars" cranked up, Apple took a beating and damn near went out of business.
I already have friend who refuse to buy an iPhone because it's locked down so tightly. The two most common complaints I hear, in order, are: "I refuse to sign up for AT&T's service," and "I keep reading about how they won't let people publish their apps." The more they press this issue, the more they are setting themselves up for a spectacular failure. (And yes, I know people who have bought Android-based phones specifically because they don't like a company telling them what they can and can't run on hardware they paid good money for.)
Apple has been a cool company the past few years. I have an iPhone and a Mac (which I'm typing this comment from now, in fact). Still, if I owned stock in Apple, I'd be selling it about right now because they are moving in the exact opposite direction that the market is.
Very insightful reply, and you're 100% correct. That was my other line of thought. This is the company (and probably some of these "superstar" programmers are the very people) who have given us a litany of buffer overruns, security holes, and other low-level programming "features" over the years.
I'm not saying that no one should ever program at a low level, but I am saying that people shouldn't be afraid to take advantage of features of managed code and other conveniences. Don't program at a low level if you don't have to. You're only making your life harder for no reason, and needlessly exposing yourself to risks of fundamental errors that are much worse. Take advantage of all of the hard work that others have already done.
The original article and the summary both come of as rather smug to me. The truth of the matter is that you need both low-level nitty-gritty programming and high-level programming. It depends on what you're using it for.
Think of it this way. You have people who make pipes. You know, the kind used in plumbing. Fittings, too. And they're very good at it. If you take your average house builder and try to get him to make a pipe, he'll be hopelessly bad at it. But you know what those guys who build houses are good at? Putting the pipes together in meaningful ways to get what they need (i.e. building a house) done. Take a guy who's brilliant at making pipes and fittings and try to get him to build a house. Yeah, not such a superstar now.
It's the same with programmers. Tell someone who is very good at writing low-level code, "I need a killer efficient compiler." Give them enough time, and they can churn it out and make it wicked optimized. Tell them, "I need a new type of control that works in this specific way and with crucial efficiency," and they're your guys. Tell them, "I need an new application entirely from scratch that can process my specific business logic, it needs to look and feel like a standard Windows application, it needs to be easy for end users to figure out and work with, and we need a working version in a couple of weeks," and they'll probably laugh at you. Yet that's what those people they're looking down on, the people developing with higher-level abstracted languages, are doing every day.
In my experience, competence != usefulness. They're not opposites, mind you, but it takes both types. It takes the people who work with the low-level nitty-gritty stuff, and it takes the people who use what they churn out to actually accomplish real-world productive things. One isn't smarter, one isn't better, neither should be looked down upon. Both are necessary.
I won't use a machine which is useless without network.
I just about can't use a machine without using a network. My favorite game is an MMORPG, which is useless without a network. Even other games, I usually have a browser window open for reference. My e-mail is accessed via a web client. (Even with a local client, all you could do is compose or read, not send or receive.) I do web development, which is on a remote web host. When I'm developing things locally in Visual Studio, I'm constantly using online references and documentation. I suppose I could in theory write a letter or something, but to be honest, I don't write letters to people any more. I even require the Internet to do something as simple as watch television these days. (Broadcast tv? Forget it, I use Hulu.)
If you don't use the Internet as much as I do, more power to you. But I really think that going forward, offline computer use is going to be the exception, not the rule. I think saying what you said will eventually sound like, "I won't use a telephone that is useless without a wireless connectivity." Like the cell network, the Internet is so pervasive today that it's weird to run across an application that doesn't use it in some capacity.
Oh, and by the way, Chromium is released under the BSD license, which is free-as-in-speech. I don't know what the license terms will be if such a hypothetical netbook were released, but at least the OS running on it would be open source. From a freedom-as-in-Stallman viewpoint, it may not be perfect, but it is orders of magnitude better than what is currently running on most netbooks out there. Evil is not the opposite of perfect.
I honestly don't see why we can't have the best of both worlds.
For example, we have a thriving public education system which guarantees almost universal education. We also have a thriving private education system for those who, for whatever reason, don't want to take advantage of public eduction. Sure, right-wingers gripe about our public eduction system, and I know that there are people out there would like to see it systematically dismantled, but the truth is that it works pretty well. Especially when you get to the university level, such as state colleges and universities.
Speaking of education, we have a fantastic student loan system as well. As a student, you can borrow money from the federal government to attend college. You can also borrow money from private lenders. You have a choice.
