More and consumer choice is a useful tennet of capitalism when it means prices are pushed down by competition.
But as in this case because of Apple and co's practices the prices have gone up then the tennet of increased consumer choice is irrelevant.
It's also dishonest to say it gave customers more freedom. It may have given them more choices to purchase from, but it gave them less freedom in terms of what price to pay.
"What I understand of the agreement seems pretty clean from Apple's perspective, but not as much for the publishers."
Which is of course why they've been accused of being the ringmasters, because it's clean from Apple's perspective.
Still, it's not as if the people who called Apple the ringmasters in this case are legal professionals or anything is it. At least we have a random Joe on Slashdot to clarify the situation who obviously knows the law better.
Yes, Larry Page is extremely poor. The research he did into graphs in relation to the worldwide web that went on to make him the multi-billionaire he is today had nothing to do with math.
I agree with you for the most part but there is a question of balance. For example, would people really be any less likely to have kids if they only got 6 months of full paid maternity leave rather than 9 months? What about 7 months? 8 months?
I think you probably see the point, I'm not really advocating either way - whilst you're right about the general good reason for supporting child birth, this doesn't necessarily mean that some countries aren't giving away too much free money to those that have kids such that the excess they're giving wouldn't be a factor in the first place. For example, a female colleague of mine I used to work with complained that child benefit reduction here in the UK would leave her £20 worse off a week, so I looked at her and smirked then suggested "Well maybe you could not buy the new iPad your holding, by something slightly cheaper than the Gucci glasses or Prada shoes you're wearing, or not having the latest iPhone you have on your desk" - to be fair she laughed and said fair point, but I think this highlights the thing - the child benefits she was getting had given her additional income that contributed to her buying "nice things" for herself, she didn't really need them but because the money was there and she had it to spend it gave her this ability - not having it in the first place wouldn't have had any impact on her having children, it just meant she'd have been comfortable in life living with just one less designer product per year which isn't really a hardship.
So yes, encourage child birth, but no that doesn't necessarily mean giving away free stuff just because people have children - the two aren't necessarily related - having kids is a big decision and it's something you'll make one way or the other regardless of whether you can buy 4 or only 3 designer products in a year or regardless of whether you only get 8 months fully paid maternity instead of 9. Such factors are in practice just simply too small to have an impact on the outcome of such a big decision.
"Need to fire someone? You can't, or you spend a goodly sum getting rid of him/her."
For what it's worth, I used to think this too, as it's what I was always told when I asked the question "Why the fuck is he/she still in the job?".
But in practice providing you have good reason to get rid, either redundancy or because they were a bad employee then it's really not difficult. It's largely a myth built up by managers who are too cowardly to confront people about problems, and so rather than admit they haven't got what it takes to be a firm manager when they need to be, they simply make up shit about how it's too hard because of the law. An alternative form of the problem is because the manager asked HR and HR thought "Fuck that, that means we'd have to do some paperwork" they told the manager "Sorry, can't be done". The final common issue is simply that there are no grounds to get rid of the employee - they've done nothing wrong, there's no need to make cost savings, the manager is just a dick and wants to fuck them over but they don't have legitimate grounds to do so and so HR do the right thing and block them.
Failure to fire people who genuinely need to be fired, here in the UK at least, is much more about incompetence of those doing the firing, than it is the law making it too difficult.
"Even with a labor market full of candidates with the skills you need, you're still looking at a few weeks to get them in the door. In the meantime, your project is disrupted. Sure, you can try and train up someone on your team and make them work harder for a month or so, but they don't just learn stuff overnight, and your good team member is going to be overworked because those people still have to get their own code/project out the door on time as well."
Do you not just bite the bullet and hire contractors for that sort of period? Good contractors should not really take too long to get up to speed. Of course there's a cost involved of using contractors to fill temporary gaps, but I guess it depends whether the cost outweighs the cost of lost productivity towards a monetisable release.
Look, I get it, you're unemployed, you're bitter, and you're looking for blame, but you've been going on like this for weeks now and it's tiresome.
I'll admit I'm not American, and I don't know the vagaries of the H1-B system, maybe that means I don't know what I'm on about, but maybe alternatively it allows me to be objective.
You see here's the thing, I hear a lot whining about how H1-B has decimated the US technical industry, and the people I hear it from all seem to have one thing in common - they're unemployed or they seem to believe they're underpaid, and it's all the fault of immigrants. So I decided I'd look at the fact.
I figured I'd see exactly what these low paid immigrant workers are getting paid and so forth, and I found this site which seems to have a pretty good database:
For 2012 a search of programmer came up with 10k records, developer another 10k, whether any of these crossover I'm not sure, but hey let's call it 20k anyway. Estimates are shaky but currently the amount of developers in the US seems to be anything from about 1 million to 4 million depending on who you ask, but again let's given the benefit of the doubt and pretend there are only 1 million, so H1-B visas account for 2% of developer jobs each year based on these figures, that's a small amount but it's certainly not negligible so it's a fair criticism that H1-B immigrants are taking at least a non-negligible amount of jobs each year. Note that the number of developers has grown each year, and so has the visa cap, roughly linearly so the figure will be reasonable for past years also.
