It wont be a quick slide but it will be a slow steady slide down steve jobs made the whole package. No other company can do that and be competitive. Just look at RIM, Palm, etc.
Let me just make an observation. There are plenty of people claiming that Apple will inevitably go downhill without Steve Jobs. On the other hand, on theregister where they discuss Nolan Bushnell (ex-Atari) mentioned his ex-employee Steve Jobs, they insist that he didn't actually do anything worthwhile at all, that he is just a marketing guy doing nothing of any worth, and his success is all due to pure luck.
"Anybody could access... with just AppleID and date of birth" is not true. You needed someone's AppleID, date of birth, _and_ the knowledge of a clever hack. As a reaction, Apple first shut down the site, then fixed the problem.
The "social engineering hack" won't work anymore once you switch your AppleID to two factor authentication. The disadvantage is that if you lose two of (password, backup code, trusted device), Apple _cannot_ restore your account. It becomes unusable. The reason social engineering won't work is that even a proven genuine account owner cannot get help.
Of the two strategies, the second seems better backed by numbers. The sharp dip in the crime rate from the later 1990s through the 2000s is thought to be due to much longer sentences being handed down to violent criminals starting in the late 1980s-early 1990s. Incarceration costs are up, but public harm is down. Spend money, get benefit.
I read it was due to abortion becoming much more acceptable, which led to fewer kids being born into a bad family situation that would eventually lead to criminal behaviour.
There's a bit in your brain that tells you "don't do this, this is a bad idea" when you want to do something that is a bad idea. That bit usually stops you from getting into trouble. It will stop you from smacking your boss in the face if he upsets you, which tends to be a bad idea. It will stop you from smashing a car window and grabbing things on the seat. It will stop you from doing things that hurt you (in the end), including any badly planned crime. People where this bit of the brain is underdeveloped tend to do stupid things, including re-offending after getting out of jail and getting caught.
On the other hand, criminals of any kind who carefully plan what they are doing are not affected by this. They also tend to get caught less often.
Why should any single one of us actually respond to a DMCA take down notice after this case, when clearly even if we answer every last take down notice with pulling the data requested offline, we STILL will not be granted safe harbor??
Let's see. The DMCA is meant for websites that have no intent to further copyright infringement, so when they receive a DMCA takedown notice, they can effectively distance themselves from any alleged copyright infringement. And that works just fine.
There are websites whose primary intent is profitting from copyright infringement. They may do other things to appear to have legitimacy. They respond to DMCA takedown notices to (1) appear legitimate, and (2) if they didn't, the copyright holder could crack down on them immediately. But their main purpose stays, and in the end responding to takedown notices isn't enough.
So why should you respond to a DMCA takedown notice? Because if you don't, they get you for copyright infringement.
Get a Mac. Turn full disk encryption via Filevault2 on. Backup using Time Machine with an encrypted backup drive. The encryption is invisible except that you have to enter the password from time to time.
At this point (and I mean exactly this point, no comment for future potential,) it's mostly a matter of license, which is pretty much irrelivant for compilers since even the GPL's copyleft doesn't force you to go GPL to use their compiler.
The license killed gcc on MacOS X. The license didn't allow Apple to do things they wanted to do (and I suspect that was the intent of the license change), so 4.2 is the latest gcc version available with Xcode, and I think Xcode now doesn't ship with gcc at all.
Isn't that the essence of the very problem here? If Apple's contract state you must sell X amount of Apple phones, then isn't that an implicite stipulation that you can not sell phones from other manufacturers unless you can meet X?
And if the other manufacturer offers spiffs to your store employees for selling their phone, doesn't that mean they cannot sell iPhones if they want their cash from Samsung?
Dell isn't concerned with selling shinies to unknowing fools.
They tried hard at some point, but failed miserably. Can't even remember the name of their supposed "Airbook" competitor which was heaver, had less power, and more expensive until the last 100 were sold at half price.
