Jobs said, "It's a constant cat and mouse game," according to ComputerWorld's account of the discussion. "We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it's our job to stop them breaking in."
Mr. Jobs, can you tell us why it's your job to do that? You sell hardware. We are the customer. Is AT&T paying you to keep that exclusivity by all technical means? Oh, wait, I see. We are the consumer, not the customer. See, whenever industry uses the word consumer, it means there's someone else (such as another company) who is actually the customer. "The customer is always right" doesn't apply if we're just sheeple consumers.
And in other news, Carly Simon finally admits that Jack Thompson was the object of her scorn in her old hit song, "You're So Vain (You Probably Think This Song is About You)."
A junior employee or contractor made an error that is against our policy.
Translated: A local store manager is foolishly given broad discretion to run the local store and making ass-pulled risk estimates such as "this guy can't possibly escalate his complaint from porch-seat grumbling to global public-relations catastrophe."
Actually, I have tried Blender. I use it often. And to a newcomer, the UI is completely bizarre and breaks EVERY notion that you get from standard UI areas. However, once you get used to the Blender interface, it gets to be very familiar, and in fact, better than many other GUIs you might try. It's a pretty common observation that after you've gotten familiar with Blender, you start wishing for some of the "Blenderisms" in other software.
Call me wacky, but the UI isn't a problem. Any tool can be learned in a few days or weeks of using it.
Instead, here's my wishlist:
icc profiles for display and printer
deep color (16bit/channel or deeper) and hdri color
better support for huge images in moderate memory
filter layer types
Being on Mac OSX, my top wish is for an updated Mac OSX build (even if it still must be under X11.app). The OSX-ready builds are far behind the main development releases, and for the glacial pace of GIMP development, that is really saying something. I bet all of the above items are ready on Linux, just not the officially recognized OSX-ready builds on macports or the website.
Nobody works their way to becoming multi-billionaires... There's absolutely nothing one man could do that could possibly be worth that kind of compensation.
They, like many others, hit the stock-market lottery. There's enough stupid people that will buy stocks for millions of times what they're actually worth, that early buyers can become billionaires just because they happen to be there.
The jetstream is always moving fast, but you can't catch the jetstream if you don't fill the balloon and cut the tethers.
Brin and Page did "hit the stock-market lottery." I agree with that. But they would not have been able to get there without actually doing some interesting stuff and telling people about it. Yes, there are a lot of people who are doing interesting stuff and telling people about it, yet don't hit the stock-market lottery. But the fact that all this interesting stuff gets done is what advances society.
I think that's what the other posters were referring by the "American Dreamer is dead" sentiment. A dream without action is a fantasy of entitlement and resentment. A dream with action is a goal.
It wasn't clear to me if the iPod Touch (soon to be called the iTouch by everyone and their brother, but I think I'll go with iPoke instead) had full Safari and WiFi for whatever you wanted, or if it was limited to the partner apps and sites?
The other thing that seemed incredibly lame was the idea that it should cost a $0.99 service charge just to turn a four-minute.aac file into a ten-second proprietary file for a ringtone. Pay for MORE bits, I can sorta stomach. Pay for a file conversion that crops out most of the content?
And to add salt to this discussion of bizarre legal machinations on the part of a "religion," note the bizarre "NOT SHOWN BECAUSE OF COPYRIGHT" on the government's website (who can choose to ignore copyright, even if this wasn't clearly fair use, which it is). Church of Christian Scientists, and the Muslim five-pointed star.
There was an important case, about a year ago, which went to the supreme court, where a man refused to show his ID, or to identify himself to a police officer.
As I remember the court's analysis, you only have to show your ID if you are a suspect or have comitted a crime
The ruling is that you must identify yourself if you are suspected of having been involved in a crime, even if you are not in operation of, nor in the operator's seat of a motor vehicle. Verbal identification is okay unless you are in operation of a license-class motor vehicle, in which case you must show the license when asked. This is in itself a HUGE step down from the previous state of law: if you were not in operation or being arrested, you could remain anonymous. Your mangled wording implies several entirely different things, including being presumed guilty.
