Ironically enough it is the same thing that prevents donations of food to a variety of charities for fear of being held liable over any problems. Someone gets sick off the frozen pizza you donated...sucks to be you...happy fun lawsuit time. The protection vs entitlement thing is horribly broken. It blows my mind when people getting free shit bitch. In the case of the sick off of free/donated food...unless there is some proof that the donating party knew they were bad and would make people sick...fuck off. Yeah...you got sick...that sucks...but I think we all know what happens when you don't eat...a might bit worse than just getting sick for a few days. I believe 100% in strong consumer protection. I think it is the ONLY way to fix a wide variety of economic problems we face. However, this whole entitlement mentality is beyond me. The notion that they should be forced to mention a cutoff for a free service is pretty laughable and I would hope to $deity that any judge would throw them right out of the courtroom rather than waste my tax dollars listening to their whining. The flip side of strong consumer protection is that there should be 0, nada, zip, zero, ZILCH protection for consumer stupidity. Do your research, pay attention, protect your interests and you should have the force of law on your side. Whine like a little brat with a sense of entitlement...fuck off. Seriously...people deride the rich and famous and those little twats born with a silver spoon in their mouth for their sense of entitlement, their tendancy to act as if they are above the law, and then bitch and moan in situations like this. It disgusts me....hypocrits 100%.
Just like the food example...this is EXACTLY the kind of moronic whining bullshit that prevents positive consumer treatment. When you as a business owner are forced to treat every customer as a potential liability it only fucks the legitimate businesses. When this kind of "moron protection" law happens it only hurts legitimate business. You run a business that legitimately endangers workers...yeah...you deserve to have your ass handed to you. You run an honest business and lose millions because some dumbass ignored the safety guidelines and lost their foot because they refused to wear protective gear... Well gee... I wonder why so many businesses are moving everything away from the US while continuing to just sell their products here.
One end wants corporatism to reign supreme where people are nothing more than commodities to be traded, the other side takes an equally hardline and irrational stance about how businesses should operate. Ugh... When you have to be able to afford an army of lawyers just to do business...well guess what kiddies...of course only the major corrupt players with fist fulls of cash are going to play the game. For every honest business owner there are probably at LEAST 100 asshats with a sense of entitlement willing to take the lawsuit lottery challenge to make their millions rather than doing anything productive themselves.
Actually from what I read the apology actually went something like this "We are sorry...but it was completely justified and necessary in these times". Which is akin to "We are sorry you are a towel headed muslim and that we didn't catch you trying to blow up the plane this time..."
Also, I don't think the media had as much to do with it as the fact that BOTH of the guys involved were lawyers. One is a tax lawyer (I can only imagine the fear that could send up the spine of shoddy business leaders), and the other was a lawyer for the Library of Congress. So a bunch of ignorant shits at AirTran just brought irked the hell out of two lawyers... Oops....
The really funny thing is that I suspect that these two guys (and I can't even believe that I am saying this about lawyers...) are probably better paid, more productive, and more educated than anyone in the chain of events of their harassment. What really blows my mind is that even the FBI came back and basically said "Uhm...they really didn't do anything, let them back on and quit bothering them". The most depressing piece is in multiple articles the wife basically explains that she has come to expect this type of behavior, but that she didn't expect it to go this far.
Fear and stupidity never cease to amaze me. I suppose they should be happy they didn't all get rounded up into concentration camps like the Japanese Americans did in WWII. So...it looks like we have made at least a little progress over they years...
I would actually be interested to see any evidence of that being the case. The real question is if there is a net reduction. If the reduction of crime X is significantly higher than crime X + murder then it is still effective. You also have to contend with the fact that the repeat offense rate of sex offenders is something like 70% or higher. Further, the belief that you can walk away with little or no punishment is going to lead to an increase in both. Not that I don't agree that it could be a likely possibility, it also hinges on the belief that the murder piece is simply related to leaving witnesses.
Actually I found the answer a bit later, that isn't really the case here. The last time yellowstone had a super volcano eruption was 640k years ago. The last time yellowstone had a lava flow was 70k years ago.
To be honest, my only problem with the death penalty is that governments should not be allowed to execute their citizens. Time has proven too many people innocent, and has seen too many corrupt governments. Despite having lost everything, I imagine almost all of the people who are eventually released for crimes they didn't commit are pretty happy to at least be alive. The problem is we need to reserve prison for REAL crimes.
You smoked a joint? You sold a joint to someone who smoked it? You didn't pay taxes on the income you made from selling the joint to someone who smoked it? Please...none of that should send you to prison. Pretty much all of the non violent type stuff...just put their asses to work for minimum wage picking up trash on the highway or something (you have to pay them a reasonably fair wage else the government just goes to using crime to generate slave labor).