One should also take into account the useful life of the products they manufacture, with sealed-in batteries and throw-away design, along with their own marketing effort to out-fashion their own devices after only two years.
My MacBook is still running fine. Bought in 2006. My first iPod was an iPod mini with one of your "sealed-in" batteries. A new battery was £3.95 on eBay, and it is still working fine. The sealed-in batteries on a Retina MBP last for 1,000 charges and the fact that they are sealed in means at least 20 percent more capacity with the same space and weight. And your last sentence is just bullshit.
Sure. That's exactly why they are doing more. They were unfairly singled out for the allegations, not because their record was bad, but because they were a juicy target.
And as a result, they do more than any other company to ensure their third party manufacturing is squeaky clean as regards these practices.
You claim a connection that doesn't exist. You claim that unfair allegations force Apple to improve working conditions. The truth is that Apple has been working in that area many years before the first allegations by liars like Daisey appeared. Just like Apple made their products more environmently friendly before Greenpeace started their shit.
(A side effect of that was that Greenpeace gave HP huge number of bonus points for promising to get rid of certain dangerous chemicals, while Apple got rated down for not making such promises. Not realising that the same chemicals had already been gone for two years in Apple products).
News flash: Apple is pretty much the only tech company that is actually addressing that concern. Apple actually investigates their manufacturers and drop them if they use child labor. Other tech companies by and large don't.
Samsung is of course a lot ahead. There are no cases of child labour at any place that Samsung uses. At least that is what Samsung says.
(Now if we consider that an Apple audit usually finds one or two underage employees at a dozen or two companies, which can be attributed to the companies not being careful enough doing checks, and one company employing dozens of underage employees which promptly leads to the contract with that company being cancelled, you can decide whether Samsung is very lucky, trying hard not to see any evil, or just plain lying).
I'm still not sure what to think - whether it was a good idea to cave and take the antibiotics (it might have taken alot longer to heal otherwise) - or if it was a bad thing to gamble on it *possibly* not being a virus.
Did you actually finish the treatment? By what you are saying, it was "pretty much cleared up", not "cleared up". If antibiotics kill "pretty much" all the bacteria but not all of them, the survivors have a chance to produce resistant bacteria. If you kill all of them, no chance of producing resistant bacteria. People who stop their treatment as soon as they feel better and not follow through to the end are the ones causing the problems with bacteria resistant to antibiotics.
Inspectors go in, FoxConn guy says "Oh no, these are workers of PhantomCorp, not our employees" and the Inspector goes the other way.
I wonder what evidence you have for this. BTW, Apple performs audits at Foxconn and right now about 150 subcontractors, and at least two companies lost their contracts after an audit.
Just because you think there is DRM, doesn't mean there is DRM. For example, on the App Store, paid-for ePub books always _look_ as if they have DRM to a naive person, even when they don't.
ePub books are basically.zip files. If you have DRM, then there is a file describing the DRM, and a file containing a list of which files are encrypted (so a book could have an unencrypted title page, contents, and sample chapter). On paid-for App Store books without DRM, the DRM-related files are there, but the list of encrypted files is empty, and everything is readable just fine.
A tool that just checks for the presence of the DRM-related files will of course give a false positive. And if you ever make an ePub reader, don't give up just because it says there is DRM; check whether the actually files inside are encrypted or not.
What makes you think that being raped in prison makes you a better person who will not behave like an anti-social idiot anymore? Or that seeing this happen makes others better?
I think the idea isn't that it would make him a better person. The idea is that it might make someone who had his house attacked by a SWAT team feel better. Whether that works, I don't know, but that's the idea.
Seriously, if they can sell the book for $25 US in Thailand and still turn a profit, there is no legitimate reason the same book could not be sold for the same price in the US.
So you think you are entitled to get books at the same cost as someone in a poor country with a tenth of your income. No reason other than pure, unadulterated greed.
Seriously? Reselling a physical product you bought legally needed the highest court in the land to adjudicate?