I guess I don't understand why health care can't work the same way. We have a public system to take care of everyone's basic medical necessities. We have a private system to take care of what people want above and beyond that. (Private rooms, name-generic prescriptions, specialists who charge above the normal rates, elective procedures, etc.) No one has to go bankrupt because they get sick. No one has to decide between having a broken bone set or buying dinner that night. If for whatever reason you don't like the public health system, you're free to go spend money out-of-pocket on either a private plan, or if you have enough, pay the health care providers directly.
It seems to me that those who are fighting against the public option are the ones who want to limit our choice, not the other way around.
That last one really bother me because it reminds me of the story from the UK...
Oh man, you do NOT want to go there. If you get into a battle of anecdotes on the issue of public versus private health care, you will be killed on that debate every time.
Seriously.
Don't make me go digging through all of the stories of people who have been screwed over and scammed by private insurance companies, because it will take at least a couple of weeks to write the book about it.
If Facebook photos are the standard by which we're judging whether or not people should be paid insurance claims for being depressed, I wonder if I can use that?
No, I'm not depressed. I mean, I have ups and downs like everyone else, but I don't think it's so severe to be classified as a medical condition. Still, I could certainly churn out a few photos when I'm feeling down one day and post them. Then maybe I could call my insurance company and tell them, "See? I'm depressed! It's right there on Facebook!"
How about actually checking how many people die from smoking-related illnesses versus how many people die from murder.
Smoking harms no one other than the person who decided to smoke despite being aware of the risks.
This is an idiotic claim. (And yes, in case you missed it, I'm calling you idiotic for making it.) It's the same as claiming that murder harms no one other than the person who decided to murder. Yes, it is that ludicrous. Just because you want to believe it for rationalizing your own stupidity doesn't make it true. ("Hey, look, I killed someone. Oh well, at least I'm the only person who's affected, since I'm the only one who has to suffer the consequences of feeling guilty about it and stuff." That really is how stupid you sound.)
I'll tell you what I'll concede to. Let's build some gas chambers where people can go to smoke without affecting other people. Then let's make them turn over any kids they might have to foster care or next of kin. Also, have a lawyer on-hand to help them create a will and sign a form consenting to not having any medical care that they don't pay for directly out-of-pocket. Lock them in, and let them kill themselves from stupidity.
Then come back to me, and maybe I'll be willing to say it shouldn't be made illegal. Otherwise, I'm going to keep pushing for as many bans as we can get until the stuff is outlawed completely. I delight in smoking bans. I don't care how angry it makes you, how much you whine about the "nanny state," how stupid your rationalizations are for destructive behavior. It's a drug, it's deadly, it's harmful both directly and indirectly to both the people who do it and the people around them. No matter how you dress it up, it's idiotic that it's not illegal already. The only reason it's not is because of the billions in blood money that have been paid to lobbyists to keep it as a special exception to regulation that is granted to no other drug.
Are you going to wage a war on obesity when you finish with smoking then?
There's such a thing as eating responsibly. There's no such thing as smoking responsibly. Besides, in case you haven't noticed, there is a war being waged on obesity. And yes, I'm happy with the progress being made on that front, too.
And my favorite color is blue, I really like Pink Floyd, I think that Bill Watterson and Gary Larson are gods, and my car is a Honda. Any more smart-ass questions that have nothing to do with smoking?
Anyone who thinks that once Google perfects this, they're going to be content to simply sit idle on the cloudbook (I'm making that word up; consider it public domain) market with it is fooling themselves.
Is Google overly optimistic? Maybe, but what company isn't? My point, though, is that they've got a LOT of really good things going for them. Don't dare think of Chrome as forever relegated to "OS-lite," or else you'll be making the same fundamental mistake that many other companies have made with Google. (And indeed, that a lot of them made with Microsoft in the past. "Oh, Internet Explorer will never catch up to Netscape." "Excel is like a scaled-down Lotus 123." "Our company has invested way too much in Netware to change." "Visual C++ is neat, but for serious development, go with Borland.")
It's really kind of fun to watch a company out-Microsoft Microsoft, except in a good way. As far as I'm concerned, I hope Microsoft continues to think of ChromeOS as just a toy that will never be a serious contender with Windows outside of very limited niche devices.
I've not abused anything or anybody, aside from my own, let alone anyone's rights.
See this? Right there? THAT is why we have to push for smoking bans. Because of idiots who think they're not hurting anybody but themselves. Because you care so little about what other people think and you're so ignorant of the damage you're causing, we have to pass laws to punish you because "gosh, I shouldn't do that" isn't enough of an incentive and "hey, this is causing other people problems" never even crosses your mind.
