Yeah, I'm unconvinced of the whole story. How about emailing Steve Jobs directly? Jesus, if you know enough to contact Gizmodo and Engadget and try to get a bidding war going, you certainly are smart enough to write an email saying:
"TO: sjobs@apple.com
Subject: Lost iPhone prototype (?) found in Redwood City, CA
Mr. Jobs,
I recently came across a device which I believe may have been lost by your company. It appears to be a new iPhone unit, and was found at $LOCATION. I know contacting you this way is unorthodox, but I'm very serious, and I'd like to return the device to Apple if it is your property. Could somebody at Apple look into whether or not you're missing an iPhone prototype unit, and if so, contact me? I've attached a photo of the unit for you to look at, and I'm interested in returning this unit to you if it is in fact yours.
Sincerely,
A guy who's not an asshole looking for a cheap payday"
FFS, the man responds to user questions about "Will my iphone have a unified inbox someday?" Do you think he wouldn't at least forward that email to somebody on the iPhone team and say, "Is this guy for real? FOLLOW UP IMMEDIATELY AND FIND OUT IF HE IS!" Does anybody here really believe that Steve Jobs wouldn't have known that a prototype / test unit of one of Apple's biggest next-generation products got lost somewhere the day after it happened?
If I'd had the opportunity to be working on integral components of one of the most recognizable devices on the goddamned planet at the age of 27, I sure as hell would've been working 90 hours weeks too.
Or do you not understand the concept of "resume building"?
You are wrong. Under California law, where this incident took place, the law most certainly states that you have a legal obligation to turn over "found" property to the police. Fail harder next time.
You are clearly not familiar with California law, then, which explicitly states that you must notify the owner, and/or the police when you come into possession of "lost" property.
This whole story reeks of "Hehehehe sorry we didn't know," and I'm sorry, for a "news" organization, that's not fucking good enough. If you're a news organization, you perform due diligence. If you're a news organization, you don't respond to a letter from a corporation's legal department as if you're writing a status update on Facebook to your friend. That's fanzine bullshit, and Gizmodo fucked up.
A continuously changing professional knowledge baggage is not attractive, its consequence is obvious - your whole time life should be allocated for keeping up.
This is where you lost me. There is NO "professsion" where keeping up and learning new things is not demanded of you except at the very bottom of the job chain.
Want to be a janitor? Great, you'll never have to "learn new things," because you just have to push a broom & empty trash bins all day. Want to be a lawyer? You're going to have to keep up with current case law and evolving precedent.
Want to be a day laborer? Great you can work the same fields year after year, picking oranges and lettuce for slave wages. Want to be a doctor? You damn well better be prepared to stay current by reading current medical literature and networking with your peers.
Want to work at a car wash? Great, you can splash soap on a car and hose it off all day. Want to be a mechanic? You damn well better be able to learn how to work on new types of engine control modules, new safety systems, and new brands of vehicles.
There is no "profession" where you are not going to need to continuously learn new things to keep up. If you don't want to do that, then you are relegating yourself to the role of manual labor, where the same motion is performed countless times in repetition without any critical thought whatsoever.
No employer should be burning its employees out by overloading them with demands and then not supporting them. But claiming that what's ruining any profession is this infernal need to "keep up" with the state of the art is foolish.
The problem is that not every software download & use is run by the copyright lawyers. Some young, enterprising engineer sees "It's open source, of course I can use it!" and builds a critical component of $COMPANY's new product, incorporating F/OSS code in a way that violates the GPL. He never ran the decision by legal, he just grabbed a copy from gnu.org - it's all free software, so what's the problem, right?
There's a pretty big risk exposure there, so it's easier to simply say, "This is entirely prohibited."
You're a bigot. Linux is just as usable as Windows once set up.
Which is to say - not all that usable?
Some things Windows does better, some things Linux does better.
You're right - Windows is hands down the best in running spyware, antivirus software, and blue screening. Linux definitely takes the lead in having difficult-to-understand user options and "almost" supporting a lot of common peripheral hardware in a way that doesn't *totally* break.
So you want to attract new people to the development by asking them to write documentation, which you then go on to admit is a task "most developers hate"?
Not a likely scenario. If the developer writing the code can't be bothered to document it, why would a newbie - who has to struggle just to understand what the code does, much less the design intentions - write documentation for it? They will likely get a thousand design points *wrong* because they will make assumptions about intent that were not present in the original developer's design, and that were not documented in any way, other than a cryptic comment like:
/* Sean Connery gambit. LOL. Come back and document this later. */
WTF is a Sean Connery gambit? Who knows. Only the developer who left that flavor text, and it's likely he doesn't even remember anymore.
I would argue that there are much better, FAR more maintainable ways of collecting varying levels of log in put than "s/^#print/print/g".
I've run into the situation that the GP post refers to: Self-taught "old school" guy who writes complete shit code and has no idea what he's doing. As a small example, I once inherited a suite of command-line tools that "had been written in shell, but were ported to Perl by one of our developers." He had, for all intents & purposes, "ported" to perl by wrapping just about every shell command in a system( ) call.
When you are managing a hundred servers (or more) for a high-profile, high-traffic, high-availability web site, good luck with your GUI tools.