Parole just blows my mind. Ok...so we are going to take a criminal...punish him...and then let him out for good behavior... So...because he was smart enough to put on a happy face we let them out early? Well I wonder why we have such a high repeat offender rate...we let these asshole back out for pretending to be well adjusted for a while.
To me it seems like the sex offender stuff should have some kind of age spread built into it. Under 18 AND more than X years difference. In the cases of things like 18 and 15 they are frequently going to the same damned school at the same time, or hang out in the same social circles. In the cases of 40 and 15 if they are going to the same school one of them is probably a teacher...
Some of these arguments astound me. "Oh, the big bad government is treating them horribly". Ok...let us look at this in a slightly different light.
As far as I am concerned many of these people should be put to death outright. Now yes, "sex offender" can be broad, and for some reason EVERYONE knows someone that became a sex offender for peeing in public. However, rather than wasting societies time and money keeping them locked up, letting them out and tracking them, or whatever, I would be perfectly ok with convicted of rape or on offense with a child = placed in small box and buried. The fact that we tolerate this kind of behavior at all astounds me. The fact that victims of this behavior are treated in a way that causes them to be ashamed to reveal these things happening makes me sick.
Now, I do think this law is pretty stupid, but not because of some "oh we are trampling on their rights" nonsense. Hell, lets get rid of this and just increase their sentences to match their registration and then not worry about this evil tracking. If they are in a jail cell for the rest of their life then we don't have to worry about all the resources tracking their stupid asses. You see...this law (as dumb and unenforcable as it may be) is about letting these people have a second chance in a way that provides minimal risk to the rest of society. The alternative is to not release them at all. To go on about "wiping the record clean when released" is fairly nonsensical because the real answer to that is "fine, we won't release them".
We can't assume anything because as far as I can tell no in depth release has covered exactly what went wrong. I have seen a wide variety of obscure technical problems that only would happen when a large number of factors just happened to align. They are the absolute worst type of things to try and predict, detect, and correct. Since the root cause hasn't been shown, only a workable solution, I am going to go ahead and give the Apple folks the benefit of the doubt that this was indeed a obscure bug. If it comes out that they all had a party, got drunk, and shipped untested software with a common bug then that is a different story and they should indeed be raked over the coals for that.
Second...a firmware issue is a huge difference from a hardware problem. A hardware problem would indicate that all MBPs of a particular model would suffer. A firmware problem would indicate that all MBPs with similar firmware would all have the same problem. Now that COULD be dependent on hardware as well, but if Apple ships firmware bundles that cover multiple MBPs then you could even get down to only MBPs with a specific hardware configuration with a specific firmware version are affected. Which again...is a bug in the firmware not a fault in the hardware. In fact yes...all hardware problems are physical...hence the differentiated names of hardware/firmware/software.
As pointed out previously their limited set of hardware isn't as limited as everyone would like to blather on about. Yes, it is FAR more limited than the free for all PC market. But there are Mac Books, Mac Book Pros, Mac Pros, Mac Minis, iMacs, and many generations with multiple configurations of each of those for many years all capable of running 10.5.6.
Again...stupid bug? trivial to reproduce? I haven't even seen what exactly was causing it. I have seen no evidence that says ALL MBPs with a particular firmware had the problem, or that all MBPs with a particular hardware configuration had the problem. Did you actually read the links? All PCmag is doing is quoting users with aliases from the apple discussion boards providing very random and incomplete information about the problem. I have perused the discussion boards at Apple and it has been about the same, a bunch of random complaints and random solutions with no word on a specific cause. I am fighting a Windows update problem...specific software crashes on some machines...same patch level, same hardware. Turns out command.com didn't get updated correctly on a few of them and they are running an older version that is causing problems. So...I could scream and moan about how this should have been an easy thing to catch...but 3 out of 500 computers have shown this problem and all are XP SP3 and all 3 have XP SP3 machines with identical hardware without the problem. So...bizarre fluke on a tiny fraction of the machines causes major problems. By all means..show me hard evidence that ALL identically configured/installed MBPs have this problem, show me hard evidence exactly what it was that was causing this problem. The links in the summary sure as shit don't have any definitive information. A link to a discussion on apple that has a wide variety of complaints, a pcmag story quoting a wide variety of complaints from the apple discussions, and a blog from someone that says they found a fix. All of this has triggered an outpouring of nonsense pundit opinion on slashdot bitching about how Apple fucked up because something went wrong with NO NONE NADA ZERO ZILCH indication how widespread this problem really is or if all of these users bitching even have the same issue. Is it 50%, is it.05%? I can't tell you how many fucking times I have heard users claim "oh yeah, installing XYZ broke this!" when it turned out they had managed to fuck their system up in a way that had nothing to do with their claim. Because a bunch of people on the internet bitching on a support forum are obviously the best way to determine the scope of a problem...