But I also found figures for average salaries for developers, they seem to have remained fairly stagnant for a few years (if the economy isn't growing much, neither will wages grow much) at roughly $73k per year as the average and the top 10% earning an average of $110k. So the next issue is that immigrants are being employed because they accept less money and are bringing salaries down, again though looking at http://www.h1bwage.com/ I can't really see how that's true - the majority are getting paid more than the average so if anything H1-B immigrants must be raising the average.
In fact, many of the companies that I see chided here for wanting to increase the H1-B quota "to bring down developer wages" are doing quite the opposite. Facebook in 2012 was paying an average of $115k per developer, Google $125k, Microsoft $104k, Apple $119k. Given this, all these major companies are paying well above the average developer salary to immigrants, and all except Microsoft are paying above the average paid to the top 10% of developer salaries in the US.
So here's what frankly I think the facts say the reality of the situation is, that in practice, across the globe it's not ever going to be the case that every American programmer is better than every other programmer in the world, in fact, there will be a sizeable segment where the opposite is true, that is for example, that perhaps the bottom 50% of American programmers are statistically going to be nowhere near as talented as the top 10% of developers in almost every other country in the world. That's bound to be a lot of developers, and awful lot. What this means is that technology companies who want to populate their company with the best talent available no matter where in the world that comes from are going to have to use the H1-B visa program.
I'm not saying there aren't companies taking the piss, one company at least stood out on my peruse through and that was Wipro, they clearly seem to pay a little below average on average, and lot in some cases whilst also taking up more than their fair share of the quota, but by and large the H1-B visa program seems to be being used for what it's intended to be used for, on average does not appear to decrease average developer salaries but in fact increases them and that companies such as Facebook, Microsoft etc. want to
I'm amazed the community hasn't just set up their own free DNS service yet like OpenDNS but overriding entries where necessary, such as redirecting ICE domain seizure based entries to mirrors of the sites or similar.
Sure this seems like a bit of a dirty hack and a use of public DNS that was never intended, but the internet was also never intended to be globally censored by national entities either quite frankly so it simply seems like a necessary fix to a problem of corruption of the network.
"Yeah, this does mean that you could effectively port any Mac OS X program to Windows by recompiling it, if Apple were to make the technology available, which they likely never will."
Judging by how bad all Mac OS X software they've ported to date (i.e. iTunes and Safari) is on Windows I hope they never will too if this is what comes out of it:)
I've never been a fan of this type of porting anyway though, I've always felt you need to either build on a cross platform but platform neutral technology like Java, or at least write a native user interface for each distinctly different platform and only keep libraries that aren't affected by platform differences cross platform.
Obviously this isn't feasible for all companies or solutions but I don't think Apple has an excuse, it's not like they have a shortage of money to pay for the talent and development time required to do it right. As others have pointed out it works both ways too, some Microsoft software on Mac OS X can be quite painful for example and you see poor ports between iOS and Android all the time from sometimes fairly major companies.
"I was saying that before the iphone, folks didn't consider giving up their laptops."
People don't now. They are completely different use cases, anything an iPhone can do a pre-iPhone smartphone could do pretty well relative to the obvious differences in hardware advancements, even the old 7650. I guess if you worked at Apple you live in the US and hence have the very US-centric view of the smartphone market - it wasn't like that here in Europe or over in Asia, we already had everything the iPhone offered before it offered it other than mainstream touchscreen interfaces - we did have stylus interfaces with the iPaq though. I recall going to Canada even in 2005 and wowing everyone with my colour screen camera phone that could install apps and comfortably play MP3s in a decent music player whilst also having GPS and mapping and this is the point - most European and Japanese smartphone features had a year or two before the iPhones release features that the iPhone didn't have until it's 2nd or 3rd iteration.
"The app store built a wonderful framework for building and monetizing real world applications for phones. Before that, you were living on the leavings of the guys porting Doom to a proprietary Nokia OS."
This shows complete and utter ignorance of the smartphone market, it's as if you think the smartphone market started with the iPhone, it didn't. A number of companies had app stores before the original iPhone again which didn't have one. The mobile app industry was already worth billions in Europe and Asia before the iPhone even came along.
I'm not saying the iPhone didn't change things in the smartphone world, but it didn't change the things you think it did except perhaps in the North American market which was about 5 years behind much of the rest of the world. America has always been a tech leader in most fields but historically cellphones and smartphones is one of those markets that America was horribly backwards in and basing your worldview on the history of smartphones whilst only knowing about or understanding the North American market is bound to grossly warp your sense of what phones that were about beforehand could do.
"Actually, they weren't. Illegal downloads were possible. Legal downloads were very hard, simply because the owners of the media weren't willing to play. Jobs made that possible. "
I suppose that depends what particular music you were after, but it's irrelevant anyway, mainstream or indie, legal or illegal, it's pretty obvious Jobs didn't invent online music downloads, it's pretty obvious he simply built his own implementation of an already well established idea. Was his popular? without a doubt, because he could link it to his hardware business, but he certainly didn't event it. Hell, iTunes wasn't even an Apple innovation, they bought it in for crying out loud.
"Wrongo, moosebreath. Apple made it possible to GET the media. ITunes worked on windows too. Nobody would have trusted the clowns at napster to sell their music. "
Wrongo fuckwad. See above, it's pretty obvious that you could get the media regardless, the fact you think otherwise shows you live very desperately deep inside the reality distortion field.
"Look up the history. That Microsoft bailout happened years later, after Microsoft was in control of the software industry, after Jobs came back to Apple in 96. Think back to the windows 3 days. They stole the underlying ideas for windows 3 (and the APIs) from the Mac OS code they had access to for Word and Excel development."