Yes, because the law that decided whether reselling was legal or not was written in such a way that a reasonable judge could decide either way. If that law had been clearer, it wouldn't have gone that high up. Of course the law could have been clearer in a way that makes reselling imported books illegal. But it wasn't.
will not stop the publishers from making DMCA requests / filling strikes that can cost you $35 a pop.
DMCA request doesn't apply here at all, because no copies are being made. And anything else can now be classified as tortuous interference with a business, so that could get expensive.
I think a major part of the problem here is that the suggested fine is so disproportionate and is vastly more for instance than a much more serious offence of smashing a car window and stealing CDs with that music would attract. It's also pushing a civil problem (disobeying commercial terms of service) into the criminal realm, and it's very hard to justify that at all. It's like treating people who share half a hamburger with a friend instead of buying one each as criminals.
Basically the problem is the inflexibility of this law. There are some reasonable aspects: If I started selling pirated CDs for profit on a large scale, and a record company finds out and they lost money because of it, it would be unfair towards them if I had to pay damages for the 100 CDs they can prove that I sold, and keep the money for the other 999,000 CDs that I sold where they don't have evidence. That's why there are statutory damages.
The first problem is that these statutory damages are "per work". A CD with 20 songs is 20 works. I have one CD with a single song over an hour, that would be only one work. Seems unfair that the statutory damages would be twenty times higher because one artist split the music up in 20 little pieces, while another produced a single piece of music of one hour. And a DVD with a three hour movie is also one work! Apple's MacOS X was in a court case considered "one work". War and Peace is one work, a volume with hundred short stories is hundred works with hundred times the statutory damages.
The second problem with statutory damages is that not only they don't require proof of damages (which is Ok to some degree), but they don't even need reasonable estimates. If I have no income other than selling pirated CDs, and have a big house and two Ferraris, it would be common sense that the damages I caused would be quite high. But if there are 20 million file sharers, and the average file sharer downloaded 1000 songs = about $700 damages (assuming damages = amount the record company would receive if the songs had been purchased from iTunes), then common sense is that the average file sharer also _uploaded_ 1000 songs = $700 damages. And not $220,000 worth.
While speed for single and double floats is all well and good, I wonder - when will there finally be hardware support for 128 bit (quadruple precission) floats?
It was there on PowerPC for many years, and with Haswell it will be there for x86 as well. FMA is all you need for efficient 128 bit arithmetic.
As someone else pointed out, all he did was request data from a public server and AT&T sent it to him. Also, he got 41 months for forwarding 114,000 email addresses to news site, which is overkill. Had he physically broke into an AT&T office and took the email addresses from someone's desk, he would have received less prison time.
Not quite. All he did was forging a request that one specific iPad would have done legitimately, sending it to AT&T and recording the answer. And then he forged another request that another iPad would have done legitimately. And then another one and so on, 114,000 times.
The judge who refused to throw out the case stated that it would not have been an issue if information on a few users had been released as examples of the issue. He stated that 114,000 was far to many to prove an issue and it became malicious intent at that point.
He could have run his scraping script for a minute, gathered 30 email addresses, and told them "I ran this script for just one minute and got 30 addresses, if I ran it for a week I would got 114,000 addresses. ". Instead, he ran it for a week (or however long it took).
If the database was publicly-accessible, how is it a criminal act, as a member of said "public", to actually access it? That's like a newspaper that accidentally publishes data it considers private and prosecuting readers.
It wasn't publicly accessible. The information of _one_ iPad owner was accessible to that _one_ iPad owner. He figured out how to make his computer pretend to be many different iPads.
There was some interesting discussion recently about anti-hacking laws were huge problems were caused by the fact that the law makes "exceeding authorized access" a crime, which can then be used to apply in all kinds of situations that actually don't have to do anything with hacking. This one is the opposite: The guy didn't have authorization to access the email addresses of any iPad user, except possibly his own if he owned an iPad. So no "exceeding authorized access" but no right to access at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It wont be a quick slide but it will be a slow steady slide down steve jobs made the whole package. No other company can do that and be competitive. Just look at RIM, Palm, etc.