Frankly, when you are managing a hundred servers (or more) for a high-profile, high-traffic, high-availability web site, your job is more correctly termed "operations" or "system administration," not "development." I'll be honest, it sounds like you spend your days writing 100-to-500-line shell scripts, and trying to pass that off as "development."
I don't know a single developer I've ever worked with who would say "Yes, debugging on the command line without a GUI is far preferable." Sure you can do it, but it's a pain in the ass, and the GUI makes it a lot easier to understand what's going on.
The code-completion feature you dismiss with a sarcastic "BFD" is often quite helpful when you are working on very large systems that require you to collaborate with other developers. If you didn't write the methods and object code you're calling, and instead are relying on code written by other members of your team (or third-party libraries), that code completion feature is a huge time-saver when you can't remember the name of the methods you're trying to call.
You may be very skilled at administering systems, but your commentary indicates that you have very little experience writing significant amounts of code as part of a large project. In light of that, I'd suggest that your endorsement of "emacs and the command line" as the best way of doing things is based on a very narrow set of development experience.
Yeah, because emacs is the epitome of "lean and stripped down," right?
I've been writing code for about 14 years. For some things, command line, vim, and a quick terminal session are great. For other things, IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans are absolutely wonderful. Sometimes that multi-view GUI is just right, especially on a bigger (or dual) monitor setup. My usual workflow involves opening half a dozen putty windows to the servers I need to access, and an Eclipse window for the Database, ClearQuest, ClearCase, and perl work I'm touching.
Big & bloaty? Perhaps. But I'm not getting paid to minimize processor & memory usage on my laptop. I'm getting paid to deliver business solutions, and so I choose the toolset that is appropriate to my workflow and my requirements. Your condescension about the command line likely puts off quite a few people you work with - what a shame you'll find yourself relegated to maintaining the equivalent of legacy mainframe code because "that guy knows command line stuff like this, and nobody wants to work on projects with him anyway..."
This is merely natural selection at work, and for the most part the outcome will be as it should be — unlike closed-source products, which live entirely at the whim of their creator.
Yep, I heard Microsoft is thinking of killing off Windows and Office because Ballmer wokeup one morning with a sour stomach. Anybody using those products better get with the times and move to open source alternatives now, because it's only a matter of time before Microsoft decides to kill off its product for fun.
they are already taken into consideration in the stock price (at least theoretically). Right?
If you actually understand what you're buying when you buy a piece of stock, then yes, the "value" of what you're buying is theoretically built into the stock price. It's clear that you do not understand what you're buying, so I can understand why share price would seem to be a reliable indicator of corporate success to you.
Stock Prices are, exactly the market valuation of all things regarding a company at that moment, nothing more, nothing less. Stock prices aren't based much on reality, but on fiat value.
No, stock prices are exactly the market valuation of a single share out of all outstanding shares of a company at that moment, nothing more, nothing less. Oracle has approximately 5 billion shares of stock issued. Red Hat has about 187 million shares of stock issued. So Red Hat's share price of $31 per share means, roughly stated, that 1/187-millionth of the company is worth $31. Oracle's share price of $26 per share means, again roughly stated, that 1/5-billionth of the company is worth $26.
If Red Hat had the same amount of shares outstanding as Oracle, the price of those shares would be roughly $1.16 (5.84bn market cap / 5bn shares = 1.16). If Oracle had the same amount of shares outstanding as Red Hat does, its share prices would be about $696.52 (130.25bn market cap / 187mn shares = 696.52).
As a measure of the health or successfulness of a company, share price is totally meaningless absent the context of things like "how many shares are outstanding?", and even more importantly, things like cash flow, revenues, profit margins, etc. If you buy stocks solely based on their current share price, then you are almost certainly throwing your money away.
The comment wasn't about shareholders, the comment was about "how well the company is doing." Every financial indicator indicates that Oracle is doing more business, earning more profits, and has better margins than Red Hat. A simple share price communicates none of that.
Your chart showing a 200 day comparison of share price changes offers no information that would indicate anything other than "Red Hat's share price has grown faster than Oracle's share price over the past 200 days."
Leaving aside the fact that Oracle has a much stronger revenue stream, more cash on hand to weather downturns, and much higher profit margins, a company with fewer shares will have more volatile prices (even small divestments or purchases can drive up the overall price more easily). Oracle has also split repeatedly over its lifetime, and is still performing in the same price-per-share league as Red Hat. All of this points to Oracle having a broader & stronger business than Red Hat, which speaks directly to the issue of which of them is doing better.
In short, your chart does nothing except demonstrate that there are some people willing to bet that Red Hat will, in the future, perform quite strongly. Which is entirely possible (and even probable). But the price per share does nothing to illustrate that RHT is doing better than ORCL as a company today, yesterday, or tomorrow. A share price is a share price. People were paying a lot of money for Enron shares just before it crashed. Nobody would suggest that Enron's share price is a reflection of a company "doing well," would they?
Some might argue they are doing better than Oracle.
Yes, some might argue that. And those people would be idiots.
Profit Margins, Revenues, Market Capitalization, Earnings, P/E Ratios, Earnings per Share, Revenues Per Share, Cash Flow, and most other measure of the "success" of a company are all significantly higher for Oracle (ORCL) than they are for Red Hat (RHT).