This is exactly my point: I don't release things under GPL because I don't believe in the GPL ideals (to fight people who want to use a published method alongside an unpublished method). I do release things to BSD-like or public domain as I see fit. The incentive to creation is either financial or feel-good. I don't get any feel-good by fighting.
The FSF will only work to enforce the GPL if the GPL code in question is signed over to the FSF. While I can understand that legal logic, I have a hard time with the concept of creating something, keeping a copyright in force, and then signing the copyright away for no benefit to myself. The only benefit would be that the FSF would then fight when someone uses it in an "unauthorized" manner. If I'm not going to hold my own copyright, why not just specifically disavow copyright and let it enrich everybody via the public domain?
This is the root of my problem with GNU in general: why show everybody how you achieved and developed a certain technological capability, without letting people actually use that method? If you only want certain people to be able to use that method, then only show those certain people how it's done. I think it's just a bit petty to show the code but not authorize its use. The "unauthorized" user can't steal it because you will always have it. The "unauthorized" user can extend it and keep those extensions hidden, but I fail to see how that really hurts me: I can extend my copy too. If I give an ice cream cone to my brother, I can't dictate to him how he eats it.
There are many store monitor camera systems that are installed with poor defaults and wide open access. Several makers' web interfaces have easy formulaic URLs to select different store views, and these commonly can be searched with plain old web search engines. This was a fun thing to do a few years back, with whole sites dedicated to lists of web cams that were likely not intended for global viewership. Without any real evidence that the web cameras were "hacked" I think it's a big stretch to assume any skill was involved here.
The extra mouse travel distance [to the menu bar] is not a problem because it's easier to hit a target always at the top of the screen than one that might be mixed around other menus.
This is referred as Fitt's Law in the OSX fanboi circles (I say this as someone who has just bought his fourth OSX machine and retired his last Athlon Linux box). The corners are the easiest to hit because the mouse can be slammed into them with a flick of the wrist. The edges are likewise easy to hit in approximately the right area, then you just slide along the edge to the item you want. Sounds good in theory.
What I hate is that there is ALWAYS a return trip back across the expansive 1980x1020 screen (or even larger), a trek that seems to take days across the frozen tundra of non-application desktop or the rocky real-estate of other applications, just to get back to where you were before you needed a menu item. And no, since my drawing or text or sound is NOT a menu item, I can't just use Fitt's Law to arrive magically and easily back to where I was.
In short, Fitt's does not help half of the trip to a menu item: the return trip. If you think about it, the corners are actually the second-easiest place to target with the mouse. The easiest place to target with the mouse is exactly where your mouse is already positioned. That is why right-click context menus win.
One last thought: I really hate nonlinear mouse acceleration. OSX is all about simplifying the controls, so it's got ONE slider from slow-and-low-acceleration to fast-and-high-acceleration. Of course, Fitt's is amplified if you have high acceleration, because one flick can still travel 2000 pixel distances, instead of the repeated lift-move-lower-slide mouse dance that you have to use otherwise. Maybe it's because I used mice for many years before acceleration was common, but I want fast-but-constant-speed, an option available to me on the "give users more choices" operating systems.
Have you heard anyone under the age of 40 who uses the word 'glitch' to describe undesirable behavior in machinery? Everyone over 40 remembers the modem days so bandwidth issues aren't a big surprise, either. Just another sign that Microsoft is truly the proverbial dinosaur.
If I recall, the Microsoft Money product was the first in the Windows realm to do this sort of thing. They dubbed it IntelliSense and more apps gained the feature. It was only a slight improvement on the interfaces given by Un*x apps like Emacs years earlier, in that the user didn't need to "ask" the application to try to complete the string. The app merely made a zero-risk completion on every keystroke (zero risk, because the selected text could be dismissed by simply continuing to type).
But you see, we can't just create any color we want using only one wavelength. That's why all the color spaces seem to need at least three parameters: RGB, CMY, Lab, HSV, etc.
For example, say you can pick any single wavelength you want, and you pick, oh, that bright "green laser" green #00FF00. How do you make it less saturated? How can it be a shade like celadon #FEFFFE (green but damn near white) or a shade like canned spinach #112211 (green but pretty dark)? Maybe you think you can do it by attenuation: you can get "green laser" green and you can get "spinach green" by dialing down the intensity, but that still won't give you celadon.