Despite your whining about limited hardware they still have a fairly wide variety. MBPs from years ago are still capable of running 10.5.6, so you figure up the multiple configurations of each MBP option, multiplied out by all of the different 'generations' of MBP, then multiplied out by all of the possible firmware revisions that they can use. Mine is two generations back from the current one they are selling and I have only owned it for about a year. So...indeed...welcome to the fail boat. By the way...from what I can tell...the whole damned problem is that the update check on the firmware was not triggering correctly and that this update actually attempted to fix that. So...they should have used the piece in this update they fixed before applying the update to fix it to determine if the fix would break it before it was fixed?
Now, as I have pointed out, my firmware updated itself just fine. It detected that I needed the update and prompted me to allow it. If the firmware update was not triggering properly that would seem to indicate there is more of a problem on those specific MBPs that were affected beyond "oops, wrong firmware". There is a whole lot of armchair quarterbacking here bitching about Apple should have done XYZ without knowing exactly what the problem really was. Now, even beyond that you have totally missed my point in that maybe they did do all of the testing and due diligence they should have because as far as I can tell it isn't some huge number of MBP owners that got bit. Now if some exceedingly large number of MBPs got hit by this then that is a different story, but if it is only some small percentage of them that had this problem and that small percentage is exceptionally vocal (which is usually the case...people that had something go wrong are much louder than those that didn't have problems) then oops move on.
A rational person WOULD assume that Apple does such testing. A rational person would also assume that this was probably an obscure combination that somehow got overlooked and is now causing problems for a small number of people. An irrational person posts to slashdot about how Apple didn't do any testing and they just throw updates out there willynilly and its their supreme incompetence that has caused this for some huge group of MBP owners. I agree they probably could have done more, but you can't catch everything (which is why you have software updates in the first place). In contrast, I have rarely gone through a MS update cycle that didn't cause tragic problems on at least a few machines in our organization. I dread Java updates because without fail they break something. Having to grab an external monitor/mouse/keyboard for the apparently rare case of a MBP going odd on a particular combination of hardware/firmware/software and updating the firmware for a full recovery is fairly low on the scale of horrible to recover from tragic update problems.
As I said before my MBP updated to 10.5.6 with no problems so it isn't like every MBP owner is experiencing this. I once got raked over the coals for going through an Active Directory install to clean up all the unused computer accounts. 1800 accounts, approximately 700ish were legitimately still in use. I got my ass chewed for misidentifying 6 active accounts as dead because they were laptops that hadn't been connected in many weeks. But of course...those 6 users were "furious" (really, the PC guys were more pissed that they had to get off their lazy asses and go add those 6 back to the domain). So...my boss chews my ass and goes to his boss to try and make my life worse...I go to his boss and ask "Are you seriously going to listen to this? I had a margin of error of less than 1% and he is upset. I had given everyone 3 weeks notice that I was doing this, but no one wanted to listen or help." My boss was basically told to shut up and color and to leave me alone. The people that took 10.5.6 update and didn't have problems aren't going to go and make noise...the minority of people throwing the fit are the ones that are going to get noticed. They are going to blog and post and whine and so on. I have read the Apple discussion boards...very frequently there was a clear reason and solution posted in the first few posts and the threads will go on for pages of people just bitching and bickering over the shit and not actually DOING the fix.
Yeah...it seems when they sent their people out to check every purchased machine to make sure the user had updated their firmware they missed a few addresses. I bet those people didn't register their hardware or something...
This wasn't a hardware problem, it was an obscure firmware issue. My MBP updated its firmware on its own many months ago and then took 10.5.6 with no problems.
Also...Linux FAILS on TONS of hardware, Windows FAILS on TONS of hardware. With the exception of my laptop here and a throwaway windows install for games (Fallout 3 was just too much to resist) all of my PCs run some variety of linux. I have had infinitely more headaches following Linux/Windows updates than I have with OS X updates. I mean really...pause and think for a moment. If it was all handled perfectly the first time around would there even be software updates? Of course none of it is perfect, which is why all of these systems have updates. To think any given update is going to be the perfect update to end all future updates is pretty goofy.
I hear the next one is 7. I think this illustrates why they should not be in the OS business, they can't even put simple integers in the right order let alone do complex calculations.