Is Red Hat profitable? Sure. But they're not anywhere near as profitable or successful as Oracle has been, and claiming that a higher share price constitutes evidence that one company is "doing better" than another is foolishness of the first order.
Because when you only need 400 licenses, and the OS is cheaper, you might as well waste money on buying 100 extra licenses you don't need with the money you would have saved!
Those are beard-nibblets. How would toechunks get into his beard?
He picks the toechunks from his feet and puts them in his mouth. See this video if you think you can stomach it. Having seen it once, just the thought of it makes me slightly nauseous. Now, that doesn't make him stupid, I'll concede he's a smart man. But when you behave like a lunatic in public, you have to be willing to take some blame when your views are ascribed to "that lunatic guy who eats his own toe jam."
The AC you're responding to may have been modded troll, but he has a point. Stallman's predictions of a massively dysfunctional, dystopian future have not come to pass. For those of you calling it "prescient", the word means, "able to foresee the future." The piece isn't "prescient," the piece is "wildly speculative," "alarmist," and engages in the worst "slippery slope" rhetoric I've seen in a long time. Not to mention that it's some of the most appallingly bad fiction I've ever seen.
Now now, don't attack the man, he raised an interesting point:
It was more a joke than an attack. As an "oldish" guy myself, I know how tempting it can be to view every new gadget as the herald of the end of civilization as we know it.:)
The reason we don't value music enough to pay as much as we used to, these days, may very well be because we can see, hear, and access music everywhere.
"Valuing" music in the sense of art appreciation is not necessarily tied to the amount of money you pay for it. Recording companies are fairly new in the history of music. They have commoditized and packaged SOME music for mass distribution; this is not necessarily evil or bad. But they have exerted a significant control on the pricing of the product - or would you really argue that CDs were $17 worth of "value"?
The Portable audio player (iPod, Sansa, Nomad, Zune, what have you), and easy access to music over the internet allows people more choice of the music they listen to. The result of this is that music becomes even more personal, because the music you choose is an expression of your individual taste - not just a reflection of what you're spoon fed every 3 hours by the local AAA radio station. So what if a kid gets most of their music for 99 cents? That doesn't diminish their appreciation, or their enjoyment, of the music any more so than my buying a $5 used CD would mean I enjoyed the album 1/3 as much as if I paid $15 for a shrinkwrapped "new" copy. Some of my absolute favorite songs I've downloaded for free from artists' websites, with their blessings. And knowing that it's free, I send those links around to my friends saying, "you gotta check this out."
Yes, much of what I hear in the doctor's office and at the mall is exactly what the OP mentioned: "background music." That doesn't mean that music will suddenly cease to be important to us, or suddenly cease to move us, delight us, or excite us. Long before there was a "music industry," people made music. Long after today's "music industry" is a pile of rubble, people will make music. The format you carry it around on will change, the way it's distributed will change... but the kids are all right, really. They're not going to stop loving music because it's easy to hear whatever song you want whenever you want to hear it. If anything, they will simply tune out the "background" music being piped in, and listen to their own personal playlists - witness the ubiquity of the white iPod earbuds on any city street or in any shopping center, and you'll see what I mean.
And let's be honest, I'd rather hear Lady GaGa at the mall than the sound of a bunch of out of shape middle aged folks huffing and puffing as they walk up and down the stairs.:)
"I'm old, and I predict the imminent demise of western civilization because these newfangled gadgets the kids love so much are different than what I grew up with. And get off my lawn!"
It would have been faster. I bet if we went back and looked at the hypothetical iPod playlist of a 13-year-old You, it would be as embarrassingly banal as the playlists of today's crop of 13 year olds. Nostalgia is powerful, but tends to blind us to the fact that things really aren't "worse" than they were, things just take different forms.
The existence of my iPod does not cheapen my connection to music; I go to MORE live shows, and listen to MORE music now than I ever did when I was 13. Back then, my play list was determined almost solely by what was on the radio and what my parents listened to around the house. Then came MTV, and suddenly I was hearing music that I had never heard on the radio (this was in the days where there was actually music on MTV). Then came the internet, and suddenly I could discover even more music! And I can carry around all of that music (~17,000 tracks in my itunes library at last check) in a device the size of a deck of cards in my pocket, listen to it whenever I want, share the listening with others in my car, and discover new similar artists (or entire subgenres) with a few clicks of a mouse, and share recordings with dozens of friends and family with a few more clicks of the mouse via Youtube, Last.fm, Pandora, etc.
And you think that all of this somehow makes me less interested in, or supportive of, the arts? You are wrong.
Look at the increasing amount of direct "artist-to-consumer" relationships, where indie artists are promoting and distributing their material directly to fans over the internet, and it's hard to imagine that the "cartel" will have much power to control anything for much longer.
If many of the major RIAA supporters folded today, most people would never notice the difference - music would still be created, performed, recorded, and sold. I make a conscious effort to buy directly from the artists I appreciate whenever that option is possible - and it is getting increasingly more common that that option is available.
And with arguments like these, it's a wonder that liberals aren't more widely loved and admired.
I presume that you are a JD with deep knowledge of constitutional law to state with such certainty that the proposed health care plan is "entirely constitutional"?
But when an insurance company says to a poor person, "your money or your life," that is oppression too.