In RGB, the difference between Red and Blue versus Green drives the saturation while the average drives the value. In HSV the saturation is a direct component distinct from value. You need at least three parameters for a color, just as much as you need three parameters to describe a location in 3space.
But that's not bad for Google anyway, because now we're talking about them (again), they get press, more people (not everyone uses Google) use their search, and that's where they make their money.
They're not just about search anymore, they are about data management and distributed computing.
Yes, publicity is good, but I must stress, Google doesn't make money on searches. They make money on ads. All they spend on search and data management technology is a loss leader, just like the "kids eat free" night at the local buffet or more accurately like the sparkly electric lights on the casino building. They make their money not on search but on advertising. It's those AdWords and AdSense that form Google's backbone, and the search is just a way to make the web usable to get people to see (and respond to) ads.
There are already some great planetarium software applications available, like Stellarium. I see that it could be "more convenient" if Google Earth offered similar views, but I can't help but think that with the patchwork quality of Google Maps/Earth data, that the sky dataset will look like another half-finished project.
I may joke that in Google Sky, Rigel appears to be "(c) google" and Sirius will be a hotlink for digital radio, but there's a more serious concern of incomplete, poorly matched, patchwork quality, license-encumbered imagery that will blunt the value of Google Sky if they're not careful. Since Google's an ad company, I fail to see how this will actually bring them more revenue.
Just for mentioning the phrases "American", "phone call", "pay the price", "bomb someone", "protect themselves", and "outside their control", you have been added to the Department of Fatherland Security watchlists. All of your finances, foreign or otherwise, will be monitored closely (in San Francisco) for any corroborating tendrils of threatening intent on your part.
I don't see what the beef is with teaching kids about copyright laws as they are today. Perhaps it would be an appropriate time to discuss the matter and introduce various points of view.
If that was the curriculum, I'd be overjoyed. But (1) the teachers don't know much about this field, so they're talking off some handy curricula circulars from the district, and (2) those curricula circulars are written by, and the legislative priorities are set by lobbyists and corporate interests. Do you think they'll include that bit about "discuss" and "various points of view"? It is like getting , oh, I don't know... RIAA drafting the Iraqi constitution's intellectual property protections.
The proposal says "and ethical" which I take to mean indoctrinating a willingness to prop up ancient and unfair art-patron business models rather than nourish a new generation of self-referential art and culture.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Jobs, can you tell us why it's your job to do that? You sell hardware. We are the customer. Is AT&T paying you to keep that exclusivity by all technical means? Oh, wait, I see. We are the consumer, not the customer. See, whenever industry uses the word consumer, it means there's someone else (such as another company) who is actually the customer. "The customer is always right" doesn't apply if we're just sheeple consumers.
And in other news, Carly Simon finally admits that Jack Thompson was the object of her scorn in her old hit song, "You're So Vain (You Probably Think This Song is About You)."
Sounds like Rule 4 is "don't hit obstacles" unless you rewrite Rule 1 as "don't crowd too close to anything."
A junior employee or contractor made an error that is against our policy.
Translated:
A local store manager is foolishly given broad discretion to run the local store and making ass-pulled risk estimates such as "this guy can't possibly escalate his complaint from porch-seat grumbling to global public-relations catastrophe."
Actually, I have tried Blender. I use it often. And to a newcomer, the UI is completely bizarre and breaks EVERY notion that you get from standard UI areas. However, once you get used to the Blender interface, it gets to be very familiar, and in fact, better than many other GUIs you might try. It's a pretty common observation that after you've gotten familiar with Blender, you start wishing for some of the "Blenderisms" in other software.
Call me wacky, but the UI isn't a problem. Any tool can be learned in a few days or weeks of using it.
Instead, here's my wishlist:
Being on Mac OSX, my top wish is for an updated Mac OSX build (even if it still must be under X11.app). The OSX-ready builds are far behind the main development releases, and for the glacial pace of GIMP development, that is really saying something. I bet all of the above items are ready on Linux, just not the officially recognized OSX-ready builds on macports or the website.
Nobody works their way to becoming multi-billionaires... There's absolutely nothing one man could do that could possibly be worth that kind of compensation.