Write and Apple stole it from PARC. Apple stole the idea of a wheel to scroll through lists on it's MP3 player from Creative's side scrolling wheel, they stole the idea of a touchscreen smartphone from LG and HP, they stole the idea of a touchscreen tablet from various sci-fi authors and Microsoft et. al's attempts before them. So what? You're giving Steve credit for things he didn't create all the same and accusing Microsoft of stealing ideas whilst pretending Apple didn't, that's fanboyism at it's fine
DA lump multiple spurious charges on the accused, these guys were lumping multiple defendants on a single spurious charge, so to be fair it's not really the same issue.
You're still assuming that liveable temperatures are the only measure of human survivability with your response, that's not the case, human existence depends on other species and ecosystems that are much more at risk from much smaller fluctuations.
Your view of the world and evolution is grossly over-simplistic, we do not live in complete independence and isolation from the environment around us.
Neither of the reasons you give justify anything close to 50% of CPU usage on a system within iTunes' minimum requirements and there's no reason to really continuously poll given that Windows can raise events when a device is attached anyway.
It's their Windows development team, they're just fucking incompetent.
When they released Safari for Windows it was the most god awful piece of software I've ever had the misfortune to use. It's user interface was non-standard and made no sense, it crashed every few seconds and it was slow as fuck. It's the sort of trainwreck of a piece of software I'd expect from someone writing their first ever application using C++ without knowing the first thing about pointers and so forth, it was just horrible.
I'd wager Apple just don't invest that much in their Windows dev team. They must just pay peanuts or something because certainly all they have in that team are bottom of the wrung monkeys in terms of talent. There seems to be absolutely no QA aspect for that team either, it's as if they just write shit and put it straight out for download, I can't see any other way that so much bad Windows software could come out of what is an otherwise rich and successful company. They'd have got a better job done if they'd outsourced it to the cheapest software outsourcing firm they could find in India and the code that comes out of those sorts of overseas coding sweatshops is bad enough.
It has to be because of a lack of funding for Windows dev and zero QA and testing time assigned to Windows products, I just can't see how many abysmal pieces of software could come from such a company otherwise.
Which has what to do with the question I posed? You were going down the route of implying that extreme circumstances don't matter because bacteria can survive in them. You still haven't explained what relevance this has to humanity surviving extreme circumstances.
You understand that life adapts and that's great, but you're completely failing to understand that there are still constraints on that adaptation and that just because some extremophiles can adapt doesn't mean more complex beings like humans can. Birth rate matters and part of what allows bacteria to thrive is because they reproduce so rapidly so evolution can easily occur through natural selection due to changing circumstances. That's not the same with humans we can only multiply over much longer time spans.
The problem isn't whether "something" will survive and it's not even whether life can adapt, we know it will and we know it does, but the problem is whether we can survive and adapt and you seem to completely fail to grasp the amount of generations required for evolution to adapt to change relative to the pace of change we've actually got forecast.
I'm not really sure that's interesting or new. All it confirms is what we already knew- that all other companies believe in cross platform interop to some degree is better whereas Apple still believes only in platform lock-in.
Google, Microsoft, Blackberry et. al. have simply decided there's more value in letting people use their products and services whatever platform they choose, whilst Apple has simply decided to keep all it's products and services Apple only in the hope that that will keep customers loyal and stop the decline in market share.
Apple's calculation is that if they allow iTunes on say Android then they'll see a catastrophic loss of iOS users as they could then easily migrate their purchases across to a different platform and as they make money as a hardware vendor they can't afford to do this. In contrast Google is primarily a software provider and Microsoft is comfortable being such too, so they're more than happy to maximise the profit they make off of software and services.
"Nope. First, if you don't want your site open to the public, protect it. There is no indication that MS tried to get around any authentication methods or used false credentials to gain access to the site."
I actually agree with you but various governments including the US don't see things this way given that people have been punished for accessing publicly accessible unprotected US government resources and for port scanning. The issue therefore becomes one of double standards - if Microsoft complained to the police that someone accessed one of their systems that had no security in place and was public facing but wasn't publicly listed anywhere then the police would likely chase up that person. If however Microsoft did the same as in this case and accessed someone elses not publicly listed URL and they complained to the police I'd wager absolutely no one would bother to try and chase it up with Microsoft.
Most computer crime statues across the globe simply make "unauthorised access" illegal - if you didn't give Microsoft permission then by law that's unauthorised access.
It sucks that the law is this way because personally I believe that if it's public facing and not protected it's fair game. I even believe this should apply to things like photos too frankly - if you publish it publicly on the net there should be no limitation on others using it on the net because the web was designed this way - for information sharing and linking yet there are people who complain about this. If you don't want others to link to a photo you have and embed it in their document then you should secure it. The onus should be on you to protect it. The public internet should be fair game for anyone wanting to use and reuse the information available and anything someone doesn't want public should be made private or otherwise secured. This makes far more sense because it's both how the internet was designed and how it works in reality (regardless of what the law says).
What if I write a novel about a fraudulent scientologist businessman in my jurisdiction outside of Germany. Should I be penalised on sales of my book because of some asshat half way around the globe whose decided my novel sounds just like them and decides to have the autocomplete for my book removed?
"Isn't the brain just a whole bunch of neural networks?"
