To be fair, he's written and podcasted (atp.fm) about a bunch of examples in the last few months. They aren't directly referenced in this article, but I don't think he would necessarily have expected it to be picked up on slashdot in isolation. Things that come to mind include:
* iWork wasn't updated for years, then when a new version was released it seemed like a rush job as it was missing many features from previous versions. Some (not all) have been added back since, but the latest update removes some backward compatibility capability - it no longer can read some files which the previous version could. (Since the old version may at some point stop working on new OS versions, this is Apple saying to its customers "we don't care about your data, and you shouldn't trust us with it").
* The iOS update which stopped some users from making phone calls.
* The App store provides almost useless search results
* Some kind of iOS API bug to do with the parseing of resources by the App store caused his app Overcast to run as iPad-native, when it wasn't intended (or tested) to be.
Curved TV's reduce breakage in shipping and handling. That's a big deal as screens get bigger. A curved surface is stiffer/stronger than a flat surface of the same area. That's one reason why all the sheet metal in cars is curved.
The marketing dept was charged with the task of selling the curve to the public so they came up with the BS about more realistic images.
I don't know if statistics bear that idea out, but mechanically it's very plausible. This is worthy of comment.
Different meaning. In audio circles, compression is a technique used during mastering to make the sound louder without inducing clipping artifacts by selectively amplifying the quieter portions of the audio.
You're right about the ambiguity of the phrase "compressed to hell", but since the GGP then stated talking about "at least cd quality loss-less" I think he really was talking about the lossy file-size compression.
To the GGP: Try testing yourself at mp3ornot.com if you think you can hear the difference.
I think the reason he called them irresponsible, is that the code is formatted as though their reallocater were an optional feature, but in fact they've only tested with it switched on. If you switch it off, you're running a bitrotted code path which doesn't work.
I'll give it a year. If the market doesn't implode that is. I doubt a tablet and guess what. I don't use it that often. I either use my PC at home, or the laptop when travelling, or the smartphone when I can't be bothered carrying my laptop around. It is niche hardware.
You don't use your Android tablet that often, and this spells doom for the iPad?
Admittedly I'm only guessing you bought Android, but you don't sound like an mass-market Apple user. You think the iPad is niche? I'll tell you what's niche: owning four different computing devices, when just one will do 90% of the things that 90% of people want to do.
LLVM weakens GCC's ability to attract free software contributors. That's why Apple funds LLVM.
You think Apple funded almost the entire development of a new open source compiler, in order to hurt Linux through hoping that GCC support would get worse. That's what you're seriously claiming?
I'm unfamiliar with the U.S. legal system, but surely the fact that King were not the first people to use the word "Candy" in a computer game title must weaken their claim to it? For example "Candy Crisis" from about 1997.
If you didn't want to limit your legal remedies to those available in a certain area, then why did you agree to doing so in the first place? Was it an intentional act of fraud in order to benefit from what you otherwise couldn't?
This isn't something that just got made up. Its part of the license agreement people agree to in order to install the software.
What license agreement? The only installed software in this discussion in Safari.
As a Dutch person, America's sarcasm detector seems collectively turned completely off. All of Paul Verhoevens films are dark comedies about the big issues of our times (as seen by Mr. Verhoeven), but it seems it takes another Dutchman to see this. The fact that some people only now see Starship Troopers as perhaps somewhat sarcastic blows my mind. How can you miss it?
Yes! Same with Robocop, a satire on corporate greed and its influence on capitalism. Even the studio that produced it doesn't seem to have understood the joke judging by the two sequels they made.
I only mean that, in isolation from other configuration, turning hyperthreading off produced a higher benchmark result than turning it on. Dell didn't publish details of how they had configured the computer to produce their numbers although the compiler probably had a large part to do with it; according to the follow-up article, the host OS was different (Linux vs Windows) and they had probably used the Intel compiler whereas the VeriTest study used gcc (for both the x86 and the G5, which makes sense if your aim is to compare chip performance as opposed to compiler performance).
From the article:
To be fair, at least Apple and VeriTest tell you what they've done, which is more than can be said for the vendor-supplied figures on SPEC's web site. What tweaks have vendors applied to boost their own scores?
That report was later discredited. The accusation was largely based on the fact that the testers had disabled hyperthreading on the compared Dell PC: it turned out they had done this because it made that benchmark result *better*. They showed the x86 in its best possible light, so that those in the peanut gallery couldn't credibly accuse them of bias in favour of the G5.
