Let me introduce you to one of the other evergreen knocks against Apple: accusations that Apple steals someone else's innovation and incorporates it into the OS. I don't mean borrowing an idea from Microsoft, I mean duplicating something developed by a small independent developer.
That can't happen unless innovation is *not* dictated by Apple. Other people are innovating the functionality, all Apple is dictating is what goes on the install disks.
Since everything on the netzilla is calledzilla zillazilla these days, I'll fill in the details for the grandparent commenter. But by 1989, Richard Crandall, now Distinguished Scientist at Apple (and once my roommate at Reed College), started networking NeXT computers to find, factor, and test gargantuan prime numbers.
"Community supercomputing occurred to me one day at NeXT engineering headquarters," Crandall recalls. "I thought we ought to make these machines do what they were designed to do, which is to work when we humans are not working. Machines have no business sleeping."
Crandall installed software that allowed idle NeXT machines to perform computations, combining their efforts across the network. He called this software Godzilla, but after a legal inquiry from the company that owned the rights to the movie character, he renamed it Zilla. Crandall put Zilla to work on huge prime numbers, which are crucial in cryptography. It was then used to test a new encryption scheme at NeXT - a scheme now employed at Apple, which acquired NeXT. In 1991, Zilla won the Computerworld Smithsonian award for science.
Later, Crandall and several colleagues used distributed processing to complete the deepest computation ever performed, asking the question: Is the 24th Fermat number (which has more than 5 million digits) prime? "It took 10**17 machine operations - 100 quadrillion," Crandall says proudly. "With that level of computational effort, you can create a full-length movie. In fact, that's about the same number of operations Pixar required to render A Bug's Life."
Also, a surplus of curiosity can be detrimental as well, if you spend your time pursuing things that interest you the most, in place of the things you are supposed to be working on.
This is especially a problem if your curiosity leads you to never finish anything because you're jumping from interest to interest before anything is completed.
"My issues with iTunes DRM is because I cannot buy music from iTunes and play it on my computer, which runs Linux"
Burn it to CD, and re-rip it as MP3. iTunes lets you do that.
Apple is not obligated to satisfy every possible use case of every possible user. iTunes doesn't support linux. It also doesn't run on Windows-based cell phones. The iTunes music store doesn't support Linux users. it also doesn't support the far more numerous population of music listeners without computers or iPods.
"The price per song should be lower and with public disclosure of how much each party receives from each sale."
That's going to be tricky, because it gets into myriad contracts the label has with performers, producers, and other people involved in production. Contracts that, I bet, none of them necessarily want exposed in that kind of detail.
iTunes doesn't control how much money the artist gets, that would depend on their contract, and would vary depending on, for instance, whether they wrote the songs or not.
Likewise, when you buy a book at a store, the cover doesn't tell you the author's advance and royalty rate, and those aren't determined by the retailer.
A useful heuristic exists, however. The artists who come out best are the ones who perform their own songs and own their own label. The worst-off are the people who perform other people's songs and work for a major label; they end up getting the short end of the stick because they are usually new and have less clout than their producers and songwriters. (I'm not sure if producers get a royalty, but songwriters defintely do. If you perform your own song, you get two royalties.) Plus, if you're working for a major label, the label has to pay for all your PR, and all the huge overhead of a big corporate operation that wants to look glamorous and whose executives are pampered. And that's going to come at the expense of the musician.
"Employees who don't play along are not laid off, but instead either quit or are terminated for cause. This dodges the legal issues (42 USC 2000e and the ADEA, see also http://www.eeoc.gov/ [eeoc.gov]), and avoids severence pay and contract issues."
Also, they wouldn't be able to collect on their unemployment insurance.
"Contrast that to the 100% earning capacity lost by the employees Apple just stabbed in the back."
Oh, bollocks. We're talking about people in Bangalore, here, not some small town where Apple is the only employer for miles. They didn't lose "100% earning capacity". In fact, if they get new jobs quickly, as is likely (some already have), they'll be at 200% earning capacity.
" India was probably more of a contingency if they couldn't expand in Cupertino."
I don't think it's related to the expansion: the expanded campus won't be ready for a few years, so cancelling the plans in India now leaves a big gap.
Steve Jobs won't settle for quickly erected generic office space. That would be wildly out of character for the guy who had I. M. Pei design a floating staircase for NeXT headquarters, and who built that whole glass cube Apple store thing on 5th Ave.