We don't know for sure right now, that's really the problem. There's a lot of suspicion that this might be the case and given that we can interface digital computers to mammal brains and issue commands there's every possibility that our brains are in fact, at least to some degree digital and we just need more power to replicate that artificially in computers.
There are a lot of reasons to think that the idea of ANNs isn't actually too far off reality to some degree. We've all been in a situation where we've been trying to solve a problem such as a maths problem at school and we've just not been able to do so because we find ourselves just ending up down the same wrong path no matter how we try to approach it and if we keep trying we can keep making the same mistake for hours. If however we step away from the problem and do something else then come back to it we can suddenly find ourselves going down a different and possibly correct path to a solution in a matter of minutes.
Research seems to show that this is because the neurons in your brain enter a positive feedback loop around that particular original wrong solution and so that positive feedback results in the area of your brain responsible for finding a solution keeps converging on that same incorrect point. Moving away to do something different refocuses your brain and allows those neurons causing the feedback loop to stop firing such that when you come back there is every chance that your brain will converge to a different set of neurons, hence a different solution. If you keep at it with the incorrect problem then you're just re-enforcing the convergence on that incorrect path because the same neurons are firing and the same solution is being led to by the positive feedback loop caused by that. We see the same unplanned behaviour occur in some ANN setups so even if the theory of ANNs isn't a correct model of the brain, they do exhibit some of the traits of the human brain at least.
"I'm no jobs groupie. However, he was the first to recognize the commercial possibilities of personal computers. That alone should give him a higher standing than what you allow. He was also the first to recognize the commercial possibilities of a graphical user interface, the first to really buy into the idea that computer generated animated films were viable, and the first to really recognize the idea that your phone would be your computer instead of just your phone. He was the guy who made music downloads possible. "
Sorry but a lot of this is just patently false. Especially so the latter ones - my Nokia 7650 from 5 years before the iPhone came out had a camera, apps, ran ports of games like Doom, had a web browser and so on - the idea of a phone as a computer was determined many many years before Apple even considered seriously entering the market. HP's iPaq range was even closer in this regard when they turned them from PDAs into phones.
Music downloads were also possible way before iTunes, both legal and illegal.
"I haven't a clue how he did it, but he changed things around us. There is really no way to deny that. "
This is only true if you live an Apple centric world and only consumed things via Apple - e.g. if you didn't download any music until iTunes came about.
"You could make the argument that he made Microsoft as well; without windows, and the mac version of word and excel, what would microsoft be today? Can you say 'digital research'?"
This seems especially silly given that Apple would've gone under without Microsoft's bailout.
The biggest problem with your comment is most of those ideas didn't even come from Jobs, they came from Apple staff, sure Steve recognised them as worthwhile to go ahead with, but Jobs was not the visionary behind any of them.
I think if anything your distorted view of what he as a person chose and did highlights just how good he was of marketing, not just Apple and it's products but himself. He made himself a messiah who from your comments you would believe was the mind behind every innovation at Apple - he wasn't, he was just the guy who picked the good ideas and signed off on them then drove them forward to popularity with excellent marketing. Given this I think you are a Jobs groupie - you're attributing ideas to him that weren't his.
A new social networking I'm working on called LifeSpy, it tracks everything about your life and broadcasts it to all your friends.
Found a small lump on your testicles that you fear may be cancer? Thinking of telling your close friends about it? Now there's no need, thanks to LifeSpy we already recorded the conversation you had with your doctor using the phone in your pocket and broadcast it over the whole of the internet for you, whilst also debiting your account for $10,000 a visit to the worst foremost expert in testicular cancer who will examine you streamed live to everyone you know and everyone else whose paid us to watch.
LifeSpy, the social network without Ads - we don't need them, we just bill you for products our algorithms determine you need and have them delivered to your hand by our StalkerCourier service that tracks you down using the GPS signal provided by your mobile.
I think Gates may never have been an inherently "evil" person as he's sometimes painted. I think he always genuinely felt he was doing the right thing, that by pushing Microsoft as he did he was pushing computing and by pushing computing he was helping humanity. I recall him saying, with quite some quite genuine seeming distress and frustration that he simply couldn't understand why he was being attacked and penalised for wanting to tie the browser and OS together - in his mind he felt he was genuinely making technical progression.
I think the problem he had was that of naivety. He was a guy who'd been too successful and made too much money at far too young an age - his life had changed so quickly and been so hectic that I suspect he'd simply never had time to really stop, step back, and think about his actions.
But I think this is why when he started to step back from Microsoft he suddenly did have time to do this.
I think he really genuinely always felt that he was doing good but only when his life finally reached a point where he actually had a bit of time to stop and think was he able to reconcile what he wanted to do and felt he was doing with the realities of the world around him.
"That should be enough to keep Steve's reputation as a tech genius"
Even Gates didn't support that myth, re-read what he said. Gates made it pretty clear that he felt Steve was a marketing and design genius, and says nothing about him being a tech genius. It does say Apple did a good job with the iPad, but Apple always consisted of more than just Steve and Steve always had little impact on the actual "tech" portion of Apple - even in the early days that was pretty much all Woz.
But therein lies Steve's image problem, whilst technology is generally seen as being a great good in the world, design and marketing don't have the same reputation - they're seen as relatively shallow contributions to society in contrast to technology (and philanthropy).
Steve's real place in history if anything will likely be alongside some of the most famous fashion designers if anything, because he knew how to make technology cool and how to make it fashionable.