Funny you should mention that...that is exactly why he was being called to testify... Undermining the voting system. I'm not going to sit here and speculate, but it is most certainly not part of a disinformation campaign to say that this was suspicious. Twice he says he cancelled flights due to suspected tampering with his plane. He reported threats from Karl Rove. He gets called to testify. He dies. Maybe it was an accident, but treating it as a brush off "oh well it was just an accident" is stupid at best. It should be investigated deeply. If none of these other events were happening and he died in a crash it would be a different story.
You see...the things he was accused of being involved in should actually qualify as treason. Treason carries some pretty stiff penalties. So, I'm not going to sit here and say he was guilty by association. What I will say is that when you hang out with bad people you are much more likely to have bad things happen to you. Please...find me an example of a nun who was killed by her drug dealer when the deal went bad.
Seriously...innuendo and rumor or not was associated with some very dirty characters and events. That is the legacy he chose to leave behind. If a Burger King owner can tell some obnoxious kids "Get out, we will not serve you here." Then this guy could have done the same. Look at McCain...that poor bastard sold out and traded every shred of integrity he had to Karl Rove during his bid for the White House. The depressing part is you could even see it towards the end. This is a man that refused preferential treatment in a POW camp due to his father's rank reduced to defending Obama on the campaign trail from his psychofuck running mate's lynch mobs. Love or hate his policy and politics he genuinely seemed distraught about the later turns of events. Now look at the legacy he will be leaving behind for cozying up to that freakshow crew.
The simple answer here is don't associate with those kinds of people if you don't want to wind up with a shitty reputation (and possibly an accidental death). I don't know that I buy off on all the initial speculation...but something does smell pretty rotten. Accidental deaths happen all the time...but accidental deaths of people slated to testify against very powerful people are much less frequently. If it was an accident then a deep investigation would reveal that and shouldn't meet any resistance. If it was an "accident" then a deep investigation would help bring those responsible to justice. So...suspicious death...two very good reasons to proceed with a deep investigation. I suspect this will all go away quietly with no real investigation, which in itself makes it more suspicious.
VCR vs Beta was a clone issue. They took the concept, reverse engineered it, and built their own. Do you think that VCRs would exist if all they had done was taken the guts of a Beta and stuffed it in a bigger box?
So no, economics does not disagree in this case at all. A clone would be taking the underlying BSD code and building your own Aqua lookalike on top of it and putting it on a PC. Taking Apples work and slapping it on a PC is not a clone.
Don't even get me started on that piece of this disaster! How is it that I can withdraw $20 from an ATM and have all of the bank and ATM fees properly calculated and withdrawn accurately each and every time. Then I get a reciept telling me accurate numbers for how much I withdrew, how much is in my account and so on. You let me know when I can use OCR to scan in a deposit/withdrawl slip at an ATM and have it do anything.
However, with a voting machine I can't count on it to do a simple vote votal +1 operation correctly nor do I get a receipt verifying that it counted my vote correctly.
Clearly, the companies are not to blame for this. I place the blame squarely on math. It would seem that subtraction is fundamentally more accurate than addition. Clearly this is why ATM deposit slips are picked up and manually verified, however, you can subtract money from your account with a quick card swipe and button punch.
Well arguably yes. My point is that half assed features will cause worse outcomes than missing features. It is better to add new (complete) functionality than patching it together as you go. Aside from the reputation issues, what if you have to alter how it works to get it done. Now you have to deal with that whole retrain your users crap. (Fuck you Microsoft and your constant total interface redesigns! The first time you set up a wireless connection in Vista you may need antipsychotic meds afterwards. Let's not talk about Office either.)
Apple may have issues, but they tend to have a much better UI design.
I have and that idea gives me nightmares. I dread screwing up enough that I need to use it. Nothing wrong with it, just a pain to get it in place. I think that cut and paste like that would often be far more trouble than it's worth.
Your right. They would say "that's a fucking stupid idea to scan ballots and use OCR to read them and then just rely on the machine when it promises that it got the answer right, at the very least we should be counting button presses".
Do you hold your ATM pin number up to the screen waiting for it to be scanned or do you punch the buttons...