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31 limbs isn't out of the question if it's something like a multiplayer party game. That could be, for example, seven people, three of whom are men.
The point is for you to have the choice.
I can distribute any Windows application I want to whomever I want in a multitude of ways to choose from with or without involving a third party in doing so. Is Microsoft open? No, but in that sense, it's a hell of a lot more open than Apple is.
Actually Apple's vetting process for developers is just as stupid as it is for apps. I paid my $99 to Apple to join their developer program. They demanded documentation that I was who I said I was. I sent them some more paperwork in addition to what I had already filled out. Then they demanded that I send them notarized documentation of my identity, I shit you not. It's not like I have a very common name or have been the victim of ID theft in the past. It's not like I've ever had a problem establishing who I was with anyone in the past.
After several months of trying to satisfy them, I finally said to hell with it, I want my $99 back, and told them that I'll be developing on non-Apple platforms from now on.
So yeah, I would completely disagree with your assertion that anyone can submit apps to the app store. Aside from the obvious (TFA that this submission is about), Apple makes you jump through as many hoops before you can even get to the point where you can submit an app.
I have an iPhone, and it's a wonderful device, but as soon as my contract runs out (maybe sooner), I'll be moving to a different platform, and this is exactly why.
As long as the iPhone is a closed platform with the only way to get apps through the app store, you will be dealing with this. Apple isn't going to allow competing applications on the device because they simply don't have to. They give a good song and dance about how closed the device is being about the "user experience," but the simple truth is that they don't want competition from other sources. That's their business model, it's how they work.
It's a crying shame, because Apple really is a good company when it comes to style and design, and especially in figuring out exactly what scratches consumers' itches. But this is almost historically identical to what happened with the Macintosh a couple of decades ago. They kept it so closely-held and closed that when the PC came along, which allowed users to shrug off proprietary and use it how they wanted to instead of how some company told them to, Apple damn near went out of business.
I really do hate to see them rebuild their reputation (and market value) again, just to throw it all away like they did last time, but damned if it doesn't look like that's exactly what they're trying to do.
You know, now that you mention it, that's not a bad plan if you're a tobacco company. I can't tell you how many times when I try to get friends to stop smoking, they fall back on excuses like, "Well, eventually something is going to kill me..." or "Everything causes cancer..."
Talk about lame rationalization. Still, if they start slapping "This may cause cancer!" labels on stuff that has been proven, in fact, not to cause cancer, it's just more ammunition. If you're a tobacco company, that might be a viable strategy. Get cancer labels on everything so that no one will believe the labels on anything.
I'm thinking you're missing the point. If I were Hollywood, I'd be interested in this not because of the plot or the acting, but because the guy made a pretty impressive scene with lots of pretty sophisticated special effects on a shoestring budget.
If I were Sam Raimi, I'd be thinking, "If he can do that for $500, even if $500 is exaggerated and it actually cost him a grand or two, then for $300 million, I could probably get a hell of a lot more bang (literally) for my bucks than I'd get using traditional Hollywood special effects studios."
The "cgi bonanza" is likely precisely what they're interested in, not the shakeycam or acting.
To his credit, the plot of the YouTube video was a lot more interesting than around 80% of the movies that Hollywood does churn out these days.
You should make a commercial about your experience with AT&T. Oh wait, there's a SLAPP for that...
(Yes, for the legal pedants out there, I know it's not the same, but nothing else rhymed quite the same. It's satire, lighten up already.)
I probably do have some of the facts wrong, it was a while back. And I am not a lawyer, but a buddy of mine is. He tells me stories about this stuff, and that's one of the stories that he tells me about. He has told me about cases such as those linked above.
So I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm 100% positive about what I said. But I will say that based on what I've been told by a trustworthy person who would be positive about it, I'm inclined to believe it.
YMMV, but I wouldn't suggest actually putting it to the test.
My ISP's nameservers are broken. Whenever I try to resolve a name that doesn't exist, instead of the DNS server telling me it doesn't exist, it returns the address of one of my ISP's web servers, which presents me with an ad-laden search page for whatever name I typed in. This is clearly not what the DNS spec says it is supposed to do.