They, like many others, hit the stock-market lottery. There's enough stupid people that will buy stocks for millions of times what they're actually worth, that early buyers can become billionaires just because they happen to be there.
The jetstream is always moving fast, but you can't catch the jetstream if you don't fill the balloon and cut the tethers.
Brin and Page did "hit the stock-market lottery." I agree with that. But they would not have been able to get there without actually doing some interesting stuff and telling people about it. Yes, there are a lot of people who are doing interesting stuff and telling people about it, yet don't hit the stock-market lottery. But the fact that all this interesting stuff gets done is what advances society.
I think that's what the other posters were referring by the "American Dreamer is dead" sentiment. A dream without action is a fantasy of entitlement and resentment. A dream with action is a goal.
Can you de-TLA the term RMT?
It wasn't clear to me if the iPod Touch (soon to be called the iTouch by everyone and their brother, but I think I'll go with iPoke instead) had full Safari and WiFi for whatever you wanted, or if it was limited to the partner apps and sites?
The other thing that seemed incredibly lame was the idea that it should cost a $0.99 service charge just to turn a four-minute .aac file into a ten-second proprietary file for a ringtone. Pay for MORE bits, I can sorta stomach. Pay for a file conversion that crops out most of the content?
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.org/funeral_informa tion/authorized_emblems.html
And to add salt to this discussion of bizarre legal machinations on the part of a "religion," note the bizarre "NOT SHOWN BECAUSE OF COPYRIGHT" on the government's website (who can choose to ignore copyright, even if this wasn't clearly fair use, which it is). Church of Christian Scientists, and the Muslim five-pointed star.
The ruling is that you must identify yourself if you are suspected of having been involved in a crime, even if you are not in operation of, nor in the operator's seat of a motor vehicle. Verbal identification is okay unless you are in operation of a license-class motor vehicle, in which case you must show the license when asked. This is in itself a HUGE step down from the previous state of law: if you were not in operation or being arrested, you could remain anonymous. Your mangled wording implies several entirely different things, including being presumed guilty.
This is exactly my point: I don't release things under GPL because I don't believe in the GPL ideals (to fight people who want to use a published method alongside an unpublished method). I do release things to BSD-like or public domain as I see fit. The incentive to creation is either financial or feel-good. I don't get any feel-good by fighting.
The FSF will only work to enforce the GPL if the GPL code in question is signed over to the FSF. While I can understand that legal logic, I have a hard time with the concept of creating something, keeping a copyright in force, and then signing the copyright away for no benefit to myself. The only benefit would be that the FSF would then fight when someone uses it in an "unauthorized" manner. If I'm not going to hold my own copyright, why not just specifically disavow copyright and let it enrich everybody via the public domain?
This is the root of my problem with GNU in general: why show everybody how you achieved and developed a certain technological capability, without letting people actually use that method? If you only want certain people to be able to use that method, then only show those certain people how it's done. I think it's just a bit petty to show the code but not authorize its use. The "unauthorized" user can't steal it because you will always have it. The "unauthorized" user can extend it and keep those extensions hidden, but I fail to see how that really hurts me: I can extend my copy too. If I give an ice cream cone to my brother, I can't dictate to him how he eats it.
There are many store monitor camera systems that are installed with poor defaults and wide open access. Several makers' web interfaces have easy formulaic URLs to select different store views, and these commonly can be searched with plain old web search engines. This was a fun thing to do a few years back, with whole sites dedicated to lists of web cams that were likely not intended for global viewership. Without any real evidence that the web cameras were "hacked" I think it's a big stretch to assume any skill was involved here.
This is referred as Fitt's Law in the OSX fanboi circles (I say this as someone who has just bought his fourth OSX machine and retired his last Athlon Linux box). The corners are the easiest to hit because the mouse can be slammed into them with a flick of the wrist. The edges are likewise easy to hit in approximately the right area, then you just slide along the edge to the item you want. Sounds good in theory.
What I hate is that there is ALWAYS a return trip back across the expansive 1980x1020 screen (or even larger), a trek that seems to take days across the frozen tundra of non-application desktop or the rocky real-estate of other applications, just to get back to where you were before you needed a menu item. And no, since my drawing or text or sound is NOT a menu item, I can't just use Fitt's Law to arrive magically and easily back to where I was.