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Ironically enough it is the same thing that prevents donations of food to a variety of charities for fear of being held liable over any problems. Someone gets sick off the frozen pizza you donated...sucks to be you...happy fun lawsuit time. The protection vs entitlement thing is horribly broken. It blows my mind when people getting free shit bitch. In the case of the sick off of free/donated food...unless there is some proof that the donating party knew they were bad and would make people sick...fuck off. Yeah...you got sick...that sucks...but I think we all know what happens when you don't eat...a might bit worse than just getting sick for a few days. I believe 100% in strong consumer protection. I think it is the ONLY way to fix a wide variety of economic problems we face. However, this whole entitlement mentality is beyond me. The notion that they should be forced to mention a cutoff for a free service is pretty laughable and I would hope to $deity that any judge would throw them right out of the courtroom rather than waste my tax dollars listening to their whining. The flip side of strong consumer protection is that there should be 0, nada, zip, zero, ZILCH protection for consumer stupidity. Do your research, pay attention, protect your interests and you should have the force of law on your side. Whine like a little brat with a sense of entitlement...fuck off. Seriously...people deride the rich and famous and those little twats born with a silver spoon in their mouth for their sense of entitlement, their tendancy to act as if they are above the law, and then bitch and moan in situations like this. It disgusts me....hypocrits 100%.
Just like the food example...this is EXACTLY the kind of moronic whining bullshit that prevents positive consumer treatment. When you as a business owner are forced to treat every customer as a potential liability it only fucks the legitimate businesses. When this kind of "moron protection" law happens it only hurts legitimate business. You run a business that legitimately endangers workers...yeah...you deserve to have your ass handed to you. You run an honest business and lose millions because some dumbass ignored the safety guidelines and lost their foot because they refused to wear protective gear... Well gee... I wonder why so many businesses are moving everything away from the US while continuing to just sell their products here.
One end wants corporatism to reign supreme where people are nothing more than commodities to be traded, the other side takes an equally hardline and irrational stance about how businesses should operate. Ugh... When you have to be able to afford an army of lawyers just to do business...well guess what kiddies...of course only the major corrupt players with fist fulls of cash are going to play the game. For every honest business owner there are probably at LEAST 100 asshats with a sense of entitlement willing to take the lawsuit lottery challenge to make their millions rather than doing anything productive themselves.
Actually from what I read the apology actually went something like this "We are sorry...but it was completely justified and necessary in these times". Which is akin to "We are sorry you are a towel headed muslim and that we didn't catch you trying to blow up the plane this time..."
Also, I don't think the media had as much to do with it as the fact that BOTH of the guys involved were lawyers. One is a tax lawyer (I can only imagine the fear that could send up the spine of shoddy business leaders), and the other was a lawyer for the Library of Congress. So a bunch of ignorant shits at AirTran just brought irked the hell out of two lawyers... Oops....
The really funny thing is that I suspect that these two guys (and I can't even believe that I am saying this about lawyers...) are probably better paid, more productive, and more educated than anyone in the chain of events of their harassment. What really blows my mind is that even the FBI came back and basically said "Uhm...they really didn't do anything, let them back on and quit bothering them". The most depressing piece is in multiple articles the wife basically explains that she has come to expect this type of behavior, but that she didn't expect it to go this far.
Fear and stupidity never cease to amaze me. I suppose they should be happy they didn't all get rounded up into concentration camps like the Japanese Americans did in WWII. So...it looks like we have made at least a little progress over they years...
To think...we passed on electing a VP that could have promised moose free roads...
I would actually be interested to see any evidence of that being the case. The real question is if there is a net reduction. If the reduction of crime X is significantly higher than crime X + murder then it is still effective. You also have to contend with the fact that the repeat offense rate of sex offenders is something like 70% or higher. Further, the belief that you can walk away with little or no punishment is going to lead to an increase in both. Not that I don't agree that it could be a likely possibility, it also hinges on the belief that the murder piece is simply related to leaving witnesses.
Actually I found the answer a bit later, that isn't really the case here. The last time yellowstone had a super volcano eruption was 640k years ago. The last time yellowstone had a lava flow was 70k years ago.
One article says last eruption was 70,000 years, the other says 640,000 years ago. Someone seems to be a bit off...
To be honest, my only problem with the death penalty is that governments should not be allowed to execute their citizens. Time has proven too many people innocent, and has seen too many corrupt governments. Despite having lost everything, I imagine almost all of the people who are eventually released for crimes they didn't commit are pretty happy to at least be alive. The problem is we need to reserve prison for REAL crimes.
You smoked a joint? You sold a joint to someone who smoked it? You didn't pay taxes on the income you made from selling the joint to someone who smoked it? Please...none of that should send you to prison. Pretty much all of the non violent type stuff...just put their asses to work for minimum wage picking up trash on the highway or something (you have to pay them a reasonably fair wage else the government just goes to using crime to generate slave labor).
Parole just blows my mind. Ok...so we are going to take a criminal...punish him...and then let him out for good behavior... So...because he was smart enough to put on a happy face we let them out early? Well I wonder why we have such a high repeat offender rate...we let these asshole back out for pretending to be well adjusted for a while.