While this might not sound like such a big deal, for developers it's a pain in the butt. For one thing, if I want to test to see if, for example, a name I have registered has propagated, I can't just do an nslookup to see if I get a response; I have to actually verify that the address that is returned (since all lookups will resolve to something) is the actual correct address instead of my ISP's web server. Also, on the client side, when my applications communicate via the web, they have to not only verify that an address resolved, but actually verify with the back-end application that it is what it's supposed to be instead of an ISP's search page. Just since I changed my DNS servers last week, I've already saved at least a minute or two I shouldn't have had to spend in the first place.
Plus, even if all of that still doesn't convince you that Google is actually doing something helpful, there's the simple fact that my ISP's servers actually had on average an hour or so down time every couple of months. It wasn't scheduled or anything (that I know of, anyway), I would just all of a sudden not be able to resolve any addresses. If I called technical support, the goobs there would insist on me plugging my computer directly into their modem, and when it still wouldn't work, they'd schedule a time a few days out for a technician to come out to my house. They simply wouldn't acknowledge that the problem was on their end, not mine, and they didn't understand simple concepts like nslookups, tracerts, etc. I'd invariably just give up, tell them not to send anyone, and wait without Internet access for their network people to figure it out after a lot more people called in.
I started using OpenDNS a long time ago because of all of the problems with my ISP's DNS servers, even though they also redirect queries that aren't found to their search page. If I wanted other features OpenDNS offers like parental controls and such, I'd probably stay with them. As it is, though, consider me another happy consumer of another helpful Google service. As the informal tech support guy for most of my family and friends, I'll be switching as many of them over as I can too, so I can avoid just a few more "Hey, I can't get to the Internet" calls.
In the U.S., there is no defense against such crimes. If a girl uses a fake ID, for example, to make you think that she's 18, they will still haul your ass to jail for statutory rape if you meet her in an adults-only club and have sex with her later that night. That's one of the big complaints people have about our laws. You do have to be a mind reader.
Here in Georgia not too long ago, we had a case of a 17-year-old girl and her 18-year-old boyfriend having consensual sex. I think it was her parents that found out about it, reported him to the police, and he had to spend the next three years of his life in jail and register as a sex offender because of it. Yes, he probably knew that she was only 17, but the point is that when it comes to "protecting" children, never underestimate the stupidity of politicians trying to pick up votes for being "tough on crime."
So what if it did? Would anyone really stop using cell phones? I suspect it's kind of like knowing that the odds are pretty good that sometime in your lifetime, you'll have an automobile accident. It might even be fatal. Are you going to stop driving?
Everything is a risk. It all comes down to judging how much of a risk something is versus what you gain from taking that risk. Even if using cell phones increases your risk of brain cancer, it must be by some amount that is so minuscule that it's practically non-existent, witnessed by the fact that 95% of our population isn't walking around with brain cancer.
I like those odds.
No, but we're smart enough to realize that no one is going to pay out of pocket to provide all the services that Google does for free with no revenue model at all, not even to pay for the infrastructure servers and network necessary to do it.
I'll make you a deal. Multi-billionaire technology philanthropist that you seem to be, you set up a company to compete with Google, one that provides all that they do and that has exactly zero sources of revenue, and I'll willingly become your fanboy.
The practical situation is that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. When Google came along, we were headed towards every web site--especially search engines and directories--pushing out more and more pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, graphics-heavy, annoying ads, and they changed that. God forbid any of them actually contribute back to the community in the form of numerous open source projects and free services.
Google changed all that by providing a much more customer-friendly "less is more" philosophy, and their customers have supported their efforts in a very free market-friendly way. So while you can take potshots at targeted advertising if you want, I honestly can't think of a less obtrusive and relatively harmless revenue model that can support all that Google does and how much they are contributing to advancing technology.
While I'd love for someone to volunteer to do all that Google does without making money for it, given that that's not going to happen, yeah, targeted advertising is about the least annoying way I can think of to get the bills paid and continue providing service.
You know that old phrase about those who don't know their history being doomed to repeat it?
I don't know what Apple is thinking. Up until now, it's all been good for them because of the lack of serious competition. With Android-based phones cranking up, how long will it be before Apple loses their market share due to these shenanigans?
The scary thing is that Apple has been in this EXACT situation before. They owned a large market share of the PC market way back when IBM PCs were too expensive for the common consumer to afford. They kept all of their hardware all locked up tight, with proprietary everything. As the cost of PCs came down as the hardware moved to commodity parts and the PC "clone wars" cranked up, Apple took a beating and damn near went out of business.