In short, Fitt's does not help half of the trip to a menu item: the return trip. If you think about it, the corners are actually the second-easiest place to target with the mouse. The easiest place to target with the mouse is exactly where your mouse is already positioned. That is why right-click context menus win.
One last thought: I really hate nonlinear mouse acceleration. OSX is all about simplifying the controls, so it's got ONE slider from slow-and-low-acceleration to fast-and-high-acceleration. Of course, Fitt's is amplified if you have high acceleration, because one flick can still travel 2000 pixel distances, instead of the repeated lift-move-lower-slide mouse dance that you have to use otherwise. Maybe it's because I used mice for many years before acceleration was common, but I want fast-but-constant-speed, an option available to me on the "give users more choices" operating systems.
Have you heard anyone under the age of 40 who uses the word 'glitch' to describe undesirable behavior in machinery? Everyone over 40 remembers the modem days so bandwidth issues aren't a big surprise, either. Just another sign that Microsoft is truly the proverbial dinosaur.
(says the guy who just turned forty)
Yep, they're a patent troll, but they're not merely a patent troll. Like a pig wearing a tutu isn't merely a pig.
If I recall, the Microsoft Money product was the first in the Windows realm to do this sort of thing. They dubbed it IntelliSense and more apps gained the feature. It was only a slight improvement on the interfaces given by Un*x apps like Emacs years earlier, in that the user didn't need to "ask" the application to try to complete the string. The app merely made a zero-risk completion on every keystroke (zero risk, because the selected text could be dismissed by simply continuing to type).
But you see, we can't just create any color we want using only one wavelength. That's why all the color spaces seem to need at least three parameters: RGB, CMY, Lab, HSV, etc.
For example, say you can pick any single wavelength you want, and you pick, oh, that bright "green laser" green #00FF00. How do you make it less saturated? How can it be a shade like celadon #FEFFFE (green but damn near white) or a shade like canned spinach #112211 (green but pretty dark)? Maybe you think you can do it by attenuation: you can get "green laser" green and you can get "spinach green" by dialing down the intensity, but that still won't give you celadon.
In RGB, the difference between Red and Blue versus Green drives the saturation while the average drives the value. In HSV the saturation is a direct component distinct from value. You need at least three parameters for a color, just as much as you need three parameters to describe a location in 3space.
Yes, publicity is good, but I must stress, Google doesn't make money on searches. They make money on ads. All they spend on search and data management technology is a loss leader, just like the "kids eat free" night at the local buffet or more accurately like the sparkly electric lights on the casino building. They make their money not on search but on advertising. It's those AdWords and AdSense that form Google's backbone, and the search is just a way to make the web usable to get people to see (and respond to) ads.
There are already some great planetarium software applications available, like Stellarium. I see that it could be "more convenient" if Google Earth offered similar views, but I can't help but think that with the patchwork quality of Google Maps/Earth data, that the sky dataset will look like another half-finished project.
I may joke that in Google Sky, Rigel appears to be "(c) google" and Sirius will be a hotlink for digital radio, but there's a more serious concern of incomplete, poorly matched, patchwork quality, license-encumbered imagery that will blunt the value of Google Sky if they're not careful. Since Google's an ad company, I fail to see how this will actually bring them more revenue.
Just for mentioning the phrases "American", "phone call", "pay the price", "bomb someone", "protect themselves", and "outside their control", you have been added to the Department of Fatherland Security watchlists. All of your finances, foreign or otherwise, will be monitored closely (in San Francisco) for any corroborating tendrils of threatening intent on your part.
If that was the curriculum, I'd be overjoyed. But (1) the teachers don't know much about this field, so they're talking off some handy curricula circulars from the district, and (2) those curricula circulars are written by, and the legislative priorities are set by lobbyists and corporate interests. Do you think they'll include that bit about "discuss" and "various points of view"? It is like getting , oh, I don't know... RIAA drafting the Iraqi constitution's intellectual property protections.
The proposal says "and ethical" which I take to mean indoctrinating a willingness to prop up ancient and unfair art-patron business models rather than nourish a new generation of self-referential art and culture.
I read that first as Slashdot and Linux.com troll for the same corporate overlord. Whups.