It's the classic battle between the arts and the sciences - Steve's achievements were firmly in the arts, "tech genius" falsely implies his achievements were in the sciences.
Slashdot Mirror
More and consumer choice is a useful tennet of capitalism when it means prices are pushed down by competition.
But as in this case because of Apple and co's practices the prices have gone up then the tennet of increased consumer choice is irrelevant.
It's also dishonest to say it gave customers more freedom. It may have given them more choices to purchase from, but it gave them less freedom in terms of what price to pay.
"What I understand of the agreement seems pretty clean from Apple's perspective, but not as much for the publishers."
Which is of course why they've been accused of being the ringmasters, because it's clean from Apple's perspective.
Still, it's not as if the people who called Apple the ringmasters in this case are legal professionals or anything is it. At least we have a random Joe on Slashdot to clarify the situation who obviously knows the law better.
Yes, Larry Page is extremely poor. The research he did into graphs in relation to the worldwide web that went on to make him the multi-billionaire he is today had nothing to do with math.
Wait, what?
"(FWIW, Chrome has *always* been too big to use PGO.)"
Chrome is also more performant too though, so what do they do instead? Is it simply better architected from the outset?
I agree with you for the most part but there is a question of balance. For example, would people really be any less likely to have kids if they only got 6 months of full paid maternity leave rather than 9 months? What about 7 months? 8 months?
I think you probably see the point, I'm not really advocating either way - whilst you're right about the general good reason for supporting child birth, this doesn't necessarily mean that some countries aren't giving away too much free money to those that have kids such that the excess they're giving wouldn't be a factor in the first place. For example, a female colleague of mine I used to work with complained that child benefit reduction here in the UK would leave her £20 worse off a week, so I looked at her and smirked then suggested "Well maybe you could not buy the new iPad your holding, by something slightly cheaper than the Gucci glasses or Prada shoes you're wearing, or not having the latest iPhone you have on your desk" - to be fair she laughed and said fair point, but I think this highlights the thing - the child benefits she was getting had given her additional income that contributed to her buying "nice things" for herself, she didn't really need them but because the money was there and she had it to spend it gave her this ability - not having it in the first place wouldn't have had any impact on her having children, it just meant she'd have been comfortable in life living with just one less designer product per year which isn't really a hardship.
So yes, encourage child birth, but no that doesn't necessarily mean giving away free stuff just because people have children - the two aren't necessarily related - having kids is a big decision and it's something you'll make one way or the other regardless of whether you can buy 4 or only 3 designer products in a year or regardless of whether you only get 8 months fully paid maternity instead of 9. Such factors are in practice just simply too small to have an impact on the outcome of such a big decision.
"Need to fire someone? You can't, or you spend a goodly sum getting rid of him/her."
For what it's worth, I used to think this too, as it's what I was always told when I asked the question "Why the fuck is he/she still in the job?".
But in practice providing you have good reason to get rid, either redundancy or because they were a bad employee then it's really not difficult. It's largely a myth built up by managers who are too cowardly to confront people about problems, and so rather than admit they haven't got what it takes to be a firm manager when they need to be, they simply make up shit about how it's too hard because of the law. An alternative form of the problem is because the manager asked HR and HR thought "Fuck that, that means we'd have to do some paperwork" they told the manager "Sorry, can't be done". The final common issue is simply that there are no grounds to get rid of the employee - they've done nothing wrong, there's no need to make cost savings, the manager is just a dick and wants to fuck them over but they don't have legitimate grounds to do so and so HR do the right thing and block them.
Failure to fire people who genuinely need to be fired, here in the UK at least, is much more about incompetence of those doing the firing, than it is the law making it too difficult.
"Even with a labor market full of candidates with the skills you need, you're still looking at a few weeks to get them in the door. In the meantime, your project is disrupted. Sure, you can try and train up someone on your team and make them work harder for a month or so, but they don't just learn stuff overnight, and your good team member is going to be overworked because those people still have to get their own code/project out the door on time as well."
Do you not just bite the bullet and hire contractors for that sort of period? Good contractors should not really take too long to get up to speed. Of course there's a cost involved of using contractors to fill temporary gaps, but I guess it depends whether the cost outweighs the cost of lost productivity towards a monetisable release.
Look, I get it, you're unemployed, you're bitter, and you're looking for blame, but you've been going on like this for weeks now and it's tiresome.
I'll admit I'm not American, and I don't know the vagaries of the H1-B system, maybe that means I don't know what I'm on about, but maybe alternatively it allows me to be objective.
You see here's the thing, I hear a lot whining about how H1-B has decimated the US technical industry, and the people I hear it from all seem to have one thing in common - they're unemployed or they seem to believe they're underpaid, and it's all the fault of immigrants. So I decided I'd look at the fact.
I figured I'd see exactly what these low paid immigrant workers are getting paid and so forth, and I found this site which seems to have a pretty good database:
http://www.h1bwage.com/
For 2012 a search of programmer came up with 10k records, developer another 10k, whether any of these crossover I'm not sure, but hey let's call it 20k anyway. Estimates are shaky but currently the amount of developers in the US seems to be anything from about 1 million to 4 million depending on who you ask, but again let's given the benefit of the doubt and pretend there are only 1 million, so H1-B visas account for 2% of developer jobs each year based on these figures, that's a small amount but it's certainly not negligible so it's a fair criticism that H1-B immigrants are taking at least a non-negligible amount of jobs each year. Note that the number of developers has grown each year, and so has the visa cap, roughly linearly so the figure will be reasonable for past years also.