I already have friend who refuse to buy an iPhone because it's locked down so tightly. The two most common complaints I hear, in order, are: "I refuse to sign up for AT&T's service," and "I keep reading about how they won't let people publish their apps." The more they press this issue, the more they are setting themselves up for a spectacular failure. (And yes, I know people who have bought Android-based phones specifically because they don't like a company telling them what they can and can't run on hardware they paid good money for.)
Apple has been a cool company the past few years. I have an iPhone and a Mac (which I'm typing this comment from now, in fact). Still, if I owned stock in Apple, I'd be selling it about right now because they are moving in the exact opposite direction that the market is.
Very insightful reply, and you're 100% correct. That was my other line of thought. This is the company (and probably some of these "superstar" programmers are the very people) who have given us a litany of buffer overruns, security holes, and other low-level programming "features" over the years.
I'm not saying that no one should ever program at a low level, but I am saying that people shouldn't be afraid to take advantage of features of managed code and other conveniences. Don't program at a low level if you don't have to. You're only making your life harder for no reason, and needlessly exposing yourself to risks of fundamental errors that are much worse. Take advantage of all of the hard work that others have already done.
The original article and the summary both come of as rather smug to me. The truth of the matter is that you need both low-level nitty-gritty programming and high-level programming. It depends on what you're using it for.
Think of it this way. You have people who make pipes. You know, the kind used in plumbing. Fittings, too. And they're very good at it. If you take your average house builder and try to get him to make a pipe, he'll be hopelessly bad at it. But you know what those guys who build houses are good at? Putting the pipes together in meaningful ways to get what they need (i.e. building a house) done. Take a guy who's brilliant at making pipes and fittings and try to get him to build a house. Yeah, not such a superstar now.
It's the same with programmers. Tell someone who is very good at writing low-level code, "I need a killer efficient compiler." Give them enough time, and they can churn it out and make it wicked optimized. Tell them, "I need a new type of control that works in this specific way and with crucial efficiency," and they're your guys. Tell them, "I need an new application entirely from scratch that can process my specific business logic, it needs to look and feel like a standard Windows application, it needs to be easy for end users to figure out and work with, and we need a working version in a couple of weeks," and they'll probably laugh at you. Yet that's what those people they're looking down on, the people developing with higher-level abstracted languages, are doing every day.
In my experience, competence != usefulness. They're not opposites, mind you, but it takes both types. It takes the people who work with the low-level nitty-gritty stuff, and it takes the people who use what they churn out to actually accomplish real-world productive things. One isn't smarter, one isn't better, neither should be looked down upon. Both are necessary.
I just about can't use a machine without using a network. My favorite game is an MMORPG, which is useless without a network. Even other games, I usually have a browser window open for reference. My e-mail is accessed via a web client. (Even with a local client, all you could do is compose or read, not send or receive.) I do web development, which is on a remote web host. When I'm developing things locally in Visual Studio, I'm constantly using online references and documentation. I suppose I could in theory write a letter or something, but to be honest, I don't write letters to people any more. I even require the Internet to do something as simple as watch television these days. (Broadcast tv? Forget it, I use Hulu.)
If you don't use the Internet as much as I do, more power to you. But I really think that going forward, offline computer use is going to be the exception, not the rule. I think saying what you said will eventually sound like, "I won't use a telephone that is useless without a wireless connectivity." Like the cell network, the Internet is so pervasive today that it's weird to run across an application that doesn't use it in some capacity.
Oh, and by the way, Chromium is released under the BSD license, which is free-as-in-speech. I don't know what the license terms will be if such a hypothetical netbook were released, but at least the OS running on it would be open source. From a freedom-as-in-Stallman viewpoint, it may not be perfect, but it is orders of magnitude better than what is currently running on most netbooks out there. Evil is not the opposite of perfect.
Looking at your Slashdot name, that post takes on a bit of an ominous tone. Is "gave my notice" some kind of euphemism?
I honestly don't see why we can't have the best of both worlds.
For example, we have a thriving public education system which guarantees almost universal education. We also have a thriving private education system for those who, for whatever reason, don't want to take advantage of public eduction. Sure, right-wingers gripe about our public eduction system, and I know that there are people out there would like to see it systematically dismantled, but the truth is that it works pretty well. Especially when you get to the university level, such as state colleges and universities.
Speaking of education, we have a fantastic student loan system as well. As a student, you can borrow money from the federal government to attend college. You can also borrow money from private lenders. You have a choice.