It'll probably be 18 months before he signs off on a design by some 'name' architect. (For the sake of Apple's employees' vision, I hope it's not some blindingly reflective (yet old hat and ultimately boring) titanium-sheet Frank Gehry design.) It'll probably be another 6-12 months before the foundations are laid.
"Whether you want to believe it or not, there is a minimum level of commitment inherent in creating and recruiting for open positions. "
The same minimum level of commitment required of the employee who takes the position. How much notice do people in India have to give their employer before they quit?
Apple as a company should show more respect for their employees, be they in North America, India, or anywhere else.
3 months is often within the probationary period for a new hire, especially new hires who need training. These are not people who have made great sacrifices for the company. They may have taken a risk in leaving the prior job, but that was taking a risk in their own interest, not out of charity for Apple.
They worked 3 months, they get 2 months' severance which will basically be free money for most of them because they should be able to find jobs quickly. That's even better than most Americans would get, and most Americans in that situation probably wouldn't be eligible for unemployment benefits after such a short employment period.
Frankly, that's about as good as it gets.
Giving them more notice would be rather pointless, considering the 2 months of severance and the fact that they were probably still coming up to speed on things. These are not people who have built up a body of work at Apple, they aren't key people in the middle of big development projects requiring a lot of knowledge transfer before they leave Apple.
Apple clearly wouldn't have any work for them to do, and there'd be little point spending more time learning the details of their jobs at Apple, so it'd be wasting everyone's time if they kept coming to work at Apple. Far better that they use their two months' pay to network and job-hunt full-time, or get a job ASAP and invest the two months' pay. (This may be even more pronounced as Apple employees than it would be if it were another tech company, because the things they've been learning for their jobs at Apple are less likely to be transferable to other jobs at other companies.)
But in India, at $800/month you can probably afford a full time servant who will take care of your laundry and ironing, your cooking, your shopping, your errands, etc.
(This isn't because $800/month is big money in India, it's because there is a vast supply of cheap labor available for such service jobs.)
"Then I WON'T have the freedom to choose an ISP that ignores those QOS header strings and gives me whatever the hell I want - because they're bound BY LAW to restrict my access along with everyone else's
That won't do you any good unless all the sites and services you want to use are hosted by your ISP. Otherwise, at some point, the packets are going to cross through another company's servers, and they'll be able to extract a QOS toll. Or degrade performance. Or filter the content.
If network providers can put high-bandwidth traffic in a pay lane, they can put porn on a pay lane, or even throttle it down to 28k if they wish.
I'd be willing to bet that trans-atlantic and trans-pacific transfers will be treated differently, as well.
"some artists get less then half a cent per purchase from other online music stores."
It's not the music stores, it's the labels, the publishers.
The solution for this is for artists to not sign contracts with the crooked publishers.
And the solution for music listeners who are bothered by this is to listen to artists who are signed with indie labels or who have their own label. Small labels don't have the overhead of the mainstream labels, they don't have to keep a vast roof in the Hamptons over Tommy Mottola's head, they don't pay for stretch Hummer limos, they don't pay for entourages, they don't pay for gala parties in Manhattan. They might run some shows at a bar in Austin for SXSW, but that's about it.
My MacBookPro's sensor appears to be miscalibrated, so that even when level it thinks it's tilted to the left.
I suppose that a correct reading isn't strictly necessary for Apple's application of the sensor - it just needs to notice rapid relative changes, not the static orientation.
Slashdot Mirror
"Creative is going old-school SCO style by touting this in a series of press releases."
And I wouldn't be at all surprised if Creative was behind the story about the iPod factories.
All of the innovation is dictated by Apple.
Let me introduce you to one of the other evergreen knocks against Apple: accusations that Apple steals someone else's innovation and incorporates it into the OS. I don't mean borrowing an idea from Microsoft, I mean duplicating something developed by a small independent developer.
That can't happen unless innovation is *not* dictated by Apple. Other people are innovating the functionality, all Apple is dictating is what goes on the install disks.
The early Java GUI tools were a well-thought-out abomination that sent droves and droves of developers in search of better solutions.
Netcode Constructor looked promising, but then Netscape bought them and it disappeared.
Since everything on the netzilla is calledzilla zillazilla these days, I'll fill in the details for the grandparent commenter.