But I also found figures for average salaries for developers, they seem to have remained fairly stagnant for a few years (if the economy isn't growing much, neither will wages grow much) at roughly $73k per year as the average and the top 10% earning an average of $110k. So the next issue is that immigrants are being employed because they accept less money and are bringing salaries down, again though looking at http://www.h1bwage.com/ I can't really see how that's true - the majority are getting paid more than the average so if anything H1-B immigrants must be raising the average.
In fact, many of the companies that I see chided here for wanting to increase the H1-B quota "to bring down developer wages" are doing quite the opposite. Facebook in 2012 was paying an average of $115k per developer, Google $125k, Microsoft $104k, Apple $119k. Given this, all these major companies are paying well above the average developer salary to immigrants, and all except Microsoft are paying above the average paid to the top 10% of developer salaries in the US.
So here's what frankly I think the facts say the reality of the situation is, that in practice, across the globe it's not ever going to be the case that every American programmer is better than every other programmer in the world, in fact, there will be a sizeable segment where the opposite is true, that is for example, that perhaps the bottom 50% of American programmers are statistically going to be nowhere near as talented as the top 10% of developers in almost every other country in the world. That's bound to be a lot of developers, and awful lot. What this means is that technology companies who want to populate their company with the best talent available no matter where in the world that comes from are going to have to use the H1-B visa program.
I'm not saying there aren't companies taking the piss, one company at least stood out on my peruse through and that was Wipro, they clearly seem to pay a little below average on average, and lot in some cases whilst also taking up more than their fair share of the quota, but by and large the H1-B visa program seems to be being used for what it's intended to be used for, on average does not appear to decrease average developer salaries but in fact increases them and that companies such as Facebook, Microsoft etc. want to
Thanks for funding the RIAA and the BPI.
I'm amazed the community hasn't just set up their own free DNS service yet like OpenDNS but overriding entries where necessary, such as redirecting ICE domain seizure based entries to mirrors of the sites or similar.
Sure this seems like a bit of a dirty hack and a use of public DNS that was never intended, but the internet was also never intended to be globally censored by national entities either quite frankly so it simply seems like a necessary fix to a problem of corruption of the network.
"Yeah, this does mean that you could effectively port any Mac OS X program to Windows by recompiling it, if Apple were to make the technology available, which they likely never will."
Judging by how bad all Mac OS X software they've ported to date (i.e. iTunes and Safari) is on Windows I hope they never will too if this is what comes out of it :)
I've never been a fan of this type of porting anyway though, I've always felt you need to either build on a cross platform but platform neutral technology like Java, or at least write a native user interface for each distinctly different platform and only keep libraries that aren't affected by platform differences cross platform.
Obviously this isn't feasible for all companies or solutions but I don't think Apple has an excuse, it's not like they have a shortage of money to pay for the talent and development time required to do it right. As others have pointed out it works both ways too, some Microsoft software on Mac OS X can be quite painful for example and you see poor ports between iOS and Android all the time from sometimes fairly major companies.
"I was saying that before the iphone, folks didn't consider giving up their laptops."
People don't now. They are completely different use cases, anything an iPhone can do a pre-iPhone smartphone could do pretty well relative to the obvious differences in hardware advancements, even the old 7650. I guess if you worked at Apple you live in the US and hence have the very US-centric view of the smartphone market - it wasn't like that here in Europe or over in Asia, we already had everything the iPhone offered before it offered it other than mainstream touchscreen interfaces - we did have stylus interfaces with the iPaq though. I recall going to Canada even in 2005 and wowing everyone with my colour screen camera phone that could install apps and comfortably play MP3s in a decent music player whilst also having GPS and mapping and this is the point - most European and Japanese smartphone features had a year or two before the iPhones release features that the iPhone didn't have until it's 2nd or 3rd iteration.
"The app store built a wonderful framework for building and monetizing real world applications for phones. Before that, you were living on the leavings of the guys porting Doom to a proprietary Nokia OS."
This shows complete and utter ignorance of the smartphone market, it's as if you think the smartphone market started with the iPhone, it didn't. A number of companies had app stores before the original iPhone again which didn't have one. The mobile app industry was already worth billions in Europe and Asia before the iPhone even came along.
I'm not saying the iPhone didn't change things in the smartphone world, but it didn't change the things you think it did except perhaps in the North American market which was about 5 years behind much of the rest of the world. America has always been a tech leader in most fields but historically cellphones and smartphones is one of those markets that America was horribly backwards in and basing your worldview on the history of smartphones whilst only knowing about or understanding the North American market is bound to grossly warp your sense of what phones that were about beforehand could do.
"Actually, they weren't. Illegal downloads were possible. Legal downloads were very hard, simply because the owners of the media weren't willing to play. Jobs made that possible. "
I suppose that depends what particular music you were after, but it's irrelevant anyway, mainstream or indie, legal or illegal, it's pretty obvious Jobs didn't invent online music downloads, it's pretty obvious he simply built his own implementation of an already well established idea. Was his popular? without a doubt, because he could link it to his hardware business, but he certainly didn't event it. Hell, iTunes wasn't even an Apple innovation, they bought it in for crying out loud.