To me it seems like the sex offender stuff should have some kind of age spread built into it. Under 18 AND more than X years difference. In the cases of things like 18 and 15 they are frequently going to the same damned school at the same time, or hang out in the same social circles. In the cases of 40 and 15 if they are going to the same school one of them is probably a teacher...
Some of these arguments astound me. "Oh, the big bad government is treating them horribly". Ok...let us look at this in a slightly different light.
As far as I am concerned many of these people should be put to death outright. Now yes, "sex offender" can be broad, and for some reason EVERYONE knows someone that became a sex offender for peeing in public. However, rather than wasting societies time and money keeping them locked up, letting them out and tracking them, or whatever, I would be perfectly ok with convicted of rape or on offense with a child = placed in small box and buried. The fact that we tolerate this kind of behavior at all astounds me. The fact that victims of this behavior are treated in a way that causes them to be ashamed to reveal these things happening makes me sick.
Now, I do think this law is pretty stupid, but not because of some "oh we are trampling on their rights" nonsense. Hell, lets get rid of this and just increase their sentences to match their registration and then not worry about this evil tracking. If they are in a jail cell for the rest of their life then we don't have to worry about all the resources tracking their stupid asses. You see...this law (as dumb and unenforcable as it may be) is about letting these people have a second chance in a way that provides minimal risk to the rest of society. The alternative is to not release them at all. To go on about "wiping the record clean when released" is fairly nonsensical because the real answer to that is "fine, we won't release them".
We can't assume anything because as far as I can tell no in depth release has covered exactly what went wrong. I have seen a wide variety of obscure technical problems that only would happen when a large number of factors just happened to align. They are the absolute worst type of things to try and predict, detect, and correct. Since the root cause hasn't been shown, only a workable solution, I am going to go ahead and give the Apple folks the benefit of the doubt that this was indeed a obscure bug. If it comes out that they all had a party, got drunk, and shipped untested software with a common bug then that is a different story and they should indeed be raked over the coals for that.
.05%? I can't tell you how many fucking times I have heard users claim "oh yeah, installing XYZ broke this!" when it turned out they had managed to fuck their system up in a way that had nothing to do with their claim. Because a bunch of people on the internet bitching on a support forum are obviously the best way to determine the scope of a problem...
Second...a firmware issue is a huge difference from a hardware problem. A hardware problem would indicate that all MBPs of a particular model would suffer. A firmware problem would indicate that all MBPs with similar firmware would all have the same problem. Now that COULD be dependent on hardware as well, but if Apple ships firmware bundles that cover multiple MBPs then you could even get down to only MBPs with a specific hardware configuration with a specific firmware version are affected. Which again...is a bug in the firmware not a fault in the hardware. In fact yes...all hardware problems are physical...hence the differentiated names of hardware/firmware/software.
As pointed out previously their limited set of hardware isn't as limited as everyone would like to blather on about. Yes, it is FAR more limited than the free for all PC market. But there are Mac Books, Mac Book Pros, Mac Pros, Mac Minis, iMacs, and many generations with multiple configurations of each of those for many years all capable of running 10.5.6.
Again...stupid bug? trivial to reproduce? I haven't even seen what exactly was causing it. I have seen no evidence that says ALL MBPs with a particular firmware had the problem, or that all MBPs with a particular hardware configuration had the problem. Did you actually read the links? All PCmag is doing is quoting users with aliases from the apple discussion boards providing very random and incomplete information about the problem. I have perused the discussion boards at Apple and it has been about the same, a bunch of random complaints and random solutions with no word on a specific cause. I am fighting a Windows update problem...specific software crashes on some machines...same patch level, same hardware. Turns out command.com didn't get updated correctly on a few of them and they are running an older version that is causing problems. So...I could scream and moan about how this should have been an easy thing to catch...but 3 out of 500 computers have shown this problem and all are XP SP3 and all 3 have XP SP3 machines with identical hardware without the problem. So...bizarre fluke on a tiny fraction of the machines causes major problems. By all means..show me hard evidence that ALL identically configured/installed MBPs have this problem, show me hard evidence exactly what it was that was causing this problem. The links in the summary sure as shit don't have any definitive information. A link to a discussion on apple that has a wide variety of complaints, a pcmag story quoting a wide variety of complaints from the apple discussions, and a blog from someone that says they found a fix. All of this has triggered an outpouring of nonsense pundit opinion on slashdot bitching about how Apple fucked up because something went wrong with NO NONE NADA ZERO ZILCH indication how widespread this problem really is or if all of these users bitching even have the same issue. Is it 50%, is it
Despite your whining about limited hardware they still have a fairly wide variety. MBPs from years ago are still capable of running 10.5.6, so you figure up the multiple configurations of each MBP option, multiplied out by all of the different 'generations' of MBP, then multiplied out by all of the possible firmware revisions that they can use. Mine is two generations back from the current one they are selling and I have only owned it for about a year. So...indeed...welcome to the fail boat. By the way...from what I can tell...the whole damned problem is that the update check on the firmware was not triggering correctly and that this update actually attempted to fix that. So...they should have used the piece in this update they fixed before applying the update to fix it to determine if the fix would break it before it was fixed?