Is there an upper limit to the number of times we can sarcastically quote "Open Always Wins!" after news articles like this one, before it stops being funny? I know we haven't reached it yet, I'm just asking for information.
I'm convinced that he only got that job because Hunt and Health start with the same letter. There was an Embarrassing Incident in his previous role as Culture Secretary.
So do you have any objection to DRM on rentals, then?
DRM is a way of forcing ALL sales to be rentals.
except, no discount for being just a rental. you pay full price but still don't get to actually own what you bought.
Well, that's utterly dodging the question. iTunes has two prices for most of its movies - £1-5 for a "rental" you must watch in a 30 period, or £8-15 to "buy" and you can keep until Apple go out of business. I kinda agree that the "buy" option is a long-term rental in disguise, and I wasn't arguing against you wanting to remove DRM from it. But the explicit "rental" option does have a considerable price discount, and makes it clear what you are getting (and what you are not getting) for your money. Are you saying that iTunes "rental" option should send a non-DRM movie file, and just ask you nicely not to keep it?
What about something like Netflix? You pay one month at a time, for one month's access to their library. It's explicitly a rental arrangement, and if they go out of business you don't lose anything you'd paid for in the past. Do you think their movies should be without DRM too? How do you stop someone from buying a subscription, downloading enough movies to occupy themselves for a year, and then cancelling the subscription after one month? Or is that not something that should be stopped, and Netflix would have to "just alter their business model" to cope with people doing it?
So let's say that I buy 2000$ worth of movies, music, ebooks from some BIG CONTENT provider, and then BIG CONTENT provider is bought by another one, and sells off the music business to some other content provider. Now when I visit their site or use their app I no longer have access to the music I already paid for.
THAT is the why DRM is bad and needs to go away.
So do you have any objection to DRM on rentals, then?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, _most_ people like shiny flashy things; that's why Apple products sell well.
Yeah. 75 million people per quarter buy Apple products because they're shiny and flashy.
It couldn't possibly be because they're also solidly designed and functional.
Loss of information is not a human-created concept, it is an expression of what is (as far as we know) a fundamental law of thermodynamics. You may have heard of them.
Some people think that every problem can be fixed by adding more guns. Why not this one?
Well, thank you for contributing so highly to the tone of this debate.
And here's a good place to start: http://i.imgur.com/71l5luv.png
To be fair, he's written and podcasted (atp.fm) about a bunch of examples in the last few months. They aren't directly referenced in this article, but I don't think he would necessarily have expected it to be picked up on slashdot in isolation. Things that come to mind include:
* iWork wasn't updated for years, then when a new version was released it seemed like a rush job as it was missing many features from previous versions. Some (not all) have been added back since, but the latest update removes some backward compatibility capability - it no longer can read some files which the previous version could. (Since the old version may at some point stop working on new OS versions, this is Apple saying to its customers "we don't care about your data, and you shouldn't trust us with it").
* The iOS update which stopped some users from making phone calls.
* The App store provides almost useless search results
* Some kind of iOS API bug to do with the parseing of resources by the App store caused his app Overcast to run as iPad-native, when it wasn't intended (or tested) to be.
Curved TV's reduce breakage in shipping and handling. That's a big deal as screens get bigger. A curved surface is stiffer/stronger than a flat surface of the same area. That's one reason why all the sheet metal in cars is curved.
The marketing dept was charged with the task of selling the curve to the public so they came up with the BS about more realistic images.
I don't know if statistics bear that idea out, but mechanically it's very plausible. This is worthy of comment.
Different meaning. In audio circles, compression is a technique used during mastering to make the sound louder without inducing clipping artifacts by selectively amplifying the quieter portions of the audio.
You're right about the ambiguity of the phrase "compressed to hell", but since the GGP then stated talking about "at least cd quality loss-less" I think he really was talking about the lossy file-size compression.
To the GGP: Try testing yourself at mp3ornot.com if you think you can hear the difference.
I think the reason he called them irresponsible, is that the code is formatted as though their reallocater were an optional feature, but in fact they've only tested with it switched on. If you switch it off, you're running a bitrotted code path which doesn't work.
This is what happens when a biblical zeal for vengeance meets modern technology.
Biblical? "An eye for an eye" was a limitation, not an entitlement.
I'll give it a year. If the market doesn't implode that is. I doubt a tablet and guess what. I don't use it that often. I either use my PC at home, or the laptop when travelling, or the smartphone when I can't be bothered carrying my laptop around. It is niche hardware.
You don't use your Android tablet that often, and this spells doom for the iPad?