"Wrongo, moosebreath. Apple made it possible to GET the media. ITunes worked on windows too. Nobody would have trusted the clowns at napster to sell their music. "
Wrongo fuckwad. See above, it's pretty obvious that you could get the media regardless, the fact you think otherwise shows you live very desperately deep inside the reality distortion field.
"Look up the history. That Microsoft bailout happened years later, after Microsoft was in control of the software industry, after Jobs came back to Apple in 96. Think back to the windows 3 days. They stole the underlying ideas for windows 3 (and the APIs) from the Mac OS code they had access to for Word and Excel development."
Write and Apple stole it from PARC. Apple stole the idea of a wheel to scroll through lists on it's MP3 player from Creative's side scrolling wheel, they stole the idea of a touchscreen smartphone from LG and HP, they stole the idea of a touchscreen tablet from various sci-fi authors and Microsoft et. al's attempts before them. So what? You're giving Steve credit for things he didn't create all the same and accusing Microsoft of stealing ideas whilst pretending Apple didn't, that's fanboyism at it's fine
DA lump multiple spurious charges on the accused, these guys were lumping multiple defendants on a single spurious charge, so to be fair it's not really the same issue.
You're still assuming that liveable temperatures are the only measure of human survivability with your response, that's not the case, human existence depends on other species and ecosystems that are much more at risk from much smaller fluctuations.
Your view of the world and evolution is grossly over-simplistic, we do not live in complete independence and isolation from the environment around us.
"The reason is two-fold."
Neither of the reasons you give justify anything close to 50% of CPU usage on a system within iTunes' minimum requirements and there's no reason to really continuously poll given that Windows can raise events when a device is attached anyway.
It's their Windows development team, they're just fucking incompetent.
When they released Safari for Windows it was the most god awful piece of software I've ever had the misfortune to use. It's user interface was non-standard and made no sense, it crashed every few seconds and it was slow as fuck. It's the sort of trainwreck of a piece of software I'd expect from someone writing their first ever application using C++ without knowing the first thing about pointers and so forth, it was just horrible.
I'd wager Apple just don't invest that much in their Windows dev team. They must just pay peanuts or something because certainly all they have in that team are bottom of the wrung monkeys in terms of talent. There seems to be absolutely no QA aspect for that team either, it's as if they just write shit and put it straight out for download, I can't see any other way that so much bad Windows software could come out of what is an otherwise rich and successful company. They'd have got a better job done if they'd outsourced it to the cheapest software outsourcing firm they could find in India and the code that comes out of those sorts of overseas coding sweatshops is bad enough.
It has to be because of a lack of funding for Windows dev and zero QA and testing time assigned to Windows products, I just can't see how many abysmal pieces of software could come from such a company otherwise.
Which has what to do with the question I posed? You were going down the route of implying that extreme circumstances don't matter because bacteria can survive in them. You still haven't explained what relevance this has to humanity surviving extreme circumstances.
You understand that life adapts and that's great, but you're completely failing to understand that there are still constraints on that adaptation and that just because some extremophiles can adapt doesn't mean more complex beings like humans can. Birth rate matters and part of what allows bacteria to thrive is because they reproduce so rapidly so evolution can easily occur through natural selection due to changing circumstances. That's not the same with humans we can only multiply over much longer time spans.
The problem isn't whether "something" will survive and it's not even whether life can adapt, we know it will and we know it does, but the problem is whether we can survive and adapt and you seem to completely fail to grasp the amount of generations required for evolution to adapt to change relative to the pace of change we've actually got forecast.
I'm not really sure that's interesting or new. All it confirms is what we already knew- that all other companies believe in cross platform interop to some degree is better whereas Apple still believes only in platform lock-in.
Google, Microsoft, Blackberry et. al. have simply decided there's more value in letting people use their products and services whatever platform they choose, whilst Apple has simply decided to keep all it's products and services Apple only in the hope that that will keep customers loyal and stop the decline in market share.
Apple's calculation is that if they allow iTunes on say Android then they'll see a catastrophic loss of iOS users as they could then easily migrate their purchases across to a different platform and as they make money as a hardware vendor they can't afford to do this. In contrast Google is primarily a software provider and Microsoft is comfortable being such too, so they're more than happy to maximise the profit they make off of software and services.
"Nope. First, if you don't want your site open to the public, protect it. There is no indication that MS tried to get around any authentication methods or used false credentials to gain access to the site."
I actually agree with you but various governments including the US don't see things this way given that people have been punished for accessing publicly accessible unprotected US government resources and for port scanning. The issue therefore becomes one of double standards - if Microsoft complained to the police that someone accessed one of their systems that had no security in place and was public facing but wasn't publicly listed anywhere then the police would likely chase up that person. If however Microsoft did the same as in this case and accessed someone elses not publicly listed URL and they complained to the police I'd wager absolutely no one would bother to try and chase it up with Microsoft.
Most computer crime statues across the globe simply make "unauthorised access" illegal - if you didn't give Microsoft permission then by law that's unauthorised access.
It sucks that the law is this way because personally I believe that if it's public facing and not protected it's fair game. I even believe this should apply to things like photos too frankly - if you publish it publicly on the net there should be no limitation on others using it on the net because the web was designed this way - for information sharing and linking yet there are people who complain about this. If you don't want others to link to a photo you have and embed it in their document then you should secure it. The onus should be on you to protect it. The public internet should be fair game for anyone wanting to use and reuse the information available and anything someone doesn't want public should be made private or otherwise secured. This makes far more sense because it's both how the internet was designed and how it works in reality (regardless of what the law says).