No, it is not. You are comparing "selling medical insurance" with "mugging someone." They are not the same, conceptually, legally, or morally. While I can't disagree that a "moral" society should look out for its less-fortunate members, I do have strong reservations with and concerns about the government's ability to deliver on that promise. It doesn't mean nobody should try, and I'm hopeful that this will not turn into another program where politicians raid the coffers and stuff it full of IOU's, but let's be honest - past precedent doesn't give us much cause for hope there.
But let's restrict this to your comparison, shall we? What is insurance? It is, at its core, the pooling of risk and the sharing of the costs of that risk with other people who belong to the pool. For the purposes of this discussion, let's look at the incidence of prostate cancer, which the CDC reported in 2005 was occurring at roughly 142 new cases per 100,000 men per year. For the sake of round numbers, let's say that prostate cancer costs $100,000 per year to treat. That means the cost of treating prostate cancer in a population of 100,000 men averages out to about $14.2 million per year. We'll oversimplify and stipulate that treatment is always successful, and takes exactly one year.
Now, obviously, for the 142 men who get prostate cancer, $100,000 is a LOT of money. But not every man gets prostate cancer. So some smart person (an actuarial mathematician) comes along and says, "If each one out of the 100,000 guys in the population gives me $142 a year, then we can pay the costs for prostate cancer treatment for all of them!" This is known as a risk pool, and is essentially how health insurance works. Obviously there are deductibles, and caps, and other conditions and everything else to worry about, but at it's core, health insurance is based on the premise that not everybody gets sick at the same rates or with the same conditions, and that if everybody pays a small amount, the people in the insurance plan who DO get sick will be able to get treatment.
This equivalency you're drawing is shockingly simple-minded and plain wrong. The insurance company does not tell you, "If you don't give us money, we're going to give you prostate cancer and you'll die," that is known as extortion, and is quite illegal, and no insurance company engages in it.
What is happening instead, is that the government will tell us "your money or that guy's life," setting up an institutionalized system of hostage taking, where I am made to pay for health insurance not just for myself, but also to cover the share of risk of a significant number of people who are presently uninsured because they don't buy insurance for themselves. And I'm told that those people "will die" if I don't give a bunch of money to the government. As I said earlier, the government has a track record of shockingly inefficient management of entitlement programs; if they can demonstrate that it can be done more effectively and efficiently by the government, I'm willing to listen. But drawing the equivalency you have simply demonstrates that you don't grasp the issues at hand.
But we just voted to protect the right to health care, and so it is a right, created as we create any right: by agreeing as a society to protect it.
No, our governing documents specifically affirm that some (many) rights are inalienable "natural" rights, and are not created by "society's agreement," but are granted to us as corollaries of our very existence, and which may not properly be denied to us by government or other men. Some other rights are granted by law ("civil" or "social" rights), but not all. And here's the rub: health care costs something. That money comes from someone. What the granting of this civi
Except you failed to notice the numerous references to "my" impressions and experiences, as opposed to speaking in the absolutes you used - which is the point I was arguing against.
You stated that all of these are "major failures," as a categorical fact; I am pointing out that they are neither categorical, nor fact - they are entirely subjective, and you would do yourself a service in remembering that. If you don't like the device, and it's not for you, great. That doesn't make it rife with "major failings," it makes it a "bad choice for you."
But if it makes you feel better: bazing! wow, you sure got me! I'm just an apple fanboi and will go get emo over some photos of my lord and master, Steve Jobs.
Let's not forget that if your Open House doesn't have the furniture you want, you also have the freedom to hear these delightful responses when you ask about how to acquire the missing furniture:
1) Build it your fucking self, loser.
2) You didn't need that anyway, it's a proprietary spec, and the Open House doesn't support closed furniture. Use Ogg Beanbag, it's suitable for multiple purposes.
3) What have you done for Open Housing lately, anyway? Fuck off, we don't work for you!
Oh, and your Open House comes with a Stallman Room. Don't ever ask what goes on in there. *shudder*
The iPhone was massively crash prone for a long time, it is extremely noisy to other device, the battery is not user replaceable, it has no expandable storage, it doesn't multitask, you cannot get a model with a physical keyboard, and it needs special software to put your own music on it.
Early mobile safari versions were certainly crash prone. Other than that, I don't recall ever feeling like my 1st gen iPhone - bought about 2 weeks after launch when my Treo running Windows CE/Mobile/Phone/Whatever-the-fuck-it's-called finally kicked the bucket - was "massively crash prone". In fact, it felt far more stable and responsive than the Treo it replaced, and a crash-prone browser was still far superior from that turd of a mobile IE that I had to use on the Treo.
I don't know what you mean by "extremely noisy to other device" - literally. The iPhone is silent for me... wondering what sort of noise you're hearing, because I never hear anything from the phone outside of the phone calls I'm making, and the music I'm playing.
Number of times I've ever bought a replacement battery for a cell phone I've owned: zero. User-replaceable battery isn't much of a concern for me. Perhaps it will be someday with my iPhone, but it hasn't even remotely been a concern so far.
Its lack of expandable storage was not an issue for me, its lack of a keyboard was actually preferable to me - typing on a blackberry with big fingers is an exercise in frustration, and having to use itunes in order to put music on it has never felt like all that much of a restriction to me.