Let me just make an observation. There are plenty of people claiming that Apple will inevitably go downhill without Steve Jobs. On the other hand, on theregister where they discuss Nolan Bushnell (ex-Atari) mentioned his ex-employee Steve Jobs, they insist that he didn't actually do anything worthwhile at all, that he is just a marketing guy doing nothing of any worth, and his success is all due to pure luck.
So which one is it?
"Anybody could access ... with just AppleID and date of birth" is not true. You needed someone's AppleID, date of birth, _and_ the knowledge of a clever hack. As a reaction, Apple first shut down the site, then fixed the problem.
The "social engineering hack" won't work anymore once you switch your AppleID to two factor authentication. The disadvantage is that if you lose two of (password, backup code, trusted device), Apple _cannot_ restore your account. It becomes unusable. The reason social engineering won't work is that even a proven genuine account owner cannot get help.
Of the two strategies, the second seems better backed by numbers. The sharp dip in the crime rate from the later 1990s through the 2000s is thought to be due to much longer sentences being handed down to violent criminals starting in the late 1980s-early 1990s. Incarceration costs are up, but public harm is down. Spend money, get benefit.
I read it was due to abortion becoming much more acceptable, which led to fewer kids being born into a bad family situation that would eventually lead to criminal behaviour.
Now let's first use it on our politicians.
Totally misunderstanding what this is about.
There's a bit in your brain that tells you "don't do this, this is a bad idea" when you want to do something that is a bad idea. That bit usually stops you from getting into trouble. It will stop you from smacking your boss in the face if he upsets you, which tends to be a bad idea. It will stop you from smashing a car window and grabbing things on the seat. It will stop you from doing things that hurt you (in the end), including any badly planned crime. People where this bit of the brain is underdeveloped tend to do stupid things, including re-offending after getting out of jail and getting caught.
On the other hand, criminals of any kind who carefully plan what they are doing are not affected by this. They also tend to get caught less often.
Why should any single one of us actually respond to a DMCA take down notice after this case, when clearly even if we answer every last take down notice with pulling the data requested offline, we STILL will not be granted safe harbor??
Let's see. The DMCA is meant for websites that have no intent to further copyright infringement, so when they receive a DMCA takedown notice, they can effectively distance themselves from any alleged copyright infringement. And that works just fine.
There are websites whose primary intent is profitting from copyright infringement. They may do other things to appear to have legitimacy. They respond to DMCA takedown notices to (1) appear legitimate, and (2) if they didn't, the copyright holder could crack down on them immediately. But their main purpose stays, and in the end responding to takedown notices isn't enough.
So why should you respond to a DMCA takedown notice? Because if you don't, they get you for copyright infringement.
Get a Mac. Turn full disk encryption via Filevault2 on. Backup using Time Machine with an encrypted backup drive. The encryption is invisible except that you have to enter the password from time to time.
At this point (and I mean exactly this point, no comment for future potential,) it's mostly a matter of license, which is pretty much irrelivant for compilers since even the GPL's copyleft doesn't force you to go GPL to use their compiler.
The license killed gcc on MacOS X. The license didn't allow Apple to do things they wanted to do (and I suspect that was the intent of the license change), so 4.2 is the latest gcc version available with Xcode, and I think Xcode now doesn't ship with gcc at all.
Isn't that the essence of the very problem here? If Apple's contract state you must sell X amount of Apple phones, then isn't that an implicite stipulation that you can not sell phones from other manufacturers unless you can meet X?
And if the other manufacturer offers spiffs to your store employees for selling their phone, doesn't that mean they cannot sell iPhones if they want their cash from Samsung?
Dell isn't concerned with selling shinies to unknowing fools.
They tried hard at some point, but failed miserably. Can't even remember the name of their supposed "Airbook" competitor which was heaver, had less power, and more expensive until the last 100 were sold at half price.
One should also take into account the useful life of the products they manufacture, with sealed-in batteries and throw-away design, along with their own marketing effort to out-fashion their own devices after only two years.