Now, as I have pointed out, my firmware updated itself just fine. It detected that I needed the update and prompted me to allow it. If the firmware update was not triggering properly that would seem to indicate there is more of a problem on those specific MBPs that were affected beyond "oops, wrong firmware". There is a whole lot of armchair quarterbacking here bitching about Apple should have done XYZ without knowing exactly what the problem really was. Now, even beyond that you have totally missed my point in that maybe they did do all of the testing and due diligence they should have because as far as I can tell it isn't some huge number of MBP owners that got bit. Now if some exceedingly large number of MBPs got hit by this then that is a different story, but if it is only some small percentage of them that had this problem and that small percentage is exceptionally vocal (which is usually the case...people that had something go wrong are much louder than those that didn't have problems) then oops move on.
A rational person WOULD assume that Apple does such testing. A rational person would also assume that this was probably an obscure combination that somehow got overlooked and is now causing problems for a small number of people. An irrational person posts to slashdot about how Apple didn't do any testing and they just throw updates out there willynilly and its their supreme incompetence that has caused this for some huge group of MBP owners. I agree they probably could have done more, but you can't catch everything (which is why you have software updates in the first place). In contrast, I have rarely gone through a MS update cycle that didn't cause tragic problems on at least a few machines in our organization. I dread Java updates because without fail they break something. Having to grab an external monitor/mouse/keyboard for the apparently rare case of a MBP going odd on a particular combination of hardware/firmware/software and updating the firmware for a full recovery is fairly low on the scale of horrible to recover from tragic update problems.
As I said before my MBP updated to 10.5.6 with no problems so it isn't like every MBP owner is experiencing this. I once got raked over the coals for going through an Active Directory install to clean up all the unused computer accounts. 1800 accounts, approximately 700ish were legitimately still in use. I got my ass chewed for misidentifying 6 active accounts as dead because they were laptops that hadn't been connected in many weeks. But of course...those 6 users were "furious" (really, the PC guys were more pissed that they had to get off their lazy asses and go add those 6 back to the domain). So...my boss chews my ass and goes to his boss to try and make my life worse...I go to his boss and ask "Are you seriously going to listen to this? I had a margin of error of less than 1% and he is upset. I had given everyone 3 weeks notice that I was doing this, but no one wanted to listen or help." My boss was basically told to shut up and color and to leave me alone. The people that took 10.5.6 update and didn't have problems aren't going to go and make noise...the minority of people throwing the fit are the ones that are going to get noticed. They are going to blog and post and whine and so on. I have read the Apple discussion boards...very frequently there was a clear reason and solution posted in the first few posts and the threads will go on for pages of people just bitching and bickering over the shit and not actually DOING the fix.
Well, my guess is that they probably did and that it is a relatively rare combination that triggers the problem that got overlooked somehow.
Yeah...it seems when they sent their people out to check every purchased machine to make sure the user had updated their firmware they missed a few addresses. I bet those people didn't register their hardware or something...
This wasn't a hardware problem, it was an obscure firmware issue. My MBP updated its firmware on its own many months ago and then took 10.5.6 with no problems.
Also...Linux FAILS on TONS of hardware, Windows FAILS on TONS of hardware. With the exception of my laptop here and a throwaway windows install for games (Fallout 3 was just too much to resist) all of my PCs run some variety of linux. I have had infinitely more headaches following Linux/Windows updates than I have with OS X updates. I mean really...pause and think for a moment. If it was all handled perfectly the first time around would there even be software updates? Of course none of it is perfect, which is why all of these systems have updates. To think any given update is going to be the perfect update to end all future updates is pretty goofy.
I hear the next one is 7. I think this illustrates why they should not be in the OS business, they can't even put simple integers in the right order let alone do complex calculations.