The only "major failing" you noted that gave me pause when I purchased the phone was the lack of multitasking, and then I realized that I was essentially buying the phone to combine my treo with my ipod, and that all the other features were just bonuses, and so I realized that I probably wasn't ever going to run Office on the damn thing to type up a design document and need 8-way multitasking anyway.
The point of all this? Well, you said:
These are all major failings.
The point is this: These may be major failings for you, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your requirements are universally accepted as "required" on a phone. If the iPhone doesn't do what you think it should, by all means don't buy it, and buy a phone that does the things you need a phone to do. Don't speak in absolutes when you're describing what are obviously personal & subjective impressions & experiences.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm unconvinced of the whole story. How about emailing Steve Jobs directly? Jesus, if you know enough to contact Gizmodo and Engadget and try to get a bidding war going, you certainly are smart enough to write an email saying:
"TO: sjobs@apple.com
Subject: Lost iPhone prototype (?) found in Redwood City, CA
Mr. Jobs,
I recently came across a device which I believe may have been lost by your company. It appears to be a new iPhone unit, and was found at $LOCATION. I know contacting you this way is unorthodox, but I'm very serious, and I'd like to return the device to Apple if it is your property. Could somebody at Apple look into whether or not you're missing an iPhone prototype unit, and if so, contact me? I've attached a photo of the unit for you to look at, and I'm interested in returning this unit to you if it is in fact yours.
Sincerely,
A guy who's not an asshole looking for a cheap payday"
FFS, the man responds to user questions about "Will my iphone have a unified inbox someday?" Do you think he wouldn't at least forward that email to somebody on the iPhone team and say, "Is this guy for real? FOLLOW UP IMMEDIATELY AND FIND OUT IF HE IS!" Does anybody here really believe that Steve Jobs wouldn't have known that a prototype / test unit of one of Apple's biggest next-generation products got lost somewhere the day after it happened?
If I'd had the opportunity to be working on integral components of one of the most recognizable devices on the goddamned planet at the age of 27, I sure as hell would've been working 90 hours weeks too.
Or do you not understand the concept of "resume building"?
You are wrong. Under California law, where this incident took place, the law most certainly states that you have a legal obligation to turn over "found" property to the police. Fail harder next time.
You are clearly not familiar with California law, then, which explicitly states that you must notify the owner, and/or the police when you come into possession of "lost" property.
This whole story reeks of "Hehehehe sorry we didn't know," and I'm sorry, for a "news" organization, that's not fucking good enough. If you're a news organization, you perform due diligence. If you're a news organization, you don't respond to a letter from a corporation's legal department as if you're writing a status update on Facebook to your friend. That's fanzine bullshit, and Gizmodo fucked up.
This is where you lost me. There is NO "professsion" where keeping up and learning new things is not demanded of you except at the very bottom of the job chain.
Want to be a janitor? Great, you'll never have to "learn new things," because you just have to push a broom & empty trash bins all day. Want to be a lawyer? You're going to have to keep up with current case law and evolving precedent.
Want to be a day laborer? Great you can work the same fields year after year, picking oranges and lettuce for slave wages. Want to be a doctor? You damn well better be prepared to stay current by reading current medical literature and networking with your peers.
Want to work at a car wash? Great, you can splash soap on a car and hose it off all day. Want to be a mechanic? You damn well better be able to learn how to work on new types of engine control modules, new safety systems, and new brands of vehicles.
There is no "profession" where you are not going to need to continuously learn new things to keep up. If you don't want to do that, then you are relegating yourself to the role of manual labor, where the same motion is performed countless times in repetition without any critical thought whatsoever.
No employer should be burning its employees out by overloading them with demands and then not supporting them. But claiming that what's ruining any profession is this infernal need to "keep up" with the state of the art is foolish.
The problem is that not every software download & use is run by the copyright lawyers. Some young, enterprising engineer sees "It's open source, of course I can use it!" and builds a critical component of $COMPANY's new product, incorporating F/OSS code in a way that violates the GPL. He never ran the decision by legal, he just grabbed a copy from gnu.org - it's all free software, so what's the problem, right?
There's a pretty big risk exposure there, so it's easier to simply say, "This is entirely prohibited."
Which is to say - not all that usable?
You're right - Windows is hands down the best in running spyware, antivirus software, and blue screening. Linux definitely takes the lead in having difficult-to-understand user options and "almost" supporting a lot of common peripheral hardware in a way that doesn't *totally* break.
So you want to attract new people to the development by asking them to write documentation, which you then go on to admit is a task "most developers hate"?
/* Sean Connery gambit. LOL. Come back and document this later. */
Not a likely scenario. If the developer writing the code can't be bothered to document it, why would a newbie - who has to struggle just to understand what the code does, much less the design intentions - write documentation for it? They will likely get a thousand design points *wrong* because they will make assumptions about intent that were not present in the original developer's design, and that were not documented in any way, other than a cryptic comment like:
WTF is a Sean Connery gambit? Who knows. Only the developer who left that flavor text, and it's likely he doesn't even remember anymore.
I would argue that there are much better, FAR more maintainable ways of collecting varying levels of log in put than "s/^#print/print/g".