That and Google is global.
What if I write a novel about a fraudulent scientologist businessman in my jurisdiction outside of Germany. Should I be penalised on sales of my book because of some asshat half way around the globe whose decided my novel sounds just like them and decides to have the autocomplete for my book removed?
"Isn't the brain just a whole bunch of neural networks?"
We don't know for sure right now, that's really the problem. There's a lot of suspicion that this might be the case and given that we can interface digital computers to mammal brains and issue commands there's every possibility that our brains are in fact, at least to some degree digital and we just need more power to replicate that artificially in computers.
There are a lot of reasons to think that the idea of ANNs isn't actually too far off reality to some degree. We've all been in a situation where we've been trying to solve a problem such as a maths problem at school and we've just not been able to do so because we find ourselves just ending up down the same wrong path no matter how we try to approach it and if we keep trying we can keep making the same mistake for hours. If however we step away from the problem and do something else then come back to it we can suddenly find ourselves going down a different and possibly correct path to a solution in a matter of minutes.
Research seems to show that this is because the neurons in your brain enter a positive feedback loop around that particular original wrong solution and so that positive feedback results in the area of your brain responsible for finding a solution keeps converging on that same incorrect point. Moving away to do something different refocuses your brain and allows those neurons causing the feedback loop to stop firing such that when you come back there is every chance that your brain will converge to a different set of neurons, hence a different solution. If you keep at it with the incorrect problem then you're just re-enforcing the convergence on that incorrect path because the same neurons are firing and the same solution is being led to by the positive feedback loop caused by that. We see the same unplanned behaviour occur in some ANN setups so even if the theory of ANNs isn't a correct model of the brain, they do exhibit some of the traits of the human brain at least.
"I'm no jobs groupie. However, he was the first to recognize the commercial possibilities of personal computers. That alone should give him a higher standing than what you allow. He was also the first to recognize the commercial possibilities of a graphical user interface, the first to really buy into the idea that computer generated animated films were viable, and the first to really recognize the idea that your phone would be your computer instead of just your phone. He was the guy who made music downloads possible. "
Sorry but a lot of this is just patently false. Especially so the latter ones - my Nokia 7650 from 5 years before the iPhone came out had a camera, apps, ran ports of games like Doom, had a web browser and so on - the idea of a phone as a computer was determined many many years before Apple even considered seriously entering the market. HP's iPaq range was even closer in this regard when they turned them from PDAs into phones.
Music downloads were also possible way before iTunes, both legal and illegal.
"I haven't a clue how he did it, but he changed things around us. There is really no way to deny that. "
This is only true if you live an Apple centric world and only consumed things via Apple - e.g. if you didn't download any music until iTunes came about.
"You could make the argument that he made Microsoft as well; without windows, and the mac version of word and excel, what would microsoft be today? Can you say 'digital research'?"
This seems especially silly given that Apple would've gone under without Microsoft's bailout.
The biggest problem with your comment is most of those ideas didn't even come from Jobs, they came from Apple staff, sure Steve recognised them as worthwhile to go ahead with, but Jobs was not the visionary behind any of them.
I think if anything your distorted view of what he as a person chose and did highlights just how good he was of marketing, not just Apple and it's products but himself. He made himself a messiah who from your comments you would believe was the mind behind every innovation at Apple - he wasn't, he was just the guy who picked the good ideas and signed off on them then drove them forward to popularity with excellent marketing. Given this I think you are a Jobs groupie - you're attributing ideas to him that weren't his.
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I think Gates may never have been an inherently "evil" person as he's sometimes painted. I think he always genuinely felt he was doing the right thing, that by pushing Microsoft as he did he was pushing computing and by pushing computing he was helping humanity. I recall him saying, with quite some quite genuine seeming distress and frustration that he simply couldn't understand why he was being attacked and penalised for wanting to tie the browser and OS together - in his mind he felt he was genuinely making technical progression.
I think the problem he had was that of naivety. He was a guy who'd been too successful and made too much money at far too young an age - his life had changed so quickly and been so hectic that I suspect he'd simply never had time to really stop, step back, and think about his actions.
But I think this is why when he started to step back from Microsoft he suddenly did have time to do this.
I think he really genuinely always felt that he was doing good but only when his life finally reached a point where he actually had a bit of time to stop and think was he able to reconcile what he wanted to do and felt he was doing with the realities of the world around him.
"That should be enough to keep Steve's reputation as a tech genius"
Even Gates didn't support that myth, re-read what he said. Gates made it pretty clear that he felt Steve was a marketing and design genius, and says nothing about him being a tech genius. It does say Apple did a good job with the iPad, but Apple always consisted of more than just Steve and Steve always had little impact on the actual "tech" portion of Apple - even in the early days that was pretty much all Woz.
But therein lies Steve's image problem, whilst technology is generally seen as being a great good in the world, design and marketing don't have the same reputation - they're seen as relatively shallow contributions to society in contrast to technology (and philanthropy).
Steve's real place in history if anything will likely be alongside some of the most famous fashion designers if anything, because he knew how to make technology cool and how to make it fashionable.
It's the classic battle between the arts and the sciences - Steve's achievements were firmly in the arts, "tech genius" falsely implies his achievements were in the sciences.