Admittedly I'm only guessing you bought Android, but you don't sound like an mass-market Apple user. You think the iPad is niche? I'll tell you what's niche: owning four different computing devices, when just one will do 90% of the things that 90% of people want to do.
I never trusted Bitcoin.
LLVM weakens GCC's ability to attract free software contributors. That's why Apple funds LLVM.
You think Apple funded almost the entire development of a new open source compiler, in order to hurt Linux through hoping that GCC support would get worse. That's what you're seriously claiming?
I'm unfamiliar with the U.S. legal system, but surely the fact that King were not the first people to use the word "Candy" in a computer game title must weaken their claim to it? For example "Candy Crisis" from about 1997.
If you didn't want to limit your legal remedies to those available in a certain area, then why did you agree to doing so in the first place? Was it an intentional act of fraud in order to benefit from what you otherwise couldn't?
This isn't something that just got made up. Its part of the license agreement people agree to in order to install the software.
What license agreement? The only installed software in this discussion in Safari.
uninteligent
Speak for yourself.
As a Dutch person, America's sarcasm detector seems collectively turned completely off. All of Paul Verhoevens films are dark comedies about the big issues of our times (as seen by Mr. Verhoeven), but it seems it takes another Dutchman to see this. The fact that some people only now see Starship Troopers as perhaps somewhat sarcastic blows my mind. How can you miss it?
Yes! Same with Robocop, a satire on corporate greed and its influence on capitalism. Even the studio that produced it doesn't seem to have understood the joke judging by the two sequels they made.
It costs $5,000 (£3,108) to install and each bullet costs $500 (£312).
Apparently the exchange rate was updated while they were in the middle of writing that sentence.
I only mean that, in isolation from other configuration, turning hyperthreading off produced a higher benchmark result than turning it on. Dell didn't publish details of how they had configured the computer to produce their numbers although the compiler probably had a large part to do with it; according to the follow-up article, the host OS was different (Linux vs Windows) and they had probably used the Intel compiler whereas the VeriTest study used gcc (for both the x86 and the G5, which makes sense if your aim is to compare chip performance as opposed to compiler performance).
From the article:
To be fair, at least Apple and VeriTest tell you what they've done, which is more than can be said for the vendor-supplied figures on SPEC's web site. What tweaks have vendors applied to boost their own scores?
That report was later discredited. The accusation was largely based on the fact that the testers had disabled hyperthreading on the compared Dell PC: it turned out they had done this because it made that benchmark result *better*. They showed the x86 in its best possible light, so that those in the peanut gallery couldn't credibly accuse them of bias in favour of the G5.
Is there an upper limit to the number of times we can sarcastically quote "Open Always Wins!" after news articles like this one, before it stops being funny?
I know we haven't reached it yet, I'm just asking for information.
iTunes had a DRM-free deal with EMI, which was launched as iTunes+, before Amazon launched their MP3 store.
Challenge Accepted!
I'm convinced that he only got that job because Hunt and Health start with the same letter. There was an Embarrassing Incident in his previous role as Culture Secretary.
DRM is a way of forcing ALL sales to be rentals.
except, no discount for being just a rental. you pay full price but still don't get to actually own what you bought.
Well, that's utterly dodging the question. iTunes has two prices for most of its movies - £1-5 for a "rental" you must watch in a 30 period, or £8-15 to "buy" and you can keep until Apple go out of business. I kinda agree that the "buy" option is a long-term rental in disguise, and I wasn't arguing against you wanting to remove DRM from it. But the explicit "rental" option does have a considerable price discount, and makes it clear what you are getting (and what you are not getting) for your money. Are you saying that iTunes "rental" option should send a non-DRM movie file, and just ask you nicely not to keep it?
What about something like Netflix? You pay one month at a time, for one month's access to their library. It's explicitly a rental arrangement, and if they go out of business you don't lose anything you'd paid for in the past. Do you think their movies should be without DRM too? How do you stop someone from buying a subscription, downloading enough movies to occupy themselves for a year, and then cancelling the subscription after one month? Or is that not something that should be stopped, and Netflix would have to "just alter their business model" to cope with people doing it?
So let's say that I buy 2000$ worth of movies, music, ebooks from some BIG CONTENT provider, and then BIG CONTENT provider is bought by another one, and sells off the music business to some other content provider. Now when I visit their site or use their app I no longer have access to the music I already paid for.
THAT is the why DRM is bad and needs to go away.
So do you have any objection to DRM on rentals, then?