I've run into the situation that the GP post refers to: Self-taught "old school" guy who writes complete shit code and has no idea what he's doing. As a small example, I once inherited a suite of command-line tools that "had been written in shell, but were ported to Perl by one of our developers." He had, for all intents & purposes, "ported" to perl by wrapping just about every shell command in a system( ) call.
Frankly, when you are managing a hundred servers (or more) for a high-profile, high-traffic, high-availability web site, your job is more correctly termed "operations" or "system administration," not "development." I'll be honest, it sounds like you spend your days writing 100-to-500-line shell scripts, and trying to pass that off as "development."
I don't know a single developer I've ever worked with who would say "Yes, debugging on the command line without a GUI is far preferable." Sure you can do it, but it's a pain in the ass, and the GUI makes it a lot easier to understand what's going on.
The code-completion feature you dismiss with a sarcastic "BFD" is often quite helpful when you are working on very large systems that require you to collaborate with other developers. If you didn't write the methods and object code you're calling, and instead are relying on code written by other members of your team (or third-party libraries), that code completion feature is a huge time-saver when you can't remember the name of the methods you're trying to call.
You may be very skilled at administering systems, but your commentary indicates that you have very little experience writing significant amounts of code as part of a large project. In light of that, I'd suggest that your endorsement of "emacs and the command line" as the best way of doing things is based on a very narrow set of development experience.
Yeah, because emacs is the epitome of "lean and stripped down," right?
I've been writing code for about 14 years. For some things, command line, vim, and a quick terminal session are great. For other things, IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans are absolutely wonderful. Sometimes that multi-view GUI is just right, especially on a bigger (or dual) monitor setup. My usual workflow involves opening half a dozen putty windows to the servers I need to access, and an Eclipse window for the Database, ClearQuest, ClearCase, and perl work I'm touching.
Big & bloaty? Perhaps. But I'm not getting paid to minimize processor & memory usage on my laptop. I'm getting paid to deliver business solutions, and so I choose the toolset that is appropriate to my workflow and my requirements. Your condescension about the command line likely puts off quite a few people you work with - what a shame you'll find yourself relegated to maintaining the equivalent of legacy mainframe code because "that guy knows command line stuff like this, and nobody wants to work on projects with him anyway..."
Yep, I heard Microsoft is thinking of killing off Windows and Office because Ballmer wokeup one morning with a sour stomach. Anybody using those products better get with the times and move to open source alternatives now, because it's only a matter of time before Microsoft decides to kill off its product for fun.
If you actually understand what you're buying when you buy a piece of stock, then yes, the "value" of what you're buying is theoretically built into the stock price. It's clear that you do not understand what you're buying, so I can understand why share price would seem to be a reliable indicator of corporate success to you.
No, stock prices are exactly the market valuation of a single share out of all outstanding shares of a company at that moment, nothing more, nothing less. Oracle has approximately 5 billion shares of stock issued. Red Hat has about 187 million shares of stock issued. So Red Hat's share price of $31 per share means, roughly stated, that 1/187-millionth of the company is worth $31. Oracle's share price of $26 per share means, again roughly stated, that 1/5-billionth of the company is worth $26.
If Red Hat had the same amount of shares outstanding as Oracle, the price of those shares would be roughly $1.16 (5.84bn market cap / 5bn shares = 1.16). If Oracle had the same amount of shares outstanding as Red Hat does, its share prices would be about $696.52 (130.25bn market cap / 187mn shares = 696.52).
As a measure of the health or successfulness of a company, share price is totally meaningless absent the context of things like "how many shares are outstanding?", and even more importantly, things like cash flow, revenues, profit margins, etc. If you buy stocks solely based on their current share price, then you are almost certainly throwing your money away.
The comment wasn't about shareholders, the comment was about "how well the company is doing." Every financial indicator indicates that Oracle is doing more business, earning more profits, and has better margins than Red Hat. A simple share price communicates none of that.
Your chart showing a 200 day comparison of share price changes offers no information that would indicate anything other than "Red Hat's share price has grown faster than Oracle's share price over the past 200 days."
Leaving aside the fact that Oracle has a much stronger revenue stream, more cash on hand to weather downturns, and much higher profit margins, a company with fewer shares will have more volatile prices (even small divestments or purchases can drive up the overall price more easily). Oracle has also split repeatedly over its lifetime, and is still performing in the same price-per-share league as Red Hat. All of this points to Oracle having a broader & stronger business than Red Hat, which speaks directly to the issue of which of them is doing better.
In short, your chart does nothing except demonstrate that there are some people willing to bet that Red Hat will, in the future, perform quite strongly. Which is entirely possible (and even probable). But the price per share does nothing to illustrate that RHT is doing better than ORCL as a company today, yesterday, or tomorrow. A share price is a share price. People were paying a lot of money for Enron shares just before it crashed. Nobody would suggest that Enron's share price is a reflection of a company "doing well," would they?
Yes, some might argue that. And those people would be idiots.
Profit Margins, Revenues, Market Capitalization, Earnings, P/E Ratios, Earnings per Share, Revenues Per Share, Cash Flow, and most other measure of the "success" of a company are all significantly higher for Oracle (ORCL) than they are for Red Hat (RHT).