My MacBook is still running fine. Bought in 2006. My first iPod was an iPod mini with one of your "sealed-in" batteries. A new battery was £3.95 on eBay, and it is still working fine. The sealed-in batteries on a Retina MBP last for 1,000 charges and the fact that they are sealed in means at least 20 percent more capacity with the same space and weight. And your last sentence is just bullshit.
You can read up about it on Apple's sit. Apple has the largest solar panel installation in the USA that wasn't built by a power company.
Sure. That's exactly why they are doing more. They were unfairly singled out for the allegations, not because their record was bad, but because they were a juicy target.
And as a result, they do more than any other company to ensure their third party manufacturing is squeaky clean as regards these practices.
You claim a connection that doesn't exist. You claim that unfair allegations force Apple to improve working conditions. The truth is that Apple has been working in that area many years before the first allegations by liars like Daisey appeared. Just like Apple made their products more environmently friendly before Greenpeace started their shit.
(A side effect of that was that Greenpeace gave HP huge number of bonus points for promising to get rid of certain dangerous chemicals, while Apple got rated down for not making such promises. Not realising that the same chemicals had already been gone for two years in Apple products).
News flash: Apple is pretty much the only tech company that is actually addressing that concern. Apple actually investigates their manufacturers and drop them if they use child labor. Other tech companies by and large don't.
Samsung is of course a lot ahead. There are no cases of child labour at any place that Samsung uses. At least that is what Samsung says.
(Now if we consider that an Apple audit usually finds one or two underage employees at a dozen or two companies, which can be attributed to the companies not being careful enough doing checks, and one company employing dozens of underage employees which promptly leads to the contract with that company being cancelled, you can decide whether Samsung is very lucky, trying hard not to see any evil, or just plain lying).
I'm still not sure what to think - whether it was a good idea to cave and take the antibiotics (it might have taken alot longer to heal otherwise) - or if it was a bad thing to gamble on it *possibly* not being a virus.
Did you actually finish the treatment? By what you are saying, it was "pretty much cleared up", not "cleared up". If antibiotics kill "pretty much" all the bacteria but not all of them, the survivors have a chance to produce resistant bacteria. If you kill all of them, no chance of producing resistant bacteria. People who stop their treatment as soon as they feel better and not follow through to the end are the ones causing the problems with bacteria resistant to antibiotics.
Inspectors go in, FoxConn guy says "Oh no, these are workers of PhantomCorp, not our employees" and the Inspector goes the other way.
I wonder what evidence you have for this. BTW, Apple performs audits at Foxconn and right now about 150 subcontractors, and at least two companies lost their contracts after an audit.
Just because you think there is DRM, doesn't mean there is DRM. For example, on the App Store, paid-for ePub books always _look_ as if they have DRM to a naive person, even when they don't.
.zip files. If you have DRM, then there is a file describing the DRM, and a file containing a list of which files are encrypted (so a book could have an unencrypted title page, contents, and sample chapter). On paid-for App Store books without DRM, the DRM-related files are there, but the list of encrypted files is empty, and everything is readable just fine.
ePub books are basically
A tool that just checks for the presence of the DRM-related files will of course give a false positive. And if you ever make an ePub reader, don't give up just because it says there is DRM; check whether the actually files inside are encrypted or not.
What makes you think that being raped in prison makes you a better person who will not behave like an anti-social idiot anymore? Or that seeing this happen makes others better?
I think the idea isn't that it would make him a better person. The idea is that it might make someone who had his house attacked by a SWAT team feel better. Whether that works, I don't know, but that's the idea.
Seriously, if they can sell the book for $25 US in Thailand and still turn a profit, there is no legitimate reason the same book could not be sold for the same price in the US.
So you think you are entitled to get books at the same cost as someone in a poor country with a tenth of your income. No reason other than pure, unadulterated greed.
Seriously? Reselling a physical product you bought legally needed the highest court in the land to adjudicate?