I guess I don't understand why health care can't work the same way. We have a public system to take care of everyone's basic medical necessities. We have a private system to take care of what people want above and beyond that. (Private rooms, name-generic prescriptions, specialists who charge above the normal rates, elective procedures, etc.) No one has to go bankrupt because they get sick. No one has to decide between having a broken bone set or buying dinner that night. If for whatever reason you don't like the public health system, you're free to go spend money out-of-pocket on either a private plan, or if you have enough, pay the health care providers directly.
It seems to me that those who are fighting against the public option are the ones who want to limit our choice, not the other way around.
Oh man, you do NOT want to go there. If you get into a battle of anecdotes on the issue of public versus private health care, you will be killed on that debate every time.
Seriously.
Don't make me go digging through all of the stories of people who have been screwed over and scammed by private insurance companies, because it will take at least a couple of weeks to write the book about it.
If Facebook photos are the standard by which we're judging whether or not people should be paid insurance claims for being depressed, I wonder if I can use that?
No, I'm not depressed. I mean, I have ups and downs like everyone else, but I don't think it's so severe to be classified as a medical condition. Still, I could certainly churn out a few photos when I'm feeling down one day and post them. Then maybe I could call my insurance company and tell them, "See? I'm depressed! It's right there on Facebook!"
The women are brutally honest. The guys are covering for each other.
How about actually checking how many people die from smoking-related illnesses versus how many people die from murder.
This is an idiotic claim. (And yes, in case you missed it, I'm calling you idiotic for making it.) It's the same as claiming that murder harms no one other than the person who decided to murder. Yes, it is that ludicrous. Just because you want to believe it for rationalizing your own stupidity doesn't make it true. ("Hey, look, I killed someone. Oh well, at least I'm the only person who's affected, since I'm the only one who has to suffer the consequences of feeling guilty about it and stuff." That really is how stupid you sound.)
I'll tell you what I'll concede to. Let's build some gas chambers where people can go to smoke without affecting other people. Then let's make them turn over any kids they might have to foster care or next of kin. Also, have a lawyer on-hand to help them create a will and sign a form consenting to not having any medical care that they don't pay for directly out-of-pocket. Lock them in, and let them kill themselves from stupidity.
Then come back to me, and maybe I'll be willing to say it shouldn't be made illegal. Otherwise, I'm going to keep pushing for as many bans as we can get until the stuff is outlawed completely. I delight in smoking bans. I don't care how angry it makes you, how much you whine about the "nanny state," how stupid your rationalizations are for destructive behavior. It's a drug, it's deadly, it's harmful both directly and indirectly to both the people who do it and the people around them. No matter how you dress it up, it's idiotic that it's not illegal already. The only reason it's not is because of the billions in blood money that have been paid to lobbyists to keep it as a special exception to regulation that is granted to no other drug.
There's such a thing as eating responsibly. There's no such thing as smoking responsibly. Besides, in case you haven't noticed, there is a war being waged on obesity. And yes, I'm happy with the progress being made on that front, too.
And my favorite color is blue, I really like Pink Floyd, I think that Bill Watterson and Gary Larson are gods, and my car is a Honda. Any more smart-ass questions that have nothing to do with smoking?
Anyone who thinks that once Google perfects this, they're going to be content to simply sit idle on the cloudbook (I'm making that word up; consider it public domain) market with it is fooling themselves.
Google is also working on implementing 3D in the browser. They're also saying that for most features users use, Google Apps will be caught up with Microsoft Office in a year. They're also working VERY hard on developing a standard codebase to implement a desktop UI within a browser, and they're making very good progress.
Is Google overly optimistic? Maybe, but what company isn't? My point, though, is that they've got a LOT of really good things going for them. Don't dare think of Chrome as forever relegated to "OS-lite," or else you'll be making the same fundamental mistake that many other companies have made with Google. (And indeed, that a lot of them made with Microsoft in the past. "Oh, Internet Explorer will never catch up to Netscape." "Excel is like a scaled-down Lotus 123." "Our company has invested way too much in Netware to change." "Visual C++ is neat, but for serious development, go with Borland.")
It's really kind of fun to watch a company out-Microsoft Microsoft, except in a good way. As far as I'm concerned, I hope Microsoft continues to think of ChromeOS as just a toy that will never be a serious contender with Windows outside of very limited niche devices.
See this? Right there? THAT is why we have to push for smoking bans. Because of idiots who think they're not hurting anybody but themselves. Because you care so little about what other people think and you're so ignorant of the damage you're causing, we have to pass laws to punish you because "gosh, I shouldn't do that" isn't enough of an incentive and "hey, this is causing other people problems" never even crosses your mind.