But by 1989, Richard Crandall, now Distinguished Scientist at Apple (and once my roommate at Reed College), started networking NeXT computers to find, factor, and test gargantuan prime numbers.
"Community supercomputing occurred to me one day at NeXT engineering headquarters," Crandall recalls. "I thought we ought to make these machines do what they were designed to do, which is to work when we humans are not working. Machines have no business sleeping."
Crandall installed software that allowed idle NeXT machines to perform computations, combining their efforts across the network. He called this software Godzilla, but after a legal inquiry from the company that owned the rights to the movie character, he renamed it Zilla. Crandall put Zilla to work on huge prime numbers, which are crucial in cryptography. It was then used to test a new encryption scheme at NeXT - a scheme now employed at Apple, which acquired NeXT. In 1991, Zilla won the Computerworld Smithsonian award for science.
Later, Crandall and several colleagues used distributed processing to complete the deepest computation ever performed, asking the question: Is the 24th Fermat number (which has more than 5 million digits) prime? "It took 10**17 machine operations - 100 quadrillion," Crandall says proudly. "With that level of computational effort, you can create a full-length movie. In fact, that's about the same number of operations Pixar required to render A Bug's Life."
Also, a surplus of curiosity can be detrimental as well, if you spend your time pursuing things that interest you the most, in place of the things you are supposed to be working on.
This is especially a problem if your curiosity leads you to never finish anything because you're jumping from interest to interest before anything is completed.
Are you curious about *everything*? Were you curious about *every* subject you studied?
Most people are not like that. They are curious about *some* things, possibly *many* things, but not *everything they are required to study*.
"My issues with iTunes DRM is because I cannot buy music from iTunes and play it on my computer, which runs Linux"
Burn it to CD, and re-rip it as MP3. iTunes lets you do that.
Apple is not obligated to satisfy every possible use case of every possible user. iTunes doesn't support linux. It also doesn't run on Windows-based cell phones. The iTunes music store doesn't support Linux users. it also doesn't support the far more numerous population of music listeners without computers or iPods.
They have a business to run, not a charity.
"The price per song should be lower and with public disclosure of how much each party receives from each sale."
That's going to be tricky, because it gets into myriad contracts the label has with performers, producers, and other people involved in production. Contracts that, I bet, none of them necessarily want exposed in that kind of detail.
iTunes doesn't control how much money the artist gets, that would depend on their contract, and would vary depending on, for instance, whether they wrote the songs or not.
Likewise, when you buy a book at a store, the cover doesn't tell you the author's advance and royalty rate, and those aren't determined by the retailer.
A useful heuristic exists, however. The artists who come out best are the ones who perform their own songs and own their own label. The worst-off are the people who perform other people's songs and work for a major label; they end up getting the short end of the stick because they are usually new and have less clout than their producers and songwriters. (I'm not sure if producers get a royalty, but songwriters defintely do. If you perform your own song, you get two royalties.) Plus, if you're working for a major label, the label has to pay for all your PR, and all the huge overhead of a big corporate operation that wants to look glamorous and whose executives are pampered. And that's going to come at the expense of the musician.
Maybe he thought you had a Quadra.
"Employees who don't play along are not laid off, but instead either quit or are terminated for cause. This dodges the legal issues (42 USC 2000e and the ADEA, see also http://www.eeoc.gov/ [eeoc.gov]), and avoids severence pay and contract issues."
Also, they wouldn't be able to collect on their unemployment insurance.
"Contrast that to the 100% earning capacity lost by the employees Apple just stabbed in the back."
Oh, bollocks. We're talking about people in Bangalore, here, not some small town where Apple is the only employer for miles. They didn't lose "100% earning capacity". In fact, if they get new jobs quickly, as is likely (some already have), they'll be at 200% earning capacity.
" India was probably more of a contingency if they couldn't expand in Cupertino."
I don't think it's related to the expansion: the expanded campus won't be ready for a few years, so cancelling the plans in India now leaves a big gap.
Steve Jobs won't settle for quickly erected generic office space. That would be wildly out of character for the guy who had I. M. Pei design a floating staircase for NeXT headquarters, and who built that whole glass cube Apple store thing on 5th Ave.