Is Red Hat profitable? Sure. But they're not anywhere near as profitable or successful as Oracle has been, and claiming that a higher share price constitutes evidence that one company is "doing better" than another is foolishness of the first order.
Because when you only need 400 licenses, and the OS is cheaper, you might as well waste money on buying 100 extra licenses you don't need with the money you would have saved!
Brilliant!
He picks the toechunks from his feet and puts them in his mouth. See this video if you think you can stomach it. Having seen it once, just the thought of it makes me slightly nauseous. Now, that doesn't make him stupid, I'll concede he's a smart man. But when you behave like a lunatic in public, you have to be willing to take some blame when your views are ascribed to "that lunatic guy who eats his own toe jam."
The AC you're responding to may have been modded troll, but he has a point. Stallman's predictions of a massively dysfunctional, dystopian future have not come to pass. For those of you calling it "prescient", the word means, "able to foresee the future." The piece isn't "prescient," the piece is "wildly speculative," "alarmist," and engages in the worst "slippery slope" rhetoric I've seen in a long time. Not to mention that it's some of the most appallingly bad fiction I've ever seen.
It was more a joke than an attack. As an "oldish" guy myself, I know how tempting it can be to view every new gadget as the herald of the end of civilization as we know it. :)
"Valuing" music in the sense of art appreciation is not necessarily tied to the amount of money you pay for it. Recording companies are fairly new in the history of music. They have commoditized and packaged SOME music for mass distribution; this is not necessarily evil or bad. But they have exerted a significant control on the pricing of the product - or would you really argue that CDs were $17 worth of "value"?
:)
The Portable audio player (iPod, Sansa, Nomad, Zune, what have you), and easy access to music over the internet allows people more choice of the music they listen to. The result of this is that music becomes even more personal, because the music you choose is an expression of your individual taste - not just a reflection of what you're spoon fed every 3 hours by the local AAA radio station. So what if a kid gets most of their music for 99 cents? That doesn't diminish their appreciation, or their enjoyment, of the music any more so than my buying a $5 used CD would mean I enjoyed the album 1/3 as much as if I paid $15 for a shrinkwrapped "new" copy. Some of my absolute favorite songs I've downloaded for free from artists' websites, with their blessings. And knowing that it's free, I send those links around to my friends saying, "you gotta check this out."
Yes, much of what I hear in the doctor's office and at the mall is exactly what the OP mentioned: "background music." That doesn't mean that music will suddenly cease to be important to us, or suddenly cease to move us, delight us, or excite us. Long before there was a "music industry," people made music. Long after today's "music industry" is a pile of rubble, people will make music. The format you carry it around on will change, the way it's distributed will change... but the kids are all right, really. They're not going to stop loving music because it's easy to hear whatever song you want whenever you want to hear it. If anything, they will simply tune out the "background" music being piped in, and listen to their own personal playlists - witness the ubiquity of the white iPod earbuds on any city street or in any shopping center, and you'll see what I mean.
And let's be honest, I'd rather hear Lady GaGa at the mall than the sound of a bunch of out of shape middle aged folks huffing and puffing as they walk up and down the stairs.
You could have just said:
"I'm old, and I predict the imminent demise of western civilization because these newfangled gadgets the kids love so much are different than what I grew up with. And get off my lawn!"
It would have been faster. I bet if we went back and looked at the hypothetical iPod playlist of a 13-year-old You, it would be as embarrassingly banal as the playlists of today's crop of 13 year olds. Nostalgia is powerful, but tends to blind us to the fact that things really aren't "worse" than they were, things just take different forms.
The existence of my iPod does not cheapen my connection to music; I go to MORE live shows, and listen to MORE music now than I ever did when I was 13. Back then, my play list was determined almost solely by what was on the radio and what my parents listened to around the house. Then came MTV, and suddenly I was hearing music that I had never heard on the radio (this was in the days where there was actually music on MTV). Then came the internet, and suddenly I could discover even more music! And I can carry around all of that music (~17,000 tracks in my itunes library at last check) in a device the size of a deck of cards in my pocket, listen to it whenever I want, share the listening with others in my car, and discover new similar artists (or entire subgenres) with a few clicks of a mouse, and share recordings with dozens of friends and family with a few more clicks of the mouse via Youtube, Last.fm, Pandora, etc.
And you think that all of this somehow makes me less interested in, or supportive of, the arts? You are wrong.
Look at the increasing amount of direct "artist-to-consumer" relationships, where indie artists are promoting and distributing their material directly to fans over the internet, and it's hard to imagine that the "cartel" will have much power to control anything for much longer.
If many of the major RIAA supporters folded today, most people would never notice the difference - music would still be created, performed, recorded, and sold. I make a conscious effort to buy directly from the artists I appreciate whenever that option is possible - and it is getting increasingly more common that that option is available.
And with arguments like these, it's a wonder that liberals aren't more widely loved and admired.
I presume that you are a JD with deep knowledge of constitutional law to state with such certainty that the proposed health care plan is "entirely constitutional"?
No, it is not. You are comparing "selling medical insurance" with "mugging someone." They are not the same, conceptually, legally, or morally. While I can't disagree that a "moral" society should look out for its less-fortunate members, I do have strong reservations with and concerns about the government's ability to deliver on that promise. It doesn't mean nobody should try, and I'm hopeful that this will not turn into another program where politicians raid the coffers and stuff it full of IOU's, but let's be honest - past precedent doesn't give us much cause for hope there.