Yes, because the law that decided whether reselling was legal or not was written in such a way that a reasonable judge could decide either way. If that law had been clearer, it wouldn't have gone that high up. Of course the law could have been clearer in a way that makes reselling imported books illegal. But it wasn't.
will not stop the publishers from making DMCA requests / filling strikes that can cost you $35 a pop.
DMCA request doesn't apply here at all, because no copies are being made. And anything else can now be classified as tortuous interference with a business, so that could get expensive.
I think a major part of the problem here is that the suggested fine is so disproportionate and is vastly more for instance than a much more serious offence of smashing a car window and stealing CDs with that music would attract. It's also pushing a civil problem (disobeying commercial terms of service) into the criminal realm, and it's very hard to justify that at all. It's like treating people who share half a hamburger with a friend instead of buying one each as criminals.
Basically the problem is the inflexibility of this law. There are some reasonable aspects: If I started selling pirated CDs for profit on a large scale, and a record company finds out and they lost money because of it, it would be unfair towards them if I had to pay damages for the 100 CDs they can prove that I sold, and keep the money for the other 999,000 CDs that I sold where they don't have evidence. That's why there are statutory damages.
The first problem is that these statutory damages are "per work". A CD with 20 songs is 20 works. I have one CD with a single song over an hour, that would be only one work. Seems unfair that the statutory damages would be twenty times higher because one artist split the music up in 20 little pieces, while another produced a single piece of music of one hour. And a DVD with a three hour movie is also one work! Apple's MacOS X was in a court case considered "one work". War and Peace is one work, a volume with hundred short stories is hundred works with hundred times the statutory damages.
The second problem with statutory damages is that not only they don't require proof of damages (which is Ok to some degree), but they don't even need reasonable estimates. If I have no income other than selling pirated CDs, and have a big house and two Ferraris, it would be common sense that the damages I caused would be quite high. But if there are 20 million file sharers, and the average file sharer downloaded 1000 songs = about $700 damages (assuming damages = amount the record company would receive if the songs had been purchased from iTunes), then common sense is that the average file sharer also _uploaded_ 1000 songs = $700 damages. And not $220,000 worth.
While speed for single and double floats is all well and good, I wonder - when will there finally be hardware support for 128 bit (quadruple precission) floats?
It was there on PowerPC for many years, and with Haswell it will be there for x86 as well. FMA is all you need for efficient 128 bit arithmetic.
As someone else pointed out, all he did was request data from a public server and AT&T sent it to him. Also, he got 41 months for forwarding 114,000 email addresses to news site, which is overkill. Had he physically broke into an AT&T office and took the email addresses from someone's desk, he would have received less prison time.
Not quite. All he did was forging a request that one specific iPad would have done legitimately, sending it to AT&T and recording the answer. And then he forged another request that another iPad would have done legitimately. And then another one and so on, 114,000 times.
The judge who refused to throw out the case stated that it would not have been an issue if information on a few users had been released as examples of the issue. He stated that 114,000 was far to many to prove an issue and it became malicious intent at that point.
He could have run his scraping script for a minute, gathered 30 email addresses, and told them "I ran this script for just one minute and got 30 addresses, if I ran it for a week I would got 114,000 addresses. ". Instead, he ran it for a week (or however long it took).
If the database was publicly-accessible, how is it a criminal act, as a member of said "public", to actually access it? That's like a newspaper that accidentally publishes data it considers private and prosecuting readers.
It wasn't publicly accessible. The information of _one_ iPad owner was accessible to that _one_ iPad owner. He figured out how to make his computer pretend to be many different iPads.
There was some interesting discussion recently about anti-hacking laws were huge problems were caused by the fact that the law makes "exceeding authorized access" a crime, which can then be used to apply in all kinds of situations that actually don't have to do anything with hacking. This one is the opposite: The guy didn't have authorization to access the email addresses of any iPad user, except possibly his own if he owned an iPad. So no "exceeding authorized access" but no right to access at all.