It'll probably be 18 months before he signs off on a design by some 'name' architect. (For the sake of Apple's employees' vision, I hope it's not some blindingly reflective (yet old hat and ultimately boring) titanium-sheet Frank Gehry design.) It'll probably be another 6-12 months before the foundations are laid.
"My last job required me to relocate to another continent,"
Well, we can be pretty sure that everyone involved was Indian. And there are plenty of jobs in Bangalore, and people job-hop all the time, apparently.
So I seriously doubt there will be any significant hardships. They basically got two months' free pay.
"Whether you want to believe it or not, there is a minimum level of commitment inherent in creating and recruiting for open positions. "
The same minimum level of commitment required of the employee who takes the position. How much notice do people in India have to give their employer before they quit?
Apple as a company should show more respect for their employees, be they in North America, India, or anywhere else.
3 months is often within the probationary period for a new hire, especially new hires who need training. These are not people who have made great sacrifices for the company. They may have taken a risk in leaving the prior job, but that was taking a risk in their own interest, not out of charity for Apple.
They worked 3 months, they get 2 months' severance which will basically be free money for most of them because they should be able to find jobs quickly. That's even better than most Americans would get, and most Americans in that situation probably wouldn't be eligible for unemployment benefits after such a short employment period.
Frankly, that's about as good as it gets.
Giving them more notice would be rather pointless, considering the 2 months of severance and the fact that they were probably still coming up to speed on things. These are not people who have built up a body of work at Apple, they aren't key people in the middle of big development projects requiring a lot of knowledge transfer before they leave Apple.
Apple clearly wouldn't have any work for them to do, and there'd be little point spending more time learning the details of their jobs at Apple, so it'd be wasting everyone's time if they kept coming to work at Apple. Far better that they use their two months' pay to network and job-hunt full-time, or get a job ASAP and invest the two months' pay. (This may be even more pronounced as Apple employees than it would be if it were another tech company, because the things they've been learning for their jobs at Apple are less likely to be transferable to other jobs at other companies.)
But in India, at $800/month you can probably afford a full time servant who will take care of your laundry and ironing, your cooking, your shopping, your errands, etc.
(This isn't because $800/month is big money in India, it's because there is a vast supply of cheap labor available for such service jobs.)
they were swallowed by small dog.
Instead of Second Life, it should be "Advertising Life", because that looks to be where it's heading.
No thanks, frankly. There's too much in the real world, I'm not sure why I'd bother using a virtual world to get still more.
"Then I WON'T have the freedom to choose an ISP that ignores those QOS header strings and gives me whatever the hell I want - because they're bound BY LAW to restrict my access along with everyone else's
That won't do you any good unless all the sites and services you want to use are hosted by your ISP. Otherwise, at some point, the packets are going to cross through another company's servers, and they'll be able to extract a QOS toll. Or degrade performance. Or filter the content.
If network providers can put high-bandwidth traffic in a pay lane, they can put porn on a pay lane, or even throttle it down to 28k if they wish.
I'd be willing to bet that trans-atlantic and trans-pacific transfers will be treated differently, as well.
"You don't have to go too far back in history to find Richard Nixon."
Bush is worse. At least Nixon did *some* things right.
In consulting, it's not unusual to work four days on-site, then fly home on Thursday and work remotely on Friday.
However, during crunch times, it's also not uncommonn to only go home every second weekend.
"some artists get less then half a cent per purchase from other online music stores."
It's not the music stores, it's the labels, the publishers.
The solution for this is for artists to not sign contracts with the crooked publishers.
And the solution for music listeners who are bothered by this is to listen to artists who are signed with indie labels or who have their own label. Small labels don't have the overhead of the mainstream labels, they don't have to keep a vast roof in the Hamptons over Tommy Mottola's head, they don't pay for stretch Hummer limos, they don't pay for entourages, they don't pay for gala parties in Manhattan. They might run some shows at a bar in Austin for SXSW, but that's about it.
My MacBookPro's sensor appears to be miscalibrated, so that even when level it thinks it's tilted to the left.
I suppose that a correct reading isn't strictly necessary for Apple's application of the sensor - it just needs to notice rapid relative changes, not the static orientation.
Right, and who gets a cut from this "Code Number"?
I bet the code number means "the person presenting this code number is e$pecially gullible".
Of course they oppose it - they'd sell the hardware that would implement traffic discrimination.
They probably see it as an opportunity to sell the world all new hardware, which will be 'compatible' with the new regime.