But let's restrict this to your comparison, shall we? What is insurance? It is, at its core, the pooling of risk and the sharing of the costs of that risk with other people who belong to the pool. For the purposes of this discussion, let's look at the incidence of prostate cancer, which the CDC reported in 2005 was occurring at roughly 142 new cases per 100,000 men per year. For the sake of round numbers, let's say that prostate cancer costs $100,000 per year to treat. That means the cost of treating prostate cancer in a population of 100,000 men averages out to about $14.2 million per year. We'll oversimplify and stipulate that treatment is always successful, and takes exactly one year.
Now, obviously, for the 142 men who get prostate cancer, $100,000 is a LOT of money. But not every man gets prostate cancer. So some smart person (an actuarial mathematician) comes along and says, "If each one out of the 100,000 guys in the population gives me $142 a year, then we can pay the costs for prostate cancer treatment for all of them!" This is known as a risk pool, and is essentially how health insurance works. Obviously there are deductibles, and caps, and other conditions and everything else to worry about, but at it's core, health insurance is based on the premise that not everybody gets sick at the same rates or with the same conditions, and that if everybody pays a small amount, the people in the insurance plan who DO get sick will be able to get treatment.
This equivalency you're drawing is shockingly simple-minded and plain wrong. The insurance company does not tell you, "If you don't give us money, we're going to give you prostate cancer and you'll die," that is known as extortion, and is quite illegal, and no insurance company engages in it.
What is happening instead, is that the government will tell us "your money or that guy's life," setting up an institutionalized system of hostage taking, where I am made to pay for health insurance not just for myself, but also to cover the share of risk of a significant number of people who are presently uninsured because they don't buy insurance for themselves. And I'm told that those people "will die" if I don't give a bunch of money to the government. As I said earlier, the government has a track record of shockingly inefficient management of entitlement programs; if they can demonstrate that it can be done more effectively and efficiently by the government, I'm willing to listen. But drawing the equivalency you have simply demonstrates that you don't grasp the issues at hand.
No, our governing documents specifically affirm that some (many) rights are inalienable "natural" rights, and are not created by "society's agreement," but are granted to us as corollaries of our very existence, and which may not properly be denied to us by government or other men. Some other rights are granted by law ("civil" or "social" rights), but not all. And here's the rub: health care costs something. That money comes from someone. What the granting of this civi
Except you failed to notice the numerous references to "my" impressions and experiences, as opposed to speaking in the absolutes you used - which is the point I was arguing against.
You stated that all of these are "major failures," as a categorical fact; I am pointing out that they are neither categorical, nor fact - they are entirely subjective, and you would do yourself a service in remembering that. If you don't like the device, and it's not for you, great. That doesn't make it rife with "major failings," it makes it a "bad choice for you."
But if it makes you feel better: bazing! wow, you sure got me! I'm just an apple fanboi and will go get emo over some photos of my lord and master, Steve Jobs.
Let's not forget that if your Open House doesn't have the furniture you want, you also have the freedom to hear these delightful responses when you ask about how to acquire the missing furniture:
1) Build it your fucking self, loser.
2) You didn't need that anyway, it's a proprietary spec, and the Open House doesn't support closed furniture. Use Ogg Beanbag, it's suitable for multiple purposes.
3) What have you done for Open Housing lately, anyway? Fuck off, we don't work for you!
Oh, and your Open House comes with a Stallman Room. Don't ever ask what goes on in there. *shudder*
Early mobile safari versions were certainly crash prone. Other than that, I don't recall ever feeling like my 1st gen iPhone - bought about 2 weeks after launch when my Treo running Windows CE/Mobile/Phone/Whatever-the-fuck-it's-called finally kicked the bucket - was "massively crash prone". In fact, it felt far more stable and responsive than the Treo it replaced, and a crash-prone browser was still far superior from that turd of a mobile IE that I had to use on the Treo.
I don't know what you mean by "extremely noisy to other device" - literally. The iPhone is silent for me... wondering what sort of noise you're hearing, because I never hear anything from the phone outside of the phone calls I'm making, and the music I'm playing.
Number of times I've ever bought a replacement battery for a cell phone I've owned: zero. User-replaceable battery isn't much of a concern for me. Perhaps it will be someday with my iPhone, but it hasn't even remotely been a concern so far.
Its lack of expandable storage was not an issue for me, its lack of a keyboard was actually preferable to me - typing on a blackberry with big fingers is an exercise in frustration, and having to use itunes in order to put music on it has never felt like all that much of a restriction to me.
The only "major failing" you noted that gave me pause when I purchased the phone was the lack of multitasking, and then I realized that I was essentially buying the phone to combine my treo with my ipod, and that all the other features were just bonuses, and so I realized that I probably wasn't ever going to run Office on the damn thing to type up a design document and need 8-way multitasking anyway.
The point of all this? Well, you said:
The point is this: These may be major failings for you, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your requirements are universally accepted as "required" on a phone. If the iPhone doesn't do what you think it should, by all means don't buy it, and buy a phone that does the things you need a phone to do. Don't speak in absolutes when you're describing what are obviously personal & subjective impressions & experiences.