If you have any interest in good government, vote
Funny you should mention that...that is exactly why he was being called to testify... Undermining the voting system. I'm not going to sit here and speculate, but it is most certainly not part of a disinformation campaign to say that this was suspicious. Twice he says he cancelled flights due to suspected tampering with his plane. He reported threats from Karl Rove. He gets called to testify. He dies. Maybe it was an accident, but treating it as a brush off "oh well it was just an accident" is stupid at best. It should be investigated deeply. If none of these other events were happening and he died in a crash it would be a different story.
You see...the things he was accused of being involved in should actually qualify as treason. Treason carries some pretty stiff penalties. So, I'm not going to sit here and say he was guilty by association. What I will say is that when you hang out with bad people you are much more likely to have bad things happen to you. Please...find me an example of a nun who was killed by her drug dealer when the deal went bad.
As callous as it sounds...sucks to be him.
Seriously...innuendo and rumor or not was associated with some very dirty characters and events. That is the legacy he chose to leave behind. If a Burger King owner can tell some obnoxious kids "Get out, we will not serve you here." Then this guy could have done the same. Look at McCain...that poor bastard sold out and traded every shred of integrity he had to Karl Rove during his bid for the White House. The depressing part is you could even see it towards the end. This is a man that refused preferential treatment in a POW camp due to his father's rank reduced to defending Obama on the campaign trail from his psychofuck running mate's lynch mobs. Love or hate his policy and politics he genuinely seemed distraught about the later turns of events. Now look at the legacy he will be leaving behind for cozying up to that freakshow crew.
The simple answer here is don't associate with those kinds of people if you don't want to wind up with a shitty reputation (and possibly an accidental death). I don't know that I buy off on all the initial speculation...but something does smell pretty rotten. Accidental deaths happen all the time...but accidental deaths of people slated to testify against very powerful people are much less frequently. If it was an accident then a deep investigation would reveal that and shouldn't meet any resistance. If it was an "accident" then a deep investigation would help bring those responsible to justice. So...suspicious death...two very good reasons to proceed with a deep investigation. I suspect this will all go away quietly with no real investigation, which in itself makes it more suspicious.
Hey now, I have plenty of memories of watching movies on our Beta so none of that lawn stuff...
Unfortunately I did not remember my coffee this morning... HHD DVVDD BVD will be the new format anyways.
VCR vs Beta was a clone issue. They took the concept, reverse engineered it, and built their own. Do you think that VCRs would exist if all they had done was taken the guts of a Beta and stuffed it in a bigger box?
So no, economics does not disagree in this case at all. A clone would be taking the underlying BSD code and building your own Aqua lookalike on top of it and putting it on a PC. Taking Apples work and slapping it on a PC is not a clone.
Don't even get me started on that piece of this disaster! How is it that I can withdraw $20 from an ATM and have all of the bank and ATM fees properly calculated and withdrawn accurately each and every time. Then I get a reciept telling me accurate numbers for how much I withdrew, how much is in my account and so on. You let me know when I can use OCR to scan in a deposit/withdrawl slip at an ATM and have it do anything.
However, with a voting machine I can't count on it to do a simple vote votal +1 operation correctly nor do I get a receipt verifying that it counted my vote correctly.
Clearly, the companies are not to blame for this. I place the blame squarely on math. It would seem that subtraction is fundamentally more accurate than addition. Clearly this is why ATM deposit slips are picked up and manually verified, however, you can subtract money from your account with a quick card swipe and button punch.
Because when you think about it that way it doesn't make for sensationalist flamebait articles on slashdot. Duh.
Two atoms are talking and one of them looks sad.
Atom 1: Whats wrong?
Atom 2: I lost an electron
Atom 1: Are you sure?
Atom 2: I'm positive.
For actually reading what is going on rather than wild and moronic speculation based on a stupid headline and bad summary.
Well arguably yes. My point is that half assed features will cause worse outcomes than missing features. It is better to add new (complete) functionality than patching it together as you go. Aside from the reputation issues, what if you have to alter how it works to get it done. Now you have to deal with that whole retrain your users crap. (Fuck you Microsoft and your constant total interface redesigns! The first time you set up a wireless connection in Vista you may need antipsychotic meds afterwards. Let's not talk about Office either.)
Apple may have issues, but they tend to have a much better UI design.
I have and that idea gives me nightmares. I dread screwing up enough that I need to use it. Nothing wrong with it, just a pain to get it in place. I think that cut and paste like that would often be far more trouble than it's worth.
Your right. They would say "that's a fucking stupid idea to scan ballots and use OCR to read them and then just rely on the machine when it promises that it got the answer right, at the very least we should be counting button presses".
Do you hold your ATM pin number up to the screen waiting for it to be scanned or do you punch the buttons...